Chapter 13 #2
He’d also saved me.
He had to.
He couldn’t feed the wards or live an immortal life without his bonded.
More awareness meant more pain. As I tried to sit up, it seized my leg—an iced inferno that made me writhe, desperate to claw free of it. A wall of muscle held me captive. Buttery citrus snuck beneath the metallic odor of blood and my collapsed defenses.
His scent.
“This wound is too deep to mend quickly, Ethel.” Guttural, he ordered, “Drink the fucking blood.”
I stilled in his arms.
He took advantage. Warm magic brushed my lips.
I couldn’t fight it. I licked it from them, and as soon as his blood met my tongue, instinct took over.
I seized his bitten wrist and sucked.
Behind my fluttering eyelids, starlight appeared. As I swallowed and swallowed, those stars grew until they burst. The fire within me weakened.
“That’s it,” Brey crooned.
His praise caused a different kind of heat to bloom. A warmth that made me shiver and forget the misery this man had inflicted upon me when he swept strands of hair from my face. A need so powerful, it startled.
I released his wrist and turned away.
“Be as infuriatingly stubborn as you want,” he said. “After you’ve had a little more and your lovely thigh doesn’t look like it’s been run through by a giant spider’s leg.”
Just imagining what it looked like caused the pain to flare. Teeth clenched, I groaned.
Brey cursed. Again, he placed his wrist before my mouth.
I took it.
I sucked and swallowed him down in greedy gulps. Perhaps it was the injury—my body’s need to repair. Perhaps it was the bond we’d never gotten the chance to experience. But never had I felt so gluttonous. So desperate.
I bit him.
A hissed intake of breath broke through the fog. I paid it no mind. Lost to this foreign bloodlust, I didn’t notice the groans Brey tried to trap behind his gnashed teeth. Nor did I notice the way his other hand gripped my waist.
“Ethel.”
I moaned and curled closer to him, in search of more. More blood. More of him. Something more to alleviate this snarling need within me. I climbed onto my knees, his wrist held tight to my mouth, and stared at him through clouded eyes.
Brey stared back, lashes feathering over his jeweled gaze.
I heard his harsh swallow. Heard his thudding heart, beating in sync with my own. It was then I understood that whatever this intensity was, he felt it too.
He needed me, too.
A violent screech stilled us both.
My lips slid from his wrist. So did my fingers as the canopy of thickly twined branches shifted above us.
I blinked and looked at Brey with clearing vision. His eyes were slit—a green so bright, I felt my bones lock. I’d never seen them that vivid before. I needn’t have asked to know that my eyes were the same.
I closed them and took a slow breath. My hand trembled as I swiped at my mouth.
Brey cleared his throat. It failed to keep a rasp from entering his voice. “Does it still hurt?”
Everywhere, I didn’t say.
He was talking about my thigh. Not what we’d done to one another. Unsure I was ready to speak, I inched back—to test my leg and put some very necessary space between us—then shook my head.
He stood. “I know where the ward is.”
I nodded.
Good. Great, even. The sooner we fed it and left this isle of nightmares, the better.
Brey waited until I was on my feet, then led the way through the trees.
We walked in tense silence. Unable to ascertain if such tension had come from the feeding or the eerie quiet of the dark forest, I was torn between keeping close to Brey’s back and putting distance between us.
Recalling the agony and the hairy underbelly of that giant spider, I decided to keep close.
My boots still squelched. The humidity had me itching to tear my sodden clothing from my body. Plucking at my bloodstained blouse, I finally asked, “Where were you?”
“Running after you.” Brey huffed. “At least, I thought I was. You’re shockingly nimble when scared. I lost your scent and assumed you’d headed for the hills. But when I neared them, I heard you scream and came for you.”
“Cannot feed the wards and continue breathing without the queen you just had to have,” I sang snidely.
Brey’s back went rigid.
Eyeing the sword I’d teased, that had saved me, I sighed. “Did you hear the spider coming?” I asked, “Before you said to run?”
“I saw eyes deep in the brush.” Belatedly, he added, “A rather disturbing number of them.”
So it had hunted us. Then hunted me.
I trailed Brey around a large boulder. “It kept saying ‘no tithe, no safe passage.’”
He said, “It wants blood. An offering in exchange for safely passing through this forest.”
I remembered aloud, “That broken well.” Those spiders crawling all over it. “The one we passed after we arrived.”
“With the ward being a well, the spider probably wants to trick visiting royals into feeding that first one we saw. A thing that size can certainly fend for itself and has no need for vampire blood. I assume it wants it for its offspring.”
