by Liv Olteano
I groaned. “Well, I’m chased by ghosts through the halls and up the stairs, I run into my room, and here I find you looming in darkness, waiting to prey on me, it seems.”
A deep snort shook the air at my nape. “Loom? I don’t loom. And I most certainly don’t prey, Ms. Richards. If any preying is being done here, it’s by your lovely self. You shot into my room in the dead of night, all flustered, and quite predatorily—might I add—pressed yourself against my door after you locked it. Then you talked about spending the night someplace else. I should be outraged, but I find it in my generous heart to indulge you, and you’re still unhappy. Truly, Mer, what must a woman do to please you?”
“For one thing, this is not your room; it’s mine. For another, I didn’t offer myself to you at all. You pounced on me as soon as the occasion presented itself. And most importantly you won’t be pleasing me in any way anytime soon!”
“Obviously…,” she muttered and suddenly was gone.
Candlelight flickered to life around the room, and mortified as I was, I turned to stare wide-eyed at the furniture.
I flushed from head to toe, pressing my hands against my cheeks.
“Oh sweet ink and needles! This truly isn’t my room!”
She sat down in a large chair and crossed her long legs. She wore her trousers and the shirt with a couple of the buttons loose at her collar and the sleeves rolled up. I could spy the fleshy contour of her breasts, and despite trying, I couldn’t for the life of me move my gaze.
She smiled. “I’m glad we’re finally reaching an agreement. For the record, Mer, should you present yourself in such a way to anyone with a pulse, I assure you they’d be more than swift to take you up on the offer. And I am guilty, among all other sins, of having a pulse.”
My eyes traveled up and down the elegant lines of her legs as she sat there, somehow more imposing and intimidating without her full dress suit on. And so beautiful.
Goodness gracious, what she must think of me! “I’m so terribly sorry! I was running up the stairs, and I thought… I was sure, I mean, positively certain that it was my room and I….”
She shot her hand up, silencing me. She swayed her long fingers to offer me the seat before her. Seeing as the harm was done and she’d taken a good eyeful of me in this bedraggled state, I took her up on the offer. My shoulders slumped as I sat there, hands folded in my lap. One pesky hair roll kept falling over my eyes. After three attempts at putting it back in place, I gave up and stared at her around it.
The smile she wore tugged at my heart deliciously, warmth flooding my chest. It spread from there to my extremities. This was the same woman who’d played the piano for me hours earlier. This face, now sporting a crooked grin, was the one that shone as she played with her eyes closed. Oh, and her eyes… a dark, delicious green that made my heart flutter. The crooked grin turned into a devastating half grin.
“We’ll both agree this whole situation is quite something. Let’s say we’ve both done some wrong and move on. But I’ll be greatly receptive to taking advantage of you, or you taking advantage of me, for that matter, if and when that should be an option.”
I frowned and scrunched my nose at her. “One shouldn’t make light in such delicate situations,” I informed her and sulked.
“I wasn’t making light, sweet Mer. Merely clarifying where I stand on the matter.”
Leaning forward in her chair, she reached for one of my hands. After capturing it, she slowly lifted it to her lips, trailing them over my skin before actually pecking. I blinked and squirmed in my seat as her eyes fixed on mine, hungry and consuming. She lifted her face and slowly reached mine. Her lips were even hotter than they were earlier in the evening, so hot they made me tremble when they touched my cheek, very near the corner of my lips.
I breathed out through my parted lips and gripped her hand in mine. “Nikola, I….”
“Yes?” she whispered, massaging her lips against the patch of skin she’d kissed.
Oh sweet ink and needles, so close to my lips. I swallowed. “I….”
“Hmmm?” she mumbled as she kissed the spot again, making the flesh there burn almost too hot to bear.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but I angled my face and brushed my lips against hers, barely touching. She made a sound, a sort of moan, but held back so it came out like a groan, an odd expression of something between pleasure and torment. She opened her mouth and sucked my lip inside, lapping at it with her slick, hot tongue. I moaned and gripped her hand tighter, tight enough my own pulse pounded. She brought her other hand up to my nape, closing her fingers around the column of my neck to adjust the angle of my head and hold me in place as she slipped her tongue between my parted lips. I pushed my body into hers and tried to massage her tongue with mine, needing to feel more contact, needing to have her closer. To have more of her.
