Page 4 of Velvet Folds (Velvet)
Chapter 4
In which our hero makes his plans
Tybald waits for me with a robe over one arm and an imperious look in his eyes. “I trust the village is safe for another month?”
“They are, but they have more reason to fear me than they did yesterday.”
“Was there a problem?” he asks as he helps me into what he calls a semblance of civility.
The robe always catches on my wings oddly, even with his help and I have to shake the feeling of back-brushed hair from myself before it feels like it fits.
As the only one within a hundred miles who knows how to kill me, he has no real right to worry over the other threats his kind pose to me.
“I have dealt with it.”
“I’m very glad to hear it.” He falls into step beside me as we walk further into the castle.
The people in the village below call Tybald and the others my servants. And they do serve, but not in the way old stories tell.
I only need human blood when the moon turns red. It is a curse of my kind and theirs as well. The stories would have their listeners rapt listeners believe that Tybald and the others who have chosen to live here with me are anemic creatures. Whimpering souls I drain at every opportunity.
Those stories are wrong.
The only one I’ve heard the villagers tell each other that is true is the one that speaks of my future bride and even that embellished in the wrong ways.
Blood and brides and breeding… I do not know who first deviated from the true tales, but they have departed from reality to the point of complete fiction.
Now that I have tasted her, now that I have found my mate… my sweet sacrifice is the only one I’ll drink from.
She is the only one I desire.
The only disappointment this night had been the woman who had disappeared.
After I had dispatched the man who forced his daughter to be a sacrifice, I had returned to the bell tower to find her gone.
Her scent lingered, mixed with one other. They parted at its base and though I followed her from the village, I lost the trail of her when faced with a curtain of soap vines.
Either she did not want me to follow and chose the path so that she would pass through those leaves that would hide the scent of her path from me, or she didn’t know what they were and my losing her was in fate’s design.
It didn’t matter. I will find her again… once the sun sets, I will go hunting again. This time, for her alone.
“Why,” Tybald asks, “are you smiling?”
“I have found my mate.”
Tybald’s steps halt and I manage to dim my smile before I turn back to enjoy the shock on his weathered and lined face. It is a rare sight. But he composes himself quickly.
“If that is the case, where is she?” He glances up and I know he imagines I may have left her in the tower, in the bed where I will eventually breed her.
The memory of her velvet folds beneath my fingers makes me shiver.
Breeding her will be a delight.
With a deep breath, I compose myself and say, “I don’t know.”
His confusion draws deeper creases in his brow. Suspicion sets his frown in a sharp arc.
“She was a true sacrifice,” I tell him, “but she disappeared while I performed a favor for her.”
I detail the night to him and when I’m done, he says, “I will find her for you.”
The sun is on the rise. It’s almost dawn. My flesh was not made for sunlight and I cannot linger outside the vaults, even inside my own home.
“If you do, bring her to me.”
He stops, only letting me get a little ways away from him before he says. “You did not tell me her name.”
I manage to hide my displeasure before I turn back to tell him, “I don’t know it.”
In the moment, her blood had been too intoxicating. And when her rage lingered on my tongue, it was the last thing I needed to know.
Now, divorced from either of them, I long to hear it.
“The girl she saved is called Felicia. Start with her.”
He nods and leaves me to descend into darkness all on my own.
The solitude that once brought me peace feels, for the very first time, like a cell.
My only comfort is knowing that with her blood inside me, I will dream of her… or so the stories say.