Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 114

Chapter Fifty-Three

Memento Mori

Markus beheld her with a fixed and terrible stare overspread in complete, obliterating darkness. It was such as could freeze hell itself; it froze Emma’s hand as not even her own will had had the power to do.

The quiet of the library was so absolute and dreadful that it disturbed nature herself. The want of birdsong outside was as discordant as the shriek of fright that withered in Emma’s chest and palsied every nerve. The only movement of life was the cold trickle of a tear down her cheek.

“Do you weep for me,” he asked at last, “or for yourself?” The sound of his voice, detached and cold-blooded, instantly shattered the prodigious silence that had held her in catalepsy.

Though she could breathe again, she could not tear away her gaping eyes, for they were still ensnared by his. Her horror was multiform, the greatest of which was for herself and the guilty hand interposed between them. Why had he not struck her yet or seized hold of the weapon? And why could she do naught but gawp stupidly at him?

“It behooves you to act with great dispatch if you wish to kill an immortal,” he said. Notwithstanding his dilating nostrils, he made no move nor undertook to extricate himself from the reach of her weapon. “Make a choice, Emma, or I will make it for you.” The latter was said in deadly tones.

It was warning enough to spark her limbs into frenzy. Emma scrambled backwards, sick with fright and disgust, her movements careless. The abrupt entanglement of the blanket around her legs foiled her escape, coiling about her like a snake. The unexpected cumber tore her screams from their bridles as she fell, flailing hopelessly. The ground came fast to meet her.

“Emma!” He flipped her onto her back and, straddling her, snatched the blade from her fingers. A look of surprise and fury mottled his brow as his gaze settled over her naked chest.

She shut her eyes against that hellish stare, her mouth agape in silent screams, the pain in her heart omnipotent. Whatever he said thereafter was suffocated by the peel of thunder in her ears as the blood pummeled her drums and her vision flooded with red.

With his eyes still swathed in blackness, his great black wings rampant overhead like some diabolical halo, he bared his fangs. His head descended swiftly, his face contorted exactly as it had done in the blood memory—a cruel phantasmagoria she was reliving. The blow of fangs against flesh and bone was so stunning that her vision splintered. The shock of impalement was piercing and instant! It choked the breath from her so that she could neither breathe nor scream.

Was she, like Cleopatra before her, to die beneath this angel of death—her dark lover from whose sanguinary kisses she would nevermore awaken? Were the wolfish sounds of his kisses to be the last sounds to ever touch her ears? Who would save Milli after she was dead?

The violent cessation of his gorging, however, wrenched her back from the gathering darkness. That snake-like whispering that had become a constant intrusion in her head was finally silent. The red receded from her eyes and her vision became as crystal clear as it had been yesterday. Her hands too were now hers to command. Coughing, she rolled to her side, benumbed with shock. Markus doubled over as though in pain.

The last thing on earth she expected was to see him turn and purge all the lifeblood he had siphoned from her heart! The carpet was soaked in blood. The next instant his fangs were brutally employed in opening the veins in his wrist. His breathing was belabored as he shoved his bleeding flesh against her mouth. “Drink!”

“No!” She shrank back from him.

From between cords of black hair he regarded her, his skin a pale, ashen green. “Look at your chest.”

She did. A spider web of stark, black veins was spread across her white chest, the blackest cords were concentrated over her heart. “What have you done to me?!”

“It isn’t my doing,” he said. “That is witch venom.” He coughed and spat yet more of her blood onto the floor. “I withdrew what I could of it.”

“The snake!” It hadn’t been a dream after all. “Victoria did this!”

But Markus shook his head. “I told you, that is witch venom.” He held his wrist out to her again. “Please…you must drink. They are still in your blood.”

Emma was too fearful to do more than obey him at once; what could be worse than having that hemolytic voice inside her veins, compelling her to do awful, wicked things! And to think she had accused Markus of influencing her mind with dark power—she now knew what mind control really was. God help her, she would be no snake’s puppet! If she did not drink from him now she knew that the next life in peril was her own. The snake had said only one of them would survive; and she had failed to slay the dragon. Markus was, therefore, her only hope. If Emma was to protect Milli then she would have to make sure she lived.

Emma clawed her way over the blood stained carpet and pressed her mouth to Markus’s open wrist, swallowing the hot spurting ichor in deep gulps. He was offering her life! It streamed down her throat and into her belly, spreading warmth into all the flesh that had turned cold, checking some of the pain that still throbbed around her ravaged chest. A soporific haze began to cloud her eyes. The blood ceased to a trickle as his vein and flesh began to knit shut. Emma sighed against his wrist and kissed the vanishing wound before she collapsed onto