Page 32 of Blood & Ice

I was hoping to convince Rook’s dad to give me the lessons instead.

“Get out of my sight,” Aurea hissed after a protracted sight. “I don’t want to see your face anywhere near the daytime dorms for a week. Do you understand me?”

Rook gave her a sardonic smile and a wave of acknowledgment before turning for the door.

“Always a pleasure, Aurea,” he called over his shoulder. “Toodles.”

Rook barely bit back a chuckle when her hex went wide, missing him by a hair. The talisman I’d tucked into his breast pocket was doing its job, deflecting dark magic.

The laughter died almost as soon as it began, put on only for the headmistress’ benefit. Silence swallowed us a few feet into the corridor. The gothic architecture looked gloomy in my current state of mind. If my heart could have beaten, it would have been racing.

We’d done it. We’d made it to Blood Rose.

Now what?

Chapter Eighteen

Maverick

“Move!”

I spat the words into Knox’s face. Which was, coincidentally,myface. The vampire god, or whatever he really was under that smug grin, had used my body like a template, using it to create a physical form that was more than shadow. He seemed to appreciate it, too, because he’d been luxuriating in making my limbs move for a while now. I’d never been possessed, but this sounded eerily similar to some of the stories Wanda told on the rare occasion she deigned to talk about her experience.

It had been confusing at first, waking inside my own head, trapped in some elusive corner, alive but not able to move my body. I could feel it like a heavy weight holding me down. It was almost unbearable and reminded me of the fits of terror that night hags could produce. Had they been spawned from this son of a bitch?

Staring at Knox, I finally understood why I’d been punched in the face so often in my past. The sneering set of my mouth, especially guided by the vampire deity’s derision, made me want to haul off and break his face. I’d tried planting a blood bolt between his eyes only an hour after waking here, but to no avail. Because all of this was only existing in my mind—this opulent prison he’d forced us into was just a holding cell, but in it I could still lunge at him. Try to fight him.

And get absolutely nowhere.

Knox blew a stream of smoke into my face before offering me an ‘aww shucks’ smile as though he hadn’t intended to do that the entire time. It felt strange and somehow incestuous to notice how full my mouth was. It was also hard to think about him as me, even though we now shared a face. My face.

He didn’tfeellike me, and that was the most I could pindown about his energy. He kept himself a huge, scary mystery on purpose. The fucker wasn’t done manipulating me yet.

“I told you, dear boy: I already have a summoner. I can’t turn on a dime and betray her.”

“So you kill me instead?”

He chuckled at that. “You are far from dead. To the outside world, you might appear that way, but don’t worry, though. The witches of your coven haven’t buried you yet. They can tell something’s off—that you aren’t really dead. You just look incredibly convincing. And that’s by design—I had to make it look good toher.The spell should wear off in a few days. That’s all it will take, in the end. Just a few days, and then you and I can be one… at last.”

It wasn’t the words that disturbed me. It was theexpression.The vampire was eyeing me like a particularly fine cut of beef, and he was wondering how and when to make the first cut. Paired with the longing in his voice, it felt like I’d walked in on something personal. Something inhuman and ugly that I was never meant to see. There were monsters in the descriptive sense. Classified so by humans. Then there weremonsters.Demons of the lowest infernal layers. Reepers. Hags. Wendigos. Killers. Soul crushers. Knox was one of those. He wanted to crack me open like a nut and live inside my skull. Creepy didn’t even begin to cover it.

“Save the Hannibal Lecter routine for someone who gives a damn,” I hissed, pacing back the way I’d come.

He’d channeled Wanda’s aesthetic when creating the place. The red velvet damask wallpaper was something she’d have adored. I thought it made the room feel tight and cluttered, especially with all the antique furniture shoved into the space. The chandelier would have been to Wanda’s taste as well. Or perhaps Wanda had adoptedhispreferences. I didn’t like thinking that way, but maybe there was more than one reasonWanda had been susceptible to the Reeper’s influence. Maybe because there was a shard of something evil inside of us that we hadn’t asked for.

I ended up sitting stiffly on a black wingback chair, glaring at Knox instead of trying to rush the door. He’d been standing vigil there for a while. I couldn’t tell if hours, days, or weeks had passed while I paced my cage, waiting for the fucker todo something.

“Come, don’t get sour grapes now,” he said, ruining the rebuke with a toothy smile. His fangs disturbed me viscerally. They looked wrong in my face. The eyes were wrong too, red seeping in under the gray so that they resembled the color of blood in murky water. I didn’t want to know what else might be hiding in their depths. “We’ve only just begun.”

“Why are you keeping us here?” I asked. “Where’s Tally? Where are the boys? If you hurt them—”

He raised a hand. “Slow down, Charmin.”

“If you’re going to wear my damned body, you’ll call me by my right name.”

“Maverick,” he corrected himself with a smirk. “The boys and the fae princess are fine. In fact, when they come out of the spell, they won’t remember a thing. Only you are conscious.”

“Thank the goddess for small mercies,” I muttered.

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