Chapter 32

CHAPTER32

Ihave strange dreams about snow and snakes and incantations. Sometimes I know I’m dreaming and I come so close to waking that I feel Ashen’s grip tighten around me. I hear him whisper in my ear but only once do I make out the words.

Rest now, vampire. The only real dream is the one that sleeps in my arms.

Eventually, my dreams change.

I’m wandering down the road outside House Urbigu in the Shadow Realm. The fog seems heavier than before. Like I could push it. Manipulate it. Maybe even lift it. Peel it back like orange skin. I wonder what would be beneath. Horror, probably. Suffering. No other place knows such darkness, and I’m guessing it has much more to offer than what I’ve seen. But I wonder if it could be different. If the fog was stripped away, if everything was exposed to the sun, what would it be like?

I keep walking down the road. I see no souls or reapers. The silence has a presence to it. I don’t like it. It’s thick, like the fog.

I start humming to myself to fill the void of sound. My voice sounds different from the way it’s been since Cairo. More like the way it used to be, but somehow richer. Darker. It feels like it pushes into the fog, reaching for something.

I hear a sound in the distance. I halt and go quiet. It’s a chanting refrain that grows louder with every beat of my heart, surrounding me from the gray, limitless depths of the mist.

It’s my own voice, calling back to me.

Do it now. It is time.

There’s a pull to these whispered words that snaps my eyes open and I feel wide awake, buzzing with a current beneath my skin. I shift my gaze to the clock hanging across the room. It’s just after three in the morning.

I lie still. The minutes flow on and on. That voice keeps whispering with every tick of the second hand.

Do. It. Now.

It. Is. Time.

I’ve been trying to push these thoughts down but I can’t seem to. There’s an urgency that keeps me blinking in the dark, keeps my muscles stiff beneath Ashen’s heavy arm. It’s like the longer I fight to ignore it, the more insistent my own voice becomes.

“Are you going to lie awake all night, or are you going to talk to me?” Ashen’s whisper teases in the dark. I press my eyes closed and exhale slowly through my nose before I roll over to face him.

“How did you know I was awake?”

He scoffs, his breath flooding my face with sweet warmth. “You think I don’t know the cadence of your sleeping heart? Or the slow rise and fall of your breath when you dream?”

I smile into the shadows, but it’s fleeting. That urgent whisper is growing louder in my head.

Don’t waste another moment. Do it now.

“What is it?” Ashen asks. The concern thickens in his voice. He sweeps some hair away from my face and lets his hand trail down my neck. My pulse thrums against his fingers as nerves knot my insides like rope. “Lu?.. What’s wrong?”

I sit up and swing my leg over Ashen’s body so that I’m straddling his waist. His warm palms land on my thighs and the skin beneath the satin of my nightgown pebbles with gooseflesh. My heart is jumping in my chest and I bet he can hear it, which only makes the blush already climbing through my skin even brighter. Just as I start to thank all holy fucks that the lights are off, Ashen whacks the switch for the lamp on the nightstand and I drag my hands down my face with a dramatic sigh.

I lean forward and switch the light off.

Ashen turns it back on.

I hiss but it sounds desperate rather than fierce. I move to hit it again or maybe smash the lamp right off the nightstand but Ashen catches my wrist. When I try to swipe it with my other arm he catches that one too.

“Vampire,” he says through an uncertain laugh. “What has gotten into you?”

“Lights off, Reaper.”

“No. You’re blushing and I like it.”

I hiss and he laughs again, melting some of my frustration with that warm, rich sound.

“Quit deflecting your energy on the lamp. It’s done nothing to earn your ire. Tell me what’s going on.”

I take a deep breath and try to gather my wits. Cassian’s voice is in my head now too. To love is an act of bravery. The courage he seemed to think lives in my heart has definitely jumped out the little window and run away to live a long and happy life without me in the Romanian countryside.

“You’re vibrating,” Ashen says. The concern is starting to ratchet up again in his voice. His gaze travels over my shoulders and sure enough, I’m actually shaking. I’ve fought more battles than I even care to count, and here I am, quivering in his grip like a lost little mouse. Christ. I almost roll my eyes at myself. “Lu, what in the hell-”

“I want to mate,” I blurt out. So fucking eloquent. I just chucked it right out there into the night.