I let go of her hand and trailed my fingertips up her arm, all the way to her shoulder, glided them over the exposed skin of her neck, up to her jaw, then combed them through her hair. I gripped it between my fingers. The kiss went on and on until blood sang through my veins, until I could hear a strange clicking in my eardrums. My flesh felt feverish and the apex of my thighs was undeniably soaking wet. I pulled back from her, breathing harshly and still not letting go of her hair.
She smiled and left a hot trail of kisses from my jaw down my neck, stopping to look up at me as she cupped my breasts. I drew in a sharp breath as she played with my peaked nipples, pulling on them softly through the fabric of my nightgown that only served to add more friction.
“Nikola, I….”
“Hmmm?” she hummed as she kept playing with my nipples and leaned in to suck on my earlobe, then proceeded to nibble on the sensitive cartilage of my ear.
I moaned, this time openmouthed and shameless, and she slipped her hands lower than my breasts, leaving them pounding. Her hands reached my knees and pulled on them softly until I parted them. I wasn’t thinking, I couldn’t over the loud sound of my racing heart. She cupped my sex and rubbed the moisture there with her warm palm, making goose bumps explode all over my body. She pressed harder against it, and I gave a startled moan, freezing in place, panting.
She pulled back and angled my chin up so our gazes met. “Are you all right?” she whispered.
I swallowed and blinked slowly, lost in her ravenous gaze. “I don’t know, I….”
She smiled. “I’m sorry, I went too far.”
“I want you to go farther, not stop.”
“You’re just so deliciously irresistible. I want to taste you all over, kiss every inch of your skin….”
I was breathing through my open mouth, my lungs starved for air. “I… I want that too.”
“Shhh, I know, don’t fret about it. We’ve got all the time in the world,” she said, pulling me in for a tender embrace.
My heart beat wildly in my chest and the heat of both our bodies made for an almost too-hot embrace, too personal, too… close. Yet I loved it, basked in the comfort of feeling her so close. I closed my arms around the middle of her back and squeezed her closer, afraid I’d slip away somehow, terrified at how lost I’d feel without sensing her close. At how lost I already felt.
She kissed my cheek softly, then pulled back and looked into my eyes. “Now why were you running around the house in the middle of the night, in your nightgown and with charming little octopuses on your head?”
After a couple of tries, I regained my breath and settled back in the chair. My face was hot enough to melt off. I tried to calm down. The damned hair roll dangled in front of my eyes again and I blew at it, overly annoyed.
She calmly reached for it, and to my never-ending embarrassment, fixed it back up on my head. “There, all set,” she whispered. “Will you tell me now?”
There was a certain kind of tenderness in her eyes, as soft as the caress of velvet. It took my breath away. I stared at her lips, still close to me now as she was leaning over after saving me from the hair roller. I marveled at the
curve of her lower lip and at the dimple in her chin. My heart twitched and pumped frantically in the prison of my chest as I remembered how drunken I’d gotten on her touch, on her taste, on the feel of her body so wonderfully close to mine.
“The water pitcher,” I whispered. “I woke up thirsty, poured myself a glass of water. My mother’s ghost materialized there beside me. She was stronger than all other apparitions. Slapped the glass of water right out of my hand and blew the pitcher into dust. I was so scared…. I ran out, down the stairs since they were the closest. She followed me, a group of ghosts gathering behind her. Objects flew when she passed them by. Nikola, I was so scared, so scared, and then I ran back up the stairs and…. Her face, she looked so horrified, panicked wide eyes and her lips sewn together!”
Nikola pulled me out of the chair with her strong arms and I found myself snugly fitted into her embrace. I buried my head in her chest, just above her breasts. She wrapped her arms around me like vines. I was shaking like a leaf, all of it coming back to the surface now.
