Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 93
Markus chuckled and lifted her up so that her gaze was level with his. It roused her heart to apprehend that, although he could easily smite her with the barest flick of his wrist, or slip of the claw, he was painstakingly gentle. After a pause, he proceeded to the bed again, his aegis slipping back into place. When he lowered his head to cover her mouth with his, he was once more in his guise of humanity. Even his wings had somehow retreated beneath the sinews of his back, or so it felt as she ran her hands over the naked span of his shoulders.
The subaqueous candlelight guttered out and they were once more veiled by night; but not before she’d seen the creamy linens bespattered in blood. Her blood. There was a feint grey blush on the horizon that filtered weakly through the casement. It was enough only to delineate his shape above her as her head fell back against the pillows.
“Will you…drink again?” she asked.
“Do you wish me to?” He pulled at her underlip with careful fangs.
“No.” She slipped a finger between their lips. “For the second act you are merely as mortal as I.” Or so she could pretend.
“As you wish,” he said, nudging her finger aside with his nose. His thirstful kisses thereafter were no less heady for all they did not pierce.
As dawn broke steadily across the sky, Emma allowed herself to forget for a moment what Markus was; and what she was to him. Forget that she was only one fleeting, inconsequential beat in the eternal rhythm of his undying heart.
Chapter Forty-Four
Forbidden Fruits
How different she looked when her lineaments were softened by sleep. How like a lamb. And how deep that slumber. That she had found such peace in his bed, the bed of the very beast for whom she’d shed her stream of life not once but twice. A remarkable creature was she, his Emma. His obsession perhaps? An unpalatable thought.
Markus turned from the bed and stalked towards the open window where, closing his eyes, he could almost catch the scent of Adriatic spice and the lush incense of papyrus reeds, lotus, and date palms floating along the night currents. And the intoxicating perfume of honey and rose. The scent of her—his original sin.
She was incomparable, his little queen. Perched in the shadows aloft, he watched her with tireless devotion each day and every night. The column of her neck was finest alabaster, made starker by the defiant red curls that eschewed the confines of her golden diadem. Hers was not the face of Hellenistic beauty, for it conformed not to the aesthetic ideals that might have launched a navy to Troy; hers was instead the sui generis eminence of a goddess. He did not wonder at her claiming to be the winged goddess, Isis, incarnate.
The God of Death alighted from the shoulder of Horus whose stony gaze surveyed the obsequious nobles and the gluttonous priests that worshipped at the feet of the two young royals below. The servants, however, were nearly as invisible as he. No mortal eye observed him, for he walked in their world and not they in his. He paid them little heed, it was only the queen who intrigued him.
For millennia he had beheld the earth with dysphoric eyes, watching as one eon slipped invariably into another. He was already an ancient being when the oceans were naught but scoria and the mountains raged with fire. In all that time, he’d never seen such a one as her. Until now, no creature had tempted him to soar down from his empyrean throne to look closer.
Perhaps, he thought with dread, he had been too long among these mortals. Latterly, in her lifetime, his heart—if such he possessed—had been unexpectedly and unthinkably moved to beat a mortal and seductive tempo. An earthly affliction with grave and everlasting consequences. The fate of his sister alone ought to have taught him that much. Yet he rarely left his little queen’s side, tempted again and again to touch her. All he allowed himself, however, was to look at what he must never have.
Her nose was like that of a fine young eagle—which was apt in light of her noble Ptolemaic progenitors—and he recognized in its profile a shrewdness that defied her youth. To the gaze of a plebeian it might not have inspired esteem or renown, but to him it was nowise a diminution of her beauty. On the contrary, he regarded it highly. The eyes too were not that of an earthbound creature. They were sunlit gold and imbued with a falcon-like keenness that was wholly without need of the kohl and malachite that adorned her lids. In the petal-like curvature of her mouth, no one could find fault. It was generous and alluring, her voice rich with feminine authority. In fine, there was nothing of docility nor of conformity in either Cleopatra’s accents or her strange beauty. He never tired of watching and listening to her. He’d forsaken all else and all others to watch her with a nascent and forbidden love that he took pains to hide from the Great Eye of Heaven—Ra as He was known here.
So to the shadows Death cleaved and over her old and wizened body he would someday weep in secret, for what was her life but a ripple on the Nile that would vanish in a mortal instant. And mortals, such as she was, whose passions rivaled even the sun, were never long destined to scatter their light like stars upon the vast and winding waters of that great river. Her star would be snuffed far sooner, he feared, by which