Page 56 of Claimed

I have been here before.

All vampires old enough to understand their curse have felt Netheris breathe against the back of their neck. We borrow from it each time we heal. We deny it each time we rise, then make a kingdom out of postponement and call it immortality.

Tonight, Netheris feels especially smug as it waits.

I turn, already reaching through blood and the violent new thread burning between myself and the woman whose name I am beginning to suspect will ruin me.

Eira.

The name leaves me without sound and enters the dead air like a flare.

For one heartbeat, I feel her warmth in the cold, a pulse through the void, a blade of life sharp enough to cut a path home.

Come to me, little hunter.

The plain shudders and the black river stills as every candle-eye in the far towers turns towards me.

And then laughter answers.

Soft.

Female.

Ancient enough to make the dead remember fear.

‘Oh, my beautiful ruined king,’ Morrighan says. ‘Still calling for pretty things in the dark?’

Despite the dread nipping at me, I do not turn quickly.

That would please her.

So I turn with all the controlled contempt I have spent centuries perfecting and find her standing at the edge of the river, bare feet on the blood-glass shore, her hair spilling around her like a cloak woven from night and arterial red. She appears as she chooses to appear, as she appeared before the Chrysalis took her flesh and made a prison of her godhood. Lush mouth. White skin. Eyes like twin wounds cut through creation.

Morrighan.

The Crimson Mother.

My Creator and my Curse.

The first hunger wearing a woman’s face.

The sight of her should be impossible. Her body remains sealed in crystallised blood and void-iron, hidden where only the Five Blood can reach by combined resonance. We made sure of that. We paid enough to make sure of that.

Yet here she stands, smiling at me as if the prison was merely a room she tired of waiting in.

‘Morrighan.’

Her smile widens. ‘Ah. Still so stern. Still so deliciously certain that command is the same as control.’

I will my fists not to clench. ‘You are a dream.’

‘I am many things. Dream is the kindest among them.’

The ground beneath us pulses harder as the mark burns. I look down and see it exposed on my skin, no longer contained, its lines glowing like cracks in a furnace door.

Morrighan watches my gaze follow it. ‘Your little mortal fed you.’

The possessive rage that moves through me is immediate and immaculate. ‘Do not speak of her.’