I'm the Vampire Professor's Assistant, And He's Claiming Me As His Own

The lecture hall was stuffy, smelling of old paper and the damp wool of a hundred coats. Evie sat in the third row, her notebook open but her pen still. The guest speaker, Dr. Alaric Morgan, stood at the podium, a stark figure in the warm, dim light. He wasn't what she'd expected. The flyer had promised a visiting historian, an expert in medieval superstitions. She’d pictured a stooped, tweed-wearing academic.

Morgan was anything but. He was tall and unnaturally still, dressed in a dark, tailored suit that seemed more appropriate for a funeral than a university lecture. His face was a study in sharp angles—high cheekbones, a severe jawline—and his skin was so pale it looked like polished bone under the spotlights. But it was his eyes that held her. They were dark, almost black, and they didn't just scan the room; they seemed to pierce through the gloom and pin each student to their seat.

His voice was a low, resonant baritone, each word articulated with a precision that felt ancient. He spoke of strigoi, of the Nachzehrer, of the draugr, not as forgotten myths but as tangible fears that had shaped the very psyche of medieval Europe. He didn't use slides or notes, simply stood there, his hands resting lightly on the podium, weaving a narrative that was both academic and deeply unsettling. He glided over the material with an intimacy that felt less like study and more like memory.

"The fear," he said, his gaze sweeping over the audience before it snagged on Evie’s, "was not simply of death. It was of a perversion of life. An existence outside of God's grace, outside of the warmth of the sun, driven by a singular, insatiable thirst."

The air in Evie’s lungs felt thin. He was looking right at her, as if he’d plucked the half-formed question from her mind. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, stupid rhythm. Before she could stop herself, her hand was in the air.

Morgan’s lips curved in a smile that held no warmth. "Yes, Miss...?"

"Evie," she managed, her voice feeling small. "Evie Rowe. You speak of the thirst as a metaphor, but in the accounts... the folklore... it’s so literal. Was it the fear of being consumed that was the most potent? The loss of self, of blood, of life?"

He didn't look away. The intensity of his stare was a physical weight, pressing her into her chair. The rest of the lecture hall, the other students, her own professor nodding in the front row—it all faded into a dull, peripheral blur. There was only him.

"Fear of being consumed is elemental, Miss Rowe," he answered, his voice dropping, becoming a confidential murmur that seemed to cross the space between them in an instant. "But the true terror, the one that lingers in the quiet hours of the night, is not the fear of being prey. It is the secret, shameful longing to be the one who consumes. To have that power. To shed the frailty of your own flesh and blood and command the darkness, rather than hide from it." His eyes bore into hers, and she felt a hot, mortifying blush creep up her neck. It was as if he’d reached into her chest and exposed the most restless, hungry part of her soul. "Is it not?"

The spell broke. The overhead fluorescent lights flickered on, washing the lecture hall in a flat, sterile white. The murmur of students gathering their belongings filled the sudden silence. Evie blinked, feeling as though she’d surfaced from a deep dive. Her heart was still pounding a heavy, thick rhythm against her ribs. Morgan gave a slight, formal nod to the room and stepped away from the podium, melting into the shadows at the side of the stage as if he were made of them.

Professor Albright, a round, cheerful man whose tweed jacket was a familiar campus fixture, took his place. "A round of applause for Dr. Morgan, please!" he boomed, clapping enthusiastically. The applause was scattered, a bit dazed. "Now, before you all rush off," Albright continued, "Dr. Morgan has generously agreed to take on a student research assistant for the duration of his month-long residency. This is a rare opportunity."

Evie’s attention snapped back into focus.

"The work will be intensive," Albright warned, a twinkle in his eye. "We're talking late nights. Very late nights. Dr. Morgan's research requires access to the oldest collections in the Atherton Library archives—materials that can only be handled after hours. It's a paid position, of course. Anyone interested, please form a line here to my right to submit a brief application."

A current went through her, sharp and decisive. It wasn't a choice. It was a compulsion, a gravitational pull toward the dark figure still standing just out of the main light. She had to know more. She had to understand the unnerving resonance of his words, the feeling that he hadn't been lecturing about folklore, but delivering a confession she was meant to hear.

She grabbed a form from the stack Professor Albright held out and quickly filled in her details, her handwriting barely legible. A short line of other keen folklore majors had already formed, and Evie took her place at the end, her stomach twisting. She watched as Morgan spoke briefly to each student, his posture relaxed but radiating an aura of absolute authority. He took their papers, his gaze sweeping over them with an unnerving, evaluative intensity.

