Corvina was antsy the whole day the next day.
She’d barely slept through the night, odd dreams invading her mind when she did, scenes from Dracula interposing with scenes from Verenmore.
It was a bizarre, horrific, yet erotic dream of masked students having orgies and drinking blood in the Main Hall, being controlled by one master sitting on a throne in the room. She’d been naked in his lap, riding his cock backwards while watching the display, exposed for all of them to see while he remained unseen behind her. He’d turned her around in the dream, his fangs scoring the curve of her breast until a drop of blood emerged and slid down right over her nipple, disappearing into his mouth. His eyes had opened and instead of the silver she loved, they had been all black without any whites. She had gasped and pulled her breast away from him, only for him to turn into a beast and throw her onto the floor, ravaging her as students drank each other to death, the castle floors turning black with their blood, soaking her hair and her skin.
“This is the Black Ball,” beast-Vad had roared, taking a huge bite out of her shoulder.
Corvina had woken up with a gasp, the hickey on her shoulder throbbing from where he’d bitten it in the woods, sweat drenching her entire body as it shook with both the horror and the arousal of the dream. Pressing a palm to her head, she had rushed to the bathroom and splattered cold water on her face, looking at herself in the mirror.
It had remained intact and uneventful.
Now sitting in his class, the last class of the day, discussing Dracula of all things, the dream stayed in the forefront of her mind.
“One of the key themes in Dracula,” Mr. Deverell said, tapping the open marker on the board, “is female sexuality.” His eyes slid to her briefly before he continued. “It’s written in a time and referring to a society where women were either entirely chaste, betrothed slash married, or whores and thus inconsequential to the society in their eyes. In a time as such, the overt sexuality of the three female vampires who seduce Jonathan, or Lucy who is turned by the beast, in short any female sexual expression, was taboo.”
Ria, the girl who always raised her hand, did so again. “Could it be that the taboo aspect comes from the correlation of female sexual expression with the act of consuming blood?”
As he addressed her, Corvina remembered the vivid visual of dream-Vad and his fang scoring the curve of her breast, that drop of blood that went in a straight line to her nipple, and the way he drank it up.
Shuddering at the wickedness of the image, Corvina crossed her hands over her breasts, somehow hiding her hardened nipples behind her arms while taking notes.
The class went on for what seemed like ages before the last bell of the day rang.
“Miss Thorn, Mr. King, Miss Clemm,” his voice rang out. “Please stay back for a few minutes. I’d like to discuss your papers with you individually.”
Corvina’s heart began to pound as she watched him take a seat on his chair, bringing out papers from one of the drawers.
People filed out of the class, and she stood up with her bag as well.
“What did you write about?” Jade asked her from the side as Ria went to him first. They had a quiet conversation, with him pointing out some things on her paper and her nodding.
“Just death, I guess,” Corvina shrugged, knowing he wasn’t holding her back for her paper. Though her paper was good, she knew that too. She’d written about deaths that left no answers for the living they left behind, mostly about her father’s and all the missing people from Verenmore who were no doubt dead after so long.
“I think I’ll go to the medical room. I don’t feel good.”
Corvina focused on her. “What’s wrong? Are you sure?”
Jade headed to the door. “Yeah. I like the medical room. It’s… peaceful. I’ll see you in the tower later.”
“Just, let me know if I can do anything,” Corvina called out to her, worried for her friend who’d been more and more understandably withdrawn after Troy’s death.
Jade gave her a thumbs-up and walked out, leaving her in the room with Mathias and Vad who were deep in conversation. Corvina let them be and went to the windows on the side. The day was dark, black clouds rolling from the zenith to the horizon, covering the entire landscape in an inescapable gloom. The steep cliff on this side of the castle went straight down into the blanket of dark green, nothing but endless mountains in sight, standing lethal and majestic.
The sound of a door clicking shut had Corvina whirling on the spot. Vad walked back to his table after closing the door and leaned back on it, folding his arms over his chest, his silver eyes encased behind those black-framed glasses that matched his all-black outfit.
His eyes did a slow, lazy perusal of her from head to toe. “Why were you aroused in class today?”
Corvina gripped the side of her bag, determined to have her answers from him. “Why are you pretending to be a teacher?”
His eyebrows went up. “I am a teacher.”
“You’re also the owner of this castle,” she reminded him.
“Correct,” he got comfortable on the desk behind him. “You mean why no one else knows that?”
“Yes.”
“What do I get in return for answering your questions?” his head tilted in a move she was beginning to recognize.
She swallowed, her choker ribbon right against her pulse. “Me. However you want me.”
