Page 47 of The Vampire's Guide to Wooing a Curator
“Did you hear what I said?” He snatched the artifact out of her grasp.
Seraphina sighed. “Oh, Jonathan. So innocent.”
He felt a familiar wriggling sensation in his head, like fingers had reached through his scalp. She was trying to read his mind.
“Sera, please.” He dug his fingers into his hair. “I hate when you do that. The hunters will come. We can’t stay here.”
The wriggling stopped. His sister’s irises glowed so bright that he couldn’t see her pupils. “Do you really think we’d let you play your game unsupervised? Yes, they will come. And we will be waiting.”
He should have been furious that he’d once again been excluded from whatever plan his nest had created to deal with the Sorrow family, but his failure weighed too heavily to permit any other emotion.
After demanding to deal with Felicity on his own, he’d allowed himself to become subjugated with the crucifix of St. Samuel, nearly died in a filthy alley, and revealed the location of his haven to her hunter family.
They were right to treat him like a fledgling.
“Precisely,” Seraphina said. “Now let’s see what else we have.” She returned to the table but only made it halfway through the collection before she suddenly fell silent.
“What is it?” he asked.
She lifted the dagger with the golden dog’s head. Her eyes were wide, and when she spoke, her voice was shaky. “Do you know what this is?” She curled her fingers around the hilt, then brought the blade to her wrist. The moment the metal touched her skin between the edge of her sleeve and her glove, a thin tendril of smoke rose and floated up to the ceiling.
Jonathan snatched the weapon out of her grip. “What the hell was that?”
She ran her fingers over the rapidly healing wound. “It’s a hunter’s blade. Do you not recognize it? It once belonged to our maker.”
Marguerite.
He held it in his hands, trying to remember if he had seen her with it before. Nothing came to mind. The dagger was as unfamiliar to him as any of the other artifacts. But if Seraphina was right, then he had to consider the possibility that Marguerite was responsible for everything. The attacks, the bruises on the fledglings’ bodies, the coincidental discovery of the cane in the brothel, even the deaths of Felicity’s parents.
Seraphina twitched her sleeve back into place. “You truly believe our maker lives?”
He scowled. “Are you incapable of staying inside your own head?” He was growing weary of having to guard his thoughts whenever she was around. She should have known better than to invade the privacy of her own siblings.
“It is not something I can simply turn off,” she said. Then she stepped closer. “You think of the hunter often.”
He winced but did not reply. She would see through any lie he offered, and he was not prepared to face the truth of how important Felicity had become to him.
“Take my advice,” Seraphina said. “Stop resisting.” She tugged off her left glove, revealing a golden band wrapped around her fourth finger. “I would do anything to go back and have one more day with my beloved.”
“I’m sorry,” he said because he didn’t know what else to say. He’d known she’d cared for her husband but hadn’t realized how deeply. Her situation was different, though. She’d married a human who’d been unaware of her nature. The nest had not approved of the match, but they hadn’t tried to stop her.
Felicity was different. She was a hunter and part of a family that had attempted to murder Marcus and Winifred. He could not allow himself to care for her. Biting her had been a mistake. He’d been so cocksure that he’d failed to consider that his own body might come to crave hunter blood. That had to be the reason he was no longer interested in drinking from anyone else.
Seraphina replaced her glove. “Perhaps you are right.” Then she shuffled out of the room, leaving him to study the artifacts that were now free of the taint of hunters. Restoring them to their proper owners would take months. A week earlier, he would have been thrilled at the prospect of a mission that would occupy his time and keep him from thinking of Marguerite. But now that he knew she’d been alive ten years ago despite hissiblings’ insistence she’d died decades before that, all he wanted to do was find her and demand answers.
Mordecai had also declared that she was dead. It had to have been a lie. He would have felt it in his soul if his maker had died.
Why had she left? Had she been watching them all along? If she was also the one who had made the crazed fledglings, what was she trying to accomplish by letting them roam free?
Then there was Felicity. His feelings for her were entirely different from those he held for his maker. Marguerite’s abandonment had carved a hole in his soul, but the thought of never seeing Felicity again made his skin clammy.
A shooting pain in his hip made him double over. When it passed, he gingerly lifted his shirt and winced at the mess of bruises and oozing wounds. He could hardly go an hour without drinking blood before they returned, and each recurrence was worse than the last.
The codex was the answer. If he was going to survive long enough to find Marguerite, he needed a cure. He limped through the house until he found Helena in the library with the codex open in front of her, her lips moving silently as she read. A stack of paper sat next to her, filled with lines of neat text. He picked up the topmost one. “Have you finished the translation?”
She spread her arms across the table. “No!”
He felt his eyebrows rise. “Are you sure?” He touched a corner of the codex beneath her elbow. There were only a few pages left. “I know how quickly you read.” Nearly as fast as he could run.
