He grumbles at me, eyes flashing. “You deserve to be tied up and tortured with my tongue, with not even a hint of release.”
“Promise?”
I kiss him quickly and then turn around, patting my hands over my hair. We walk down the halls and stairs. Every bleeding flower droops and withers and dies when he walks past them, then blooms again when I silently ask it to. The faces in the paintings watch us as we go, perhaps amused by this little game.
“You know,” I say to Solon as we reach the main level, heading for the final set of stairs that will take us below to Dark Eyes, “I was thinking about what you said earlier, when I told you about the shadow in the room this morning, the feeling of something being there. Something bad. And how you said that it could be a manifestation of my feelings.” He eyes me to go on. “Well, do you guys have a therapist or something?”
He stops on the landing and blinks at me. “You guys?”
“Yeah. Vampires. You vampires. Do you have a vampire therapist? Because if you don’t, I think that’s a thing that’s sorely needed. Not just for those who are just turning into one, but, I mean, you’ve been alive for centuries and you’ve personally spent a lot of that time an actual beast, I think maybe vampires would benefit from talking about their problems.”
He frowns. “Who said I have problems?”
I laugh and smack him on the arm. “Oh, really? Mr. I Keep a Skull For Every Human I’ve Killed to Remind Me Of My Humanity.”
He gives me a steady look, clearly not amused. “Lenore, a therapist is for human beings. For human problems. Humans only have so many years to get their shit together. They need therapy. Medication. Whatever works for them in the short amount of time they have to make their lives bearable. Vampires, on the other hand…” He shrugs with one shoulder. “We have all the time in the world to sort ourselves out. You’ll sort yourself out soon enough. I promise.”
“Yeah, but how soon is soon in vampire time?” I mutter under my breath.
He just gives me a quick smile, leans in and kisses me on the forehead, causing butterflies to brush against my ribcage, then links his arm around mine and leads me down the rest of the way.
“Nervous?” he asks me, as we pause outside the gilded doors with their embossed roses. Once we open the doors, we step through the protection spell that’s cloaking the entire house. We become vulnerable to a degree.
“How could you tell?”
“You wear every single emotion you feel, Moonshine,” he says affectionately. “At any rate, you have nothing to be nervous about. To be honest with you, I was surprised you wanted to come tonight.”
“I figured it was time,” I tell him. “I can’t hide in the house and pretend this part of your world, of my world, doesn’t exist. I want to be among the vampires, even if they don’t want me there, even if they fear me. I need to feel like…I need to get used to this. To what I am.”
“And what you are is mine,” he says.
Then he pushes open the doors and we step into the club. It’s like stepping into a living, breathing set from some forties film noir, all mirrors and glass, polished mahogany and teak, leather, rugs, tapestries and fine art.
My nose is assaulted with a million scents, my brain working quickly to place them all. The scent of cigar from the lounge, even though the door is always closed and the room is airtight. The tang of booze from the bar where Ezra is currently mixing a drink for someone, on bartending duty tonight. The old leather of the chairs, the wood of the floors, the faint hint of freesia, which tells me Amethyst was in here earlier. Occasionally a hint of vanilla perfume wafts past me, and my eyes instinctively scan the crowd wondering who it can be. As a rule, vampires don’t wear perfume because it’s too much for our sense of smell, but sometimes a vampire says fuck it and wears it anyway.
Then again, the perfume might belong to a human. Even though I know there aren’t any in the club at this exact moment, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t behind the steel doors of the Dark Room, where the feeding happens. Because that’s the other thing I’m picking up, the very faint hint of blood. Human blood. The steel doors do a great job of keeping the smell out of the lounge (otherwise all the vamps would go wild with bloodlust), but sometimes it escapes.
That said, I don’t think anyone has noticed because all eyes are on us. On me, to be more specific. There are about thirty vampires in the club, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s thirty sets of hateful, curious, lethal eyes and it makes my human blood run cold.