“Is this okay?” I asked, still feeling totally awkward about what we were—if anything at all.

  Rook shook his head, lips slightly parted. “It’s more than okay,” he said, his voice deep and gruff. “You have no idea... how long it’s been since someone touched my hair. It’s... it’s nicer than I remember.” He sighed then. “I forgot the little stuff.” Then something else seemed to occur to him and his expression changed. “You don’t have to feel obligated—”

  “I don’t,” I said quickly. “I like touching you.”

  He stared at me, brow furrowed. “Why?”

  “Why what?” I frowned right back at him.

  “Why do you like it?” he asked. He looked genuinely befuddled, like I’d started speaking a language he didn’t understand. “Having vampire cousins is one thing,” he continued. “A vampire lover though... well, most witches would say that’s entirely worse.”

  “I’m not most witches,” I answered, brushing my lips over his. “And you should know that by now.”

  “I do know that,” he answered. “For damn sure. But I still don’t understand why.”

  “And I still don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

  “In the beginning… I thought I scared you. Your heart started hammering anytime I got near you. I could hear it.”

  I felt the heat rise to my face. “That wasn’t fear, Rook,” I said simply. “I mean… maybe a little fear, but I liked you, even when you were acting like a jerk.”

  “Yet you’re a witch.”

  I raised my eyebrows at that. “Obviously, not a very good witch. The things that should scare me don’t and the things that are meant to turn me off… don’t.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “Well, I guess you could say that makes two of us. I’m supposed to hate witches. I do hate witches.”

  “But?”

  “But I don’t hate you,” he answered on a chuckle before his eyes glassed over with something else—something decidedly hungry. Then, in a move too fast for me to track, he arched his hips, bucking me off him. I landed on the mattress with a soft ‘oof’ of surprise, and then he was on top of me, pinning my hips with his. His robe had fallen open, and I realized he was wearing boxers and nothing else. I fought not to look down at that silky underwear, but failed. He was excited. That made two of us. Sucking in a breath, I watched as he trailed kisses in a line down my throat, hovering over the spot where my pulse beat frantically just beneath the skin.

  “This doesn’t scare you?” he asked, teasing the skin with his teeth. “The thought I might bite you?”

  I squirmed beneath him, embarrassed beyond belief when my body responded to the perceived threat with enthusiasm. Warmth pooled between my legs, and my hips rolled without my conscious permission. The friction between us made a moan build in my throat. I couldn’t escape the feeling that whatever this was between us was wrong, though every cell in my body wanted it.

  “No,” I whispered. “It doesn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I know you’re not going to tear into me like an animal.”

  “Do you want me to bite you?” he asked as he pulled up onto his forearms to look at me, as if this were the most important question he could think of. “Would you let me?”

  The answer was mortifying, but I couldn’t lie. “Yes.”

  And then he lowered his head and I could feel his breath on my neck as his fangs sank into my skin, just a fraction, drawing two tiny droplets of blood to the surface. He laved them with his tongue, sealing the wounds almost as quickly as they formed. I could feel his frustration on the air. He repeated the process, with similar results. He was hungry, and I wanted his bite. It was playing with fire. But I threaded my hands into his thick auburn hair, rather than push him away.

  “I’ve wanted this from the moment I met you,” he groaned.

  “My blood?”

  “To start,” he answered, voice rough with need. “But it’s more than that. I don’t want just one taste. I could swallow you whole, Astrid. I wanted to. Still want to. And that means you’re dangerous.”

  It was my turn to ask why.

  “How can you seriously ask me that question,” he answered, shaking his head. “You know why it’s dangerous.”

  “You wouldn’t turn me.”

  “I would—if you asked me to and the thought of it…” He breathed in deeply and shook his head again. “Do you know how insane it felt to want to sire you the day I met you?”

  My heart beat unevenly. Sire me. He’d been thinking about turning me the entire time he’d stitched my arm up. And he’d contented himself with a kiss instead. And then later, when we’d been ready to fight, he’d been struggling against the same instinct. That had to have taken incredible restraint.

  “Why did you want to sire me?”

  “I still want to. It’s like this driving… need. It’s hard to explain.”

  “But why me?”

  “Because you were… you are different. It’d been so long since anyone cared about... who I am. What being a hostage to witches means for me. People don’t get close, because I won’t let them. It’s just been me against them all this time. Then you come in, completely and brazenly unafraid, talking to me like I’m not this thing to be pitied or feared. And your reaction to me didn’t change when you knew who and what I was. You seemed to flirt with me even more.” He laughed. “Klaus is the only person besides our merry little mystery-solving band who’s willing to look me in the eye, and I don’t swing that way.” He breathed in deeply as his eyes settled on mine again. “But you… Astrid, I wanted to keep you. You. A virtual stranger.”

  “To keep me?”

  He nodded. “If I sired you, that would mean you’d have to stay here with me. All heirs need their sire.”

