Red Blood (Series of Blood Book 2), Emma Hamm [little red riding hood ebook free .TXT] 📗

conversation with me. I just wasn’t present for it.”

“No need to be so angry.” He chuckled.

She could hear him shuffling around in the room but couldn’t understand what he was doing. Her fingers itched to rip the blindfold off. But there was a meaning to everything he did. She wasn’t quite ready to ruin this moment yet.

A soft creaking sound accompanied Wolfgang’s slow movements every now and then. The noise abraded her ears and distracted her from figuring out what he was doing. She couldn’t quite connect the sounds with anything she had heard before.

The creaking noise made her jump when it was much closer than it had been before.

“Charlie?” she asked.

The creaking immediately stopped.

Wolfgang chuckled again. “Good. You’re using your hearing more then.”

“The blindfold is coming off,” she replied crossly.

“No, it’s not.”

Lyra had never been very good at following orders. He could tell her what to do all night, and she wasn’t going to follow it. She reached up to yank the velvet off but paused when she realized there wasn’t a knot at the back of her head anymore.

The fabric had knit itself together into one smooth headband. She tried pushing it up, but it was so tightly wrapped that she couldn’t get it to budge.

“Wolfgang.”

“There’s a point to all of this, you know.”

He was right behind her. She jumped and immediately leaned forward to palm one of her blades. It was always strapped to her thigh, but he wouldn’t know that.

“No weapons.”

The blade hummed against her palm and immediately turned to water. Her fingers clenched around empty air.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked.

“No, I need you to learn how to trust me.”

“Why?”

“Because it is something I deeply desire,” he whispered into her ear. She felt the warmth of his arms on either side of her head as he reached around her. His hands cupped carefully around her eyes. “You need to learn how to not be alone.”

“I’m not alone. I have my family.” She was thinking of Jasper. He was the only person she would ever call family.

“I am not your family. Call me selfish. Call me arrogant. But I want to you realize that without me, you do not see in color.”

“What are you doing?” she asked, just as his hands shifted around her.

He drew his thumbs down in a line spanning from her hairline to the very edge of her eyebrows. The movement would have been soothing if she wasn’t beginning to feel trapped. His fingers curled like spider legs down her nose and tucked underneath her chin. His elbows spiked towards the ceiling like the wings of a vulture.

“I’m showing you how to see.” His breath tickled the whorl of her ear.

And then, as he commanded it, she did.

All around her the world burst into vivid color. Not sight, in particular, but a different way of seeing the world. Everything around her sparkled. The table and inanimate objects around her glittered less, but it was the living creatures that caught her attention.

She could see Mungus as never before. He was not just a skeleton. The light curled around him and warped his body into shape. The movement of color was similar to a Van Gogh painting she had seen in a book once. There was no beginning or end to the shape but a connection of the world to this creature.

It swirled and moved with a life of its own. Mungus turned towards her, and she gasped when she saw the aquiline shape of a distinguished nose, the high arch of a prominent forehead, and full lips spread into a warm smile. He bowed to her.

“What is this?” She breathed the question out against his fingers.

“I’m showing you how I see.”

“This is how you see the world?”

“When I wish to remind myself that there is good left.”

Her heart hurt. He was always making her heart hurt; this dastardly man who refused to tell her things but managed to change the way she thought. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes as she widened them. She wanted to see everything.

“Look down,” he murmured in her ear.

“I don’t want to miss anything.”

“Look down, and see how I see you.”

She tilted her head as far as his arms would allow her and gasped. In her palms were the great eddies of the ocean. Her fingers were crashing waves of color and seafoam sparkling fingers.

She raised her hand up to peer into the depths of the sea. In the very center of her hand, she felt as though she could see stars.

“This?” she couldn’t help but ask.

“The first moment I saw you, I saw an abyss. The darkest of whirlpools that would drag me down under crashing waves and crushing weight. I thought you would take my soul and bury it so far away I would never find it again.” His fingers shifted to gently stroke under her chin. “But when I looked deeper into that abyss, I saw the brightest of lights.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Then say nothing. Just look.”

Look she did. Lyra drank in every object she could find as though it were infinitely important. This magical world was a Siren’s dream. Everything was beautiful, sparkling, clean. There wasn’t a speck of the world that she did not like.

He had given her this gift. But there was something missing.

“Wolfgang, I want to see you.”

She felt his chest rise through the fabric back of the chair as he inhaled. “I do not believe you should.”

“I want to.”

He held his hands against her eyes for long moments more before she felt him nod against her neck. She stood slowly so she didn’t dislodge his hands.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

“Why?”

“So you can turn around.”

“Oh.” She quickly squeezed her eyes shut as hard as she could and nodded. “Okay ready.”

He helped her turn, although she doubted he could have caught her if she tripped. Lyra was small, but she was heavier than she looked. She could easily knock the two of them to the ground.

She did not flinch