Page 38 of Flirting with Darkness

Stay,I wanted to beg her.

But no, I wouldn’t pray to the god that had damned her. I wouldn’t help her come to terms with a death I refused to let her meet.

“I can’t,” I said, and went to my office without another word. I didn’t stop working until dawn, and I fell asleep over my books.

But Thomassen came more and more often, and death crept closer and closer.

If I was less distracted by my work and the grief I so tried to stave off, perhaps I would have been more concerned by the acolyte’s constant presence in this house. Perhaps I should have given more thought to the way he watched me, the lingering stares at the doors I left ajar.

But I was used to being judged, too used to it to realize when judgment became dangerous.

I didn’t have time to worry about one old man’s thoughts about me. I had to work.

I was running out of time.

* * *

But then, one day, when nearly a month had passed since my last visit to Vale, something shifted. I slept in my study that day, as I so often did now, and I woke up to a pile of Vale’s letters, strewn across my desk. Four of them, in the sparse hours I’d been asleep.

My heart jumped with either anticipation or dread. So many in such a short span could only signal something wonderful or terrible.

It turned out it was the former.

Vale had made a discovery. I flipped through his letters—pages upon pages torn from one of his books. I’d gotten used to his scrawled handwriting, but the translations in the margins were even messier than usual, as if he’d been writing so fast he couldn’t even stop to form real letters. It took me hours to fully decode them.

When I did, I gasped.

He had found a crucial missing piece. The text was old, detailing experiments done on vampire blood in Obitraes. Yet, despite their age, the figures answered so many of the questions I had been grappling with about how to effectively distill vampire blood into something different. Vale and I hadn’t found much in the way of Obitraen science—vampire society, it seemed, was much more inclined to work with magic instead.

But this… it was exactly the sort of information I’d barely allowed myself to dream of.

“Vale,” I breathed under my breath. “Vale, you—you—”

I was grinning so widely my cheeks hurt. I probably looked like a lunatic, half-mad with exhaustion and hope. I hadn’t changed my clothes in days, and I figured another day wouldn’t do any harm, because I launched myself right back into work.

Hours blurred to days. New equations became new formulas became new vials of experimental potions. Vials of experimental potions became tests as I gave them to my ailing rats.

And tests became medicine as those rats grew less and less sick.

The next batch, too. And the next.

And then, one bleary morning, I found myself standing before an entire cage of healthy, active rodents, cradling those vials in my hands like a newborn infant—and medicine became a cure.

A cure.

It was only fitting, of course, that this was when everything fell apart.

15

Iopened the door, and Farrow stood there, his sandy hair wild and eyes wide. Sheer terror.

He sagged against the frame when I opened the door, like he was so relieved to see me that all his muscles gave out.

Mine, on the other hand, tensed, as my fragile newfound hope smashed to the floor.

“You have to go.”

He said it so fast that the four words ran together in a single exhale.

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