After sighing, I fully open my mouth, letting the blood do its job. It gives me another night or two to skulk around this shitty city I’m in. I hate little cities like this. The atmosphere here is far too small town for me. I was once a human living in a small village, it sucked.
The door opens to my room, and I hear the heavy thuds of motorcycle boots clomping across the bedroom carpeting.
Raphael sighs. “Asher.”
Licking my lips to clear the blood off them, I say, “I’m eating.”
“You’re playing with your food.”
“Not true.” I lift my hand up to increase the spin of the woman’s body.
Raphael growls. “The Order took a coven out.”
“Where?”
“Boston,” he says angrily.
“Jeremiah’s Coven?”
“Yes.”
It doesn’t come as a surprise. Jeremiah’s coven has been in Boston for over ten years. They’re staunch supporters of Malice’s. Well, I should say were, I guess.
Malice, the problem child of the undead world. He wants to go back to the way things were before the Order gained a tight hold on the various churches around the world. He wants strongholds in every country. He wants us to proudly stand up to all who want to destroy us.
Yet the fucker lives in hiding. Somewhere in Africa, if reports are right. He’s pissed off too many of our kind.
“And you’d like for me to send a retaliatory strike against the Order, further inciting the war?” I say as I spin the body suspended above me in the opposite direction.
“I’d like you to do something beyond lying there, feeding like a fat fucking lion in some zoo,” Raphael shouts at me.
I wince at the volume of his voice, the anger of his words practically burning my skin.
He’s right, of course, but I’m getting tired of all the bloodshed caused by fighting these fucking parasitical fanatics. There are just too many of them. Humans breed like fucking bunnies while vampires can take centuries before we find our soulmarked, if we ever find them.
Reaching up to stop the girl from spinning, I snap her neck. “Send a strike team to Corpus Christi, remove three priests and bring them back.”
“What will that do for us?” he asks.
I sit up from the bed, shouting at him. “It will do what I fucking want!”
The force in my words causes him to take a step back. As his fucking sire he should know to watch his tone. Perhaps he’s forgotten not to poke the fucking bear.
Standing up from the bed, I yell, “Bring me three priests and three nuns. I don’t give a fuck if they’re Order of Saint Benedict or not. We’ll make the nuns ghouls and unleash them on their Sunday fucking Mass.”
Shaking his head, Raphael starts to laugh. “What do you really want to do?”
“Exactly as I just—”
Head swimming with disorientation, the entire right side of my body goes numb and weak, as if I’m having some sort of aneurysm.
“Raph?” I look at him in confusion.
Raphael rushes over to me as I feel myself falling to the floor. “Asher!”
Looking up into a bright light, I’m momentarily blinded by the painful sting of illumination. It physically hurts to look upon it, yet I’m unable to turn away or close my eyes.
I want to turn my head so badly from the pain, but I have no control over my body. I can’t move. I can’t fucking blink.
I can do nothing but writhe mentally, stuck inside a prison of some sorts.
A crying scream that’s not my own suddenly erupts from my throat, and a face covered in a medical mask comes into view.
She’s here.
My soulmarked.
I sense it instantly, the connection crashing into me like two worlds colliding together.
I’m inside her somehow, I quickly realize.
Seeing the world through her newborn eyes.
My thoughts surge through a rush of emotions. Fear, anger, desire, and loathing. Wonderment, joy, and sadness. Each one slams into my consciousness before it’s rapidly replaced by the next.
In the end I have to settle for being restlessly tense.
If I could move, I’d feel much better about things, but I can do nothing it seems but bear witness.
The face above me shifts to another. It takes a moment for my fated’s eyes to adjust to the movement, but I can make out the smile of a lightly-freckled woman.
I can’t feel my own body, and I can’t feel the tiny being I’m trapped inside of, but I still have access to my mind and senses.
Forcing my power into my fated’s eyes, the world shifts from black and white to technicolor, making it much easier for me to see what’s going on.
The woman holding me has a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and dark blonde hair falls down her shoulders. Her strained smile is full of love, but her lips and damp skin are paler than they should be.
She’s bleeding from somewhere…