Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXIX⎮Sinistra

It was safer, therefore, to inspect his imperial bed. Or was it? The ebony bedstead was as wide and impressive as a sturdy Spanish galleon, it's four thick pillars hung with crimson brocade drapes. Each elaborate post was guarded by, indeed coiled with, a mahogany gargoyle dragon that seemed to glare with toothsome ferocity at the matching counterpane onto which she soon would spill her blood.

"Let the maid make her bed where the dragon lies," he'd said earlier. And now she understood his arcane words far better.

But Winterly suffered her not to avert her eyes from him a moment longer. A warm finger slipped beneath her chin and turned her face up to his searching gaze. "Not hen-hearted after all," he murmured. Thankfully there was nothing of smugness at his lips as he took her lifeless candle from her white fingers and set it aside.

"I believe, Lord Winter—"

"Markus," he bade her gently. "Tonight I am Markus."

"Markus," she whispered, nodding. "I believe there was little choice." He had ever been to her a piercing inevitability in her heart. She placed the chess piece in his hand. "The rook has taken the queen." Completely. Eternally.

But he mistook her meaning. "Don't be dramatic, there is always a choice." He released her abruptly and deposited the white queen non-too-gently on his ornate dresser beside her dead candle.

"Not when the devil himself beguiles—"

"Exactly!" he growled. "He has no greater weaponry than words; no power other than that which he is granted." Suddenly he was caging her in against the door, though he was careful not to touch her ... yet. "And I shall tell you something else for nothing: there is no devil. You mortals are your own devils ... and you create your own hells."

"And what of God? Is he merely fiction too?" she asked with all dubiety.

"Of course He exists, I've met Him... It was He that cast me from Heaven; and banished me to hell."

"Hell?! But you walk here amongst us!" Had he somehow escaped the Lake of Fire?

"Precisely. Did you never consider that this earthy realm is the Underworld?"

Was he lying? she wondered, her mind reeling. "Why were you cast out of Heaven?"

He gave a shrug. "Pride. Lust. Forbidden love. Take your pick. No matter which way one perceives it, I was neither wholesome nor selfless enough to serve Him."

Love?! Surely he could not mean—

"But Satan is the fabrication of man," he went on. "A means by which to cast the blame of omnipotent evil to a faceless entity — one that controls, possesses, and destroys. It is an excuse, and one which allows for mankind to shirk responsibility for their own misdeeds and depravities. The Destroyer, my dear, is mankind, not I." He then moved back and smirked to see her so unraveled by his nearness. By his revelation. "So, you see, you have a choice after all. You are here not because I forced you, but because you too crave the forbidden; yearn for what only I can give you."

"And what is that exactly?"

"Intrigue. Peril. We've had this discussion before — every woman wants a little danger." Out came the giant wings again with an almighty snap. At first they were only a shadowed blur before they stretched and became corporeal, stilling precariously overhead like frightening broad scimitars.

"A very little, perhaps!" she whispered, awe-struck. When he'd folded them behind him like a spurred black cloak, she finally felt equal to the task of forging on. "But I find myself mired within considerably more than just a little peril. And I cannot but wonder how much danger was of my own making ... and how much of it was by your design. I speak of your dark gifts."