“You asked, I answered. Are we going to keep going?”
I exhale slowly. “I was worried how the professor would react if he caught you going through his belongings.”
“How did you think he would react?”
I hold up a finger. “You’re terrible at this. You just can’t ever stop talking, can you?” Bronwyn looks like she might hit me, so I take a small step back as I mull over my thoughts trying to sort through the questions I’d like to ask. I need to settle on one, but with so many burning questions it is hard to pick just one. “What were you hoping to find in Morozov’s office?”
“Answers.”
I fold my arms over my chest as I step closer to her so I can glare down my “straight pretty nose” at her. “You can’t be that vague, that’s a violation of our agreement. How would you like it if I just started giving you one-word answers?”
“You’d have to learn how to get to the point to do that,” she says glibly, but then she exhales. “I was suspicious of the professor. With first you showing up as a vampire and then him being here also clearly a child of Neltruna well…” she narrows her eyes as she looks me over. “What are you two up to?”
I let out a nervous chuckle. For all her annoyances, she is sharp. She cut straight to the matter far faster than I had anticipated. I had no idea she had already pieced together so much, like the fact that I’m working with Morozov; although thinking back I see that we left plenty of evidence. It seems as if she has the whole story, and yet, I still know nothing.
It leaves me feeling vulnerable.
“If you already know so much then I don’t know why you bother asking me.”
“Answer the question,” she says stepping toward me, her eyes hold a challenge, but I notice her fingers nervously twisting the ring that she is wearing.
I turn toward the door. “I think I’m done playing this game.”
Her hand reaches out snagging mine. She tugs on it, turning me around so quickly that I feel dizzy. “This isn’t a game. You said yourself that my life is in danger if Morozov suspects me of snooping. What exactly did I stumble upon?”
I swallow hard. A plot that will forever alter the world… and not necessarily for the better.
Chapter Twelve
Bronwyn
Wilder is scared. I can read it in the stiffness of his shoulders, the hesitancy in his voice, the way that his fingers tighten just a bit around mine. The Wilder I knew last year was cruel, devastatingly handsome, and suave. Never scared. What does someone like him have to be afraid of?
I look up, allowing myself to stare for the first time into his face. In the dark his eyes just look black, disguising the deep red, but his skin is so pale it practically glows white, like the freshly fallen snow.
I reach up, slowly hesitantly. I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing until I’m resting the palm of my hand against his cheek. “What did they do to you?” I whisper. His skin is cold under my touch, as I’m actually touching the snow.
“They made me a monster,” he whispers, his tone breaking a bit on the last word.
“Do you mean to tell me thatthiswas not what you wanted?”
He snorts, breaking the spell between us, pulling back. I release my breath, dropping my hand and also moving away onlyjust now realizing how close I had been standing to him. I’d been practically standing atop his shoes.
Wilder releases an exhale that the cold makes visible in the air between us, reaching up to run his hand through his silvery hair. “Why would you think I’d choose to be a vampire? To be among the cursed race? To be an outcast?”
I feel my eyebrow rise slowly. I suppose that I can now guess which of the varied origin stories for vampirism that Wilder believes.
Some say that vampires were created by Neltruna, the goddess of monsters. The first vampires were followers of her daughter the demigod Lady Night, that much most people can agree on. But how they became vampires is wildly disputed. Some, like Wilder here, believe that Neltruna in a fit of jealous rage cursed her daughter’s followers to become monsters since they worshiped Night instead of the goddess of darkness herself. Others believe that Lady Night gifted her followers with this form of immortality, her own way of trying to usurp her mother and create monsters of her own.
That’s the belief my father always held.
And then there are those that would consider vampirism a disease, given that it can be spread from person to person, but I put no stock in those theories.
How could a disease cause eternal life?
No, it is either a blessing or a curse, and perhaps I am too optimistic, but I like to think of it as a blessing. It helps to make the thought of my future of an eternity as a vampire easier to live with. But as I look upon Wilder, I see all my fears and reservations staring back at me.
Father has always said that someday we will all become vampires, he cannot, nor will he, live in a world without us so we must become as immortal as he is. But he left the timing of it upto us. Corallin was already a vampire when she was adopted, but Natasya and I have been waiting.
