ELIAS #2
And now he was here telling me that to keep any of it, to keep breathing at all, I had to put my mouth to my mate's vein and drink.
Which meant I'd never gotten out at all.
I was still a parasite. Worse, because my blood would do nothing for her.
There was no equal exchange. I'd rather die a man than live as the thing I was again.
I think some part of me actually decided that, in the blurry gray of my room. I think I chose it.
My mouth was still watering, but I gritted my teeth and swallowed it down.
"Do ye know this for certain?" Killian asked Dae.
"No," he admitted. "I don't. But it feels right."
"Fine," Killian said. "Let's test it then."
Something in his voice set me on edge. The helplessness was gone out of it, replaced by a flat, awful calm. Slowly, he reached out and took Talin's wrist.
"Killian?" she said. "What are you doing?"
"I'm sorry, lass," he told her, and he brought her wrist up and sank his fangs deep into the vein there.
It wasn't a feeding. I knew that even in the state I was in, knew it in the clinical back-of-the-skull place where I'd once known how to operate on a man in an open field and sew him back together after.
There was no hunger. He didn't even swallow.
It was a field cut, quick and precise, two clean punctures to open the vein and nothing more.
He didn't take a drop. He lifted his head immediately and allowed her blood to well up bright and red and run down the inside of her arm.
Her blood was not his to take, and he knew it, and that was the entire point.
But my body did not do clinical.
My body saw another male's mouth on my mate's wrist, his hand still gripped around her forearm, and it detonated.
I don't have a word for what came up out of me.
It wasn't a distinct thought, per se. It came up from somewhere deep within me, under the man and under the vampire both, from the root of an animalistic instinct, and it did not care that I was dying.
It did not care that my heart could barely hold a beat.
It looked at Killian's bite in Talin's skin and it lifted me up off that floor like some strange animated puppet, and it went straight for him.
I got a hand in the front of his shirt. I heard a sound tear out of my own throat that I had never made in my life, low and feral.
MINE!
Killian let me come. He didn't even try to fight me.
Arms clamped around me from behind before I could do anything worse. It was Dae. Warm and solid and immovable, one arm banded across my chest and the other pinning my shoulder, he held me easily with a strength I no longer possessed.
"There he is," Dae said against my ear. "I told you."
"Talin." Killian's voice. "Now, love. Hurry."
And she was there. Holding her bleeding wrist cradled in her other hand. Her eyes met mine over the top of it, tears streaming down her pretty face. But her eyes were fierce as she stared me down.
And pressed her wrist to my mouth.
The wall didn't come down brick by brick. It came down all at once, blown away in the space between one weak heartbeat and the next.
Ah, gods.
It was her. The taste I'd been dreaming of and refusing, and it wasn't hunger and it wasn't horror and it was not the dark coming back for me.
It was only Talin. It was every scar I'd ever kissed and every night I'd held her tight so she could sleep and every morning I'd watched her pretend she wasn't absolutely beautiful.
It was the whole of her, poured warm and living straight into the cold hollow place at the center of me, and that place, that guttering starved half-dead thing I'd been so proud of letting die… it drank.
I heard myself groan at the first taste of her.
I felt my hand come up and close around her forearm, not to push it away now but to hold her there, greedy, shaking, my fingers spread over the soft skin above where she'd been bitten.
Heat crashed through me in waves, and my heart caught the beat of it, hard and sure against my ribs.
The gray peeled back from the edges of the room.
Feeling came screaming back into my limbs, pins and fire and life, and with it came every other thing her blood woke, because I was suddenly alive again.
I swallowed, drinking her life essence, taking her inside of me. But I needed more. I needed all of it. All of her.
Somewhere in the distance far away, I heard a door close.
Killian's low voice and Dae's, the click of the latch, then footsteps moving away.
I didn't lift my head to watch them go. I couldn't have named their faces just then if you'd paid me.
There was only the taste of her in my mouth and her pulse under my tongue and Talin's ragged breathing, and when I finally, finally made myself stop, made myself lick the wound closed instead of chasing more, and looked down at her, she was staring at me like I'd come back from somewhere very far away.
"There you are," she whispered, her voice thick with new tears.
I got a hand into her wet hair, the other around her waist. And I pulled my mate down onto my lap on the edge of the bed, my whole body roaring awake, alive in a way I'd refused to let myself be for far too long, and I stopped pretending I understood what I was.
Because I understood the only thing that mattered.
She was mine, and I was hers, and I wasn't going fucking anywhere.
Her hands found my face. Mine found the hem of the shirt she'd pulled on. The last of the sunset slid down through the unshuttered window and lit the side of her throat gold, and I bent my head to it, and I stopped thinking about anything except how badly I wanted to crawl beneath her skin…