“I can have you however I want you anyways, little crow,” he reminded her, and she knew he was right. “But it pleases me that you offered. So you’ll get your answers.”
God, he could sound like a dick sometimes, and it still turned her on.
“So why doesn’t anyone know?” she leaned against the window behind her, the knowledge of nothing but the glass between her and the cliff secretly thrilling.
“It’s a long story.”
“I have time.”
He nodded, sitting up on the desk in a sleek move. “My father paid my mother off to get rid of me. She dumped me somewhere and they sent me to the boys’ home, where I stayed for a very long time.”
Her heart ached for the little boy this man must have been, discarded so coldly like trash.
He took out a cigarette and lit it up, taking a deep drag in. “One day when I was thirteen, an old man showed up out of nowhere and adopted me. He took me to his really nice home and told me I was his grandson. His son had told him about me on his deathbed. He said he’d spent years trying to trace me.”
“That was good of him,” Corvina felt her chest lighten at the story taking a better turn.
He gave a dark chuckle. “You’d think that. He didn’t have another heir, you see. He was getting older and the Board was taking more and more control of the castle, and he didn’t want that.”
Corvina watched him blow a ring of smoke up at the ceiling, his body relaxed as he regaled his tale.
“He began to tell me all about Verenmore,” Vad said through the smoke. “Put me in a private school, made me learn all about the properties and controlling them, about taking on the Board. He taught me a lot of things, the only good of which was the piano. And that had only been done as a way for me to control my wild side. To train me to sit still and think alone.”
Corvina turned to open the window behind her, to let the smoke clear out, and moved to the nearest desk, hopping onto it as he continued.
“Verenmore became this huge, elusive treasure to me,” he explained, his eyes on the view outside the window. “It became this ancestral heirloom that rightfully belonged to me, a boy who’d never had a single thing of his own. I wanted it, as perfect as it had been in the stories.”
A wind caressed the back of her neck, sending a shiver through her body as she stayed silent, letting him talk.
“The night I turned eighteen,” Vad finished his cigarette. “My grandfather told me about the Slayers.”
“He told you the legend?” Corvina asked, and he gave her a dark smile.
“He told me something worse,” Vad crushed the cigarette under his boot, his eyes chilling her. “The truth.”
Corvina felt her breath catch. “Tell me.”
He considered her for a long minute, just studying her, gauging her. Taking his glasses off, he ran a hand through his hair, messing it up. “My grandfather was a student here when the disappearances began. The castle had been empty for years before the school started here, and there were secret passageways, dungeons, woods that nobody knew anything about. Nobody except my grandfather, who had a map that’s passed down our family.”
Corvina encouraged him to go on.
“His girlfriend at the time had allegedly been a witch,” he told her wryly. “Or so she told everyone. I don’t think anyone believed her except him. No one knows. He believed it.”
The skies darkened a shade outside with both the approaching evening and the clouds.
“He and his friends took one of the maids at the castle into the woods because his girlfriend told them she could make her do things. They wanted to experiment. So, they took her to play with, and something happened. The girl died, they hid her body, and they got drunk on the power of it.”
Goosebumps covered her arms, her jaw slackening as realization hit her.
“They were the Slayers,” the words escaped her in a whisper, her hand going to cover her mouth immediately.
His eyes came to her. “Yes. Ninety years ago.”
Holy shit.
“Holy shit.”
“Yes, those were different times,” he tapped his fingers at his side, his gaze far away. “Full moons were nights people were wary of anyways. That’s when they went down to the village and brought someone back to the woods. Played whatever power games they had to play and killed them after. It was a high for them, he told me. Especially for him knowing he was the master of it all.”
Corvina rubbed her arms, trying to calm her heartbeats when something occurred to her. “Wait, how is that possible? The Slayers were all killed, weren’t they? How was he alive?”
Vad worked his jaw, looking out the window again. “When the school discovered what had been happening, a group of students found the Slayers in the woods and lynched them.”
Corvina nodded, knowing that part of the legend.
“He was leading the group.”
The silence after his statement was heavy. Corvina took a second to wrap her head around the fact that his grandfather hadn’t only murdered people with his friends, but he’d turned on his friends and murdered them too. That was… she didn’t even have the words for what it was.
After a long pause to let that sink in, he continued. “He told me his girlfriend cursed them with her dying breath,” his voice stayed steady. “Told him the Slayers would hunt all their killers down from beyond the grave.”
Fuck, this was spooky, especially in the waning daylight.
“What happened then?” Corvina wrapped her arms around herself as the horror of the story slowly started to penetrate her mind.