“Shh, shh. Calm down, Mer. It’s all right, she wouldn’t hurt you. She’s still your mother, however she may appear. Shhh.”
I shook my head against her. “You don’t understand. She blew the pitcher into dust right in front of me! I’m lucky it didn’t cut my throat out.”
“But it didn’t, did it? You said so yourself: she blew it into dust so it couldn’t hurt you. Let’s go look at the scene of the crime. Show me.”
I nodded and pulled free. As dignified as I could be, I went down a flight of stairs in my nightgown with hair rollers bouncing at my steps. Nikola’s room was right above mine, I realized. I’d run a level too high in my frantic escape. As soon as we reached my room, the candlelight and glowing fireplace soothed me. I quickly put the housecoat on since I had it handy, not wanting to put up with more humiliation. Honestly it had to be my only pink nightgown she’d see me in, not even a regular white one. What a silly little kid I must have looked like to her, running around the house at night all scared in my pink nightwear and with hair rollers dangling from my head like “a meeting of hot pink octopuses with squiggly tentacles.” Silly things to occupy my mind, but I latched on to anything aside from the memory of my mother’s ghost.
Nikola walked around the room. She seemed to be searching for something specific in the air. Finally she reached down with a handkerchief and retrieved the broken glass. It still had a drizzle of water in it. She sniffed it, looked at it in the light of the fireplace.
“Would you please step closer, Cristina Mera?”
As I did she held the glass toward me. “Smell that. Does it smell of anything?”
After a couple of whiffs, I patted the tip of my nose with my finger. “Actually it does have a faint scent, but I can’t tell of what.”
“Water, my dear, is odorless and colorless. Yet if you’d look at it in the light, there are faint, very faint swirls of some color still dancing in it. See?”
I stared really hard and finally saw a delicate spiral of pigment twisting in the clear liquid. My eyebrows curled as I stared back at her. “What in the world does this mean?”
“I suspect”—she spoke gravely as she looked into my eyes—“that your mother may have just saved your life. I believe this is poison. Someone tried to poison you.”
I stared wide-eyed, jaw hanging open. “That’s impossible. Who would do that? How….”
“I’ll go downstairs and test it to be sure. Wake up Mrs. Herran and join me there.”
I nodded, struck dumb. It took a few moments for me to gather my wits and go wake Nana up. Aside from Nikola’s golems, Nana, and me, there was no one else in the house. Golems wouldn’t have done anything without being ordered to by their mistress, and though Nikola was in many ways a mystery, I did know for sure she wouldn’t go through all the trouble of helping me so she could poison me in the process.
Nana opened the door after I knocked the second time. “Miss? What’s wrong?”
“Please help me dress. We have to go downstairs into Nikola’s lab.”
She nodded, put on a dress of her own, helped me put a simple dress on too as I took out the hair rolls, and left my hair to fall freely down my back. We rushed downstairs and found Nikola sitting on a chair, her chin propped up by one of her hands.
“Well?” I asked in a small voice.
She shook her head. “No doubt about it. Someone tried to poison you.”
I looked at Nana, she looked at me, and we both said, “Natalia,” at the same time.
“My thoughts exactly,” Nikola said.
Chapter 13
I LOOKED at the sample of poisoned water on her table. “What does this mean?”
Nikola sighed, looked up into my eyes, and shrugged. “I don’t suppose you have some unfinished business with Natalia? Some reason she’d take the initiative of poisoning you?”
Perhaps we had some sort of unfinished business related to her previous offer. But considering the message she sent me through Nana earlier, that it wasn’t personal, I dared believe it truly wasn’t.
I shook my head. “Nothing of the sort. It’s Verner, it must be.”
Nana sighed. “I take it he didn’t like the news of this apprenticeship.”
“You could say that. Of course I’d have said he was frothing at the mouth,” Nikola said, running her gaze over my hair.
I flexed my fingers, suddenly nervous. I should’ve done something with my hair, at least a floppy bun. My face heated up and I tried to pull some of the hot-pink waves of hair behind my ears.
