Page 44 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

I held my breath, forcing my body to behave. Each second was the length of an eternity.

Hector brought his lips to my ear. “Good girl.”

“If I ask Lady Aventine to a dance, will you make an example out of me too?” Arawn’s drawl was a splash of cold water.

In a blink, the ballroom came into focus along with a brutal and heart-dropping surge of mortification.

Thankfully, the phantom dancers had multiplied, and everyone, apart from Dahlia and Camilla, who were standing around the wine fountain with their backs turned to the room, was too busy spinning alongside them to pay any attention to us.

“Won’t you fuck off, Celestine?” growled Hector.

Arawn shot him a wry look. “I would, but the only available partner at the moment is Camilla, and I’m pretty sure that every orifice of her body has fangs.”

I grimaced. “You’re disgusting.”

“Yes, yes, I’m a repulsive, despicable vampire. Now dance with me, for old times’ sake.”

“Alright, alright,” I sighed as Hector got us up from the bench in one sweeping motion.

Arawn’s face was pallid, etched in shadow, but his smile was bright and mischievous as he grabbed my hand and swirled me theatrically onto the dance floor. Hector laughed, and the sound of it filled me with sparkling joy.

Outside, the night was cold and dark, the forest vast and foreboding, but inside the Castle, the creatures of the night were more alive than ever.

16

Thea

Dawn arrived with the promise of a glorious day, but my heart felt too moonburned to be moved by the grand sweeps of pink and peach that made the sky outside look like a fragment from a painting. How strange it was to be going to bed at this meandering, in-between hour. No wonder Esperida always said that her life was like one endless night, days and months and years inseparable from each other.

The Castle was blissfully quiet. Everyone had already locked themselves away from the lethal light of the sun, and our two lonely shadows, Hector’s and mine, seemed to reach for each other in the stillness of the floor. “Why don’t you go ahead and rest?” he suggested.

Immediate disappointment swelled in my chest. “Where are you going?”

Perhaps it was a little presumptuous of me, but now that we were alone, I thought we were going to talk about what had happened earlier in the ballroom. Maybe even do more than just talk. I hoped for two bodies in one bed. I hoped for confessions and admissions and relief. I felt as though a barrier had crumbled between us, and whatever we chose to do with the pieces of this shattered wall now was going to alter the trajectory of our lives forever.

“I need to speak with Arawn,” was all Hector said.

He’s avoiding me, I realized, my heart eggshell thin. “Earlier… Did I misinterpret…”

“You didn’t.” The words left him in a rush. They didn’t allow much room for doubt. Still, he was not staying.

“I thought you might want to—”

“I did,” he interjected again. Then more firmly, “I do.” His gaze softened on mine, like the daylight outside softened the edges of the night. “Believe me, I want nothing more than to be alone with you right now. But Arawn…” He hesitated.

My own worries quieted as Arawn’s sunken eyes focused in the prism of my mind. “He’s heartbroken,” I murmured. “I don’t think I’ve seen him like this before. And he’s so thin, did you notice?”

A look of gut-wrenching guilt seized Hector’s face. “I don’t know how I missed it,” he whispered. “I should have been there for him.”

Had Hector not been in such a terrible shape himself, I knew he would have done much more than simply be there for Arawn. After all, Hector had been the one to hold me in his arms the first time a boy rejected me. Hector had been the one to rush across the Realm with or without the Castle every time I wrote to him that I’d fought with my parents or that I’d been feeling terribly lonely without him.

I pressed a little closer, slipping my fingers over the crescents of his arm. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You suffered a great loss. And when you’re hurting, it’s hard to see that the people around you are hurting as well. Sadness falls upon your eyes like a veil. It blinds you. It secludes you from the rest of the world.”

His throat bobbed, the shame in his face shifting into melancholy. “And how do you lift the veil?”

“You don’t,” I said, and the smile accompanying that sentiment was a sad one. “You wait for it to fall away little by little until you’re able to see the world in full color again.”

“But the people I’ve hurt—”

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