The Dead Travel Fast. Deanna Raybourn

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      He glanced to the window, and the starlight I had seen from my room must have beckoned him, for he went to an iron ladder I had not noticed and pulled hard upon it. Satisfied that it was firmly fixed to the wall, he pocketed the telescope and began to climb towards a door in the ceiling above.

      “When I have opened the trap, I will come back and help you up,” he promised. I heard a great metallic clang, and before I could refuse he had swarmed back down, agile as a monkey, and taken my hand.

      “Put your hand here and your foot upon this,” he instructed. I did as he bade me—slowly for I was hampered by my heavy skirts—and soon emerged onto an open platform bound by a stone battlement that stood just higher than my waist. It was a precarious place to stand, for the tower’s conical roof rose high and pointed from the centre and our perch was the narrow footing at the base of it. But it felt as if we had climbed to the top of the world, and I looked about in wonderment. As far as the eye could see, the dark shadows of the Carpathians rippled in peaks and valleys, shrouded in forest and faintly lit with starlight. Above us the vault of the cold black sky stretched to eternity, the stars scattered over it in thousands of pinpricks of light.

      “I have never seen its like,” I told him as he climbed up to join me.

      He took a deep breath of the cold night air and expelled it slowly. His eyes were shining, his manner more animated and vital and yet more relaxed than I had yet seen him.

      “You are happy here,” I observed.

      “As I am never happy elsewhere,” he agreed. “It is my own private retreat. There is a trapdoor in each tower,” he explained, nodding towards the towers punctuating battlements. “Originally they were put into place so that the watchmen could have the vantage of the highest point in the valley to keep watch against invaders. They are connected by a single walk along the battlements, and the whole of it had fallen into disuse until my grandfather. It was he who discovered the entire walk could be put to use as an observatory.” He took another deep draught of the crisp air. “Exhilarating, is it not?”

      He turned to smile at me, and I felt the force of his pleasure as a creeping warmth in my blood. I had never known anyone like him. He was so strange a mixture of imperiousness and informality that I could not understand him. But even if I had had the grasp of his character, still I could not have explained my own feelings towards him. He had only to stand near me and I was aware of him, keenly aware, sharp to any emotion, any shift in his mood. As for myself, his approbation, the fascinated looks he fixed upon me, the warmth of his interest, all of these effected reactions I was quite powerless to overcome in his presence. My blood ran hot or cold, I shivered and felt myself unable to move. I was restless within my own skin, tossing like a creature in heat, and it ought to have embarrassed me. Instead I was intrigued by these feelings and by the man who created them.

      I should not have reflected upon such things in such a place with such a man. I ought to have stayed in my room with the door bolted against him. Instead I had followed him up to the ends of the earth and would have cast myself over the edge if he had asked it of me. I shivered in the chill of the east wind and he gave a short curse.

      “I ought not to have brought you here. It is far too cold,” he said, removing his coat and wrapping it about my shoulders. The warmth of it enveloped me, and the scent of it—of him—clung to the fabric, and later, I would discover, to my skin. It was a rich and sensual smell, like that of overripe fruit just before bursting.

      He should have dropped his hands when he finished arranging the coat, but he did not. He stood, his body blocking the wind from mine, his hands twisted in the lapels of his own coat, drawing me closer to him.