Page 53 of The Royal Street Witch
Simpering, he tilts his head, studying me in that way I’ve come to love. “I drank Cassius’s blood and was able to hide out in my mother’s office for some time. Franklin wanted to see me, since it’s been years…I had to take my shirt off and wear just my jacket.” He laughs. “Which is something I can thankfully get away with. But I could hardly converse after a couple of hours and needed blood and rest, so Cassius said I had barely slept the prior day and took me home.” His finger runs along each of my eyebrows down the bridge of my nose as he recalls the previous night of horror with so much calm. “Vampire blood is only needed for rejuvenation, so that would have been a hard clue that something was wrong. Cassius took me home, fed me, and stayed with me. I slept all day and woke up in a panic, knowing I had to get to you.
“You had to get out. I know you wanted to help. But if you had been caught in the room with me like that…”
“I know,” I say. “I was shook at first, but I realized later that you were—”
“Protecting you.” He brings his lips to mine and our lips slide along each other’s, tasting and relishing.
I pull away for air and his head plops down on the chair. “I don’t need protection,” I say, and he scoffs, rolling his eyes.
“Well I—”
“How are you now? All better?”
He smiles at my purposeful interruption and licks his bottom lip. “Yeah, I’m fine. Was a little weak earlier, but I’m okay.”
“Did a beautiful woman give you sustenance?” Ugh, I sound like a teenager, the jealousy is downright embarrassing.
“Stop,” he warns, and now I’m even more embarrassed.
“Can you describe to me what happened? Because Bastian, the potion, we need to get rid of it.”
“Huh?” He sits up abruptly, forcing me to sit up with him, his head shaking, his hands on my arms. “No, Aster. No. It was just too much. I did too much. We’ll lessen the dosage. You can fix it.”
“I don’t know if I can. Every ingredient works just right so you can walk in the daylight.”
“No, no you can fix it, baby. I know you. I know you can.” His fingers dig into my shoulders, and I stiffen and pull away from him.
“That’s not how it works. Look at medications for humans. Everything has side effects. I don’t think there’s anything I can do.”
His head drops as he pulls on his bottom lip, a fang resting on it that I hadn’t noticed slipped out.
I lift his chin to meet his eyes. “Bastian, what would have happened if you hadn’t stopped coughing up blood? Could you die from that?”
With a groan, he buckles his pants in a feeble effort to buy himself time, so I follow suit and pull my dress back around my legs and sit up. He stands, pacing back and forth, his hand squeezing the back of his neck.
“Well?” I ask, and he glares at me.
“Probably. I’m not sure. If I bled out, lost massive amounts of my blood, I could probably die. But that was hardly massive amounts.”
“Yeah, but it started as a nosebleed. What if it gets worse?”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“I don’t mess with ‘what ifs.’ What ifs are dangerous for witches. It’s what we’ve been waterboarded and burnt for. We need certainty. And what about Cassius? I’m sure he’s just chomping at the bit to kill me now.”
He squints his eyes in pain and shakes his head. “He would never do something like that—”
“Oh, he doesn’t hate me? Hate what I’ve done?” I’m yelling now, the territory seeming more and more dangerous.
“He’s angry mostly with me. But he’ll get over it. He’ll be—”
“No! It’s over, Bastian. No more. I can’t fix it and I can’t be on Cassius’s bad side. I’m already on my own coven’s bad side. Chantal is on to me, and I hate lying to her!”
The lounge chair catches him as he falls back, burying his head in his hands. And he’s silent for a long time, digesting the end of something exquisite. Exquisite and dangerous.
“And there’s something else, there’s the fact that if something…happened to you…because of me. If you died, or got really hurt…I couldn’t live, I couldn’t live with myself, okay?” My hands wring against each other with such force my fingers lose feeling. And there it is, laid bare and open. The absolute truth, the agony of the day. The torture of the unknown and worry that Bastian was hurt or even gone forever.
His head pops up, those silken lips swollen and wet, those piercing eyes filled with fevered anguish. “Well, it’s finally nice hearing it’s not just the fear of the trouble you’d get into.” He swipes angrily at his nose and I could strangle him. “That you actually might care about me.”