  My pulse sped, but I couldn’t work up to the fear that statement demanded. If he’d bitten me in that out-of-the-way room, I’d have let him do it. And if he’d offered me his blood to seal the pact, I’d have accepted it. Wanda would be mortified to know that, and so would Maverick. And my mother would no doubt disown me more than she already had. I knew all of that but still… I didn’t care. Part of me wanted to know what it was like. It didn’t matter that we were strangers. There was a connection here, and I wanted to explore it.

  We weren’t in love. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And yet… I could see it going there if we could escape this hellish position we found ourselves in. If we found the culprits, Rook could get more freedoms—I’d be able to visit him more often. We could make it work.

  “No siring at the moment,” I said, pushing at his chest at last as my wits finally sunk back into my head. “I’m only eighteen. I’d like to live a little more before I do something like that.”

  “I wasn’t inferring,” he started.

  “I know,” I interrupted and gave him a big smile. “But, regardless, I think we should sit up and that you should put some pants on.”

  He grinned, flashing very sharp fangs at me. The sight of them made my heart speed for all the wrong reasons. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I have an early morning tomorrow, and I need energy to jump back to my room before then. If you stay on top of me in just your boxers, we’ll end up doing something… physically taxing. Fun, yes, but still taxing. And that stuff all has to wait.”

  “Why is that?” he asked and looked like a kid denied candy.

  “Because we have to focus on the mission for now, Rook. We can do...” I reached between us, feathering a light touch over the bulge in his boxers. He hissed out a breath. “Something about this another night.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” he said, seeming very put out which only made me smile wider. “So, what now?”

  “I think... I think I could try to take you with me? That’s the next step, right?”

  “I’d say so.” He stood up and turned his back to me as he opened his dresser and pulled out some jeans. I couldn’t help my disappointment as he slid them up his toned and muscular legs but it was the right thing to do—now was not the time for the deflowering of Astrid.

  “Do you think you’re up to it?” he asked, and it took me a second to remember what in the spell we were talking about.

  “Maybe. But I don’t want to try to take you all the way to my room. I’m not sure I’d have enough juice to get you back here. Let’s try somewhere easier—somewhere closer.”

  “Professor Valserak’s office is in the next building catty-corner to us,” he answered as he pulled a sweatshirt over his pecs and muscular abdomen and I had to sigh which made him chuckle. “Do you think you can make it there? He should be teaching an elective down the hall from the office at the moment, so no one will be inside.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. Though the prospect made me nervous. What if Rook was wrong and Valserak was there, and watched us pop out of thin air?

  He raised a brow at me but offered his hand and I took it, letting him pull me up from the bed.

  “So, what do we do now?” he asked.

  “I fix the image in my mind and just... will myself where I want to go. I’ve never been inside Valserak’s office though, so you’ll have to describe it to me.”

  “I can do that.”

  And then he began rattling off details, painting a vivid picture of the professor’s office, piling on details until I was certain I could fix an image in place.

  “Do you have it?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “Are you ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be. Try not to get us stuck in Autumn, okay?”

  I cracked an eye open. “What happens if I do?”

  “If I wander too far away from the castle, I get sick. If I stay away for long enough, I’ll waste away entirely. No amount of blood will save me.”

  “No pressure then,” I said.

  “No pressure,” he said, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze as he gave me a smile that made me weak in the knees. “Let’s go.”

  I took another deep, steadying breath, squeezed his hand until the tips of his fingers purpled, and then stepped through the veil.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Professor Valserak’s office was dark when Rook and I emerged from our momentary trek into Faerie.

  I couldn’t see further than the tip of my own nose, but Rook’s superior eyesight didn’t have any problems with the gloom. Only moments after we’d stepped through, he flicked on an antique desk lamp, lighting the cramped office space with dim fluorescence.

  The office was completely at odds with the stark, organized persona the professor projected. The desk was piled high with folders and a mountain of loose paperwork. His desk blotter was askew, threatening to spill the whole mess onto the floor at the slightest push. The ebony bookshelf hovering like a shadow behind the desk was badly in need of dusting. I was tempted to lift one of his knick-knacks from the shelves and blow the dust from its surface but doing so would tip him off that someone had been in the office. So, I stuffed my hands into my pockets and spun slowly in place, committing the room to memory, just in case we ever needed to return here. I imagined it was easier to jump when I had a clear visual to work with.

  “Ah, Desmond,” Rook said with an amused chuckle. “Still a pack rat, I see.”

  “You keep calling him that,” I noted. “Do you know him? I mean—outside of professor and student?”

  Rook nodded. “We were turned within a month of each other. Father never intended to drag me into his world, but one of the Grimsbanes forced his hand.”

  “How?”

  “They arranged to set the boy’s school I was attending on fire, intending to flush me out and hold me ransom. It didn’t work out the way they hoped though. I got trapped on an upper floor and was forced to jump or burn to death. The fall would’ve killed me if...”

