Where Dark Things Wait: Night Creatures Book One

Chapter Fifteen - The Night After the Morning Before

The pounding in her head dragged her from sleep to find herself curled in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room, with the cool and deathly still form of Dunstan Eorl asleep beside her. A bolt of horror shot through her as her memory pieced together fragments of the day before, and her stomach churned, both with shame at her own behaviour and because it felt like someone had driven a rail spike through her skull. The hangover was a killer, and yet she knew she shouldn't have a hangover at all, not on the back of one vodka and coke.

Dammit, she was going to throw up.

The broiling in her belly bubbled up in her chest, and she new she didn't have time to find her clothes or stumbled back to her own room, so she tumbled off Eorl's bed and dragged herself onto her feet, darting to his en suite instead. She only just made it to the toilet before her stomach vented, each heave driving the rail spike deeper into her brain. Worse, she knew it was only a matter of time before Eorl found her bent over his toilet bowl, which was the last thing she wanted. In fact, she didn't want him to see her at all.

What had she done? So much for her claim that she didn't jump into bed with men she'd only just met. She'd made Cin wait three months, so why had the vampire been too tempting to resist? A vampire of all things! The first man she'd slept with since vampires murdered her husband, and she had to pick a bloodsucker!

Shame coursed through her, making the nausea so much worse, and she heaved again, feeling utterly wretched. Couldn't someone just put her out of her misery?

"Will I hold your hair back whilst you nurse your hangover, or will I keep out of your way whilst you wallow in your regret?" a cool voice asked from the doorway.

Kalyna blenched, grabbing a towel from the rail by the bath to wrap around her still naked body. Heat scorched her cheeks, and she regretted that Eorl seemed intent on making her feel worse than she already did. Hadn't he done enough? He'd made such a fuss about the rules, then he'd give in so easily. Damn him to hell.
She knew that wasn't fair; it took two to tango, and the connection she'd forged when she took his blood likely played as much havoc with his common sense as just being around him did with hers. If anyone was to blame for what they'd done, it was her.

"I'm not hungover. I had one vodka and coke. I'm out of practise, yes, but I'm not that much of a lightweight. I have Polish heritage. I know how to hold my vodka," she grumbled.

"Obviously," he murmured, scowling at her from the doorway. At least he'd put his joggers back on, even if he seemed determined to make the her pay for the whole damn farce. "You're going to have fun in training. Can you even stand up? If I'd known you were that inebriated, I never would have..."

He shook his head, then admitted, "You didn't smell of alcohol when you turned up here, but you must have been fucked or you wouldn't be hugging my toilet."

"Maybe I'm just disgusted at myself," she snapped back at him, irritated, but then another flood of bile flooded across her tongue, and she bent over the porcelain again.

Once she'd finished heaving, Dunstan noted, "I can feel your disgust, but the headache and nausea still say hangover. A headache and nausea you're forcing me to share, by the way, although I refuse to throw up on principle."

"Fuck you," she hissed at him.

"You already did. Three times, I might add," he retorted, the ice in his tone cold enough that she suspected he regretted surrendering to lust every bit as much as she did.

"You don't understand," she grumbled. "You can ask Isemay, Alad, or Zhak... I didn't get drunk. It just didn't matter because everything got kind of blurry after..."

She froze as a face loomed in her mind's eye, a stern face, half cast in shadow with symbols painted in scarred skin marking its cheeks and chin. The hooded man had done something do her. Despite the fog in her head that made a good portion of the day before feel disjointed, like she'd been a passenger in her own misadventure, she still remembered him and the blue glow of his palm in the second before it slammed against her chest.