He shrugged. “He never knew. They say the hunters disappeared too but my grandfather was too scared of that curse to return to this place again, even though he wanted to keep it.”
“And the disappearances on Black Ball?” she asked.
“He believed it was the curse,” Vad gazed at her again. “He was an old man close to his death when he told me the story. He wanted to prepare me for when I got here.”
“And how did he die?” Corvina asked, remembering Ajax’s words about his suspicious death.
“That I can’t tell you, little crow,” Vad tsked, his eyes gleaming. “I will say I have no regrets about it.”
That could or could not mean he had killed him. After hearing the story, after everything his grandfather had done, she couldn’t say she felt any regret either. He must have destroyed so many lives for his own power play.
Corvina processed everything he’d lay on her, taking her time to sift through all the history, chewing on her thumbnail. “Does anyone know about what he did?” she asked after a long time.
“Not that I’m aware of,” he began to fold the sleeves of his shirt up his forearms. “He told me I was the first person he was confessing to because he wanted to keep it in the family. The Board never had any idea he was one of them.”
“Then why doesn’t anyone here know who you are?” she was confounded. “If there’s no shame with the family name, then why?”
“Why should they?” he leaned forward, his eyes hard. “If there’s someone doing something suspicious here, do you think they would let their guard down around Vad Deverell, owner of Verenmore, member of the Board if he was on campus all the time?”
He had a point. As a student and a teacher, he had better chances of simply existing on-campus and observing everything without raising any red flags.
He kept speaking.
“When I came to Verenmore, it was immediately after being told all of this. I had wanted this place but that taint was something I didn’t want. So I just got myself admitted as a regular student, wanting to know everything about this place from the ground up, especially about the disappearances.”
“And it worked,” Corvina mused. “That’s why you continued the facade of being just another person.”
“Very good,” his voice carried his approval at her inference. “The Black Ball was approaching when I enlisted the help of one girl in my class.”
“Zoe,” Corvina remembered. “Ajax’s girlfriend.”
“Yes,” he nodded. “She had grown up in town and knew the local area better than I had at the time. She’d found a shack in the woods one day and told me. I had gone to investigate, to find someone had been living there but had left in a hurry.”
The memory of a long silhouette in the shack she had stumbled upon with Troy and her friends popped up in her head. “I think I know the place.”
He paused in the folding of his other sleeve, his eyebrows slashing down. “You’ve wandered there alone?”
“I was with Troy and some of his friends,” she told him, her eyes going to the floor at the mention of the friend who was no more. She needed to stay on track. “What happened then?”
He considered her for a beat. “Zoe disappeared. I had the board order a search of the entire mountain. She was never seen again.”
“So you think whoever was at the shack is responsible for her missing case?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Even if they are, it doesn’t explain the disappearances for under a century on the same night. And now the staged suicides.”
“Staged?” Corvina whispered, blinking in shock at the way the conversation shifted gears. “You think the suicides were what?”
Vad took out a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket, showing it to her. It was the same note he’d shown her before, the ‘Danse Macabre’ he’d found on the roof after Troy.
“Troy died the exact day your paper about this was due,” he told her, his voice steady. “This was meant for me to find, and this makes me wonder what the fuck is happening at this school. How someone could get two sane, happy people to walk off a roof.”
Corvina watched the note in his hand, her mind racing with wisps of thoughts too smoky and unsubstantial to hold onto. She rubbed a hand over her face, her head starting to hurt with all the information and all the questions it posed.
“What about the bodies?” she asked, trying to stick to a linear train of thought. “The bodies of people your grandfather-” she trailed off.
“Murdered?” he stated plainly. “He never told me what they did to the bodies of his victims. The Slayers they buried somewhere in the woods.”
“And those empty graves at the ruins?”
“Fifteen empty graves for fifteen of the Slayer victims who died there but were never found.”
That was something at least. “What about that piano there? The one you were repairing?”
“It was my grandfather’s,” he told her, his teeth gnashing. “They liked having music with their murder.”
Corvina shuddered, remembering what they had done in that place. “I can’t believe we kissed by it. That’s just so… macabre.”
Something shifted in his eyes, a side of his lips curving. “I would’ve kissed you bathed in blood, Corvina. If I had a chance to kiss you while a thousand ghosts rose from their graves, I would have kissed you. Don’t doubt that.”
Her breathing hitched. The visual from her dream returned tenfold, him fucking her as blood drenched her hair, masked people dying by exsanguinations on the sides.
