fluttering your lashes like ashes and embers

One of Alastor's ears cocked towards the floor and the sound of the glass clanking against it. How delicious, that sound; it was just as pure a sound of shock as Lotte could have made with her own mouth. It was the sound of Alastor affecting his surroundings without ever reaching out to touch them. The remainder of the liquid splattered across the wood, and his shadow reached out fingers from its places between the cracks, to soak up the whiskey. Waste not, want not.

Alastor's pupils were wide and dark, subtly spiraling in the yellows of his sclera, while he watched Lotte. He bent just a little at the waste, keening towards her and the sound of her frantic heartbeat. Just close enough that he could smell her more clearly, smell the dust that clung to her and shrouded the scent of her fear in a layer of earthy drabness. But he could smell beyond it, catch the scent of her pulsing blood. His nostrils flared, and his eyes fluttered shut for a beat.

"Not always," he said, with a wave of his hand, as if to say that it was nothing, surely not as remarkable as anything Lotte herself had done. But he thought what she said next was true - she should have been warned away from him. Someone should have loved her that much, but they hadn't. There was no one to raise her up without the desire for otherworldly things, and no one in her life now to warn her off what she'd done. No one to question whether summoning Alastor was a poor decision. This suited Alastor just fine. It might be the source of Lotte's eventual ruin, but it was to his own advantage.

He downed the remaining whiskey in his glass, and set it politely on the table, before he went to follow Lotte to the doorway. His shadow followed him, first picking up what was left of the girl's spilled glass, and place it likewise on the table. A polite guest would never leave such a mess.

Lotte went ahead of him quickly, and Alastor was in no rush, anyway. Hands clasped behind his back, he took the time to enjoy the leisurely pace of his walk from the table, through the doorway, into the slightly cooler air outdoors. Cooler, but no clearer. Worse, in that department, really. He lifted his hand, two fingers raised, and swirled them in a flourished, semi-circular pattern above his head. The dust came together in their wake, sucked up as if by a magnet, and cleared the air in a sort of bubble around himself and Lotte that extended several meters above their heads. It greatly improved the view of the night sky, at least to his eyes.

"Whatever you'd like to show me." His shoulders shrugged, and he meant what he said. He was quite amenable to anything Lotte might have wanted, him to see. "What are you most proud of? There must be something."