Page 3 of Flirting with Darkness

Waited.

Nothing.

I knocked a third time, a fourth. And then, finally, I thought to myself,Well, this is the stupidest thing I’ll ever do,and tried opening the door.

The door, to my luck or misfortune, was unlocked. The hinges squealed like this door had not been opened for a very, very long time. I had to throw myself against the mahogany to get it to budge.

It was silent within. Dusty. The interior of the house was just as strangely inconsistent in style as the exterior, though it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust enough to see that. It was dark inside, the only light the moonlight spilling from behind me. The silver outlined the silhouettes of countless objects – sculptures and paintings and artifacts and so much more I couldn’t even begin to take in. Gods, it was mesmerizing.

“Hello?” I called out.

But there was no sound. No movement, save for the faint rustling of moth-bitten gauze curtains.

Maybe he was dead. No one had seen him for a few decades. I’d be disappointed if I came all this way just to discover a rotting corpse.Didhis kind rot? Or did they just—

“It appears,” a deep voice said, “a little mouse has made its way into my home.”

3

There’s nothing to be afraid of,I told myself, but that did nothing to stop the hairs from rising on the back of my neck.

I turned.

And though I was expecting it, the sight of him standing on the stairwell, enveloped in shadow, still made me jump—the way one jumps when a snake moves in the underbrush beneath your feet.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. He stood at the top of the stairs, peering down at me with the vague curiosity of a hawk. He had long dark brown hair, slightly wavy, and a neat beard. He wore a plain white shirt and black trousers, unremarkable if a little outdated. He was large, but not monstrously so. I saw no horns nor wings, no matter how I squinted into the dark.

I was almost a little disappointed by how…normalhe looked.

Yet, the thing that most betrayed his inhumanity was the way he moved—or rather, the way he didn’t. He was still the way stone was still, no minuscule shift to his muscles or rise or fall of his shoulders, no blink or waver of his gaze as it drank me in. You don’t realize how much you notice those things in a person until they aren’t there, and suddenly every instinct inside of you is screaming,This is wrong!

He approached down the stairs, the moonlight illuminating bright amber eyes and a slow smile—a smile that revealed two sharp fangs.

My chills were short-lived, drowning beneath a wave of curiosity.

Fangs. Actual fangs, just like the stories said. I wondered how that worked? Did his saliva contain an anticoagulant or—

“Would you like to tell me what you’re doing in my house?”

His voice was deep. He had an accent, a sharp lilt stabbing into thet’s andd’s, rising the longa’s ando’s with a melodic twang.

Interesting. I’d never heard an Obitraen accent before. Then again, most people in the human lands never met anyone from Obitraes, because vampires didn’t often leave their homeland and were usually better off avoided if they did.

“I was looking for you,” I said.

“So you come into my home uninvited?”

“It would have been easier if you had come to the door.”

He paused at the bottom of the stairs. Again, that vampire stillness, the only movement a single slow blink.

“Do you understand where you are?” he asked.

That was a stupid question.

Maybe he was used to being cowered at. I did not cower. Why should I? I’d already met death three times now. So far, the fourth was a bit of a disappointment.

“I brought a gift for you,” I said.

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