Page 95 of Mama Si's Paradise

“We hunt. We fight. We play.” Valentine shrugged.

“Is italwaysthis dark?” I asked, turning to my surroundings again. My head was so, so cold because of my wet hair, but I couldn’t go back inside yet. I still tried to see—a star, a building out there, one of the animals he was talking about.

I saw nothing.

“Always. But it rains here most days. We do have that, at least.”

Rain.He liked the rain. Funny how it suited the looks of him, the rain. He’d no doubt look good wet, too.

And that thought was justwrong.

“Is it…is it because of you? Because of what you are? Does sunlight burn you?” I asked, sure that I’d gotten it right, but…

“No, it doesn’t. Those are just stories. This darkness is a magic spell meant to keep us shielded from the siren’s senses. Even dormant she can feel what goes on in Ennaris,” said Valentine.

“So, you just stay here all the damn time, all your lives?” Was that what he was saying?

“Not by choice,” he muttered, and the quick look he gave said he felttrapped.I almost felt sorry for him—but then I remembered what he was.

“The sirens force you to stay here?”

“They do. This spell does,” Valentine said.

I shook my head, even more surprised. “But how…how do you live like this?” This seemed so impossible. Such a miserable way to exist. “How do you see the world?”

I thoughtIhad problems because I got kicked out by my boyfriend, when there were people who actually lived like this?

Valentine turned to look at me, as if my question surprisedhim. As if the thoughts that popped into his head just now surprised him as well.

Then he smiled. “I’ll show you.”

We went downa spiral stairway half hidden by the wall and this black vase that was as tall as me, dotted with white ink like someone had bled white all over it. Inside were roses, those same black roses, except they were real. I touched one as I went, and they were real. Petals, just like on red and pink and white roses. Real, just like Valentine Evernight, a vampire of the Whispering Woods.

Down and down we went, and the dragon joined us, silently taking his place on Valentine’s shoulder and wrapping that tail around his neck before I even noticed him there. Valentine didn’t react at all, didn’t even flinch at the sudden contact, almost like he’d known the dragon was coming. It made me wonder about their connection.

We reached the bottom of the spiral stairway, and it was different down here. No fancy lamps and strange paintings, and no black walls. Just grey concrete on all sides and a perfectly round door at the end of the narrow corridor, like ones in the fantasy movies I watched as a kid.Mysterious.

When Valentine turned to look at me, he was smiling. “I like that,” he said.

“Like what?” I hadn’t said anything out loud, had I?

“That little skipped beat. You’re enjoying this.”

Well, fuck. My mouth opened and closed, half of me wanting to deny it, the other half absolutely in awe that he could tell when my heart skipped beats.

What in the world was this guy’s deal? He couldn’treallybe as infatuated with me as he said, could he?

He hadn’treallystayed up all night to listen to my heart beating…had he?

The groaning sound the door made when he pulled the handle said it was really heavy, and it was as thick as my shoulders, but Valentine moved it like it was nothing but a feather. On the other side of it was raw darkness. The room must have been huge—you could feel it in the air. Colder, but not too cold. Just more open. The ceiling could have been missing completely for all I knew. All I saw were some structures ahead, in what could have been the middle of the room.

Valentine started walking toward it, and the dragon was making that crackling sound again—like wood burning in a fireplace. A fleeting thought occurred to me—maybe this was it. Maybe this was where he brought me to kill me, suck all the blood from my body and leave me cold on the ground, but…

The closer to those structures we got, the more light I could see. The morecolorswere reflecting from them—and the sound, too. Sound was coming from those tall pieces of wood, and when we were halfway to them, I realized…

“Mirrors.”They were mirrors, eight of them, made out of dark wood, taller than me, and twice as wide. They were placed in a perfect circle on a wooden platform two steps off the rocky ground.

“Yes, mirrors. They see into the Isles,” Valentine told me, and we went through the narrow space between two of them to find a big round couch with cushions on it in the middle, and a few chairs scattered here and there. A violin and a flute were leaning against the wooden frames, as well as a strange looking instrument, almost like a drum. An easel was there as well, and paintings stacked on the floor. Whoever had made them hadn’t cared about preserving them at all.

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