My teeth ached; the part of me that had always brought me shame tried to elongate. The part of me, I’d been told, that would not regenerate like any other bit of my horrible body. But would grow back over centuries.
My stomach rumbled obnoxiously loud. I was enfolded, yet there were no bat-like wings. My hair was gathered into a fist, my mouth turned up, and a throat slit with a dagger I knew had an ivory handle poured a fountain of perfection on my face.
I drank.
Climbing the figure who bled in my gaping mouth like a monkey. I burrowed my fingers into bronze waves.
Gulping, rocking my hips despite how my mind screamed to stop such things, agelessness poured down my throat.
When I was done crying, nose stuffed and sniveling, I broke suction on skin that had already mended, smeared in black fluid from nose to breast—rivulets from that once gaping wound having run down my throat, staining the modest collar of the priceless gown.
Looking every bit the horrific vampire.
“Did you see that?” Hushed murmurs so soft no human might hear moved like a breeze through the enrapt room. “She drank from his throat.”
“She really is his soul.”
My hair still fisted in the grip of the man I’d just feasted upon with wild abandon, he made me meet his burning eye as he loudly proclaimed, “And she is perfect.”
Before pressing a bloodthirsty kiss to my mouth.
Chapter Five
Pearl
If one could be devoured, have their very soul sucked from their being, the kiss conquering my mouth accomplished such a feat. I was consumed.
Legs already wrapped around his waist, nails already digging into his scalp so I might hold my prey still while I gorged, I was tangled up with no escape.
Prey became predator.
The tongue twisting about mine was anything but gentle. The palm under my rear had grown claws I knew were black as sin and sharp as the nails driven into Christ.
Yet despite razor-sharp fangs, despite talons, despite ferocity and thirst and monstrous passion, I did not bleed. The demon was careful in his assault.
Hard where I was liquid fire.
Dangerous, snarling, savage, and so strong I never stood a whisper of a chance.
He fed on me as I had fed on him. Uncontrolled. Unabashed.
With a mad mind and unquenched hunger.
Was this how lovers kissed?
Did it always destroy one so completely?
Pain would come next. Rending. Penetration that would kill another part of my tattered soul.
Probably here before the room. Probably over and over until I screamed for mercy while the audience laughed, only to wake up in the crypt to find that book and the horrible notes again.
Yet… as savagely as it had begun, it ended.
The force in which he’d pulled his swollen mouth away left mine searching out missing sensation. An action obstructed by his grip on my hair. “I apologize for being so forward.”
What? What nonsense was this?
Men never apologized! They followed women through blizzards and raped them on the street. They locked girls in rooms and caused reckless, horrible harm.
My pupils dilated, the oddest sensation coming over me. Blood drunk and wine saturated, I whispered between pants, “I killed a man when he pushed me down in the snow and tried to shove inside. He might have, I was never sure. But I remember his blood all over my coat. I vomited and scrubbed, but the smell would not go away. So, an angel came to deliver judgment. I was dragged from life into death to be thrown at the feet of the Devil.” A living corpse dressed in tatters who poked around every last part of me for a century. “I… I am lost. God no longer loves me.”
“The God you speak of never did, Daywalker. Not from the moment your mother birthed you, not from the sad rejection of the screaming child she dumped on the mission doorsteps. Not when you were brutalized. Bewildered. Starved. Or left hanging from that tree as a child.”
He took my chin. “I loved you. No other.”
“You are evil.” Of that, I had no doubt.
“Then be my goodness.” A peck on kiss-stung lips. “Be my sun.”
Yet he could walk in the sun… a thought that left a few startled gasps in a roomful of glittering nightmares.
He could walk in the sun where they could not.
But in that instant, I knew why he burned with fire. He could walk in the sun, but he could not feel it. He couldn't feel anything but where my mouth had just been joined with his.
The stroke from buttocks up my spine as he unwound and slid me down his body was a screaming declaration that I was correct. The hands that came to steady me when my shoes hit the parquet floors were black, fire licking from between the cracks in the skin, singeing my dress.
But his face, that forgettable, interesting face, was so human it made my heart ache.