Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 107

Emma had watched and keened from some vague empyrean mist, unheard and unseen, a disembodied watcher—an angel of death that had swooped down from above and fallen upon the young queen with bloody tears and preternatural fury. Cleopatra had lain limp and waxen in his arms while he’d feasted at her breast, weeping and gorging himself on the hot well rushing from her stuttering heart. When that heart had knelled its last, he’d lifted his head to roar at the heavens like a savage wolf, his eyes imbrued with black agony and his mouth a lurid and murderous crimson. She’d watched the silvery plumage fall rapidly from his wings till they were naught but blackened bones, deformed and tipped with sharp, demonic horns.

Cleopatra’s head had lolled aslant, lifeless as a porcelain doll (like Milli had looked in his arms when last she’d seen her sister), the dark tresses falling away from the viperous wounds over her heart. Bite marks so deep and stark a red they were nigh black against the pale, cold flesh. No matter how fast Emma ran she could not escape that scene.

Ahead, there was a chthonic and feeble light that disturbed the shadows in the atrium. She had only a few more steps separating her from those imposing doors beyond which lay her escape. But the peripheral darkness, which she at first mistook for shadows stirred atremble as she swept past a sconce, suddenly materialized into the dread form of the angel of death.

Markus moved to thwart her escape like the fierce titan he was. “Where are you going?”

“Get out of my way!”

“Emma—”

“Kill me and be done with it, or get out of my way.” She made to move past him, but she might well have had better success walking through the very walls of the castle, such was the impossibility of getting past an indissoluble wall of preternatural muscle like the one now barring her escape.

“You speak of death as though it were no more than an insect bite,” he said. “I assure you, it is quite final.”

“I welcome it then, so long as it offers me escape from you!”

“You will not die!” He had moved so fast that Emma did not see his hands till they were locked around her arms. “I forbid it.”

“Death has been the constant stalking shadow in every corner of Winterthurse,” she said. “I am grown weary of dreading the hour it shall strike me down.”

“And I grow weary of your morose tongue.” He snapped his teeth with the force of a guillotine. “Perhaps you might consider suspending your wrath till morning.”

“I cannot bear another moment here!” She would rather face the dangers without than suffer the threat he posed within. “Stand aside, vampyre!”

“Cease your hysterics, woman.” His voice lowered to a hard and brazen timber. “There is more to fear from the night than malaria; I shall lay you by the heels before I let you leave here alone.”

Her countenance fell as she retreated from the doors he blocked. Her chest deflated and she withdrew from his grasp. He was right of course, it was madness to run about the moors in the small hours. Madder still to stay. But she possessed not the hardihood to pit herself against him tonight.

“What did you see in the blood memory?” he asked.

She stared at the checkered marble beneath her boots, hating the way his voice gentled. Only four and twenty hours ago his dark and rapturous whispers had been igniting her blood and now his soft accents appalled her. It was appalling that she was still affected by him.

He lifted her chin with the crook of his finger. “What did you see?”

Did her senses play her false or was there something of grief in the squally shadows of his gaze? No! He was vicious and deadly. Whatever she thought she’d seen did not signify, she must never forget that she was nothing to him but a bag of vittles.

With steel in her bones and a little iron in her voice, she said, “I saw you plunge your fangs into her breast; you drank her off till her heart emptied. You killed her.” He had been the serpent that’d killed the great queen.

If she’d believed him capable of such an emotion, she’d have read some vulnerability in his eyes. “Ay, I killed her,” he said, “but not as you imagine.”

“Lie to me no more, I saw for myself what you did.”

His brow beetled. “You may be sure, my prickly little rose, that I have never lied to you.”

“Why should I believe a killer? You loved her and you killed her—what hope is there for me?”

He snarled and stalked away to pace the floor. “You can ask me that—” with a black look shot from the tail of his eye “—after all that has passed between us?”

“All? What has passed between us, save blood and games?” She shook her head in dismay. “And what lies between us now, hmm?” Certainly not love. “What do you want from me, God of Lies?” Certainly not her heart. No, wait, that wasn’t true. He would have it—leastwise only insomuch as it was the vessel in which his vittles were kept warm and fresh.

Without warning, Markus kissed her. The force of it struck her dumb. It was a punitive kiss. Her lips parted instinctually, and, though she hated herself for it, she began to respond. But he abruptly disconnected their mouths and thrust her away from him as though she had been the instigator of the kiss and not he.

“Yes,” she said, “let me go. Let me leave.”

“No.” The word hit her like a gust of polar wind. “There will be no more talk of leaving.” He settled a frigid glare upon her. “We are joined in blood, you and I.”

Emma made no answer except to leave him in the atrium. She looked back only once before she ascended the stairs, and that merely to assure herself he’d made no move to follow.

He did not. Markus stood