And now there’s silence.

“With you,” I clarify. “Like, right now.”

More silence.

Dear God. Someone please kill me. The blush is burning so hot now that I’m pretty sure my skin has caught fire. You know what? I wish it was true. I wish vampires were allergic to sunlight. Fuck rocking a tan, I’d like to go outside right now and wait until morning and then burn like an overcooked burger on a grill.

I groan, my body deflating like a sad balloon at a run-down carnival as I try to crawl off Ashen and find a place to die of embarrassment, but his grip tightens on my wrists.

“Lu,” he says, drawing my name out long. I can hear the surprise in just those two letters. His voice is barely more than a whisper. “Are you serious?”

“No, not serious, just a terrible joke, epically bad timing-”

“Lu-”

“Go back to sleep, this is all a horrible dream-”

“Lu-”

“Just a half-hybrid spell, nothing to worry about, it’s only a pitiful mirage-”

In less than a heartbeat, I’m flipped onto my back. Ashen’s lips are on mine. His tongue slips into my mouth and his hands flow down my sides and he devours all my words with his touch. He kisses me deeply until the tension eases enough in my body that he seems confident I won’t continue trying to dig myself out of whatever grave I’ve just created.

Not that it stops me.

“Let’s just not-”

Ashen’s hand folds over my mouth. “Stop… talking…” he says, his eyes bouncing between mine. Sparks ignite within his pupils. The scent of unsmoked tobacco and ink floods my nostrils from the edge of his hand. “You want to mate with me?”

He doesn’t let his hand off my mouth, so I take a minute before I finally give a shaky nod.

“Not while you are swept away by a moment? You actually want this? With me?”

I nod again. I feel tears sting at my eyes but I force them away.

“Lu,” he says, and his face absolutely transforms with my name on his tongue. The smile reaches his eyes, crinkling their edges. His skin is vibrant in the dim light. His pupils shine. He looks… happy. I realize I’ve never seen him look truly happy before, not like this. Not ever.

It all slips into place, like a tightened stitch that brings a tapestry into view.

Every smile that he’s tried to contain, every shy look he’s turned away… He never thought he truly deserved something like this. For all his talk about making it hard to choose anything but him, or that the process had already begun, he didn’t actually believe it would happen. He was going to spend his immortal life reaching for something he never thought he’d grasp.

I curl my fingers around Ashen’s hand and pull it down from my mouth.

“Ask me,” I whisper. “Ask me what you’ve been asking me.”

Ashen’s eyes linger on my mouth. I see his throat bob as he swallows. It’s not just a thinly veiled joke this time, and he knows it. I can hear it in his heartbeat.

“Do you love me yet, vampire?” he asks, and his eyes find mine.

A smile spreads on my lips, so faint at first, but every tiny change in my face is captured in Ashen’s eyes. If I thought I’d seen happiness in him just a few seconds ago, it’s nothing like what I see when I say it out loud. “Yes, Ashen. No matter how hard I tried, I never stopped. I love you. And I choose you.”

Ashen holds my gaze for only a moment before his forehead drops to my shoulder and his body tenses, and I know he’s trying not to be swept away by everything he feels. I caress his back and press kisses to the side of his face. I hold him close to me and whisper it again. I choose you, Ashen. I choose you.

Ashen takes a deep breath as though rising for air from the deepest darkness of the sea, and then he dives back in, pulling me with him. His mouth is on mine. His hands touch every inch of flesh they can. He breaks away to kiss my jaw and my neck and my shoulder and then back up again. And he says the things he feels. He whispers about love, and relief, and even joy.

After a while we just embrace and lie wrapped in one another. My thoughts are drawn back to what Ashen said about decades passing in the shadow of regret and sorrow. How the days had bled together into a colorless wash. For me, those years in hiding were more about loneliness and the hollow, futile effort of trying to forget everything I’d given up to survive. Though we were walking separate paths, each step we both took was just another day of existing, not living. And then we arrived at the same destination and found something unexpected. Something imperfect. But despite its flaws, this is ours. Our own little realm where we choose one another. And I want to belong to Ashen as much as he belongs to me. I don’t want to give up more of the things I love when I have control over the choice.

