Chapter 22 #3
The first rush of her blood hit my tongue with that same impossible brightness I had come to crave and revere—celestial and living, light given flavor without losing force.
It moved through me like a bell struck at the center of my bones.
Not mortal copper. Not vampire dark. Something sunlit and severe and intoxicating enough to make restraint feel like sainthood.
I drank carefully and still nearly groaned from the power of it.
She cried out my name and clutched at me, hips moving faster now, riding the twin hungers as if they had become one current.
The surge through my veins was immediate.
Strength sharpened. Senses widened past their ordinary cruel edge.
The room’s every detail brightened: the fire’s resin scent, the weave of linen under my hands, the tiny hitch in her breathing before pleasure overtook speech.
My cock thickened harder inside her as if her blood had reached there too and made appetite a commandment.
Then her fangs came.
I felt them before I saw them—a subtle shift in the line of her mouth when she turned her face back toward me, eyes dark and blazing.
It still fascinated me every time. Those delicate white points, not borrowed from me exactly, not wholly native to what she had once been, but ours now in some way the world did not yet have language for.
She touched my throat with her mouth in asking.
“Yes,” I breathed against her skin.
Her bite was not tentative.
She pierced just above my collarbone and drew my blood in a measured pull that sent a shock through me so hard my hips stuttered.
I hissed and then thrust deeper in answer.
The feeling of her taking from me while I took from her broke something old and solitary inside my chest. Exchange, not theft.
Communion, not feeding. A circuit closing.
She drank.
I drank.
The bond opened so wide it no longer felt like a thread between us, but a chamber we both occupied.
I felt her pleasure as if it had found residence in my nerves.
She felt my awe, my possessive tenderness, my savage gratitude.
Fear for the coming battle moved through us and emerged changed—not gone, but forged into something more useful.
Determination. Shared hunger. The certainty that whatever came for us would not be meeting a vampire and an angel arranged in convenient opposition.
It would be meeting an answer neither heaven nor underworld had anticipated.
The room brightened.
Not dramatically. Not some vulgar burst. A low gold luminance gathered at the places where our bodies joined—her throat at my mouth, my blood on her tongue, the line where my chest pressed to hers, the deep hidden place where I moved inside her.
It spread softly over sheets and skin, enough to turn shadow honey-pale and make the carved bedposts seem briefly less made of wood than witnesses.
Devon shuddered beneath me, the pulse of her climax gathering.
I felt it coming before she did.
There, I sent, tightening my fingers against her hip and circling her clit harder. Let go.
She did.
Her orgasm hit like a wingbeat through the bond, vast and helpless and incandescent.
Her body clenched around me in hot, rhythmic pulses that drew my own release to the brink and held it there just long enough to make me nearly savage.
She cried out against my throat, fangs still in me, and the twin pull of blood and flesh and light took the last of my control.
I came with a rough groan into her neck, thrusting deep as pleasure tore through me in wave after wave violent enough to feel cleansing.
My bite loosened but did not break at once.
I swallowed the last hot rush of her blood as my body emptied into hers, and the combination sent power flooding through every deadened chamber in me until undeath itself seemed briefly an inadequate term.
She shuddered around me. I felt her taking the last of my blood, felt her body answer mine, felt us locked in some shining loop the old laws had never diagrammed because perhaps such a thing had never existed before.
Not vampire.
Not angel.
Not a contamination of either.
Something other.
Something that had chosen us as its first argument.
I sealed the bite at her throat with my tongue, and she did the same to mine, both of us breathing hard, still joined in every way that mattered and several that defied taxonomy.
The glow eased slowly, lingering at the edges of our skin before sinking back into us as if to hide where no enemy could measure it.
I stayed above her a long moment, forehead to hers, my cock still buried in her, my blood singing with hers in ways that made the coming war feel fractionally more survivable.
When I finally found enough breath for speech, my voice came out lower, roughened by reverence and hunger both.
“Let him come,” I murmured.
Her mouth curved, wrecked and radiant beneath me.
Through the bond, I felt the same conclusion rise in her like a blade finding its hand.
We would not meet him diminished.