Page 34 of Monsters' Manor

I’ve never seen Silas more clearly than I do right now. His shadows shift, then dissipate enough for me to see the surprise in his expression.

And the need.

It’s a sharp-edged want, so very different from the gentle, patient shade I know. An urgency, a dark desire balanced on a knife’s edge, waiting for me.

“Yes, Silas.”

Permission granted, Silas moves, a shadow tightening around my wrist as he tugs me toward the door. It’s a stronger pull than before, almost solid. I could still break the hold if I wanted, but I follow him with a laugh of surprise, reaching for the handle.

He crowds in close, shadows curling around me as I let us inside.

As soon as the front door closes, the magick between us shifts. A charge, a crackling, a static sort of energy that reaches in and pulses low in my belly. In the small space it’s hard to tell where Silas’s darkness ends and the shadows of the room begin. He seems to expand, to bleed into those shadows until he’s all around me.

With each of my fast, shallow breaths, I taste the magick of him. Midnight dew and the last embers of a bonfire. Veins of frost on fallen leaves. Power I can almost reach out and touch, share it with him like I did on the night he made his shadows mine.

It reminds me just how far from human he is, and just how far out of my depth I am right now.

The only lovers I’ve had have been human. Whether they’ve treated me well or left me wanting, they’ve all been so very ordinary. Nothing like the being of darkness and magick in front of me.

And absolutely none of them made me feel like this. This need. This hunger. This power racing through me.

But that doesn’t mean I know how to… do this.

Instead of the crashing bodies, grasping hands, and tangling limbs I’m used to, being here in the dark with Silas is more of a slow enveloping. He’s everywhere, all at once, a part of the night itself.

“How do I… How do we…”

Silas laughs, a low rasp in the dim of the room. “I’m assuming you’ve never been with a shade before?”

“No.” I shake my head, a flush rising on my cheeks. “You might have to walk me through it.”

“Perhaps I should show you instead.”

There’s so much warm, dark promise in his words. A thread of teasing that nestles itself in the pit of my stomach and makes an aching heat build in my core.

“Okay,” I say, breathless. “Yeah. You can show me.”

A tremor in the shadows as they press closer. “Do you trust me, Rose?”

“Yes, Silas. I trust you.”

A tendril of darkness bands around my wrist once more, tugging me gently down the short hall, past the bathroom and to the cottage’s only bedroom. The door creaks open, pushed by a phantom wind, and I follow Silas’s silhouette to the side of the bed.

He moves faster than I can blink, shifting so he’s behind me, and the shadow around my wrist drops to the hem of my shirt.

“Can I take this off?”

“Yes.” The word catches in my throat as he tugs it up and off me in one smooth move.

A sound emerges from his darkness, something almost like the disapproving click of a tongue. For a horrible second I think it’s because he doesn’t like what he sees. It’s only a moment later, though, that he uses a shadow to draw back the curtains and a beam of moonlight illuminates the room.

“Much better.”

A tendril of shadow caresses over the soft curve of my stomach. I tilt my head to get a look at Silas behind me and find him watching with rapt attention, eyes roving over my moonlit skin.

“How about this?” he murmurs, another shadow catching on the clasp of my bra.

“That can go, too.”

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