Ashen pulls back and looks in my eyes. Those sparks are still there and the radiance remains in his skin, but I see the hint of nerves in him too. I smell it in the sharp note of citrus and the quicker beat of his heart. “How do we do this?” he asks, stroking the hair from my face.

“Very carefully,” I say, and I push his shoulder so that he rolls onto his back. He’s only wearing pajama bottoms and I tug them down, discarding them on the floor. He’s already hard and I grasp his erection, starting to stroke him slowly. “There is no going back. We’ll be bound by life and death. If one of us dies, so does the other. Are you sure about this?”

Ashen’s eyes don’t leave mine. “More than anything, vampire.”

I keep our gazes locked as I straddle him once more, running the tip of his erection across my center and then rolling it over my clit before going back again. Ashen moans as I coat the crown of his cock in my arousal and then draw more circles across my swollen clit. His hands slide over the satin nightgown and cup my breasts as I continue my motion, gripping the base of his length with a firm hand. I’ve heard how strong mating is meant to feel, so I don’t wait longer than a few more passes before I slide him into me, shuddering as I lower my body over his girth.

“The dagger,” I say, darting my glowing red eyes to his blade on the nightstand as I roll my hips in a slow and steady rhythm. He reaches over and passes it to me by the handle.

I don’t slow my motion as I bite into the wrist that holds his knife, hitting deep to keep a good flow of my thick blood. It runs down my arm in a steady stream as soon as I pull away.

“Drink three long pulls,” I say as I hold my wrist for Ashen to take. “Imagine something you want me to know about us. A secret or something you want me to see through your eyes. Keep that moment in your mind. And then expect pain.”

Ashen nods and takes my wrist, sealing his lips across the bite. Blood drips down onto his tattoos in fat drops.

I grip his shoulder as he takes the first pull. I feel his presence surge in my veins.

He takes the next drink. My hand grips tighter to the dagger as pleasure consumes me. It’s eating through my flesh like wildfire. I spread my legs wider, trying to take him even deeper as I roll my hips.

Ashen grips my arm. His chest surges with ragged breaths. He closes his eyes and drinks a third time.

I pull my wrist from his mouth.

And then I stab him in the chest.

My senses pick up every nuanced sound. Every crunch of sinew and slip of splitting flesh. Every muscle that tenses with pleasure and pain.

I guide the dagger in until the tip pierces his heart and then I whip it back out. I lean down and press my lips over the wound and I drink straight from his heart.

It only takes an instant for me to see what he wanted to show me.

I wake in the alley in Sanford.

The vampire’s prey lies nearby.

My head throbs. I sit up and place my hand against my temple, then against my chest. It burns. When I look down, the tattoos on my chest are marred by a red slash. Confusion weighs on me as thick as the mist of the werewolves. They are gone now. And she’s gone.

My sword lies next to my hand but I don’t pick it up. I run through everything that happened. I remember seeing the vampire pull her prey into the alley and prepare to bite. I remember the look of panic on her face when I spun her around. Her eyes grew so large and round with the sight of me that I almost laughed.

Her shoulder was pleasantly cool beneath my palm. She refused to speak, but she didn’t have to. Her bright hazel eyes, those plump lips. Her features, delicate yet strong. Modern yet ancient. So beautiful. She conveyed every thought and challenge, every fear with just a look.

I remember the fight with the wolves. She was fearless. She was having… fun. There was a spark in her eye when she turned to me and smiled with blood on her fangs. And she was strong. Fast. Fluid and graceful. More skilled in fighting than any of her kind that I’ve seen in the last centuries.

I remember the bite she suffered to her arm. I pulled her from the battle. Her stomach was so cool beneath my palm and I didn’t want to let her go. I shouldn’t have given it another thought to see a vampire die in the jaws of the werewolves, as long as they did not take her away alive to make another monstrosity. But indifference isn’t what I felt. It felt wrong to let them have her. I couldn’t let her fall.

I took her arm when the fight was done. There was pain on her face… and then there was alarm.

The path of the shewolf’s blade still burns in my back and all the way through my chest to where it slipped through the other side.

Angelwing poison. Pain like I have never known. The feeling of an impending, everlasting death. I remember knowing the vampire would leave me behind to die, just like any immortal would when faced with a Reaper.

Except she didn’t.

