Free Follow The Night (Bewitch The Dark) by Michele Hauf Page A

“But I won’t.”
    He tugged down her skirts to cover her legs, surprising himself.
    A tilt of his head, regretful, spied the stain on the floor. Cursed by a revolting ability to scent blood, he left the embrace, clamping his arms over his chest and paced beneath the oculus.
    “Will you leave me, please?”
    “You shouldn’t stay in this room tonight, Leo. Not with the blood—”“
    “I know that,” he snapped. “I’ll sleep elsewhere. But will you leave? Now.”
    “I’m sorry.” He caught her by the waist and spun her beneath the rainbow. Vibrant orange cut a line across her face. “You wanted me to leave?”
    “Yes, but not because I don’t want you right here, in my arms. I want to make love to you, Roxane.”
    “I…I’m—yes.” She touched his mouth, drawing her forefinger across his bottom lip. “I wish us to make love as well.”
    He nipped her finger and then sucked it into his mouth, teasing his tongue along the narrow digit. “Why, Roxane? Do you fancy me? Or is it merely that you feel sorry for this wretched swish?”
    “Perhaps a bit of the two.” And with that she withdrew her finger from his mouth and sashayed from the room. “But mostly,” she called as she walked off, “because I wish it.”
    The door closed, leaving him alone and feeling much better about himself than he had moments earlier. The woman wanted him. Pitiful as he was, she wanted him. And he wanted her. But.
    Hell, must there be a but?
    “There should be,” he muttered.
    Striding from the room, he trailed his fingers down the mirrored wall, pressing his palm to Roxane’s door as he passed. Yes, there was a but. He had begun to care what the woman thought about him. She was not a meaningless midnight tup. He enjoyed her company. He wanted to sit with her, to talk with her, and spend time with her.
    I wish us to make love…
    Yes, but so much more. Why, he could allow his imagination to place him by her side, standing in a cathedral nave.
    Marry her?
    You’ve abandoned domestic bliss, as everyone else has abandoned you. Besides, creatures don’t marry. Or could they?
    And should the worst occur…
    What woman desired a husband who roomed in the lunatic asylum?

 
    EIGHT
     
    The next morning before the cock announced the day, Roxane mounted a gelding she had borrowed from Leo’s stable and set south for Bicêtre. The asylum sat on a hill just out of Paris, paralleled between Ville-Juif and Gentilly.
    Passing an egg-man balancing a pyramid of eggs that blocked his view, she marveled that his path took him around a stack of faggots and safely to his cart, not a single cracked shell.
    The pine board barrier at the St. Victor gate was closed up and a smaller door in the large gate was open to emit single-file a herd of bone-thin cattle. Fortunately she arrived as the last beast hobbled through.
    Roxane had passed through these gates half a dozen times in the past few months. The bearded guard recognized her and nodded her through with a forced smile. He knew her destination.
    Besides jailing thieves, debtors and beggars, the asylum also housed the sick, those the Hotel Dieu had passed on, for they either had not sufficient room or the expertise to handle those too far gone from the pox.
    As well, Bicêtre was a holding cell for the insane, a last vestige for families who could not—did not have the skill to—care for those they loved.
    Roxane bit her lip hard to prevent a teardrop. She had tried to tend Damian for all of a se’nnight before she realized she could not contain his madness within the small rue Vivienne apartment they had moved into months earlier. Since the attack her brother did not sleep, instead prancing the floor through the night, admonishing and taunting the moon to come out and duel with him. And when the moon surrendered to the sun, Damian would sit for hours and pound his fists against the stone hearth, leaving bloody runnels behind as he dashed, mad-eyed and raging, from one side of the room