As Shadows Fade

couldn’t be helped. If she had any question before, she did no longer. “I’m sorry, Sebastian.”

Now she stepped to the side, away, putting space between them. Her heart still slammed in her chest, but it wasn’t the right kind of slamming.

It just wasn’t.

A rumpled Victoria returned to the town house late that evening, tired and dejected. Despite the unpleasantness of their confrontation, she’d obtained more information than she’d hoped from Sebastian.

His knowledge had no doubt been obtained through the relationship he’d had with his grandfather Beauregard. Sebastian was able to answer several questions, and as a result gave Victoria enough to begin to formulate a plan. But the situation was not a hopeful one. It would mean long travel and danger, but worst of all, they would need Lilith’s cooperation.

Which was impossible to imagine.

To make matters worse, when she walked into the front entrance of the town house, Max was there. She had no idea what would cause him to be standing in the foyer, perhaps he was merely passing through-but he was the last person she wanted to see at that moment.

Apparently, the feeling was mutual.

His eyes scored her more sharply than usual, disdain pronounced in his expression. “Don’t expect me at supper tonight.”

Surprised at the venom in his voice, she paused in her intention to sail past him, up the stairs, to the sanctuary of her chamber. “You’re going out?” she asked, suddenly aware of the burn of moisture at the corner of her eyes. No, not now.

Not in front of Max.

She drew in a deep breath, brought herself upright, and clasped her hand over the newel post. The sting abated, but her throat felt scratchy.

“I have matters to attend to,” he replied. Still just as bitterly. His face looked as though it had been sculpted from some harsh gray stone.

“As you wish.” She turned away and started up the stairs without a backward glance. Her eyes filled with angry, furious tears, and the inside of her nose began to tingle.

Perhaps she ought to let him go.

Perhaps it would be best. For both of them.

Victoria fell asleep in her clothing on top of her bed, waking only when Verbena brought her a tray much later that night.

Amid clucking and tsking, the maid helped her mistress to remove her rumpled gown and insisted that she eat the meal of cold chicken, bread, tomatoes, and cheese. Victoria felt marginally better after her nap and a good meal, yet an angry, itchy sort of internal grumbling continued to nag at her.

Even after her bustling maid finished brushing out her hair for the night and helped her dress for bed-she had no social engagements tonight, and apparently there weren’t any vampires left in London to hunt-Victoria hadn’t relinquished her mood. Half of her wanted to curl up and sob, over what, she wasn’t certain… and the other part would have loved to come face-to-face with a pack of vampires.

She’d annihilate them.

Verbena’s twittering began to grate on her nerves, and at last Victoria sent her maid away for the night- which apparently was the right thing to do, as Verbena confessed that she and Oliver had planned for a drive to Vauxhall Gardens.

“Then be off with you,” Victoria said, noting that it was only eleven o’clock.

Perhaps all she needed was a bit more sleep.

And she did, for a time, dreaming of black-smoke demons and red-eyed vampires and dark-eyed men.

But after a while she woke to a cool moonbeam shining through her window, lighting the room as if it were a gray-and-blue-tinted day.

The thought that had been worrying, grumbling, grating in the back of her mind now came out to the fore with full force: Perhaps she ought to let Max go.

Victoria sat up, slid off her bed, walked over to her dressing table. Her face shone ghostly in the mirror, her thick dark hair falling over her shoulders, brushing past her elbows, her eyes dark almonds alongside the bridge of her nose. A faint sheen of moisture dampened her upper lip, for the heat of day still lingered.

Perhaps Sebastian was right. She was pining for a man who couldn’t give her what she wanted. Who didn’t want, or need, anyone.

She looked at herself in the mirror for a long time and at last made her decision.

If that was what he really wanted, she’d let him go. But the way he’d looked, as he stood over her in the carriage after the dinner dance, spoke otherwise.

Perhaps it was time to force his hand. One way or the other.

Rising from the stool, she whisked off her simple white night rail and pulled from the wardrobe a lacy shell pink gown. The fabric weighed little more than a whisper, and fitted her breasts like two lace hands… then fell free, in a sheer pink glaze from her bodice to the floor. Her two vis bullae glinted behind it, at her navel.

Victoria left her chamber silently and padded through the small town house to the rear, where the servants kept their rooms. Then she climbed up a flight of stairs to the next level, where the heat lingered even more heavily.

Her gown swirled around her, light as smoke, as she came to a stop outside Max’s room. The crack under the door showed no illumination, but it was well after two o’clock in the morning. He was either sleeping or out. And since there weren’t any vampires in London anymore…

Victoria opened the door and saw the same moonbeam splaying over his bed. Empty. Unslept in.

He wasn’t there.

Victoria backed out of the room, her stomach twisting uncomfortably, her palms suddenly damp.

She felt foolish.

Back down the stairs she went, and kept going down to the ground floor. She found herself near the kitchen at the back of the town house. She wasn’t hungry, but walked through to the front of the house, now wide-awake and alert. Suddenly she realized why.

The hair on the back of her arms lifted, and she slowed her careless movements into something silent. The sound had been a soft clink, or a dull scrape, perhaps.

Not a vampire-she didn’t feel a chill. It could be Kritanu or Charley or…

Victoria drew herself up tall and continued along the corridor to the sitting room. Her heart pounded.

A yellow glow shone from under the door, faint and unassuming. She turned the knob and pushed it open.

Max sat in Aunt Eustacia’s favorite chair near the piecrust table on which her stakes had lain. A short glass with liquid that glowed amber in the lamplight gave testament to the dull scrape Victoria had heard, and the fat decanter next to it, the clink. He raised his face, half of it burnished gold from the lamp, and the other melding into shadow. His white shirt, with a loose neck cloth draped around his shoulders, glowed in the dim light.

“What do you want?”

She stepped across the threshold and stood close to the wall, feeling anger… and something else… bubbling through her. Her fingers gripped the edge of the door, but she moved to stand in that beautiful, broad moonbeam from the side window. “I couldn’t sleep.”

His glance flickered over her, and she saw his mouth compress. “Go away, Victoria.”

“Max.”

Then he looked at her, straight on, and she was knocked nearly breathless by the venom in his expression. The same bitterness he’d had earlier that afternoon. That same deep, flat anger he’d had when she drugged him with salvi three weeks ago.

“You’ve settled things with Vioget. Why are you here?”

There was no use wondering how he’d known she’d visited Sebastian; she’d accepted that about him long ago. Max knew everything.

“Ye-” she began, but he didn’t wait to hear the rest of it.

“Get. Away.” His words were little more than a breath.