When it was her turn, the air grew thick. He turned his full attention to her, and the other students, the lecture hall, the entire world seemed to fall away again. There was only the silent space between them.

"Miss Rowe," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Dr. Morgan," she replied, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands as she held out the application form.

He didn't look at the paper. His eyes, dark and depthless, held hers. He reached for the form, his movements economical and precise. As he took it, the tips of his long, pale fingers deliberately brushed against the back of her hand.

The contact was a shock. It wasn't just cool; it was a deep, penetrating cold, like touching a marble statue that had been left in the winter dark for a century. The coldness was absolute, devoid of any trace of human warmth. A jolt, sharp and electric, shot up her arm, making her gasp. It was over in a second. He had the paper, his fingers no longer touching hers, but the ghost of that impossible cold and the phantom current of that shock lingered on her skin, a brand she could feel sinking all the way to her bones.

He held her gaze for a moment longer, a flicker of something unreadable in the black depths of his eyes, before he gave a curt nod and turned to the next student. Evie walked away in a daze, the cold spot on her hand burning like a brand.

Two days later, she received the email. The position was hers. Her first night was to be that Friday, 10 p.m.

The Atherton Library was a tomb after hours. The great vaulted ceilings swallowed the sound of her footsteps, and the only light came from a few green-shaded lamps casting pools of lonely yellow onto the massive oak tables. Morgan was already there, standing in the entrance to the rare manuscripts archive, a section of the library Evie had only ever read about. He wasn't leaning against the iron gate or waiting; he was simply present, a statue carved from shadow and stillness.

"Miss Rowe," he greeted her, his voice the same low resonance that had captivated her in the lecture hall. He unlocked the gate with an ornate iron key, the sound of the tumblers echoing loudly in the silence.

The air inside was thick with the scent of decaying paper and leather. Metal shelves stretched up into the darkness, packed tight with forgotten knowledge. For the first two hours, they worked in near silence. He directed her to a specific codex, a 16th-century treatise on demonology, and she carefully carried it to a reading table. He never seemed to move in a conventional way. She would look down at her notes, and when she looked up, he would be in a different aisle, his back to her, examining a spine. There was no sound of footsteps, no rustle of clothing. He didn't glide; he simply ceased to be in one place and appeared in another. She'd brought a thermos of coffee and a bottle of water for herself, but he consumed nothing, waved away her offer with a dismissive, almost contemptuous flick of his fingers.

Her task was to find any cross-references to a specific Romanian clan name. It required her to use one of the tall, rolling ladders to access the upper shelves. The particular shelf Morgan had indicated was ancient and overburdened, the wood groaning softly even under its own weight. She found the section she needed, her fingers tracing the faded gilt on a heavy, leather-bound volume. As she tried to work it free from the tightly packed row, it resisted. She gave a firmer tug.

There was a sickening crack of splintering wood. The entire bookshelf, a towering monolith of oak and paper weighing hundreds of pounds, tilted away from the wall. Time seemed to warp, slowing to a crawl as she saw the top edge begin its inexorable arc downward, directly toward her. A scream caught in her throat, a useless, pathetic sound.

Morgan had been thirty feet away, across the main reading area, examining a manuscript under a desk lamp.

In the space between one frantic heartbeat and the next, he was there. Not a blur, not a rush of movement. He was simply in front of her, his back to her, one hand braced flat against the falling shelf. The immense weight met his palm with a deafening groan of stressed wood, and then silence. It stopped dead. The force should have pulped his arm, shattered every bone from his fingers to his shoulder. He didn't even grunt. He held the entire, massive structure with the casual ease of a man leaning against a wall.

Slowly, with immense control, he pushed it back into place. It settled with a final, shuddering thud.

The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the frantic, panicked drumming of Evie’s own heart. She was clinging to the ladder, her knuckles white. She stared, breathless, at his back.

He turned, his face a mask of cold composure, though his eyes burned with a dark, dangerous light. "You should be more careful, Miss Rowe," he said, his voice a low, chilling whisper in the sudden stillness. "These old things are treacherous." He looked at her wide, terrified eyes, the way her chest heaved. A ghost of a smile touched his lips. "Adrenaline is a remarkable chemical."

