Chapter 2 #2
“Give it to me.” Greedy, she rips the pomegranate out of my hand, prying it open with her fingers, then tearing into its flesh with her sharp incisors.
Bloodred juice pours down her chin to dribble onto her already ruined gown.
There’s a feverishness to her energy. A frenzy that sets my nerves on alert.
She tosses aside the spent rind and motions to a ceramic bowl. “The milk. Now.”
As soon as I pick up the bowl of still-warm sheep’s milk, she snatches it out of my hands and guzzles it down. I lean back, muscles primed, observing with a soldier’s keen eye. I’ve seen Sabine eat and drink a hundred times. Even at her most famished, it’s never looked like this.
All around the Garden of Ten Gods, pilgrims laden with offerings stare in rapture at the newly awakened fae goddess.
Already, I can hear the rumors spreading from person to person. Traveling like an infection from the garden, to the castle gates, and out into the streets of Norhelm.
Vale and the other fae approach, stopping at the highest level of the sunken amphitheater, the weight of their presence bending the air itself.
The ceramic bowl shatters behind me as Sabine drops it, careless, to move onto a bunch of grapes on a bronze platter.
She stuffs a handful in her mouth, but her eyes dart needily over the altar’s other offerings. Oven-warm loaves of dark bread. Carved wooden figurines. Vegetable-dyed wool skeins. She pounces on a cured lamb haunch and sinks her teeth straight into the salted flesh.
After a few bites, she comes up for air, wiping her glistening mouth with the back of her hand. Her fingers are shaking. Eyes glassy, distant.
I gently touch the small of her back, and she jumps, whirling on me.
She blinks, trying to focus. “Basten.” Her voice comes out like a gasp for help. “I don’t know what’s happening… Everything inside me is too loud, too bright. Too hungry. I—I can’t turn it off.”
Her voice breaks into a sob, and with it, the last of my hesitation shatters.
I tighten my fingers on the back of her gown. How could I ever doubt her? She’s no monster like the others.
She’s still my little violet.
“I’ve got you.” I pull her into my arms, letting her hot tears stain my shirt. “I’m with you.”
“I didn’t know, I promise,” she chokes out. “I would have told you that I was—was—” She briefly turns her head to gaze up fearfully at the fae at the top of the stairs. A hiccup makes her jump. She whispers, “I don’t want to be like them.”
She suddenly breaks eye contact and begins to shake.
Her eyes are rolling again, wide like a raging horse. I cup her chin in my hand and gently guide her attention back to me. “Hey. Eyes on me, sweetheart. Listen, human or not, you aren’t like them. I know you.”
Her hands twist in my shirt. “How can you? I don’t know myself! I don’t recognize who I am like—like this.”
She swipes the back of her hand again on her cheek, brushing away a slather of greasy lamb’s meat. Her stomach groans, followed by her eyes darting back to the altar.
A deep, distant clap of thunder rolls across the horizon.
“Don’t fight the hunger,” I urge her, giving a worried glance at the sky. “You have to get through this. Your father called it a Gloaming. You need to—” I look doubtingly over the altar offerings, none of which seemed to make a dent in her appetite. “—to build back your strength.”
Her throat bobs in a hard swallow, but her will is no match for her insatiable appetite.
She grabs an oat roll and tears into it. She relaxes, but after only a few bites, her face twists into another scowl. She throws aside the half-eaten roll and grabs a wine bottle instead, tipping it up to guzzle straight from the source. Her throat bobs until the entire bottle is empty.
She throws it down, where it shatters.
A woman nearby shrieks and shies away. Sabine briefly comes back to herself, eyes widening at the woman’s fear, but then her stomach growls again, and she pivots sharply back to her altar.
Her fingers tear anxiously over bolts of woven cloth, golden coins, tapered candles. Nothing she touches seems to satisfy the frenzy in her eyes.
All around us, townspeople stand rooted to the stone steps, their offerings nearly forgotten in their arms. The air in the amphitheater feels like it’s holding its breath. Hardly anyone moves, except to lean forward, straining to make sense of the sight.
At the top of the stairs, Vale watches with a hooded expression. Iyre smirks as she packs a plug of Wicked Weed into a long-handled pipe.
The only people not focused on Sabine are the redheaded human twins who serve Samaur as his acolytes. They saunter up to him and try to loop their arms through his, but he swats them away.
“Not now,” he chides.
A memory shoots back to me: watching his lips latched to their necks one at a time, teeth to their jugulars, throat bobbing as he took turns drinking down their freely offered blood.
Is that what Sabine needs? A blood sacrifice?
It’s so damn twisted.
Wicked.
Positively fucking obscene.
