Page 5 of Flirting with Darkness

His brows lowered again, now pressed so low over his amber eyes that they looked like two little jewels peering from pits of shadow.

I didn’t even need to question whether that was confusion. Good. Maybe he was surprised that any human cared to know about the three vampire kingdoms of Obitraes. But I liked making it my business to know things. It was the only thing I was any good at, and when you don’t have much time in this world, you want to fill it with as much knowledge as possible.

He said, “Are you really not concerned that I’m going to eat you?”

A little,a voice whispered in the back of my head.

“No,” I said. “If you were going to do that, you would have done it by now.”

“Maybe there were other things I wanted to do first,” he said in a tone that implied this often got much more of a reaction.

I sighed wearily.

“Can we talk?” I said. “We don’t have much time.”

He seemed a little disappointed, then gestured to the sitting room. I took a seat in a dusty red velvet chair, perching lightly upon it with my back rod-straight, while he settled into the opposite leather couch in a lazy lounge.

“Are you familiar with Adcova?” I asked.

“Familiar enough.”

“An illness is plaguing the city.”

His mouth quirked. “I had heard that one of your fickle gods had taken a bit of offense to that place. Shame.”

As if Nyaxia, the vampires’ exiled goddess, was any kinder of a god than ours. Yes, the twelve gods of the White Pantheon could be cold and fickle, but Nyaxia—the heretic goddess who had split from the Pantheon two thousand years ago to create her civilization of vampires—was just as ruthlessly cruel.

“The illness is getting worse,” I said. “It is starting to expand to nearby districts. The death toll is in the thousands and will only rise.”

I blinked and saw dust—rancid dust, swept from sickhouse floors and streets and bedrooms, swept five, six times a day from the church floors after funeral by funeral.

I saw dust that I swept off of Mina’s bedroom floor, a little thicker each day. The dust we both pretended did not exist.

I cleared my throat. “All of Adcova and Boszia’s top scientists and doctors are working on finding a cure.”

And priests, and magicians, and sorcerers, of course. But I’d given up on thinking that they might save us. It was their god that damned us, after all.

“I think that you, Lord—” I stuttered, realizing for the first time that I had never actually asked for his name.

“Vale,” he said smoothly.

“Lord Vale.” I clasped my hands before me. “I think that you might have the key to a solution.”

He smirked at me. “Areyouone of the country’s ‘top scientists and doctors?’”

My jaw tightened. I had always been bad at reading people, but even I could recognize that he was mocking me. “Yes. I am.”

Again, that wrinkle between his brows.

“What?” I snapped. “Do you want me to be more demure about it? Are you, about your accomplishments?”

Vale didn’t look like he was especially demure about anything.

“What is your name?” he said. “In case I need to verify your credentials.”

“Lilith.”

“Lilith—?”

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