Adrenaline is a remarkable chemical.” The lie echoed in the silent archives for days. Evie tried to dismiss it, to rationalize what she had seen. Maybe the shelf was perfectly balanced. Maybe his strength was just that of a man in peak condition, amplified by a surge of panic. But she knew better. She had felt the ground shudder when the shelf settled back into place. She had seen the utter lack of strain on his face. The memory of it, of him appearing from thin air to stand between her and certain death, had become the silent, thrumming baseline to their nightly work.

The sessions took on a ritualistic quality. The heavy clang of the iron gate, the scent of dust and decaying vellum, the small circle of lamplight in an ocean of darkness. They became her entire world for three hours a night. His explanation for the bookshelf incident was never mentioned again, but it changed everything. The professional distance she had tried to maintain was gone, replaced by a tense, hyper-aware intimacy.

They were bent over a 14th-century grimoire one night, its pages brittle and illustrated with unsettling depictions of creatures that were half-man, half-beast. Her job was to transcribe the faded Latin script.

"The loneliness of these beings is always their defining trait," she murmured, more to herself than to him, tracing the outline of a winged, tormented figure. "They're cursed not just by their nature, but by an eternity of solitude."

Morgan was sitting across the narrow oak table from her, so close their knees brushed. The contact sent a familiar, chilling jolt through her leg, yet she didn't pull away. He hadn't been looking at the book; he had been watching her.

"It is not solitude they fear, Miss Rowe," he corrected softly, his voice a low vibration that seemed to sink directly into her bones. "It is the repetition. Watching the same patterns of love, betrayal, and death play out over and over, until every human face is just a ghost of one you knew before. To see cities rise from dust and know they will return to dust, while you remain. That is the true curse. Solitude would be a mercy."

The words were spoken with a profound, weary authority that had nothing to do with academic study. It felt like testimony. Her breath caught. She looked up from the manuscript and met his gaze. His eyes were black, ancient, and for a moment, she saw an abyss of time swirling within them.

"You speak as if you've… experienced it," she whispered, her heart hammering against her ribs.

A flicker of something—regret, perhaps, or anger at his own slip—crossed his features before the mask of detached scholarship fell back into place. He leaned forward, his cool presence washing over her, and pointed a long, pale finger at a line of text. The tip of his finger hovered inches from her hand. "The text suggests the creature's lamentations focus on the cyclical nature of the moon, a metaphor for the recurring cycles of mortal life from which it is excluded. A fascinating, if tragic, perspective for a scholar to consider."

He was close enough now that she could see the faint, almost invisible lines at the corners of his eyes, the only sign of age on his otherwise flawless face. He didn't smell of anything. No cologne, no soap, not even the scent of living skin. Just the cold, clean smell of stone and old paper. The pull toward him was overwhelming, a terrifying, magnetic force that silenced all reason. She wanted to close the distance. She wanted to touch his hand, to see if the cold was real, to feel the impossible strength that had saved her life. The air grew thick with everything they weren't saying, a simmering tension that was equal parts fear and a dark, consuming desire.

Her hand was trembling slightly as she reached for the next page of the manuscript. The air between them was so charged it felt like a physical substance, thick and humming. To break the spell, she focused on the task, on the fragile, razor-thin vellum. She slid her finger under the edge to lift it. The corner, stiffened by age into something as sharp as flint, sliced deep into the pad of her index finger.

“Fuck,” she hissed, pulling her hand back instinctively. A perfect, clean line opened across her fingertip, and a bead of dark crimson welled up, impossibly bright against her skin. It overflowed, tracing a thick, wet path down her finger toward her palm. The scent hit the air almost immediately—sharp, coppery, and intensely vital in the dead-scented room.

Morgan went rigid. It wasn't a subtle shift; it was a total, instantaneous transformation. His head snapped up, his eyes locking onto the drop of blood on her skin. The scholarly detachment vanished, annihilated. His pupils blew wide, swallowing the black irises until his eyes were nothing but two consuming pits of absolute darkness. A low sound tore from his throat, a guttural growl that was not human. His nostrils flared, and he shoved himself away from the table with such violence that his heavy oak chair screeched across the stone floor and slammed into a bookshelf behind him.

He recoiled as if she had thrown acid at him, scrambling back another step, his body taut as a drawn bowstring. His lips were pulled back from his teeth in a silent snarl, and for a terrifying, heart-stopping second, she saw the glint of something too long, too sharp. His hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides, his whole body trembling with a terrible, restrained violence. He looked like a wolf fighting the urge to lunge.