Hesitant, I rub my palm over the rough scars on my left forearm where, weeks ago, I carved Sabine’s name into my flesh. The bottom loop of the “e” skims over my wrist’s thick blue vein, almost like a map.
A drip of sweat slides down my temple.
“Sabine.” I roll my sleeve cuff back to my elbow, fully exposing my forearm. “Sabine. Hey—look at me. Try this.”
She’s so busy tearing into a greasy pork chop that I have to grip her by the chin and force her attention on me. Her eyes are wild, frenzied. The sharp points of her new incisors dig into her bottom lip, pricking silver blood.
I draw my hunting knife with my opposite hand.
“Look,” I prompt her. “Here. I think this is what you need.”
I set the blade’s tip against my throbbing blue vein. Realization of what I’m about to do hits her, and Sabine’s eyes suddenly snap into focus.
She pounces on the knife in my hand.
“Basten, stop! What are you doing? Have you gone mad?”
“Sweetheart, you’re changing. Gloaming—whatever it’s called. Wine and bread aren’t going to get you through this.” I drop my voice. “You know the stories, just as I do.”
For the span of a long breath, she stares at me, wide-eyed as a doe. Her bottom lip trembles. I can see the indecision in her gaze as it bounces back and forth between my face and my wrist.
Fuck it.
I make the cut. It’s a small but deep gash. Dark red blood spills out.
I growl softly, “Use me, little violet.”
Something shifts in her face. The doe disappears, overtaken by a predator. Her pink tongue snakes out to lick the drop of silver blood off her lips. Her eyes lock onto my wrist. She takes a hesitant, jerky step toward me, dropping her lip to hover over the wound but holding back.
Warring with herself.
I flinch, struck by an electric shiver. She did this before, I realize. She told me about it. We were in the woods outside Duren. She said she sucked on my cut thumb on impulse, no idea why.
But now I’m wondering if this was why. Maybe it’s more than a coincidence. It could be a pattern, history looping back on itself like a snake eating its tail.
How many times has she drunk someone’s blood?
That line of thought vanishes, however, as Sabine’s tongue darts over my bloodstained wrist. The cut stings, but to help her? That kind of pain I’d drink for days.
A moan rattles out of her chest, and with just that one lick, all her inhibitions disappear. She seizes my wrist, fingernails digging in like claws. Her tongue and lips punish my skin as she feverishly laps at the blood.
“That’s it,” I murmur, though my heart slams against my ribs—unsteady, uncertain—as she grows wilder in her need. “Take what you need.”
For a few frenzied moments, she sucks and claws and kisses at my wrist until my blood drips down her chin.
“Yes,” I hiss as she grows almost feral. “Drink me down to the dregs, if that’s what you need.”
At this, she comes up for air and blinks, almost as if seeing me for the first time. Her pupils are round as buttons.
Her gaze moves to my lips. I hear her pulse suddenly speed in her veins.
“I want…something else.”
Like an animal, she pounces on me. Her small arms pull tight around my neck, straining on tiptoe, trying to climb me like a tree with no branches.
“Kiss me, Basten,” she gasps.
“Gods, little violet.”
She’s getting blood all over both our mouths—tangy on my tongue like metal. She’s so frantic that it’s all I can do to scoop her up around the waist, bring her closer, one hand supporting her ass.
She locks her legs around my waist, fingernails twisting in my hair as she thrusts her tongue between my teeth.
I pick up on murmurs in the crowd as the townspeople’s mood shifts—from fascination to something more uncomfortable. Embarrassment. Like they’re witnesses to something too intimate and don’t know where to look now.
Gently, I try to break the kiss. We can continue this in her bedroom.
But she meets my attempt with a growl as her arms latch tighter around my neck, thighs squeezing my hips. My lungs constrict. I don’t think a monoceros could drag her away from me.
Oblivious to the shocked onlookers, she rolls her hips against mine, needy and demanding. An indecent moan rolls off her lips.
“Fuck me right here,” she begs, so loud that people a hundred paces away could hear. “Hard. I need your cock in me now.”
My jaw unhinges. Her father is twenty paces away. The rest of the fae, too. As well as a hell of a lot of little old ladies carrying sweet, embroidered quilts to lay on Vale’s altar. With their wide-eyed grandchildren in tow.
Sabine nips at my jaw, hot breath full of lust. And just like that, I realize she isn’t going to make it to the bedroom.
“Everyone,” I shout in a hoarse voice. “Get the fuck out right now.”
A handful of onlookers quickly shuffle away, cheeks burning red, but uncertain murmurs find their way to my ears as some people linger, too caught up in wonder to tear themselves away from Sabine’s transformation.