Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 103

The blackness instantly retreated from his eyes. “I never truly contrived to hide it from you, Emmaline.” He placed a mocking kiss on the inside of one wrist where her pulse beat frantically and then promptly released her.

“What power do you wield over me now that you have tasted my blood?”

He gave her his back and moved to close the window, drawing the curtains across the glazing once he’d secured the latch. “I hazard a guess your witch already divulged the nature of the link extant between us now.”

“You should have told me!”

He turned to regard her coolly. “Ay, perhaps I was wrong to omit that.”

“Perhaps?!”

“But consider that it is you who wields the power, not I. Power over me.”

Oh, if only that were true! But, no, she would not allow him to distract her with clever equivocations. She hastily banished the tears from her eyes with an angry swipe of her sleeve. “If indeed I possessed such power, my sister would be safe from you and your vile daughter.”

“As to that, I do not deny that Victoria and I were once lovers. I am an ageless creature and I have not endured the centuries a bloody monk, much less a wicked one.” He vented a sigh and drew near, carefully this time. “Yes, I sired her and gave her a choice—she chose to become Vigiles Nocturni—a watcher in the night. And as to your sister, I vowed to keep her safe and I intend to uphold that vow.” He pointed a long finger towards the writing desk and stationery. “You have only to write to the nun and allay your doubts.” His jaw clenched with some fell emotion. “But if you insist that my word holds no water then perhaps you want its veracity etched in blood?”

“What do you mean?”

By way of an answer, he plunged his fangs cruelly into his wrist and at once the crimson rills flowed into his cuff and sleeve.

“Stop!” She drew back.

“In sanguis veritate.” He held his wrist out to her, drawing the cuff away from the bite. “Drink, Emmaline. No creature surrenders its blood without forfeit. Drink and you will know the truth as I have endured it; you will have the knowledge you seek.”

Knowledge at what price? Emma dropped her wide eyes to his wrist. She gave a stiff shake of her head. “No!” Ana had warned her against this very thing. “Never!”

“Then you fear the truth.” The blood welled thick and vinous from his wrist, so dark a crimson it was nigh as black as the midnight roses in his garden.

Emma tore her gaze from the wound. The vampyre was preternatural in his stillness. It was only the tremble of the firelight shifting his shadow on the wall that animated him. His incisive black eyes transfixed her so completely that it seemed an age before she felt herself capable of stirring her tongue. “What will become of me if”—she licked the dryness from her under lip—“if I drink your blood? No more half truths, tell me what the consequences are.”

He made no movement, not even to breathe. His words left his mouth as though disembodied and far-flung, seeming to echo in her bones from a bygone era. “Blood always comes at a price.” His eyes bespoke much of his ancient past—decadence, poignancy, bitterness, and infinite world-weariness.

“What is the price?” The color of blood was so evocative of the Edenic fruit of knowledge and disgrace. The fruit of his veins—the knowledge he offered. And like Eve before her, it was becoming too tempting to refuse. “Will your blood make me a vampyre?”

“I would need to take from your veins every last bit of warmth before such would betide you. Your heart must beat its last ere my blood and venom can fill it with new life.”

“You mean death.”

“Immortality is the very antithesis of death.” Behind the sneer his fangs glinted ominously. “And little though you think of me, I have never forced immortality upon the unwilling. But if I offer you my vein and venom…”

“I become like you.”

“Not exactly like me, no, and not like Victoria either. You are something different.”

Emma gasped. “Like Skinner?!”

His chest rumbled with impatience, startling her. “Never like that! Skinner is a wight—no better than a corpse. And Victoria was merely mortal before I turned her, you are something more than mortal. At any rate, a wight is one to whom the gift of vampyre blood is denied before the last mortal heartbeat; upon death, vampyre venom alone grants something less than beautiful immortality.” One corner of his mouth lifted and she watched as he ran his tongue over a long, venomous fang.

“Then…last night…when you bit me…had you drained me completely…”

“Yes, you’d have been forced to endure a scant few centuries as nothing more than a wight who died of a vampyre bite, long in the tooth and sour in the face. And wights are easily disposed of. One has only to remove the organs or the head and—”

“Yes, thank you.” Emma shuddered to think how close she had come to that—Markus’s control over his bloodlust was all that had stood between her and Skinner’s fate.

“The wound is closing,” he said. “This is an offer I do not make lightly, so take it now or never.”

Held fast in the black depth of that ageless gaze, she felt Ana’s warnings vanish like smoke. With an extraneous gaze, she followed her fingers as they wrapped themselves around his wrist, as though she witnessed a stranger’s hand, but it was her strange hand, her movements. She could feel his sinews tense beneath her fingertips. He was all mystery to her, she thought as she lowered her mouth to hover over the puncture wounds. Her breath was hesitant as it left her lips. There was much to know, but the existential and all-consuming question of his past held primacy in her mind tonight. Who had he been? Why had he fallen? Only the past could shed light on