The entire episode lasted only a few seconds. Just as quickly as it came, the predatory mask dissolved. The blackness receded from his eyes, leaving them wide with something that looked like panic. His face went ashen, a stark, bloodless white that made his lips look dark. He pressed himself back against the bookshelf, one hand coming up to cover his mouth as he took a shuddering, ragged breath.

“Are you alright?” Evie asked, her own pain forgotten, her voice a shaky whisper. The sight of his reaction was infinitely more frightening than the cut itself.

He wouldn’t look at her. He stared at a point on the far wall, his jaw clenched so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek. “The… blood,” he choked out, the words strained and rough. “I have… it’s a phobia. Severe hemophobia.” He finally forced himself to look at her, and his eyes were filled with a convincing, desperate shame. “I’m sorry. I can’t… I can’t be near it.”

The lie was both perfect and pathetic. It explained the recoil, the pale face, the panicked retreat. But it didn’t explain the sound he’d made. It didn’t explain the flash of teeth, or the devouring hunger she had seen in his eyes. What she had witnessed wasn't fear. It was a desire so profound it bordered on agony.

“There’s a first-aid kit in the proctor’s office by the main entrance,” he said, his voice still tight and distant. He gestured vaguely without looking at her hand again. “Go. Clean yourself up. We’re done for tonight.” He turned his back on her completely, facing the shelves, his shoulders rigid with a tension that felt like it could shatter stone.

The lie was an insult. Hemophobia. As if she were a child who would believe any story an adult told her. For the next week, the air in the archives was thick with a new kind of tension. Morgan was meticulously professional, his voice a cool, distant monotone as he dictated notes or pointed out passages. He kept his distance, a chasm of several feet always between them, a dead zone she knew he was consciously maintaining. But his eyes would find her when he thought she wasn't looking, and the detached scholar would vanish, replaced by that same unnerving intensity she’d seen the night he’d saved her from the bookshelf.

Her fascination had curdled into obsession. Her days were no longer her own. She spent hours hunched over a microfiche reader in the library’s basement, the flickering green light illuminating her face as she scrolled through a century of local news. She wasn't just his research assistant anymore; she was his hunter. She searched for patterns, for anomalies, for anything that didn't fit. She found it in the winter of 1923.

A series of five articles from the Harrow’s Gate Chronicle. Five deaths in three months. Young people, all of them. The official causes of death were a bizarre mix of animal attacks and exposure, but the reporter’s prose was laced with doubt. The victims were found drained, pale, with small, almost surgical wounds on their necks or wrists that the coroner struggled to explain. But it was the last article, a short piece about the ensuing town panic, that made her stop breathing. It quoted a witness, a stable hand who had seen a man leaving the woods near where the third victim was discovered. He described "a pale, scholarly gentleman" with "dark, intense eyes" who "spoke like he was from another time."

That night, Evie brought the printouts with her. She waited until they were surrounded by books on lycanthropy, the silence of the archives pressing in on them. She slid the papers across the polished oak table. The grainy photographs of the dead stared up at them.

"I found a curious bit of local folklore today," she said, her voice betraying none of the furious pounding of her heart. "It seems this town had its own brush with what they thought was a monster."

Morgan didn't speak. He looked down, his long, pale fingers resting motionless on the cover of a Latin tome. He scanned the headlines, his expression unreadable.

"The witness descriptions are what I found most interesting," Evie pushed, tapping the final article. "They talk about a 'pale, scholarly gentleman.' It's almost a perfect echo of the vampire archetype we see in early European myths, don't you think?"

He was still for a long, heavy moment. The only sound was the faint hum of the lamps. When he finally looked up, his eyes were utterly devoid of warmth. He picked up the page with the witness statement, his movements slow and deliberate.

"An interesting, if predictable, example of communal hysteria, Miss Rowe," he said. His voice was a silken, academic dismissal, but it was pitched a fraction too low, too controlled. "Tragedy requires a narrative, and a narrative requires a villain. A frightened, uneducated man sees a stranger in the woods and his imagination, primed by fear, supplies the rest. It is the very definition of an unreliable narrator." He set the paper down, placing it perfectly square with the others. "It is a footnote in local paranoia. Nothing more."

It was a masterful deflection. He hadn't denied anything. He had simply re-contextualized it, buried it under a mountain of academic jargon. But his facade had cracked. As he spoke, the muscle in his jaw had tightened, a tiny, furious tremor. His eyes, for a single, unguarded second, had held not the disinterest of a scholar, but the cold fury of a man who had been found out. He was looking at her as if she were prey that had just learned to bite back.

