Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXIII⎮The Vampyre Ball

The vampyre moved with fluid grace beside her in the quiet of the lamplit hallway, and from beneath her lashes she caught the golden glint of the pin secured at his neckcloth. Emma made to pull her hand from the crook of his elbow, but he only passed the limp closer to his large torso, tacitly denying her even the smallest distance between them.

At length they reached a pair of pitted double doors, with rusty iron brackets, in a part of the castle yet unexplored. She had begun to suspect that there was no ball at all, for the atmosphere was positively sepulchral. There was no pausing to open the doors. No sooner had they halted before them than the ancient-looking portal groaned open without any assistance from its master.

Emma's eyes widened beneath her mask to see the two silent footmen revealed behind the doors. They were attired not in livery but in dun, wax-covered robes, black gloves, and wide-brimmed hats. Quite authentic-looking, she had to admit. They stood to attention, their miens austere as though Winterly himself were the Duke of Wellington. But it was the eerie leathern masks, protracted into stork-like beaks, and their glass eyes that gave her dreadful pause. To her mind there was, until recently of course, little else more disturbing than the look of the plague doctors of yore with their awful bills stuffed with herbs and spices, and their muffled words and incoherent prognostications.

Her companion, however, passed them by with staid equanimity, and lead her down a dextral stone declivity that was ever and anon interrupted by moderate stairs.

Here, in the the sinister hush of what looked like a rudimentary passageway better suited to the Roman catacombs, the tapers seemed to dance morbidly in their darkened scones. Where he meant to lead her she was sure she had no idea, and finding the anticipation too much to bear, she halted abruptly and pulled her hand forcibly from his arm.

Winterly, as stony as the walls that enclosed them, turned to regard her so that his black horns were angled with the questioning tilt of his head.

"W-where are w-we going?" she asked him cautiously.

"I thought we'd already established that. A masquerade, of course. But, tell me, do you imagine me to have instead formulated some nefarious scheme to entrap you?"

"I do," she replied.

"Think you I mean to ravish you in my lair?"

In your crypt, I do. Instead she answered, "Goodness! must your insinuations always be so lascivious?"

"Answer me." He had not moved even a little, excepting his mouth of course, since she'd pulled away.

"Your behavior thus far, you must admit, has not been wholly honorable, sir."

Her dubiety coupled with her nervous censure only seemed to amuse him the more, for he — as was his habit of late — pressed himself closer so that the pin at his cravat, that she'd admired earlier, was level with her gaze. An insistent, shadowy finger thence materialized at her chin to lift her face up to his. "So suspicious," he admonished lightly. "Tsk, tsk, that will not do." Without awaiting a response — she had none to offer besides — he closed the distance and placed his lips at her ear with slow deliberation, a devil in his dark, lento voice. "Only quiet your mind, madam, and hearken closely." He whispered nothing more.

So listen she did. Her heart beat in lively allegro, but when she closed her eyes to listen, doing her utmost best to ignore the fact that Winterly's lips were inching towards her pulse, she caught the faint strain of music, almost imperceptible. It was like a discord in the unearthly weight of silence — no more natural to the ear, she imagined, than hearing the "Hallelujah Chorus" at the plutonian gates. And was that not where she was bound ... on the arm of the devil beside her? To the underworld? His underworld.