Nikola walked up to me and caught my hands. “Please don’t. I love your hair like this.”
Nana snorted. “Perhaps we might focus on something other than hair right now?”
I gave her a nasty glare, and she rolled her eyes.
Nikola stepped back, smiling with a certain air of guilt. “Mrs. Herran, we’d be lost without you.”
She frowned. “If you think you’re funny—”
Nikola held up a hand. “I’m serious. And to prove it, I’ll let you save us yet again. You’ll send word to Jean through my own servants to come meet us right away.”
“Are you out of your mind? You want him to risk being caught by the authorities? You damn well know Darkwillow is being watched.”
“What?” I squeaked. “What are you talking about?”
She sighed. “Authorities suspect Miss Skazat might be conspiring with marauders. Which is why her house is being watched, and Jean knows so very well. He’s the one who told me, after all. He’d never come here.”
Nikola grinned. “You’d agree no one would imagine he’d be brazen enough to dare?”
Nana crossed her arms over her chest. “Yes….”
“So no one would guess after Nikola’s servant goes out, the one coming back in would actually be Jean himself,” I dared say aloud.
They both looked at me. Nikola nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking. I like how your mind works, Mer.”
“‘Mer’?” Nana snorted.
I bumped my arm into her and threw some hair back from my face. “The whole situation would’ve gone better if you’d shared information with me instead of hiding it.”
“You have to understand, Miss, that the less you knew, the better protected you were,” Nana replied in a small voice.
Nikola cleared her throat. “What Mrs. Herran is trying to say is she wanted to keep you safe from her marauding proclivities.”
Nana squinted at her but nodded. Sadly that only made me wonder how much else had been kept from me. I’d been itching to uncover secrets all over the hovertown when the biggest pile of them lived a couple of steps away.
“I find the whole secrecy thing more insulting than touching,” I said, turning away.
My heart whimpered. If I couldn’t trust Nana to be sincere with me, what could I ever expect from anyone else? I missed the comfort of looking at my mother’s portrait. And right now in the whole craziness, even her ghost would’ve been mar
velous. Air chilled around me and the subtle scent of cherry blossoms rose from the corners of the room.
“Mer?” Nikola asked in a curious tone.
I turned around, seeing the floor crawl with the tendrils of pink smoke. They wrapped up the edges of my skirt and seemed to dance against the fabric. My hair stirred with a soft breeze that seemed to blow up from the floor. I blinked a couple of times, feeling the sweet calm wrap around my soul.
“Cristina Mera, did you invoke this?” Nikola asked in the same tone.
Her eyes were speculative, her eyebrows riding high on her forehead. She bent forward as if to examine the smoke up close. Of course she could see it. She was alkemist. Nana couldn’t, though. She just wrapped her arms around herself and kept looking around, suspicious and alarmed.
“It doesn’t come because I call, but because I need it.” I spoke softly as a tendril of smoke crawled upward and caressed my hand.
Its touch tingled pleasantly and I smiled. The tendril grew thicker, wrapped around each of my fingers, almost like a hand holding mine. And its caress felt warm, even tender.
Nikola paced around and shook her head. “Extraordinary! I’ve never seen this manifestation before.”
I kept looking at the smoke tendrils. “Manifestation? Of what?”
“It’s clearly not chemical. Edgar was right. You truly do have some amazing talents. You’re sure you didn’t call this forth by will?”
I shrugged. “I tried calling the smoke by will back in my parlor when Herveux’s guards came in. It didn’t work.”
Nikola stepped closer, but the smoke thickened around her legs as if trying to hold her back. She glanced at it, then looked up, but stayed put. “How do you feel right now?”
I shrugged. “Upset. Angry. Scared. Someone just tried to poison me, and I find out the closest ones around me have been lying to me for who knows how long. As you might imagine, I’m less than thrilled.”
“Did you feel the same way in the parlor, with Herveux’s guards?”
I exhaled. “Not quite. I wasn’t as upset, really. Not as angry. Perhaps not as scared either. There were three of us and two of them. We’ve beaten those odds already, haven’t we, Nana?”