Page 44 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

“Are you well, Sorceress?” he says.

And only then do I realize I’m sort of drifting toward him. He almost puts a hand out to steady me—I have to ward him off by starting this whole procedure. I slap the meat over his wound, a little roughly. He winces, but I really can’t let myself focus on that. I just need to get this done. I need to wind the duct tape around and around, my hands only on the steak and not on his skin.

A ridiculous thing, really.

It should be funny.

But I’m not laughing now.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It’s only a short walk to the library, and a good hour before closing. So I decide it’s fine to go on foot. Though I regret it as soon as we’re walking down Main Street. He’s just so much more conspicuous than I thought he would be when I came up with this plan. And in a way I didn’t really imagine once I managed to magic him into semi-reasonable clothes.

I thought it would be better if he was dressed like a normal human man.

But all it did was make him look inhumanly, impossibly gorgeous. The powder blue of this sweater brings out the ocean in his eyes; the material skims the curves of his chest just enough to leave you wanting more. And the fit on the jeans I built him, the way they slide down into those too-big boots—obscene.

It looks like I’m walking down the street with a fucking celebrity. He’s that guy from the show you saw advertised on Netflix last week. It’s rumored he’s going to be in a Star Wars thing. Your friend really likes him, what’s his name again? Gorgeous McHandsome, I think, and want to kill myself.

And everybody’s reaction only makes that worse.

Mrs. Twiliger is in the middle of locking up her dance studio, and she stops dead when we stroll by. “Why, Marley Maples,” she exclaims, and I can see she wants to say more. Her gaze travels over me and then up and up and up over him, her eyes getting bigger and bigger as she goes.

Though I don’t think it’s just because he’s enormous and handsome.

He’s also the first man I’ve strolled down Main Street with in quite some time. In fact, right now I’m struggling to recall any man I’ve strolled down Main Street with—and for precisely this reason. People notice when you do things out of the ordinary. Suddenly they can see you, they’re paying attention to you, and the next thing you know you can’t follow around that gang of jocks to see if they’re secret werewolves. And there’s no way to work out what old man Hannigan is really up to when he lasers everybody with his beady eyes and makes plans to cleanse the town of filth and all the rest of it.

And you sure as shit can’t solve some supernatural problem behind the scenes. As soon as you’re the focus, everyone suddenly wants to know what you’re doing knee-deep in mud in the middle of the woods, crying and panicking and shoveling what looks like nothing into a wheelbarrow.

You can’t say it’s a fairy village that got caught in a landslide.

You’re just nuts then, forever, either way. You’re set in stone.

And I can’t have that.

“He’s just a friend,” I blurt out over my shoulder as we sail by.

But that makes Halsten lean suddenly close. Like he knows if he wants to talk to me with everyone around, he has to whisper. But dear god, I wish he didn’t know that at all. It just means I get his still unsettlingly warm breath ghosting over the side of my face. The sense of his body curving over mine, familiar in a way I just don’t understand at all. It makes me go dizzy. It makes me think I am going mad.

I should see it only as a threat, only as something alien to me.

Maybe even as something completely forbidden.

And instead I find myself thinking of words like sheltered, protected, maybe even confidant. He’s waiting for you to trust him, I think, and meanwhile he trusts you so completely he will just lean close and confess that those words about being his friend thrill him, even if they cannot be true. Like he’s excited by this tiny possibility. Like even that small crumb is amazing to him. Like he knows you somehow, in the same way you suddenly feel like you know him.

And so of course I cannot tell him that the small crumb isn’t real. That I didn’t mean it. Honestly, I’m not even sure if I don’t. The urge to answer him with something gushing and affectionate is so strong that I almost say it, even with all these eyes on us. We pass the bandstand, and somehow old man Hannigan is sitting in the center of it, surrounded by wintry scenery. He looks like a haunted tombstone in the middle of a high school production of Frozen.

And his heavy gaze follows us all the way past the laundromat.

I almost walk into a festooned fire hydrant, he seems so intent on us.

But still, the urge to be soft with Halsten is there. In fact, it’s what tears me away from that mean son of a bitch. Those cold eyes reach toward me, and the warmth of whatever madness this is makes that coldness seem very distant. More than that, really: I find myself almost wanting to shelter under one of his arms.

And then am startled to see he’s lifted one of them.

Almost like he knew, and had the urge to hold me.

Even if he doesn’t quite seem to know it. His gaze is suddenly on everything but me—on the sights and sounds of Main Street. The glow of the lamps, the colorful awnings, all the things that seem completely ordinary to me, but are fantastical to him.