Semua Bab Falling for my Vampire Captain : Bab 141 - Bab 150

Rydan’s POVThe car came from nowhere and from everywhere at the same time.That was how it felt in the half-second between Franklin’s warning and the moment my hands found the wheel properly… the headlights filling the windscreen from the right, the particular too-fast approach of something that had either not seen us or had decided not to stop, and then my foot on the brake and my arms turning hard and the car responding with the reluctant obedience of two tonnes of metal being asked to do something it wasn’t naturally inclined toward.The old lady on the road’s edge had not moved.She was at the crosswalk with a shopping bag in each hand, frozen in the lights, and the car went close enough that I felt the air displacement on my side of the window as we passed. The tyres complained against the road surface and then we were stopped, engine running, angled across the lane we had been in with the nose pointing somewhere between our original direction and the pavement.The old lady was

Rydan’s POVI put my hand on his back and kept it there.“I’m here,” I said. “You’re in the room. You’re safe.”He was still pressing his fingers to his throat, which told me that wherever he had been in the dream had felt physical enough to leave a residue in his body that his waking mind hadn’t fully separated from yet. I watched him breathe and kept my hand where it was and let the room do its work… the lamp, the familiar walls, the weight of Bruno repositioning himself at the end of the bed with the small sounds of a dog adjusting.Gradually, the quality of Franklin’s breathing changed.Not calmed exactly… the kind of breath that came after something and knew it had come after something, but had reached the other side of the worst of it. He lowered his hands from his throat.“She was real,” he said. “That’s what it felt like.”“I know,” I said. “Dreams like that feel that way.”He looked at me and I could see him deciding whether to push back on that characterisation, and then dec

Rydan’s POVI set the plate down without sound and turned toward the kitchen doorway.Franklin was in the corridor, about to come through. I held up one hand, the gesture clear enough that he stopped immediately and read it correctly… stay, quiet, wait. He went still in the doorway without asking why, which was one of the things about him I had come to depend on completely.I turned back to the window.The boy was at the gate, not quite pressing against it but close, his face oriented toward the house. From this angle and in the fading light I could make out the details I had read on the street this morning… the jacket, the build, the quality of someone who was doing something that cost them something and was doing it anyway.He was trying to see inside.I made a slow gesture toward Franklin without looking away from the window. Franklin came into the kitchen carefully, reading my body language, and I angled my eyes toward the gate without turning my head and he followed the direction

Rydan’s POVFranklin’s scream hit me before I understood what was producing it.He was in my arms and then he wasn’t… not because I dropped him, because he pulled back, both hands going to the marked one, his body curling around the pain the way bodies curled around things that were happening inside them rather than to the surface. He was on his knees on the floor and I was beside him and the mark on his hand was doing something I didn’t have a word for… not just shining now, pulsing, the light moving through the skin in slow, rhythmic waves that had nothing to do with any natural process I had encountered in three centuries.I put my hands over it.The heat coming off it was immediate and wrong, not the heat of a wound or inflammation but something operating at a different level, something that was using the skin as an expression of something happening deeper.I didn’t know what to do.That was the specific, clarifying quality of the moment… after everything, after all the weeks of t

Rydan’s POVI got my hands on him.Not forcefully… not yet. I reached for his wrists first, which was the point of contact that gave me the most control without requiring me to hurt him, and I held them and pulled him back from me and the blood from my cheek was warm and running and I ignored it because it was the least important thing happening in the room.Franklin’s face was the face of something that was using his face. The black of his eyes, the absence of recognition, the specific blankness of a person whose interior has been displaced by something else… I had spent enough time looking at him to know every register of his expression, and this was none of them.He came at me again.I stepped aside and got behind him and wrapped my arms around him, both arms, crossing at his chest and holding with everything I had, which was enough to contain him against the wall with his back to me and his face toward the room. He fought it. The strength in him was not his usual strength… it was