RoseBlood(100)

The door sweeps shut and the phone blinks off, leaving me cloaked in heavy darkness. Diable’s jingles trail off in the distance, close to the stage, but I sense a living presence nearby. Weapon raised, I swing around blindly. Someone grabs me from behind with a hand clamped over my mouth, pulling me back against a rock-hard body. I know him by the current that sparks between us. The succubus inside wants to betray me, melting into his muscles where they twitch along my spine.

I should’ve never let him seduce me on the rooftop. It’s a battle to resist his touch now. The energy that pulses between us in even a graze of our skin gives me the same jolt of rejuvenation that I got from kissing Ben and Jax.

A sweet, solvent odor radiates from Etalon’s clothes—medicinal. Doctor. That thought revives my fighting spirit. I struggle as his free hand captures my fingers where I clench my knitting needle.

“I heard everything between you and your aunt.” His hoarse whisper ruffles my hair as he holds me tight.

Of course he was listening at the vent. Here I thought he was busy. Should’ve known that’s just incubus code for eavesdropping.

“If you promise not to scream,” he continues, “I’ll let you go.” His grip over my lips loosens slightly.

I bare my teeth to bite him, but that imprint on my wrist flares, leaving me unable to. “What did you do to me?” I growl under his fingers and wrestle his hold on my hand, wishing I could stab him with the knitting needle.

“I did what I had to, to protect you,” he growls back. He pries at my fingers in an attempt to steal my sad excuse for a weapon. I make a fist around it, resisting. The moment my knuckles start cramping from the force of his digging fingernails, his own ribbon imprint brightens under his sleeve. He curses and drops my hand as if he’s been stung, leaving me armed and moderately dangerous.

“See that?” he asks, head lowered so his shaved chin cradles my temple. “I’m no more able to harm you than you are me.” He rakes his arm along his thigh to push up his sleeve and showcase his blistering-hot tattoo. Even in the dark, it looks worse than mine felt when I tried to rat him out to Aunt Charlotte. “This is why I rushed our unity ritual tonight. I don’t want him to be able to force me to hurt you . . . not with hypnotism, not with threats, not with guilt. I’ve made it physically impossible for you to go under my knife. So . . . I ask again. Will you promise not to scream?”

Numb, I nod and relax my body in his embrace. His hand falls from my mouth. He turns me around.

I can’t make out his face, but his eyes glimmer like embers—flecks of coppery light softened with shadows of brown. “I know you’re afraid, but if you leave now, you’ll endanger everyone here. He’ll burn RoseBlood to the ground with all of the students and teachers locked inside if he fails in his mission. There’s only one way we can stop him: by working together.” Diable’s bells bounce around the theater, as if he’s scoping things out. Etalon shifts nervously.

“Are you afraid he’s watching us?” I whisper, nerves alerted and prickled.

“He was in his coffin when I checked on him minutes ago.”

“Coffin?” I squeak, sounding more wobbly than I’d like.

“He sleeps there. Listen, I want to take you somewhere where we can talk safely. Somewhere I know he won’t follow. Will you let me?”

With my friends and teachers in the line of fire, there’s only one right answer. I drop my arm to my side, releasing the knitting needle so it clatters to the floor. Then I take his hand in mine.



While Etalon helped me gather my things and drop them in my tote, he told me he’d filtered an inhalation anesthetic through my aunt’s vent to put her to sleep so she wouldn’t miss me tonight. That’s why his hands and clothes smelled medicinal. He assured me it wouldn’t hurt her, and since he was honest about the injections he gave my friends at the club, I chose to trust him.

Next, he led me through the secret passage in the orchestra pit where he’d hidden Dad’s violin, and sailed us across an underground river. In any other circumstance it might’ve been hauntingly romantic. But it was too similar to the canals leading to the secluded lair I’d always heard about in the stories: the Phantom’s house of horrors.

Even worse, I was surrounded by water—the stagnant and threatening scent of it, the currents like laughing, taunting tongues, inky depths made even more endless by the blackness of the cave surrounding us.

Sensing my panic, Etalon awoke the firefly larvae along the roof of the cave to give us some light. We banked on an underground dock and took another secret tunnel on foot up into the forest. A quick moonlight jog along a path through some trees, well-worn by Jippetto’s wheelbarrow wheels—with only the sighting of a fox and an owl, each speaking their own natural languages—and now we’ve arrived.

From the outside, the caretaker’s cottage is smaller than I expected. It borders the bank of the river in back, and looks more like a shed, shadowing another shed. A soft light greets us from the sole window on the top half of the front door. Etalon, having held my hand the entire way here, leads me inside without even knocking.

The cottage’s one room serves as both a kitchen and sleeping quarters. It’s tidy. There are two sconces on the wall aglow from bulbs giving off a soft yellow light. A small antechamber with a sink and toilet is off to the side, where plaid curtains pull across for privacy. Framed watercolor paintings deck the walls around the bed, each one a likeness of a different French shop with displays featuring Jippetto’s mannequins. The artwork is signed by him.