2. Chapter 2 #2
My blood, old fear, sickness sweated through linen.
Expensive cologne, spare and dark, clinging to the man above me.
The faint copper of my own wounds. The clean winter scent of the wrist I had just drunk from.
Dust inside carved wood. Metal from fixtures somewhere beyond an open door.
Stone cooled by air-conditioning. Another person near the entrance, carrying a scent like ink, steel, and restrained violence.
I heard breathing. Mine, ragged and useless.
I heard cloth shift. I heard a heartbeat.
That made no sense, because vampires did not have hearts. Except they did, perhaps. Or one of them did. Or my ears were lying. The sound came slow, controlled, too powerful to be human. Another rhythm behind it, faint, almost hidden.
The man over me stood utterly still.
Tall. Dark-haired. Amber-eyed. Beautiful in a way that made my skin crawl because beauty had never saved anyone.
Blood marked his mouth. My blood. His blood.
Both. His sleeves were pushed up, one wrist newly sealed, the skin unmarred as if I had imagined drinking from him.
His face held no expression I knew how to read. Not lust. Not cruelty. Not amusement.
That frightened me too.
The cruel ones were easiest when they showed their teeth.
Near the door stood another figure. Leaner.
Silver-haired. Sharp enough to cut shadow.
He had taken one step into the room, or had been about to.
His eyes moved over me and then away, too quickly for me to decide what I had seen there.
Anger, maybe. Fear, maybe. Not fear of me.
Something directed at the man by the bed.
The air between them felt charged, like the seconds before a storm broke over the hills.
I did not wait to understand it.
I scrambled backward. Or tried.
My body had more strength than before and less coordination than a newborn animal.
My elbows slipped on the sheets. My heel dragged through a damp place I did not want to identify.
Pain detonated across my ribs as old bruises met motion.
My back hit the cracked headboard hard enough to send white sparks across my vision.
I folded in on myself.
Knees up. Arms in. Wrists hidden, though they were not hidden at all. They were right there in the searing light, ruined bands of old bites and fresh smears, the history of what had been done to me written in punctures, scars, yellowed bruises, purple blooms, torn skin.
I was filthy.
The knowledge landed with strange clarity.
Not afraid, not starving, not dying—filthy.
My hair hung in tangles around my face. My dress, if it could still be called that, clung to me in stiff patches of sweat and blood.
My collarbones jutted. My knees were knobs.
My body had been pared down to accusation and bone.
I remembered having hips. Breasts. Softness, my grandmother used to say came from women in our family being built to survive winter and childbirth and men who thought too much of themselves.
Lucian had starved the softness off me.
The dark-haired vampire lifted his hands slightly, palms open.
“I will not touch you,” he said.
His voice was low, controlled, accented faintly around the edges in a way I could not place. I felt it in my new hearing like fingers over velvet. I hated that too. Monsters should have ugly voices. They should sound like what they were.
My gaze snagged on his mouth. Fangs.
I pressed harder against the headboard. The split wood bit into my spine. I did not care. There was nowhere else to go. No door within reach. No sharpened slat. No tile to grind it on. No latch under my bloody fingers. Only two vampires and a room too fine to be anything but another cage.
The silver-haired one moved. Barely.
A half-step, maybe less, but my body understood movement toward me as a threat before my mind could name it.
A thin sound slipped from my throat. My hands flew up, useless shields.
The room tilted. Suddenly, I smelled the guard again.
Sour smoke. Old blood. I felt his teeth in my wrist, the wet tear when he jerked away from the slat.
I saw the door latch refusing to open. Open, open, open.
The dark-haired vampire made a sound. Not a word. A growl.
It rolled through the room so low the marrow in my bones seemed to hear it first. Shadows thickened at the edges of my sight. The lamp dimmed, or my terror made it seem so. The silver-haired man stopped at once.
The dark-haired one shifted between us.
His arm came up, not toward me, but across the path between the other vampire and the bed. His body became a wall. A beautiful, blood-marked wall with fangs and amber eyes, and power gathering around him like night.
“Stop,” he said.
The word cracked clean through the room.
Then, even lower, “Taras, don’t come closer.”
The silver-haired man’s expression tightened. I could not tell if he was offended or worried, or merely tired of obeying. I caught one word, spoken by him or the other—I was not sure at first.
Taras.
A name. Not safety. Names had never made monsters less monstrous. Lucian had a name. The guard had a name once, though I had tried hard to forget it. Everyone who hurt you had a mother’s word attached to them somewhere.
Taras did not come closer.
The dark-haired one did not look back at me.
He kept himself angled between us, broad shoulders rigid, one hand still lifted in warning.
The air in the room seemed to bend around his restraint.
I could feel how badly he wanted to move.
Towards me, maybe. Toward Taras. Toward violence. It was impossible to know.
My chest heaved.
I did not need air the way I had before. Some new instinct knew that. My lungs kept dragging it in anyway, because fear was older than biology, and mine had been well-trained.
I stared at the vampire shielding me from the other vampire.
My throat throbbed where his teeth had been.
My mouth still tasted of his blood. My body was warm for the first time in longer than I could remember, and that warmth had come from him.
So had the command that had stolen my swallow.
So had the bite. So had whatever had happened inside me that made the room too bright and every sound too sharp and my own skin no longer feel entirely human.
I did not understand why the monster stood between me and danger. I understood why that made the terror worse.
Because if he were only cruel, I knew what to do with him inside my head. Hate was clean. Fear was clean. But this—this contradiction with blood on his mouth and protection in his stance—had no place in the world I had survived.
So I curled tighter against the broken headboard, held my ruined wrists to my chest, and waited for the trick to reveal itself.