It’s coming back to me from a haze. The way she looked at me, as though she felt like it was the right thing to do. So brave and reckless. She bit into her arm, I remember that. The way her thick blood dripped into my wound. Her ancient power warming my chest. The feeling of her, alive in my veins. And her words. Her spell.

Her voice. That otherworldly, enchanted, haunting voice.

I remember now.

It was Leucosia of Anthemoessa.

It shouldn’t be possible, but it’s true.

I grasp my sword and struggle to my feet. The fire comes to life on my blade just as the human prey begins to stir.

I will find her.  And I will protect her.

I need to know why she saved me. The last of the original sirens, the rarest immortal.

I need to know if she felt the way I did, if only for a moment.

I gasp as my blood drips down the dagger in my palm and into Ashen’s wound, starting to seal the injury I’ve just inflicted. “You knew. From the first night, you knew who I was.”

Ashen nods. I can see on his face that the pain has begun to lessen as his chest slowly closes.

“Why didn’t you tell me when you dragged me out to the church gardens the next day? Or any of the days after that?”

Ashen pulls the dagger from my hand and looks at the mixture of our blood on the blade. My heart thuds a few nervous beats against my bones. “I wanted you to be able to trust me enough to tell me yourself.”

I slow my motion and just look at him for a long moment. The sparks in his eyes grow brighter as he threads his hand into my hair and draws me down into a kiss. Our blood mixes in my mouth and sets a tingling current through my veins. Without breaking our connection, he rolls us over and rises to his knees, thrusting into me with powerful strokes.

I pass him the dagger. He offers his wrist. My heart thrums in my ears as I place a kiss above his veins before I bite deep into his flesh.

I pull once as he pistons into me and growls with desire.

I drink again and he comes alive in every cell.

One last, deep drink and I let go. He hesitates and I see a flash of fear in Ashen’s eyes.

“Now, Ashen. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

He pushes the blade into my chest and I can’t help but cry out in pain. But the pleasure is just as deep and consuming.

Ashen’s rhythm falters and the blade halts.

“Don’t stop,” I whisper, gripping onto his waist. He thrusts into me and I moan, trying to keep still beneath him. I place my other hand over the fist that grips the handle of the blade. “Deeper, Ashen.”

He pushes the blade in further. I pant short breaths and dig my nails into his waist and I keep hold of the moment I want to show him. It’s the first time he gave me his blood in Saqqara, how I almost leaned forward to kiss him when he held my face in his hand with a look of warmth and pride. I want him to know what it meant to me. I want him to see it through my eyes.

He pushes the dagger in and finally I feel it touch my heart.

“Pull it out and drink,” I grit out as I let go of Ashen’s hand.

And he does. He presses his lips to my chest and takes a deep pull of blood from my heart. And then he leans back to drip his own into the wound, the same as I did for him.

Except this time, when his blood touches mine, the effect is shattering. It’s annihilation.

All my centuries of living twist open and Ashen is woven into the fabric of my history. And all the many directions the future could lead, he is part of me, in every possibility, in every success and failure. The fates have found our two threads and snipped us from the loom, tying them together to weave another picture. We are twined, shadow and light.

Darkness might still live within both of us, but I can love it as much as all the sparks of stars that suddenly surround us, rising from the floor, rushing from the hidden corners of the room, falling from the ceiling like glittering rain.

And those stars, they don’t just rain around us. They come alive beneath my skin. Every stroke that Ashen takes within me, I feel them in my flesh, filling me with light.

I lace my fingers with Ashen’s and hold our hands aloft, watching the tiny detonations of multicolored stars that consume us. We look from our joined fingers to one another and Ashen pulls my hand above my head as he leans down to kiss me with a warmth that burrows right into my soul.

With a gradual build of need, Ashen’s pace begins to quicken. His thrusts grow more powerful. He breaks our kiss to offer his free wrist. My fangs slide into his flesh as he presses his lips to the healing wound of my heart. We drink from one another and those sparks ignite even the tiniest veins and capillaries, spidering from my chest. Pleasure coils and knots around me as it steals my breath.

I moan into Ashen’s skin. He squeezes my hand, pressing it into the pillows above my head. He thrusts harder, and deeper, and I lift my hips to take him even deeper still, as far as he can go. My body grips his sex and I’m filled with his girth, stretching and forming around him.

