“Hello,” she
greeted.
He inclined
his head the barest fraction a gesture of respect that floored her. “Hello.” It
still seemed so odd that Vlad the Impaler could say something as mundane as hello.
He crossed to
the desk and plucked up the heavy crystal decanter there. Fulk’s in another
life? She still didn’t understand—and was afraid to ask—how a
seven-hundred-fifty-year-old English baron wound up owning a manor house in
Virginia. She hoped that one day Annabel would offer up the tale on her own;
with Fulk’s permission, of course.
Vlad poured ruby-colored
wine into a matching crystal goblet and returned to his chair. He gestured to
the chair opposite. Sit.
“Can I do
that?” she asked, and, when his formidable brows lifted a fraction added, “I’m
not really here.”
One brow
lowered, and she swallowed the sudden urge to laugh. Was he…funny? Maybe just
on accident.
“I’m not here
in my actual body,” she elaborated, when she was sure she wouldn’t giggle. “Am
I able to sit?”
“Your mate is
able to swordfight in his astral projection form.” He nodded pointedly to the
chair.
She took a
deep breath—or the astral equivalent of one—and folded herself down into the
chair. She expected to sink down through the seat like a ghost, and for a
moment, she felt herself…glitch. Quiver. The room started to fade, bight
sparkles dancing at the edges of her vision, and a tug at the back of her mind
warned her that if she didn’t struggle against it, her body would call her
back, and she’d slip from the astral plane.
No. No, I
want to stay.
She hadn’t
asked Val how to shore herself up in this situation, but she fumbled her way
through it on her own, and then the room solidified, and she was sitting in the
chair, legs crossed, as if she were truly present.
“Huh.”
Vlad sipped
his wine and regarded her over the rim of the glass.
“Well. How
was I supposed to know?”
Another sip,
followed by a return of the Single Brow. It was very black, and bold, and its
lifting was loud as a shout. “Val hasn’t told you?”
She felt her
cheeks warm, though that wasn’t possible. “It’s been difficult for me to
project at all. We haven’t talked about sitting in chairs yet.”
His nostrils
flared, a subtle motion. “Ah. He doesn’t know you can.”
“What?” How
could her heart race when she didn’t have one on this plane?
Vlad’s head
tilted to a sinister, knowing angle. “You haven’t told him, have you? You don’t
want him to know that you can dream-walk? Or you don’t want him to know you’re
dream-walking here?”
“I—” She
couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt like this: caught in a lie, like a
kid sent to the principal’s office who might cry rather than admit to her transgression.
“I’m not hiding anything from him.”
“But you
haven’t told him.”
“Because I
don’t want to disappoint him!” she snapped, and then clapped a hand over her
mouth. She’d snapped at the man who’d impaled a forest of his enemies.
He didn’t
seem bothered about it. Sipped more wine and made a lazy gesture with one hand
that she took to mean elaborate.