His dismissal left a frost in the air that lingered for days. Evie felt it on her walk home that night, a new kind of chill that had nothing to do with the late autumn air. The familiar path from the library, usually a quiet space for her to process her thoughts, suddenly felt menacing. The pools of orange light cast by the campus lamps seemed smaller, and the shadows between them yawned, deeper and more absolute than before. She heard a footstep behind her—the scrape of a shoe on pavement—and spun around, her heart leaping into her throat. There was no one there. Just the wind rustling the dead leaves piled against the stone walls.

The next night, it happened again. This time, she saw him. Not clearly, but as a definite shape, a man standing under the sprawling branches of an old oak tree at the edge of the main quad. He was too far away for her to see his face, just a tall silhouette standing perfectly still, watching her pass. She quickened her pace, her bag clutched tight to her chest, the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears. She didn’t look back, but she could feel his eyes on her until she turned the corner onto the street where her apartment was.

The feeling of being hunted became a constant companion. Every shadow held a potential threat, every distant sound was his approach. Sleep offered little escape. Her mind, already consumed by the enigma of Dr. Morgan, now had a tangible fear to grapple with. After the fourth night of seeing the indistinct figure shadowing her route home, always keeping the same careful distance, she arrived at the library feeling frayed and brittle, her nerves stretched thin.

She couldn't focus on the Latin translations. The words blurred on the page. Morgan sat opposite her, the lamplight carving his face from the gloom, his stillness a stark contrast to the frantic terror skittering through her veins. He was the source of one mystery, but he was also the only person who had ever made her feel safe. The memory of his impossible strength stopping that bookshelf was a solid, grounding thing in the chaos of her mind.

“Dr. Morgan?” Her voice was barely a whisper, but in the profound silence of the archives, it sounded like a shout.

He looked up from his book, his expression one of polite inquiry. The mask was so perfect, so infuriatingly calm.

“I… I think someone is following me when I walk home,” she said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “For the last few nights. I’ve seen him. He just… watches.”

The change was instantaneous and absolute. The scholar vanished. The air around him seemed to drop ten degrees. His face became a mask of cold, controlled fury. His eyes, those dark, unreadable eyes, narrowed into sharp points of obsidian, locking onto hers with an intensity that made her stop breathing. It wasn't the detached concern of a professor. It was something ancient and territorial.

“Where?” The word was not spoken; it was clipped, a low command.

“On the main path. Near the quad. He just stands there.”

His hands, which had been resting on the open pages of his book, slowly curled into fists. The knuckles went white. A muscle feathered in his jaw, a visible tremor of rage.

“What does he look like?” His voice was dangerously soft now, a silken thread of menace that was more terrifying than any shout.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice trembling. “It’s too dark. He’s just… a shape. Tall.”

Morgan pushed his chair back, the sound a low scrape against the stone floor. He stood, not with his usual fluid grace, but with a sudden, violent rigidity. He looked past her, toward the tall, gothic windows that stared out into the night, his gaze fixed on something she couldn’t see. The concern she had hoped for was there, but it was dwarfed by a cold, possessive fury that radiated from him in palpable waves. It was the fury of a predator whose territory had been encroached upon, whose chosen… something… had been threatened. It was terrifying. And in the deepest, most irrational part of her soul, it was profoundly comforting. He was angry for her.

“I will see you home,” he stated. It wasn’t a question or an offer. It was a declaration. He gathered his things with a sharp economy of motion, his fury now banked into a quiet, simmering intensity that was somehow more frightening.

The walk across campus was silent and taut. The air crackled with his unspoken rage. Evie walked beside him, acutely aware of the rigid line of his body, the way his hands were still clenched into fists at his sides. He was a storm held in check by a thread of will. She should have been afraid of him, of this cold, barely contained violence, but all she felt was the strange, protective heat of it directed outward, away from her.

She turned down her usual shortcut, a narrow service alley between the old arts building and the newer science block. It was poorly lit, smelling of damp stone and overflowing dumpsters. A mistake. She knew it the second she did it.

A figure detached itself from the deeper shadows ahead, blocking the exit. It was the silhouette from the quad, now given terrifying substance. He was big, much bigger than her, and the grin that split his face was a predatory slash in the dim light.

“Lost, little girl?” he sneered, taking a step forward.