I take a long pull of blood and the pleasure grips my center, clenching around Ashen as he pistons into me. He lets go of my chest and his moan of desire resonates through my lungs. The strain of holding back shapes Ashen’s face with a tortured kind of beauty that steals my breath. We crawl closer to the cliff edge, both of us grasping every second of pleasure and pain from this moment.

“More,” I whisper. I sound both desperate and demanding. Ashen meets my eyes as my blood-stained lips hover over his wrist. “Take more. Give more. I want everything. I want to be filled with you.”

A dark smile passes over Ashen’s bloodied face. I’ve never seen anything I’ve wanted more, and I have it. He is mine.

Ashen slides to the tip of his erection and thrusts into me hard. I cry out, so close to the edge of oblivion that I have to cling on. “My vampire. You know I will never deny you.”

He pushes his wrist to my lips and seals his mouth to the hole in my chest and we draw deeply from one another. And then he thrusts, again and again and again until ecstasy overtakes me, until sparks devour every inch of my flesh. The light of our bond consumes me, body and soul. It blankets every valve and chamber of my heart as I come apart. My muscles grip around Ashen as he thickens and spills into me. The orgasm sets off pinpoints of light at the edges of my vision, and it just keeps coming and coming in waves unlike anything I’ve felt before.

The sparks of transformation burn so brightly I can smell them before they fall away around us. The elements of life. Stardust, bursting into flame.

My elemental vampire, I hear from memory.

Time unravels around me. I understand now that the endless loops of it live within our every cell. We can sense the future. We can feel the brush of destiny against our skin. The past is an echo in our veins. And the present is the prism through which our histories and hopes collide.

I realize it now. Ashen and I both knew. We might not have been aware, but we knew that our threads were tied.

Bianca was right.

Bloodfate is true. We were always meant to come together, even if it took decades of loneliness or centuries of suffering. We were meant to end up exactly where we are.

“Vampire,” Ashen whispers, his length still hard within me as he glides in and out with slow, gentle strokes. “Look at me.”

I open my eyes, not even aware I’d closed them. A blood red fire consumes Ashen’s pupils. But it’s different. The fire looks like liquid as much as it does flame. His eyes bound between mine as he hovers over me. The expression on his face is something I’ve never seen in him. It’s wonder. Awe.

“What do you see?” I ask as I lay my palm against Ashen’s cheek.

“Cinders, faint beneath the red light of your eyes.” He leans down and presses a lingering kiss on my cheekbone and then the other. “So beautiful.”

I say nothing about the change I see in him as I let my fingers trace the contours of Ashen’s face. My touch traces the line of his jaw, dropping down to follow his jugular, then the hard cliff of his collarbone. I sense the ridges of his sternum beneath ink and muscle as I make my way to the freshly healed scar above his heart.

“You don’t just have the marks of your house anymore. You have mine too,” I say, wiping the sticky blood from the entry wound. My brows draw together as the scar is revealed beneath my thumb.

“What is it?” Ashen asks, dipping his head to follow my gaze.

“I… I’ve never seen a mated mark like this.”

I swipe more of the blood from the wound. A gold and black tattoo emerges in its wake. It’s a vertical line that tapers to a fine point at the bottom. Sweeping away from either side of the staff are the images of two lion heads, each facing outward.

“The Mace of Nergal. The symbol of peace and war. Life… and death,” I whisper, tracing my finger across the face of each lion.

Ashen’s brow furrows as he meets my eyes and then looks down to my chest. He licks his thumb and uses it to wipe away our mixed blood from the mark on my skin. Like his, it’s a dark shade of shimmering gold but with blue the color of lapis lazuli. It’s also a staff, but at the top is a blue crescent moon cradling an eight-pointed gold star.

“The Scepter of Ereshkigal. The power to command light and shadow,” Ashen says. His eyes raise to mine as he lays his hand over my heart. I feel him in every beat that drums beneath his palm. “What does this mean?”

“I don’t know. Probably something we should be worried about, given our track record,” I say. I keep my eyes on Ashen’s as I flip him onto his back and press my hands into the wall of muscle across his chest. “But tonight, you’re going to fuck those worries right out of my head.”

Ashen gives me a wicked grin. I raise my arm to my lips and bite into the marks on my wrist that are already nearly healed.

“You know I can’t deny you anything, my vampire.”