Page 41 of Veradel
Like a true Monster, I would rather watch everyone else perish than find a single scratch on her.
But when she places a gentle hand on my shoulder, and I stare into the new shade of her eyes—eyes she hasn’t even seen in the mirror yet—I’m reminded that I can’t keep her locked away from the rest of the world, or I’d be just like Arad.
“Promise me one thing,” I croak.
“More promises?” she asks, though her beautiful lips quirk in a smile.
I nod and kiss her on those lips. Right in front of everyone. “You go in prepared this time.”
According to Lucan, being prepared means taking a bath—his way of delaying the inevitable, I’m sure.
To be fair, though, I haven’t washed a single part of my body since the Blood Moon Palace. So when I slide into the water he boiled and poured into his own tarnished, silver tub in his bathroom, I can’t help but emit a groan of relief and sink as far as I can into the steaming warmth.
Lucan himself isn’t here to move my fingers along my body this time. I can hear the faint grumble of his voice through the closed door to the right of me, having some kind of conversation with the few werewolves he invited into his home after the pack confrontation. I have no idea what he’s talking about with Vivian, Merrick, and Soren downstairs, but the deep tone of their muffled words tells me it’s serious.
Maybe his friends are trying to get him to see reason with me. Fling me back over the Wall, right into Arad’s waiting arms, and forget Xantera entirely. It would certainly make more sense than this.Us. A werewolf andvampire… well, I’m not even sure I can sayin love. Has that word ever crossed either one of our thoughts yet?
Maybe mine, like a whisper of a secret fluttering across my heart when I look at him, but I haven’t heard it from him. So why didn’t Lucan kill me as soon as I woke up with these fangs ripping from my gums?
I use them to gently pierce my bottom lip now, testing the sharpness and strength. Unlike Lucan’s thick canines, these feel more like the needles I’ve used so many times to stitch up a cut in the Healing Center. I halfway wish I could pluck them from my mouth now, so that they could only be used to help and never hurt.
I already can’t live without you, and now you can’t live without me.That’s what Lucan told me, right before we came undone together. As if somehow, helikesthat I’m dependent on his blood now, that I can pierce his skin in the same way he can bruise mine. I’m just not sure if he actually means it, or if he’s pretending for my sake.
Sighing, I glance around his bathroom, inspecting the details of it with renewed fascination. Unlike the plain identical ones in Xantera’s housing units or the grand, gold-lined bathroom in my private suite in the Blood Moon Palace, this is purely and utterlyhim.
Half-used bars of handmade soap litter a shelf jutting from the wood-paneled walls, ranging in smell from mint to cedar to charcoal. A single bath mat that looks like it’s about three hundred years old sits beneath a lone, tattered towel that looks even older, hanging by a wooden knob that Lucan must have nailed in by hand. A candle sits by an unused sink on the rustic wood counter, currently unlit; enough leftover light streams in through the window for me to see what I’m doing, although even that is certainly fading fast.
Before it gets too dark, I grab one of the bars of soap and begin to lather it in between my hands, massaging every inch of my new body and marveling at howstrongI feel. My skin doesn’t so much as dent under the pressure of my fingers. And I swear, my fingernails themselves have grown longer and sharper in the span of twenty-four hours, as durable as miniature blades. I could probably take a chunk out of the wall behind me, if I wanted to.
Of course, I don’t. There’s only one Wall I want to destroy.
At that thought, I sink under the water to soak the rest of my hair, then lather the soap onto my head and wash out every single ounce of grit anddirt. When I’m done, I rise out of the bathtub, water dripping all around me in echoing plops, and step out to wrap myself in Lucan’s tattered towel.
Only then do I allow myself to look at the bottom frame of the cracked oval mirror hanging above the sink.
“Here goes nothing,” I whisper to myself, and finally look up at my reflection.
A gasp shoots down my throat.
My eyes aren’t the deep crimson of Arad’s, exactly, but pink-tinged, like a red film slathered over the hazel and green. My eyelashes are darker, my eyelids nearly purple, as if Vivian’s makeup from earlier is permanently stamped onto my face. But it’s not. This is just how I look now—as ethereal and otherworldly as all the Guardians.
“I am not a Guardian,” I tell myself, repeating Lucan’s words from earlier. Trying to find conviction in them. “I am not one of them.”
Suddenly, something rattles from downstairs, and Lucan’s raised voice passes through the walls. So quickly I almost slip on the small puddle of water around me, I wrap his towel more firmly around me and race out the door, down the tight, spiral staircase, and into the kitchen.
“Is everything okay?”
Five pairs of amber eyes flick toward me. To my surprise, it isn’t just Vivian, Merrick, and Soren in the kitchen with Lucan, but his mother, too, assessing me with both warmth and sharpness in her gaze. She’s the only one sitting down at the moment, her arms crossed in a chipped wooden chair while the other four stand, facing each other.
“Hi, Saskia!”
The words come from Vivian. Lucan himself has his jaw hanging all the way to the floor as he stares at me, and a flush crawls up my neck when I realize I’m still naked, wrapped in just a threadbare towel, water beading on my skin and rolling off onto his floor.
Shit. If I was ever going to impress his mother, I’ve missed my chance. But I suppose gaining her approval was already a lost cause as soon as Arad’s venom activated my vampire gene.
Soren, on the other hand, looks more than impressed enough.
“Well,hello.” He rounds his lips as if to whistle, only for Merrick to slam a hand over his mouth before the first note can escape his mouth. Good thing, too, because Lucan turns to him with canines bared, claws already shooting from his fingers…
