Page 7 of Flirting with Darkness

“Oh? And why is that?”

“You won’t know unless you accept my deal.”

His eyes narrowed at me.

“How many?” he asked.

“Visits?”

“Roses.”

“I’ll visit you six times, and I’ll bring you a rose each time.”

This time, I was expecting another unceremonious refusal. But instead, Vale examined the rose, twirling it slightly between his fingertips. He had a very cold, hard stare—it looked a bit familiar, and I couldn’t place why until I realized that it was the stare of a scientist, someone used to analyzing things and taking them apart.

A little spark of relief came with this realization. Because that, at least, was something I understood. Maybe Vale and I were worlds apart in every way—human and vampire, lord and peasant, near-immortal and pitifully ephemeral—but if we had that, it was already more than I had in common with most of the people I’d grown up with.

“Fine,” he said, at last. “I accept your deal. Did you bring your equipment? Let’s get this over with.”

* * *

Of course I brought my equipment. I had my needles and vials ready. Vale pulled up his shirt sleeve and extended his arm to me, and I drew his blood.

Up close, he smelled like jasmine—both old and young at once, foreign and familiar. His skin was smooth and tan. When I touched his wrist to adjust the position of his arm, I jumped at the lack of warmth, but it also wasn’t as cold as I’d imagined it would be. People spoke of vampires like they were walking corpses, but I’d seen many, many corpses, and Vale didn’t look like any of them.

Still, I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting when I pierced the smooth skin of his inner arm with my needle. I had to push much harder than I did with a human, and when the needle went through, it did so with a faintpopand abrupt force. The blood that flowed into my vial appeared to be the same consistency as human blood, but much, much darker—nearly black.

I watched it, fascinated. Then, by the second vial, my eyes had drifted up to the rest of the room, taking in the tapestries on the walls, the books on the shelves. Gods, some of those tomes looked to be many centuries old, carelessly shoved into dusty corner.

How old was Vale, I wondered? Legend said he had been here, beyond the outskirts of Adcova, for nearly two hundred years. How many decades—centuries—of life had he lived before then?

How much had he experienced?

“Are you enjoying looking?”

Vale’s voice startled me. My eyes flicked back to him. He was now looking at me as he had looked at that rose—pulling me apart, petal by petal.

Are you?I wanted to say.

Instead I said, “What will become of all of this when you die?”

“I’m immortal.”

I scoffed. “You’re not immortal. You’re just very long-lived. That’s an important distinction.”

“By the time it matters, I’m sure I won’t care.”

It already looked a bit like Vale didn’t care, judging by the condition of his living space, but I didn’t say that, either.

A knot of jealousy formed in my stomach. He spoke with such blasé carelessness about all this. About his life. The gluttony of it revolted me. He’d hoard all of this knowledge here, and he’d think nothing of it. Selfish.

“I imagine it must become the only valuable thing, after all that time,” I said. The last vial was almost full. I watched the blood bubble up in the glass, ready to pinch off the needle. “Knowledge.”

“Knowledge is cheap and dull,” Vale said, too casually, and I almost gasped at him in horror.

“I can’t imagine that ever being true. There’s so much to learn about the world.”

He laughed a little, condescendingly, the way one laughs at a stumbling kitten. I corked the last vial and withdrew the needle from his arm. I found, with some surprise, that his skin had already healed around the needle tip. I had to rip it from his vein, which he didn’t react to.

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