Page 41 of Now Comes the Mist

“I am not myself tonight,” I whisper.

“No, you are not. Or you would not have so rudely demanded my name.” He leads me back to the bench, where we sit with our arms still around each other.

“Everyone disapproves of me this evening. First Mina, then you.”

“Dear me, how self-pitying we are,” he says, not unkindly, resting his chin on top of my head. “You did shock her with your confession regarding Arthur’s visit, but I don’t believe she thinks less of you for it. She loves you too well, that much is clear.”

A trickle of disquiet poisons my relief at having won him back to me. How easily he had combed my mind for secrets, scraping my thoughts from the inside of my brain like butter from a sharp knife. He himself is a creation of my mind, I know … but still, for the first time since I have known him, I feel the urge to pull away. I do not know why my dreams, so pleasurable until now, have soured to this degree—perhaps it is a result of the agitation I felt tonight. All I know is that I want to break free of the man’s arms, wake up, run down these cliffs, and curl up in bed next to Mina, safe and warm behind a locked door.

But I stay where I am, wrapped in his embrace with my head tucked into his chest. I am so inexplicably afraid of what will happen if I dare move.Think of something else, I tell myself, my heart in my throat.For God’s sake, think of anything else, for he can hear you.

A lazy, drowsy calm suddenly settles over me. I feel my heartbeat slow and my breathing grow even, and my desire to run dissipates as the mist rises around us, cooling my heated face. I snuggle closer to him. There is nowhere I can be safer than here, with him.

“You are not angry with me, but with everyone you love. They don’t accept you as I do.” He smooths my hair off my neck and bends to kiss the burning skin there. I close my eyes as the soothing touch cascades down my spine. He parts his lips and I feel his teeth, icy and sharp, graze over my fluttering pulse. “I will teach you what you long to know and give you all that you have imagined in your darkest reveries. I will not push you away as they do.”

I am so sleepy, so calm, so happy to be with him. I clutch him tightly, wanting to be even closer to him, wanting his teeth to stop their teasingand push deep inside me. With a whimper of impatience, I pull myself onto his lap and tilt my head back, offering him everything. The contrast of his soft mouth and tongue with his rough chin and sharp teeth sends my pulse racing and my need rising. I put my hands on either side of his head, holding him to me.

And then I am saved, in that moment, by three things.

The first is the memory of how minutes before, I had put my hands on my own head in just such a way, not in passion, but in excruciating pain.

The second is the cold flutter of Mina’s silver bracelet against my wrist.

The third is his whisper against my throat: “You will give me what belongs to me?”

Belongs.

My trance breaks like the crack of fingers snapping. I pull back and put my hand over my neck, panting as the deep blue-green of his eyes washes over me. Once more, I feel the prickling pain in my head, and this time it is Arthur’s face in my mind and Arthur’s arms around me just like this, when I had sat on his lap in the parlor.No, I think fiercely.No, not again. I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine something, anything, shielding my vulnerable mind. Mina’s silver bracelet gives me an idea.Let it be silver, I think, drops of perspiration sliding down my back.A plate of silver protecting my mind that is so strong, so solid that the needles can’t get through.

I open my eyes to see a furrow between his brows. If I did not know better, I would have thought he was straining, fighting the barrier I have put into place against his invasion of my thoughts. “I do not belong to you,” I hear myself say, weak but distinct. “I am not yours to take.”

His eyes glitter, sharp as diamonds. “You think that isyourdecision to make?”

My heart pummels my rib cage, but the prickling pain lessens to a dull throb in my temples. “I do not belong to you,” I repeat, my voice stronger this time.

“You would rather,” the man says slowly, as the corners of his sly mouth turn upward, “that when I come to you, it will be as a husband to his wife?”

They are Arthur’s words. From the man’s widening smile, I see that in the quick moment before I had fought him off, he had glimpsed enough of what had happened between Arthur and me. Everything we had said, everything we had done, everything I had been thinking. Arthur kissing me with frantic passion, flying across the room, and leaving in haste to avoid temptation. Arthur, who loves me so much that he will not stain myvirtue until I am his—so unlike this man, who would greedily take everything I had without another thought.

“You will not be my husband,” I say. I am frightened, but I am angry, too, as I slide off his lap and back onto the bench. “You do not exist. It is for Arthur to come to me, and not you.”

I half expect him to threaten or punish me again, but instead, his gaze holds amusement and renewed interest.He isintrigued, I think,by my refusal, my belonging to someone else. He likes a challenge. “There, now. You may very well be a perfect woman of the age after all.”

I blink in disbelief. “What does that mean?”

“In every age, every country, and every culture, there is a class of woman admired above all others,” he says, returning to the pleasant, conversational tone of our weeks together. “She is the model, the ideal, and represents every aspiration of her society in that period of history. As a scholar of the world, with all the time I could wish, I have made it a game to seek out such women and make their acquaintance. I find myself easily bored, you see.”

I hug myself, shivering on the cold bench in the icy wind. The air hangs heavy with the smell of rain, and an ominous light touches the storm-racked sky.

“Most people bore me quickly, which is why you, with your hidden depths,” he says, gesturing to me with gallant charm, “entertain me so. But always, I find myself turning back to perfection … or what is considered perfection in a certain place and time. Do you remember when I told you of how England’s tightly buttoned, polite society fascinates me?”

“I remember.”

“We know thatproperwomen do not speak of death, nor are they entranced by it, and so you would be considered odd by those standards. But tonight, you refused me to keep yourself pure for your husband. Purity is prized in women of your society, I think?” He looks at me with a smile that I cannot be sure is not mocking. “Hence, a perfect woman of the age.”

I touch my bracelet, thinking of how Mina had said that this world was neither made by us nor for us. She may accept that fact, but I do not. “You’re wrong. I have never wanted to be perfect. I refused you because I belong to another, but it isn’t Arthur. It is me. I belong only to myself, no matter what the world has to say about it.”

He follows my eyes to the silver bracelet. “I have seen that photograph you carry before. A woman with sunlit hair and an angelic face, her eyes shining out at the viewer.”

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