“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 the rug and curled into herself. “Will I become like you now?”
“No,” he said, stroking her hair. “Sleep.” His voice was that of Hypnos himself—son of Night and brother of Death.
She felt herself floating away in his cradling arms. She was swiftly wrapped in the incense of ancient memories, and blood, and the warmth of his empyrean male spice. When she awoke from a nebulous dream, struggling weakly out of a thick haze, she felt as though she’d slumbered beneath the dust and earth for centuries. Her first cogent thought was that the world appeared saturated in a black and crimson blur. But the redness all about her was different to the venom-soaked vision of before. An indeterminate length of time elapsed before the shapes and colors revealed themselves to be a bed—the dragon’s colossal nest of red damask aglow in muted candlelight. The drapes at the window and those that hung from the bed were all parted to admit the starless night.
A silent figure was seated beside the bed, cloaked in penumbral gloom. Over steepled fingers he regarded her, farouche as the dragons that guarded his bed.
“How…how long have I been asleep?” she asked.
“One and twenty hours,” was the quiet reply.
She glanced down at her bandaged chest, amazed to be counted amongst the living considering she’d sustained both the bites of a snake and a dragon. No, he was no dragon and Emma was no harlot. She would give no more credence or power to the snake’s lies. “Thank you.” She tried to inject as much sincerity and regret into her words as could be mustered from a parched throat, but she feared her thanks would never be enough.
He made no reply.
“Did you”—there was an awkward pause as she briefly averted her gaze—“did you rest at all, or have you been keeping watch all this time?”
He gave a sharp snort, lifted himself out of his Tudor chair, and then prowled towards the foot of the bed. There the stuttering candlelight better described his towering frame and the hard angles of his face. He was all pale marble, his giant wings billowing like a demonic mantle behind him. He was wholly without his guise of humanity tonight. “Rest?” This was punctuated with another derisive snort. “If I was of a mind to rest, which I do but rarely, it would be a certain fool who would drop his guard to rest beside you.”
She flinched and pulled the counterpane up to cover her nakedness. “Let us speak plainly, Markus—”
“I rather thought I was,” he interposed with a black look.
She shook her head. “Why did you save my life?”
“Why did you seek to end mine?”
“I sought no such thing! Or I’d have smote your heart long before your eyes opened. It was the snake, not I!” She had been the unwilling marionette to a serpent. Surely he must know she was incapable of killing him.
“Ay, you allowed yourself to be poisoned against me in the first place. Witch venom is a tricky thing—whatever power it wields can only be vouchsafed by the mind of the possessed. Was it cowardice that stayed your hand? Or, dare I hope, some nobler sentiment perhaps?”
She folded her arms stiffly over her bandaged chest. “I haven’t the heart for murder, least of all yours. Especially not yours.”
“Ah, but you do. If I were now to lunge at your neck like the beast you think me, I rather think you’d warm swiftly to murder.”
She searched his face, descrying in it a fleeting glimpse of unguarded pain. “But you will not because you are neither a beast nor a dragon; at any rate, self preservation is not murder, so the point is moot.”
He shot her a dour look.
She gnawed her bottom lip, suddenly recalling afresh what she’d witnessed in the blood memories that’d come to her as she’d lain in oblivion. Perhaps straying to the brink of the Underworld had allowed her to look deeper and clearer into the realm of gods, for she had returned with a much altered perception of him. “Why did you save my life?”
“Because I love you!” The confession, though only a whisper, was fierce and heart fetched. “And for the first time in millennia, I know not how to proceed!”
“I thought you incapable of love?” Fat tears were already coating her lashes and confounding her vision.
He turned from her and moved towards the window with a terse shrug. “You judged from narrowed eyes.”
Ay, it was a fault lately realized. “Truly, Markus? You love me?”
“What would you have me say now? A pretty avowal? A ballad? You have doubted me at every turn and I am no maudlin jongleur to kneel before you with bombast and beg your trust.”
“Am I so mistook? You will forgive my doubt, seeing as you have jeered at love and omitted truths. The seeds of trust and love have been sown upon fallow ground. You neglected the former and eschewed the latter.”
“I have no faith in love, so of course I foreswore it!”
“I want to believe you, Markus…”
He turned to glare over his shoulder. “Believe what you will, you obstinate woman. Of the two occupants numbered in this room, I am not the one who undertook to kill the other.”
“I would not have killed you! Not willingly.”
“I want to believe you, Emma…”
She gritted her teeth at that.
He left the window and approached the bed again. “Would you have me trust you absolutely without the benefit of having the favor returned?”