He jumped off the desk and threw the cigarette in the can by the door before stalking towards her. Corvina felt her breath catch as he took her thighs in his palms and spread her open, hiking her long skirt up, wrapping her legs around his waist.
“Now I get to have you however I want you, don’t I?” he murmured, half his face cast in shadows, the other in the light from the grey, cloudy dusk.
Corvina gripped his shoulders as he tilted her off balance. “The student-teacher rule doesn’t really apply to you, does it? You can’t lose your job because you’re… you.”
His hands went under her skirt to cup her ass. “It applies as long as I’m a teacher here. And I have to be one until I find out what is happening here. This castle is mine. But so are you now, Miss Clemm. I have to clean up whatever mess this is but have no doubts I am breaking a rule for you.”
Corvina rubbed herself against him involuntarily, her body hot since the dream last night. But she still needed to clear up things.
“What did Ajax mean about the old woman?” she asked breathlessly. “About the purple eyes?”
His hand tugged the side of her sweater down, exposing her shoulder and the bruise she had from his mouth to the slowly darkening room.
“At the boys’ home, this old lady Zelda, she would prophecize shit about everyone,” he told her, rubbing her bruise with his thumb. “She told me one day I’ll see purple eyes, and when I did I had to follow it. So I did.”
Corvina frowned slightly, not understanding.
“The boys’ home I had been in,” he bent down, licking her bruise, making her insides clench. “It was called the Morning Star Lost Home for Boys before it burned down.”
“What?” Corvina stared at him in surprise. That was… a very odd coincidence.
“Being who I am on the Board, I get certain access. Three years ago,” he spoke into her skin softly, “I was in their database trying to look for details of my old best friend from the home. I lost him in the fire.”
“I’m sorry,” she rubbed at his biceps.
He nuzzled her neck. “It led me to the Institute’s data. That’s when I saw your mother’s photo.”
“Purple eyes,” Corvina whispered.
He nodded. “I went to see her.”
Wait what?
She pulled back, holding his arms, her eyes widening on him as disbelief coursed through her blood. “You what?!”
He pulled her right back in place, close to himself. The room around them got much darker than it had been before, but Corvina couldn’t look away from him, her heart racing at what he was telling her.
“I went to see her,” he gripped her chin, keeping her unmoving. “Three years ago. Just to see if old woman Zelda had been right.”
“And?”
“I talked to her,” he informed her like it wasn’t the most important piece of information he’d been holding onto. “She didn’t say much, but she talked about you. Told me her little raven girl would be all alone without her. She asked me if you’d been going to town more to see me. I think she was under a misconception that I was your lover. Asked me if I would look after you. Then she went quiet.”
Corvina felt her jaw tremble, her mind running to three years ago when her mama had just been admitted. “Then?”
He brushed an escaped strand of her hair away from her face. “Where were you three years ago, Corvina?”
Her heart stopped.
It couldn’t be possible.
No way.
No.
“Where were you three years ago?”
The Institute.
She’d been at the Institute, getting herself tested after self-admission.
A huge, hollow cavity in her chest filled to the brim, overflowing with something so abundant she wasn’t sure if it was even healthy but she didn’t care, not as the epiphany struck her.
“You saw me,” she whispered, her throat tight, her eyes burning.
“I saw you,” he whispered back, stroking her cheek with his thumb.
“You see me,” her lips trembled, the realization that this man saw her, truly saw her, and still watched her with that look in his eyes making something inside her shift.
“I see you,” his silver gaze seared her. “I’ve always seen you.”
She didn’t know what happened after, she didn’t care to know what happened after, not in that moment, not when this man who saw her demons, knew her demons and accepted them, stood so close to her. She didn’t need answers, not with his hand on her face and his eyes on her eyes. He saw, truly saw, into her moon of a soul, one with blemishes and scars and a dark side unseen and unknown even to herself.
Corvina crushed her mouth against his, pouring everything she was feeling but could not verbalize in that moment into the kiss, the fierceness of her emotions taking her by surprise, the liberation in her heart making tears escape her eyes.
He knew.
He had always known.
And he wanted her anyway.
Something she never thought she would have, not because she didn’t deserve it, but because who would have wanted a girl with voices in her head and uncertainty in her future? Things like that had only existed in the books she loved to read, not in her life.
But he existed.
He was real and warm and he had been for years that she hadn’t known.
He held her face, taking everything she gave him and demanding more and more and more until she had nothing left to give, all of it plundered, all of it surrendered, all of it his.
And Corvina knew, kissing him in that darkened classroom of an empty castle building, that his possession of her was complete, and if they were to ever part ways, he would haunt her for eternity.
