Page 4 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

Ten more seconds, just ten more.

I won’t have to control it for long, I tell myself, and then I squeeze my eyes shut tight, and make the gesture. Faster, I urge the umbrella, with my magic. Faster, faster, faster, I spell, and oh god, the way the whole world seems to lurch when I do. It’s like being punched in the gut by a fistful of oxygen. I immediately almost slide right off, and only manage not to by throwing myself sideways.

But that just sends me into a spiral.

I actually go all the way around, like I’m on some sort of hellish fairground attraction. My hair brushes the ground; my legs flail around in the air. And I’m entirely upside down when I get within striking distance of the front door of the Gazette. No way am I going to be able to successfully magic it open, I know. Most likely I’m going to end up crashing through plate glass, while my spell hits the attic room window and lets in a nice chill breeze.

Though I do it anyway.

I smell his winter scent, and feel the cold of his touch almost claiming me, and I just do it. I aim at whatever I can, and curl myself into as much of a ball as possible, under the circumstances, half of me screaming between clenched teeth and half of me moving too quick to get sound out.

And oh my days, the door is open.

The door is fucking open.

I’m through, I think, with such a surge of elation and relief that I don’t realize two very important things. The first being the grip he has on my clothes when I do all of this. And the second being what exactly is going to happen to said clothes when I barrel into the offices of the Gazette.

While he stays on the outside.

But oh, I sure know it once I’m sprawled on the dusty green-and-gray-checked floor—umbrella flung fuck knows where, breath coming in ragged gulps, hair like something from an eighties rock band—and then unthinkingly try to stand up and be all triumphant. Because the moment I do, the front half of my entire outfit peels off me like the skin from a banana, and flops onto the ground.

I’m left with two sleeves, and my underwear.

And even my underwear is barely holding on.

Somehow he managed to snag half my pantyhose, along with my skirt and jacket and top. Though I say somehow, when really the evidence of how he did it is right there. He’s standing in my doorway, with the entire back of my outfit still clutched in one of his fists. And the fist itself is as fucking enormous as I remember. He could probably rip the rings off Saturn with that thing. I’m amazed he didn’t take half my skin along with everything else.

I can’t be grateful he left half my skin behind, however.

He can currently see just about everything I have.

Or at least he would be able to, if he was looking. But he has mockingly averted his gaze in a way that is even more maddening than if he’d just stared. “Oh, you’re such a gentleman,” I spit at him as I’m forced to grab a folder to cover my near nakedness. It has a sticker of a smiling pumpkin on the front that Nancy stuck there last time she stopped by to chat.

You know, just to add some extra indignity.

Even though I’m already at maximum.

“Well, you know, I have seen it all before,” he says, so casually that for a second I find myself wondering. I go back through my catalog of lives, searching around for some incident. And something does sort of glimmer in the back of my mind, I have to say. A shadowy hint of bare skin, a sense of someone’s hand on my back. But then I remember who I’m dealing with.

“As if I’m gonna fall for that. You have never seen my nude body.”

“I haven’t? Huh. Maybe you’re right. I must be thinking of the other woman I’m immortally stalking across time itself. She’s much nicer than you—I don’t have to grow back a fucking eyeball every time we meet.”

“Awww, was it hard? Did it hurt?”

“No, it felt like being licked by kittens,” he drawls, face so deadpan it almost hits whatever is past that. Zombie Crock-Pot, I figure—though that isn’t the impressive part. No, the impressive part is the way he snaps into a snarl a second later. “Of course it fucking hurt, you made a tunnel through my brain. I can still see moonlight from the inside of my skull. A second ago I could speak perfect Swedish and now I can’t remember a single Swedish word.”

“Oh, give me a break, you can. It’s your first fucking language.”

“You don’t know that. Stop trying to say it like you do just so I’ll admit it.”

“I don’t need you to admit it. Your incredibly thick accent is right there for everyone’s ears to hear. No one in the world could miss it—you make the Swedish chef sound like Harrison Ford,” I say, in part because it’s true.

But mostly to cover what I really think, and suspect he knows:

That to me, his accent sounds like a slow-moving river, sliding over the smoothest stones. Sometimes he starts in on some villain monologue, and I find myself actually listening. Like he’s some soothsayer sitting in front of a fire, telling stories in a way that has people traveling miles to hear.

It’s just a shame that the content of the stories is so annoying.