Page 13 of Ouch! My Vampire Doms Keep Biting Me
His glower sparks joy. He’s so bloody angry all the time, how can I not want to take the piss?
“What do you want?” he asks.
“We’re going hunting.”
Four hours later, we’ve found a willing woman at Low Vice. Tonight, we don’t take her home—I’ve brought a small vial of oubliette with us, and if we linger over the aftercare, the woman’s bite marks will heal quickly and she’ll have no recollection or reminder of being punctured by our fangs.
But our cocks? I’ll let her keep that memory. Or I would, but Xander doesn’t fuck her.
He pulls blood from her neck while I’m thrusting into her from behind. But he doesn’t fuck her. I give him a puzzled look.
What the fuck is wrong with you?I ask him without words.
He simply closes his eyes, blotting me out of his dining experience. Wanker.
I pump my hips, appreciating the snug hold of the lady’s cunt even while I wonder what’s the matter with Xander. Somethinghas changed for him. He’s never been fully open with me about his thoughts. I get it; thoughts are private.
But something is bothering him.
He brought up Elisabeth the other day, shocking me. Her death certainly changed things for us. Many vampire pairs don’t survive the death of their amant. We survived, even if we sometimes wish we didn’t.
Autumn
I’ve spent three nights here in The Corbin, going on four. I find food left out in an employee break room after the doors have closed for the evening, with a sign readingHelp yourselfwritten out on an index card. I find shampoo left near the bathroom sinks, as well as toothpaste and a toothbrush.
The receptionist’s name is Izzie. I’ve approached her a few times since that first day I came here. I want to say thank you, but I’m not really sure how. She’s often working with someone else. Plus, whenever she’s alone and I come up to her desk, she’s super professional. What am I supposed to say?Hey, thanks for letting me squat in your library…Yeah, no.
I thought I might do some cleaning while the library is closed, as a way of saying thank you. My plan nearly dies before it begins, because the place is spotless already. A janitor moves throughout the building when the library is open, and the place is nearly spotless by the end of the day.
But I’ve also had a lot of time to explore. Last night, I found a basement stuffed full of boxes and boxes of books and papers. There are thousands of binders. At a wide table tucked between all those boxes, it looks as if someone left off in the midst ofcataloging a new shipment of books. As far as I can tell, whoever it was hasn’t worked on it in some time, certainly not since I arrived.
So I get to work, scanning the pages of the open binder. It takes me a little while, but I figure out the codes they’re using by matching the entries to books stacked off to one side. It doesn’t look like the Dewey Decimal System—at least, nothing like I would expect. Instead, there are short abbreviations and indicators of subject, author, length of the book, and a rating on how well the book would fit into one of the curated rooms upstairs.
I can definitely work with that.
For a couple of hours, I lose myself in sorting and cataloging, printing out neat entries on new forms and adding them to the binder. I place a sticky note on the page where I’ve started, so that if I’ve screwed up somehow, the person in charge will be able to figure out where things went amiss.
I set another book aside and stretch. My back is pleasantly sore from the work. I’m feeling rejuvenated. I now have a purpose, something to lose myself in. If I were hiding in one of the display cabinets right now, my mind would be whirling over and over on Dale, on Marcus’s death, on anything I might have done differently to stop the violence.
On anything I might have done differently that could have saved my mom, ten years ago.
But here, I’m happily busy and productive and distracted.
Until a faint wail echoes through the basement.
I gasp. On instinct, I reach up for the table lamp next to me and switch it off. The room plunges into darkness…almost. There’s a faint line of light coming from the back wall. That’s really weird.
I shouldn’t. I shouldnotgo over there. Every horror movie ever would tell me to stay away from creepy, mysterious basement lights.
But like the first heroine to die in all of those movies, I go to the eerie amber light.
It’s coming through a crack, one that appears in a corner where a set of old shelves meet the concrete wall. Wait a minute. There shouldn’t be a crack here, there shouldn’t be light. I look down and see scrape marks over the concrete floor, as if something gets dragged over this spot.
As if the bookcase itself is moved sometimes.
A secret door?
Please let it be a secret door. My girlhood dream was to visit the Altera Public Library and discover untold worlds beyond the mundane shelves.
