“Oh really?” the vampire asked, sounding intrigued. “Here,” he said, pulling his gloves off and selecting one of the sealed vials from the carefully organized display, cracking the wax open and offering it to him with a curious smile. “See if you can name them all.”
Hesitantly, Nathan accepted the vial, holding it delicately away from his face. He’d never been fond of bottled scents. Aside from the eye watering potency of most blends sold by market stall apothecaries, to his delicate werewolf sensibilities, they always felt like somewhat of a lie.
He liked the smell of people the way they were. It told you everything you needed to know about who they were, what they did the most and whether they were happy or sad, and sometimes, quite literally, what they’d had for dinner the night before. So it was with some reluctance that he lifted the little vial to his nose and sniffed. Then sniffed again.
It was incredibly subtle, but there was something familiar about it too, something that reminded him of wandering through the sun scorched sandy streets of Steocidell*. But there was something else there too, tingling just on the edge of his senses, soft and tantalizingly warm.
“Oil,” he said surely, naming the base, tilting his head to the side as he thought, “myrrh, frankincense, cloves…small green plant with purple flowers…looks like mint and onion had a baby together…”
“Patchouli,” the vampire supplied helpfully, wryly amused.
“Some sort of musk,” he inhaled again, savoring the headiness of it and scrunching his eyes shut in concentration. “Deer?”
“Oh very good,” Vlad said, sounding genuinely impressed, and Nathan felt it flip over in his stomach. In the back of his mind he could feel the wolf tail wagging. “But you missed one.”
“Oh?” Nathan asked, unnecessarily surly at being duped by a bottle of perfumed oil, and immediately thrown off kilter when the vampire appeared beside him in the blink of an eye, affixing a single, dark bloom to the buttonhole of his uniform lapel as he looked up at Nathan with those dark, smiling eyes, close enough to taste the scent of him on his tongue.
*My apologies to @ivytarablair for all the alliteration and sibilances you’re going to have to wrap your mouth around for the audio book lmao
