Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 109
There was a quiet murmur of leaves in the rose bush that instantly drew her notice. She was thankful for the distraction and drifted over to investigate. Her brow puckered with interest to see a flash of white amongst the dark foliage. She leaned in a little closer, careful of the thorns, and moved a rank branch out of the way.
With a lethal hiss, the white thing flew out of the brambles. It struck her breast through her clothes, the force of the attack felling her instantly. Long fangs were embedded deep in her flesh and ribs before it even occurred to Emma to scream or call out to Victoria. And when she did try, her throat was instantly constricted by clammy scales coiling tight about her neck. Gasping with silent terror, Emma found her gaze fixed to a cold, albino glare. A large, white snake reared up above her.
From somewhere nearby she could hear the muffled, almost subaquatic, sound of a raven cackling excitedly. As the crimson eyes blurred overhead and her vision darkened, it occurred to her that only a raven would laugh at a dying woman.
Chapter Fifty-One
Book of Revelation
Emma did not know how long she’d lain beneath the shade of roses, but it could not have been very long. The sky was still orange, though bruised with a darkling purple. No matter how she blinked, her vision remained dim and watery and her blood thrummed loudly in her ears.
But there was someone standing overhead talking to her. “The beast…harlot…eat your flesh…” What were they saying? Emma blinked, yet still the world remained distorted. She strained her ears and sighed, relieved, as her hearing returned and the voice became clearer, even if her sight did not.
“Kill him,” said the voice overhead. A woman’s. Familiar. Long black hair floated about the head like a murky aureole. No, like a head of snakes. Who did she know with raven hair? It couldn’t be Ana here beside her, so…
“Victoria?” Emma struggled to sit up but found her limbs had grown roots and locked her to the earth. A strange catalepsy had seeped deep into Emma’s marrow. “Help me up, would you?” How ridiculous Victoria must find her, and how ridiculous it was to have to converse whilst on one’s back. Why couldn’t she get up? Why wouldn’t Victoria help her?
“Kill the dragon,” the creature said again. “Kill Markus.” An awful sibilant voice it possessed.
“Snake!” cried Emma. “Why should I kill him? It was not he that slithered each night into Milli’s room to steal the warmth from her veins!”
“And what of your blood?” The woman replied. “Has not the dragon taken you in his coils and sipped from your open veins?”
Like a cold, dead trout, Emma opened and then shut her mouth in quick, sickening succession, mindful of the untenability of her denial. “I…I offered myself willingly, but Milli gave you no such leave.”
“You bled for the creature that bears you no love.” The voice softened and for a moment Emma misgave her there were two voices and two creatures—one light and the other dark.
Emma tried to shake the shadows out of her eyes. “Victoria, help me.”
“His name is Death, he cannot love you.”
“I know that!” Emma needed no one, especially not Victoria, to remind her of that.
Something in the creature’s unearthly silhouette trembled beneath the force of some fulminating pathos. “He will use you ill, eat your flesh, and cast your desiccated bones into the fiery pit when he is through. Kill him.” There was a pause as the shadow crowded, tripled. “Yes, kill him.” The last was uttered in the snake voice again.
Hatred, hot and bilious, surged to the fore and it was all Emma could do not to lunge at the tenebrosity looming over her. The thought of Victoria in Markus’s bed—the idea of his lips caressing her beautiful flesh—sickened Emma. “Get away from me, vampyre! You beastly, wicked thing!”
“Yes, and he made me what I am. You must free your sister from him. Free yourself.”
“So that you may wrap your leaching lips about Milli’s neck again? Go to the devil, fiend!”
“Save Milli. Kill Markus.” The black hair undulated and curled in an uncanny rhythm about the head as though the air was not air at all but some underwater hell in which even she, Emma, was floating, suspended. The movement of that hair and that swaying shadow was mesmerizing.
Emma’s eyes glazed over and the shadow became three again. Kill Markus. This time the command, roused from somewhere deep inside her own chest, fell so hard upon Emma that she felt her bones shudder with the force, and the invisible roots that held her fast began to slip. Kill Markus. Again, her limbs twitched with a vile, foreign eagerness to obey.
The trees, adjured by the encroaching cloudburst, seemed to threaten closer, menacing and demanding with dark and silent censure. Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Thrice more the command was chanted, like a murder of crows circling overhead.
“No!” Emma tried to twist her head away to bury her ears in the dirt, the better to smother their awful song. “No! No!”
“Then you will end up no better than the women in London; or you will die like every other sad creature that dared to love him.”
Swiftly came the image of Death swooping down like a raging carrion bird, cleaving instantly to his prey—to Cleopatra. No matter how fiercely Emma shook her head, she could not oust the visceral flashes of blood memory from her brain; she could no more escape the fervid sounds of his wet supping than if she herself lay dying beneath him. “I cannot!”
“You will.” Victoria’s snake voice was soft and yet it overmastered even the wind and the hideous sucking noises—Markus’s sucking noises. “You mussst trussst usss, thisss isss the only way.” The words slithered their way under Emma’s skin.
Trust anything with fangs and and a