“Then you have it, Markus.” She met his gaze directly. “I trust you with my whole heart.”
“Then…” He knelt down so that they were eye to eye. “You love me, Emma?”
“To death,” she said, cupping his cheek. Death was the least of her worries, however. She was afeared this love would cost her something dearer than life. She had a sister to protect and a soul to preserve. She took a deep breath and said the words anyway. “I love you, Markus.” She loved him not despite his darkness but because of it; it was hard to admit that to oneself but it was God’s honest truth. She loved him exactly as he was, fangs and all. “Can we not start over? Begin again without secrets between us?”
He lifted a brow. “Where does madam wish to begin?”
“Tell me why you haven’t destroyed the Horeb Blades. Why suffer such a thing to exist if it has the powe
r to kill you?”
He shrugged. “To remind us that even we antediluvian beasts are not truly omnipotent or everlasting; change is terrible and inevitable and all things must die some way or another, whether cyclic or permanent—day must give way to night; but death is not without rebirth.”
Emma nodded and for a time they were silent. “You saved my life…like you tried to save Cleopatra’s. I know that now.”
“Yes. I dared to love her; I tried to save her. I tried to draw the poisoned blood out of her heart; she was too far gone. In the end, all I attained was my own downfall, and the curse of drinking blood for all eternity. She took her own life and with it she took whatever light I once possessed.”
Emma could see, even now, how he’d roared and wept over the cradled body of his beloved queen. How he’d brought his fists down upon the bowl of poison she’d consumed, splintering it as completely as his wrecked heart; she’d seen how his tears had left bloody streaks down his nacreous flesh. “Yes,” she said, “I saw it all.”
“My dark secret love destroyed her life as it nearly destroyed yours.” Suddenly he looked as old as he was, stooped by the weight of time and memories. “Ironic, is it not? Destroying the very thing you love—seems a very mortal thing to do.”
“Markus, who sent the snake?” She rubbed her bandaged chest, thankful to be rid of that necrotic web of poisoned blood. “What is witch venom?”
“Each witch has a familiar—Tanith’s is the white snake that bit you.”
Emma shuddered, recalling the albino eyes and jaundiced white scales. “But Ana—”
“She’s as sorcerous and venomous as her sisters. But even their combined power is nothing to their father’s.”
“And who is their father?”
“You have met him already.”
Her mouth parted in surprise. “Not…”
“Malach.”
“But he’s…” What? Too young to have grown daughters? They were immortals, for pity’s sake. “Never mind I—”
“Their sire and their husband.”
She gasped, horrified.
He laughed. “Ironic that they should vilify me for having sired Victoria to be my lover, but at least my sister is not blood of my loins.”
Emma held her hand up, nauseated. “Yes, thank you.”
He grasped her hand and kissed it. “If I sired you tonight, would you think me a father?”
“Heavens, no!” And there would be no siring whatever.
He nodded, satisfied. “Like Gabriel and I, Malach too was once of Heaven—a Cardinal watcher. A brother.” His eyes darkened. “It was his blade you nearly sheathed in my heart. I found it in the armchair while you slept.”
“You tested me then?” Guilt and ire instantly warmed her chest.
“I had to know, Emma. When you would not take the goblet…I suspected.”
“And I failed your test.”
“Not entirely,” he replied, his tone like gravel. “I am alive after all.”
“It seems we dark creatures have much still to learn about one another.” Emma pushed the sheets away and held her hands out to him. When he placed himself beside her, she said, “I think you fear love, Markus, because you do not know what it is to be loved; your queen loved you no better than she loved the men that sired her children. But I love only you and no other—I never will love another.”
She gave him no chance to doubt her, for she fixed tight arms behind his neck and pressed her lips hungrily to his. With tender kisses, she proceeded to show him just how much she loved his darkness.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Maleficium
The flame weltered as the night breathed its dark musk into the room through the open window. Emma glutted her senses on the feel and taste of Markus, breathed deeply the wild heather and oak moss that clung to his hair and skin.
With light touches, he began a slow tour down her ribs, his fingertips tarrying over her breasts. Her breathing became shallow. She arched into him as he sucked her bottom lip between his sharp teeth with a teasing nip. Chuckling softly, he gently unfettered her fingers from his hair and locked them firmly either side of her restive hips like manacles. He brushed his nose and lips over her throat and down her sternum. Her nails gouged the mattress, her body writhed against the force of her lust, and her teeth drew blood where his had only grazed her lip.
Markus glanced up, his eyes blackening as he watched her tongue gloss the blood across her lips. Slowly, he pressed his mouth against hers. The dark arrangement of copper and salt lingered between them like the last fading notes of a cello. He broke the kiss only to transfer his assiduities to her abdomen.