Disgust twisted my features. “So they can grow just as horrifically large?”
“I would say so.”
I shivered and glanced at the tear in my britches, stained dark with my blood. More giant spiders were the last thing this isle—or any place—needed.
The trees began to separate enough to see the hills Brey had mentioned. Silence fell once more. This time, it wasn’t as uncomfortable.
Then he just had to open his lovely mouth. “Exactly when did you last feed?”
“Dinner, I suppose.”
“A proper feed. Not a mere dribbling within stews and toppings.”
“I don’t know,” I lied, then lied again. “Maybe a week or so ago.”
He slowed.
I nearly walked into his back. “What are you—”
“A vampire never forgets when their thirst was last quenched,” he said quietly—almost coldly. “So when was it, Ethel?”
“What I do and when I do it is no longer any of your concern, Breyron.”
“Wrong and wrong.” He turned to glare at me. “To lessen the chances of you getting maimed again, or worse, you must feed regularly,” he hissed. “If you are not at full strength, then you’re endangering us both.”
Discomfort gnawed at me, and not only from my sodden clothing and boots and hair. “Let’s just finish this.”
An incredulous puff of breath preceded his words. “You mean to tell me that you acquired your very own feeder, and you didn’t even drink her fucking blood?”
I glowered. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not telling you anything.”
“You just did.”
“I did not.”
He lifted a finger. “By speaking and by not speaking.”
Groaning, I walked around him. “I’m surprised those ever-naked feeders haven’t discovered how maddening you are and fled by now.” I snorted. “Though they likely know and just choose to look past it.”
“Because I’m pretty.” In a velveteen tone, he added, “Everywhere.”
My heart stopped.
Then thrashed as rage and regret twined through my chest like sharp ribbons. I wanted to pick up rocks and throw them at him while telling him just how much I regretted ever saying a rotting word to him—and that I hadn’t meant any of the compliments I’d given him.
But I kept walking. I trudged through the trees up the sloping terrain.
Only when I saw the well did I slow my pace.
This one was bigger than the giant spider’s. Framed by a bunch of enormous rocks, the ward appeared to be nothing more than a long-forgotten water well, eaten by time. Moss shrouded much of the stone, and much of the stone was chipped, large portions of the rim missing.
Though as I neared, I felt it—that same energy the chalice emanated.
An energy so thick, it caused my teeth to grit and gooseflesh to pebble my cooling skin. It was akin to walking through wind that was both unbearably cold and hot. Wind that roared yet made no sound at all. It hummed and pressed.
Brey walked past me through the stones.
I marveled at the size of one on my right. My hair whipped around my cheeks as I gazed up at the sharp point it tapered into.
The unsheathing of steel drew my eyes to Brey, who procured a small and thin blade from his sleeve. “Shall we get this done?” Rolling his sleeve back down, he taunted, “Or would you rather risk encountering something worse than a giant spider?”
I highly doubted anything worse existed, but I didn’t wish to find out. I hurried over to the well, eager to leave this wretched place.
Tufts of strangely yellow grass lined the bottom of the age-darkened stone.
Standing beside Brey, I stiffened as he dragged the tip of the knife across the lifeline in his palm. He then offered the blade to me.
When I hesitated to take it, he said, “I can do it for you.”
I just extended my hand, palm flat.
His eyes gleamed—whether from my silence or cowardice, I didn’t know. But I averted my own to the mossy and uneven rim of the well.
Carefully, his fingers slid beneath my hand.
I bit down on my tongue. My fangs pierced it when he quickly swept the sharp blade across my lifeline.
I winced.
But I tensed for a different reason when Brey threaded our fingers. His hand held mine tight, our blood slippery between.
Then he moved them over the well and squeezed.
Plum trickled into the darkness.
In silence, we watched our blood leave our joined hands to feed the ward until the trickle slowed to barely a drip. There was no sound of it reaching anything. No sign that it was being received by something. No change in the stone.
Quietly, so as not to disturb whatever might be happening, I asked, “How do we know when it’s been sufficiently fed?”
Nourishing these wards was long overdue. Perhaps it needed more blood.
Brey’s brows flattened as he peered into the well. “I suppose something will happen.”
Something indeed happened.
Not a moment later, that river of darkness returned. It raced up the well and poured over it to snatch us—to suck us straight into the ward.
Before we encountered whatever lay in its depths, we were spat onto the cobbled street below the palace drive.