Page 174 of Nightshade

With a trembling hand, I brought the drink to my lips and sipped. A black licorice flavor danced across my tongue, so delicious that I sipped more. I’d never had absinthe in my life, had always thought of it as something only the strange gothic types enjoyed. But whatever he’d put in the drink seemed to quench a thirst I never knew I had.

A warm hand gripped mine, as Jericho lowered the glass from my lips and chuckled. “Slowly.” His gaze dipped to my lips, and he leaned forward to lick the liquor from them. “It was once believed that absinthe caused hallucinations. Madness. Depravity. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who likened the drink to poetry.”

“It’s delicious.”

“Indulgences considered most corruptible usually are.” His tongue swept over his own lips, as his gaze moved further down, toward my throat, and I wondered if he’d bite into my neck. Instead, he pushed away. “Come with me.”

“Where?”

“Trust, Miss Ravenshaw.”

Trust. Right. After taking one more sip of the drink, I set it on his desk and stood up from the chair, a slight wooziness settling over my head. Couldn’t have been drunk, surely--I’d only sipped about half the glass—yet, I felt the warm, fuzzy sensation of a slight buzz. Hand in his, I followed after him, out of the office, through the corridor, the cloisters, to the door of the bell tower.

The bell tower.

Still, regardless of the small and conveniently-distant voice inside my head warning me to turn the other way, I followed him.

“It’s supposed to storm tonight. I’ve been told it’s dangerous up here when there’s lightning.” Hand in his, I let him guide me up the tower’s narrow, stone stairwell, lit only by the few flickering lamps that hung from the brackets on the wall.

Grip tightening as if I might try to get away, he glanced over his shoulder at me. “You’ve nothing to worry about.”

The stairwell opened up to beams and scaffolds, moving gears and the tired sounds they made. We hit a magnificent landing en route toward the bell at the tower's pinnacle, where the back end of the clock’s enormous hands ticked off the seconds in mocking. Counting down the end of innocence. I’d heard the vague rumors of the things that happened to girls in the bell tower. The utter depravity held mostly secret by its ancient walls.

“How can you be so sure?” I asked, stalling at a window, through which a cloud of lightning gave an ominous flicker over the black sea below.

His firm hand gripped me possessively, and before I even realized he’d changed direction, he backed me into the wall. Capricious as the wind that rapped against the window, he fixed his attentions on me, the chilled stones at my back a reminder that there was no escaping him.

The gentle brush of his knuckles down my cheek belied the shadow of malice that slipped behind his otherwise cold, inscrutable eye. “Because I’m so unreasonably rapacious when it comes to you, Miss Ravenshaw, that not even a bolt of lightning should dare touch your skin without consequence.”

In that moment, the thunder seemed more distant, somehow, or perhaps it was the incessant thump of my heart drowning it out.

“You’re jealous of lightning?”

He leaned in closer, the delicious scent of bergamot and licorice as intoxicating as the warm absinthe still pulsing through my veins. His lips traced a featherlight path along my jaw. Teeth grazed my earlobe, breath hot against my neck, as he whispered, “I’m jealous of anything that occupies your mind so unremittingly when you’re with me.”

Eyes closed, I fought the shiver that rippled over me like a sweeping gale across a fragile sail. The wicked promise of a rough sea. It wasn’t until he pulled away that I opened my eyes to his and caught warning of the danger below the surface, the inevitable squall that would crash over me.

I wanted to drown in it.

At the light tug of my arm, a voice inside of me beseeched, Do not go into that abyss, but I ignored it for the curiosity that blazed over those thoughts like a wildfire, the relentless pull of the unknown.

Following after him somehow felt like venturing into the deepest, darkest waters I’d ever navigated. Terrifying and thrilling.

When we finally reached the bell of the tower, my heart kicked up to full-swing terror, as I stared out at the open sea with the angry gusts of wind whipping at my hair. Over the din of blowing wind and turbulent waves, the clank of the bell echoing through the belfry left an eerie and unsettling feeling in my stomach.

“I really …” My voice wouldn’t carry over the storm’s noise, and I gathered my hair to keep it from lashing my face. “I really think we should go down now!” Cold rain pelted my skin, leaving enough moisture for the frigid air to bite. Lightning struck the water, closer than before, and I backed myself to the wall behind me, eyeing the staircase that led back down. “I want to go back!”

Ignoring my pleas, he walked the perimeter of the belfry. Calmly. Casually. So absurdly at ease it made me wonder if he’d lost his mind. With his back to the sea, he stood before me and, one button at a time, began to remove his shirt.

“What are you doing?”

Every instinct inside of me urged me to run from the man and never look back. He’d clearly gone mental, and the longer I debated that thought, the closer the storm would get.

Go, Farryn! Run! The loon is undressing in a lightning storm at the top of the bell tower. Doesn’t get any crazier than that!

Yet, I couldn’t. Mentally unsound as he might’ve been, he compelled my curiosity like nothing else. Despite my better judgement. Despite the very real possibility that I could share the same fate as my mother.

Eyes squinting against the errant drops of rain, I watched him slide his shirt over his shoulders and toss it aside. A slicing sound cut through the air, and on reflex, I shielded my face from what I was certain would be a flash of lightning striking the bell. The cold drops of rain no longer stung my skin. I no longer felt the needling bite of cold air, and the sound of thunder seemed to have retreated out to sea.