Page 78 of Nocte

I know enough to read between the lines and decipher her true meaning. Caspian killed ten people. One right after the other.

“I should head back before my dad gets up,” Colleen says, lurching to her feet. She grabs her leather case and slings it over her shoulder. Then she sizes up Caspian in a glance, and marches past him. “Make sure you square up with Mo, vamp,” she snarls over her shoulder. “If I’m not squared up for my payment there will be hell to pay. Foryou. Not her. See ya around, Niamh. I love your name, by the way.” She speaks on her way down the stairs, right up until she opens the main door and steps out into a bright, brimming daylight.

We’ve followed her, Caspian and I, side-by-side, hand-in-hand. I think I reached for him first. Maybe I didn’t. His touch is possessive, radiating ownership.

My touch is greedy, radiating ownership. I don’t care about the reason for his nearness. I’ll take it.

I’ll take it.

“Come,” he hisses, pulling me along down the stairs and to the door. He reaches for a battered metal handle and then hesitates. I watch bright, yellow sunlight lick at his fingers and paint them red.

“You forgot your limitations or something?” A woman calls out.

I turn to her and gape. She is wide and round with jiggling brown curls and sad brown eyes. Her pink dress is too tight, fighting to conform her shape to a smaller size. But her body is too big and round. Beautiful. It strains at the material disobediently, but she doesn’t care. Conformity doesn’t matter to her one bit. She glowers at Caspian, her face handsome, her eyes furtive and shrouded with secrets. She reaches for something behind her counter and throws it at him. “One of your kind left this here. You bring it back along with my payment.”

Caspian says nothing, draping the material around him. A black coat with a hood long enough to shroud his face and wide sleeves to protect his hands. At his hip is my new black bag, inside of which he stows his parcel.

He reaches for the door again, but I touch it first. The daylight doesn’t harm me. As long as he’s beneath his hood, it doesn’t harm him either.

The door slams behind us with a clinking sound—the tolling of a tiny bell attached to the top of it, sounding a hello and goodbye with every opening and closing.

Goodbye,it tells us now.

Hello,it trills.

For we are in the mortal realm.

I’ve fulfilled part of my only wish at last.

At last…

So why do I still feel so greedy?

PARTTWO

The Mortal Realm

CHAPTER29

Niamh

The mortal world smells. Oh, how it smells, like things I didn’t even know had a scent. Loud and bustling, brimming with life. It teems with nasty smells, and beautiful smells. I take a step, and I am bombarded. Overrun. Overwhelmed.

My senses are at critical mass, and it feels utterly amazing.

I keep my hand in Caspian’s as we walk down a stone path past the tall building we came out of. A peeling red sign reads:Bleeding Hearts Motel.A perfect name. A beautiful name.

Everything we pass is perfectly beautiful. There are smelly puddles in the streets that blot the landscape like lovely, little flaws. Clouds of steam waft up around my feet, sour-smelling and warm to the touch. The sky is a puzzle piece overhead, squeezing to fit in around tall square buildings that somehow seem more plain than the ones in the Citadel and yet more grand.

More perfect.

Oh my, everything here is perfect!

I need to know what everything is. What everything does. I’m so wrapped up in curiosity that I make a mistake.

I tighten my grip on the cold fingers entwined with mine, and I say, “What is this? What is this?”

And he says… Nothing. Not at first. He doesn’t want to. His eyes darken, and his upper lip curls in abject disgust. Then, a big, rolling square of metal shoots past us and draws my attention.