Evie’s blood went cold. She opened her mouth to scream, but the sound was trapped in her throat. Before the man could take another step, the space between them was filled with motion. It wasn’t that Morgan moved; it was that he was suddenly there. One moment he was beside Evie, a sentinel of quiet fury, the next he was in front of the stalker, a disorienting blur that her eyes couldn’t properly track.

There was no fight. There was only a sound. A wet, percussive crack that echoed sickeningly off the brick walls, followed by the heavy, boneless slump of the man’s body hitting the pavement. It was over before it had begun. The stalker lay in a heap, his limbs at an unnatural angle, utterly still.

The silence that fell was absolute and profound.

Morgan stood over the body for a moment, a dark, avenging figure. Then he turned to her. His face was impassive, carved from stone, but his eyes were still blazing with that cold fire. He took a step toward her, his movements now slow and deliberate, as if to prove he was made of the same flesh and blood as she was.

He stopped a foot away, his gaze searching her face. “Are you harmed?” His voice was low, perfectly even.

Evie could only shake her head, her body trembling uncontrollably. Her gaze flickered from Morgan’s calm face to the crumpled form on the ground. The sheer speed of it… the finality. It wasn’t possible.

“He’s a known mugger,” Morgan said, his voice cutting through her shock. “He’s been preying on students for weeks. I recognized him from a campus security bulletin.”

The lie was so blatant, so utterly insufficient to explain the impossible physics of what she had just witnessed. He hadn’t fought the man. He had dispatched him. He hadn’t run; he had appeared. She stared at him, the cold alley air doing nothing to stop the flush of heat on her skin. She saw not a professor, but a predator of a different, more terrifying order, and he had just staked his claim. The question of what he was wasn't a whisper anymore; it was a scream in the sudden, violent quiet.

He didn’t wait for her to process the lie. He simply placed a firm hand on the small of her back, a touch that was both a comfort and a command, and guided her out of the alley. He didn't speak again until they were standing in front of her apartment building. The silence was absolute, broken only by the sound of her own ragged breathing.

“I will walk you home every night from now on,” he stated, his eyes fixed on the door as if it were another potential threat. “You will not walk this campus alone after dark again.”

And so it became their new ritual. The professional distance of the library dissolved on the nightly walks to her apartment. The silence between them was different now, no longer academic or awkward, but a heavy, charged thing, thick with the memory of the body on the pavement and the impossible speed she had witnessed. He walked beside her, a dark guardian whose presence was a constant, terrifying reminder of the power he held in check. She was acutely aware of him, of the way he moved without sound, of the cold that seemed to radiate from him even on the mildest evenings. She should have been terrified of him. Instead, the fear she felt was for the world outside the protective circle he drew around her.

A week after the attack, they stood at her door under the weak glow of the porch light. The air was cold, and she could see her breath. He stood perfectly still, watching her, his face an unreadable mask of shadows and planes. Gratitude was a painful, swelling thing in her chest, tangled with a desperate curiosity and an attraction so profound it felt like a sickness. The lie he told in the alley hung between them, a flimsy curtain she was about to tear down. She needed to know. She needed to feel something real from him, something other than this cold, controlled protection.

She took a step closer, closing the space between them. He didn’t move, but she saw a flicker in the depths of his dark eyes. Her hand came up, trembling, and she laid her palm flat against his chest. Through the fine wool of his coat, he felt like stone—cold, solid, and unyielding. There was no heartbeat.

Looking up into his face, she rose onto her toes and pressed her mouth to his.

His lips were impossibly cold, shockingly smooth. For a single, eternal second, he remained completely still, a statue caught in a moment of sacrilege. Then, a shudder went through the solid frame beneath her hand. His mouth opened against hers, not with tenderness, but with a sudden, desperate hunger. He didn't kiss her back; he consumed the kiss, his lips hard and demanding. One of his hands shot out, his fingers digging into the flesh of her arm, his grip just shy of painful. He pulled her flush against his body, and his tongue swept into her mouth. It was a deep, searching invasion, a raw act of possession that tasted of the cold night and something ancient, like dust and winter. He was trying to draw something out of her, the very heat and life from her lungs.

Just as suddenly as it began, it was over. He ripped his mouth from hers with a low, guttural sound of denial, stumbling back a step as if she had burned him. He stared at her, his chest not moving, his lips parted. His eyes were black, churning with a violent conflict that was more terrifying than his physical strength. He looked at her as if she were both a salvation and a damnation.

Without another word, he turned and vanished into the darkness, leaving her trembling against her door, the cold, desperate imprint of his mouth branded onto hers.