  Goddess. That was... it was so sad. If the Grimsbanes had left well enough alone, Rook might have lived a normal, human life. Instead, their actions dragged him into a world of blood and struggle. And, ultimately, they’d still made him their hostage. No wonder he hated witches, and the Grimsbanes in particular. Eternity must have seemed like such a cheat in light of the life he could have lived.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Rook shook his head with a sad smile. “Don’t be. If I hadn’t been turned, I’d be dead now, and I’d like to think any life is better than death.”

  Still... I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d have been happier with a mortal life. Living with the Grimsbanes for eternity would be my definition of hell on earth.

  “So,” I said, trying to inject a little cheer into my tone. “Professor Valserak was turned a month after you?”

  He nodded, idly flipping through the graded schoolwork on the desk, chuckling at some of the more creative notes Professor Valserak had left in the top right corner.

  “He was a bastard in the traditional sense of the word. His mother had him out of wedlock and dropped him at an orphanage a few days after he was born. He did odd jobs to eke out a living, including running errands for my father. Like me, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A witch attack on father’s stronghold left Desmond bleeding out in the foyer. Father felt responsible, so he turned Desmond before he could die.”

  “Then were you both friends?”

  Rook nodded again. “You could say that. We were inseparable for a long time. Of course, that was before this hostage business.”

  “Did that affect things?”

  “It drove a wedge between us. Desmond thought I should fight, rather than submit to the role.”

  “And you didn’t want to fight it?”

  Rook continued to leaf through the folders on the desk, like he was looking for something which I found a little odd, but didn’t comment. When he found nothing of interest, he started rifling through the drawers. I wanted to snap at him to quit it because it was bad enough we were trespassing. If he continued rifling through Professor Valserak’s things, he’d know someone had broken in.

  “I was tired of fighting war after bloody war,” Rook sighed. “So, I submitted to the ritual.”

  “You trusted the witches?”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t performed by witches. It was performed by a faerie noble who was impartial—aka not a witch or a vampire. It was set so that the witches couldn’t simply undo the bindings on their hostage and leave us in the lurch. Now I’m here, centuries later, trying to avoid yet another conflict. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked finally.

  He shrugged. “Nothing in particular, I guess. I just…” He paused for a moment before looking up from Valserak’s desk drawers. “I had a conversation with the good professor about the Fae who were missing and he seemed… uninterested in furthering their cause.” I remembered that exact conversation but didn’t say as much. “I just thought maybe…”

  “He knew something?”

  Rook nodded. “Doesn’t hurt to look.”

  “I guess not.”

  He lifted a file from one of the drawers and flipped it open, scanning the contents with the same sort of casual interest he’d shown all the rest of Professor Valserak’s things. Seconds later, his demeanor changed entirely though. His hands formed bony claws around the file, and his breath came out on a hiss.

  “What?” I demanded. “What did you find?”

  Rook turned the folder toward me in lieu of a reply, and the blood drained out of my face when I processed what I was seeing. The folder was full of black and white stills. The figures in each photo were all faeries of various breeds. All of them were alternately chained to a dirt floor or strapped into nasty-looking metal contraptions. And every single one of them corresponded with one of our missing persons. Shasta’s photo was particularly brutal, the bruises on her clearly visible, even with the monochrome color scheme.

  “Professor Valserak took them?” I whispered.

  Rook’s eyes flashed with anger as he took the folder back. “Not just him. He’s strong, fast, and clever, but there’s no way he could have subdued and hidden this many faeries without help. He’s working with someone else—maybe a group of someone else’s.” He leafed through the papers in the folder. “There are correspondences in here. Code names and allusions to their hideouts. Location A and Location B are somewhere in or around the castle.” He was quiet as he read and then he looked up at me before dropping his attention back to the page and reading aloud: “We’ve done what you said. Here is proof. Commit it to memory because this folder will self-destruct as soon as you finish reading it.”

  I frowned. “But it didn’t self-destruct.”

  Rook cocked his head to the side. “No, it didn’t. Whoever magically powered it to destruct obviously didn’t do a very good job.”

  I swallowed hard. “Or they didn’t want it to self-destruct.” He looked up at me. “If they got one of the missing faeries to magic the file, they wouldn’t want it to disappear. They would have wanted it to be found… by someone like us.”

  Rook nodded. “So they botched the magic.”

  “Exactly,” I answered. “Yet Valserak didn’t destroy the evidence.”

  Rook looked around at the pile of paperwork all over the desk. “Clearly, he isn’t very good at taking out the trash, as is. This file probably just got pushed into this drawer to be dealt with later.”

  I nodded. “We should go to your father,” I said. “Tell him what’s going on.”

  Rook shook his head. “No. We can’t tell anyone.” He started reading silently to himself and then nodded. “From the sounds of these letters, one of the families of Blood Rose is involved. If we tell the wrong one, we’re the next ones to go missing. Even if we choose correctly, we’re going to spark a conflict, which won’t help us save these people.”