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Home / MM Romance / Falling for my Vampire Captain / Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

Lahat ng Kabanata ng Falling for my Vampire Captain : Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

243 Kabanata

141

Rydan’s POVI stood in the doorway and looked at twelve people on their knees and waited for the room to explain itself to me.Joel was the one who spoke first, which made sense… Joel was usually the one who spoke first when the team had collectively arrived at something and needed a person to carry it out loud.“We were wrong,” he said. “About a lot of things. This season.” He paused, and the pause had the quality of something rehearsed briefly and imperfectly. “You’ve been carrying this team when most of us were making it harder. We know that now.”Around him, the others were looking at the floor or at me, depending on how much they had made peace with what they were doing.I looked at them for a moment. At the floor, at the particular quality of twelve people doing something uncomfortable because they had decided it was necessary.“Get up,” I said.They got up.I accepted the apology in the way I accepted most things… simply, without making it the centrepiece of more time than it r

142

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

143

Rydan's POVI was on my feet before the movement had fully registered as a decision.Three centuries had produced, among other things, the ability to move from stillness to action without the intermediate stage that most people required. I was across the parlour and at the point where the shadow met the lamplight’s edge before the figure had finished passing through it.Nothing.The shadow was just shadow. The wall behind it was just wall. I stood in the dark section of the parlour and read the air in every direction and found nothing that should not have been there… no trace, no warmth, no signature of any kind. The space was clean in the complete, deliberate way that these spaces kept being clean, as if whatever moved through them had learned, specifically, how to leave nothing behind.I went back to the sofa.I sat. I looked at the screen. The film was still running, the characters going through their business with the cheerful indifference of people who existed only in lit, warm r

144

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

145

Rydan’s POVI let go of him.Not because he had given me what I needed… he hadn’t, not really. Three words and the confirmation that there were eyes on us in places I hadn’t yet mapped. But holding a frightened teenager against a wall until he gave me more wasn’t something I was going to do, and the look in his eyes told me that more wasn’t something he was currently capable of giving regardless of how long I held him there.I stepped back.He stayed against the wall for a moment, surprised by the release. Then he was moving, fast in the way of someone who has been given an exit and intends to use it before the exit changes its mind. He was around the corner and gone before I had taken two steps toward the street.I didn’t follow him.I stood in the gap between the buildings for a moment and let the information organise itself into something I could work with. They were watching. Not just at the mansion, not just at the academy, not just in the specific locations we had moved through

146

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

147

Rydan’s POVI turned toward the presence.The dark was complete in the way that power-out dark was complete… no standby lights, no streetlight through the curtains, nothing. For a human it would have been disorienting. For me it was simply a different set of conditions, and I shifted immediately to the vision I used when conditions required it.The room resolved in the flat, detailed clarity of night vision.A figure. Tall, occupying the space between the table and the door with the stillness of something that had chosen its position carefully. The face was in the shadow that existed even within my enhanced vision, but the forehead was visible and on it, the mark I had been cataloguing for months in various forms and sizes… circular, deep red, symmetrical. But larger than any I had seen before, and brighter, the kind of brightness that came from something active rather than simply present.I held my position.I read the room around him. One presence, his, in front of me. The sofa wher

148

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

149

Rydan’s POVMy hands were trembling.I looked at them for a moment, which I did not often do… three centuries had produced many things and trembling hands had not been among them for a very long time. The bleeding from the split skin across my knuckles was minor and the trembling was not from that. It was from the thing that had stopped me. The force that had come from Franklin’s direction and reached into my body and interrupted what I was doing without Franklin making a sound or a movement.I turned toward Darkun.He was still in the chair. His face had absorbed the damage I had done to it and was in the process of not showing it, the particular composure of something that healed faster than it was hurt.“Why aren’t you fighting back?” I said.He smiled. Not broadly… the contained smile of someone who has the answer and finds the question itself amusing.“Because I don’t need to,” he said.“You’re going to make me ask what that means.”“No,” he said, and the smile widened slightly.

150

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

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