Page 147 of Spark of Sorcery
I move quickly and silently through the academy and then I’m standing outside her room, pounding on her door. The scent of her is everywhere, sunken into the floorboards and buried in the walls. I have the urge to press my face up against it and inhale deep into my cold lungs.
The door opens. She’s standing there in an oversized shirt that grazes her thighs; her legs and her feet bare despite the frigid temperature. A temperature that will drop lower in my presence.
“I thought you might come,” she whispers, drawing back the door and disappearing inside.
Over the threshold of the doorway, the room glows with a dull fire – a doorway I cannot pass through without her permission.
She peers over her shoulder at me with her startling green eyes, her golden hair wound in a plait that falls nearly to her waist.
“Are you coming in?”
“Not unless you invite me,” I whisper.
The air swirls thick with her scent. It’s intoxicating. My lifeless blood seems to warm in my veins for the firsttime in years. When I’m with her, it’s like being alive again, as if she breathes life back into my soul.
She spins around to face me.
“You can come in, Professor,” she says.
Despite the invitation, despite everything in me pulling me that way – heck maybe even fate and destiny and the stars – I hesitate.
This is more than a doorway crossed, it’s a boundary. Entering a student’s room. They could fire me for it. Bardin would find a way to have me fired for it. Or worse. Even if she herself did it countless times.
“We need to talk,” she says, and I step inside, closing the door behind me.
There’s no going back now. Taking her to the clinic, waiting there all that time – that was risky, but I could have explained it away as concern for a student. I couldn’t explain this away.
There’s only a bed in the room and an old rickety closet. A cold wind sweeps through the roof as well as vermin.
It’s a long time since I visited these rooms. They are worse than I remember. My room in the dungeons is opulent compared to this. Have I become spoiled by the shadow weaver luxuries after all?
The only place to sit is the bed and as that is loaded with connotations I can’t let my mind consider; we remain on our feet.
“You must despise me,” I say as she opens her mouth and says,
“I need your help with something.”
We stare at one another.
“I … don’t think I despise you,” she says, her forehead crinkling.
“It was not fair of me to burden you with my feelings –especially when you were recovering from your injuries. It was wrong of me. I was thinking of myself and not of you.” My words sound so formal and stiff and the distance between us so vast it is impassable.
“Your hand was forced.” I frown. “By the others.”
So much of her blood was spilled in that attack, but already it has regenerated. I hear it rushing through the vessels beneath her skin and that familiar thud of her heart is loud in the room, the drumbeat to my very existence. “But you can make it up to me, by helping me now.”
I frown even harder. This wasn’t how I was expecting things to go.
“Why do I suspect I’m not going to like this bargain?”
“Because you’re a highly cynical and bitter old man.”
“I’m thirty-three years old.”
“I thought vampires were hundreds and hundreds of years old.”
“Miss Storm, you knew me back in Slate Quarter.”