Mesmeric shadows danced around their bower of black pillars and blood red silk. She closed her eyes and allowed her fingers to glide along the taut veins and iron feathers of his tucked wings, then up again into his inky hair, thick and warm and fragrant. With thirstful strokes, Markus availed himself of every inch of her as though she was bathed in nectar. Unexpectedly, he ceased his caresses with a heart-heavy sigh and rested his forehead on her birthmark.
“What is it?” she asked.
“You are distracting me abominably.” Amusement lit his eyes as she pulled herself up onto her elbows, her brows knit in consternation. “Do not look at me like that, Emmaline, you are testing my restraint. We vampyres have little enough of it, you know.”
“You are no vampyre.”
Up went a black brow. “Unless you are wroth with me, then I am swiftly relegated to vampyre once more.”
She sagged back onto the bed with a sigh. “As to that,” she said, stealing herself. “Who is the Mad Butcher of London?” She was on tenterhooks for fear that he should admit to being the slayer of women.
He was silent a moment, as though deliberating. “There are many dark creatures that prey on innocence, Emma. Man is as bloodthirsty as the worst of Hell’s monsters. My kind are no exception.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, repulsed. “You kill in cold blood then?”
“The blood is never cold.”
“Did you or did you not slay those women in London?”
“I did not. Only a witch would leave a bloody mess and steal the heart. When I dine I do so cleanly and dispose of my kill with far more—”
“Yes, yes.” She raised a supplicating hand, lest he continue.
“What need have I for organ meat?”
“But can you not…dine like a civilized creature and subsist on the blood of livestock instead?”
“You would have me subsist?” The word dropped from his tongue like arsenic. “What man subsists on the blandness of water and turnips when he may feast on Madeira and Neck of Veal à la crème?”
“Blood is blood!”
At this, his lip curled in disgust. “One creature’s blood is not like another’s—water and wine, Emma. At any rate, I like to think I am ridding the herd of disease.”
“What disease?”
“Evil.”
She shook her head. “One evil act does not forgive another. Surely you need not kill to survive? Could you not just take a little blood?”
“Would you have me believe that you need not slaughter a calf for its flesh? That the beast might continue to frolic along without the loins you took for your supper?”
“You compare humans to beasts then? If that is so then you have fallen in love with your supper! What am I if not Neck of Veal à la crème?”
The chuckle that followed was without warmth or humor. “Ahh, but that has always been my dilemma, my sweet rose.” He leant over and kissed her smartly on the lips before she could turn away. “Come, come, you would not mourn a murderer hanging from a gibbet; I am no more evil than a hangman. Though my taste in bedmates is impeccable—” (that she was the brunt of this pun did not escape her) “—my palate is less wholesome.” When she only continued to stare bemusedly, he said, “I prefer my vittles sourced from among the unsavory.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I enjoy the
taste of predators.” His smile widened. “The Newgate and Bridewell cages don’t whet my appetite, mind you, those inmates are wholly without spice. No, I much prefer the clever murderers and rapists that stalk the wilderness. Makes for good hunting, you know.”
“Criminals?” Well, that was unexpected.
“The more deranged the brains the better the flavor.”
Emma stroked her throat, grimacing. “Is that what occupied you the night I went to Whitby?”
He smiled. “I was enjoying the delicious company of a fat little magistrate with an unwholesome predilection for motherless little boys.”
“God Almighty! I hope you destroyed the beast!”
“I see you’re coming around to my way of thinking at last.”
She answered with a pained smile. Well, if she was to love her dragon completely then she could not harbor delicate sentiments; for him she would learn to accept and understand his own less than savory proclivities. “While I digest that information, I think we ought to return to the subject of witches.” Not that the habits of witches were any less unpalatable. “Why would a witch…eat…eat someone’s heart?”
“Because,” he said, “the heart is the seat of power—the life-force that sustains mortals and immortals alike; it feeds blood and flesh. And maleficium—witch venom. Black magic.”
“Ahh.” She recalled the conversation in London, at Winterly House, when Markus had explained how some venoms assailed the flesh, others the blood, and then there was that which assaulted the heart. How well she understood that now, especially the sorcerous venom that had infiltrated and poisoned her own heart. “Will the witch venom have any lasting effects? Is it like vampyre venom insofar as making one immortal?”
“They use it to toy with or control their prey when they wish it to be kept alive for a time; eventually, however, witch venom makes of the mind a gangrenous place—drives the sane to madness so that one is either committed to the madhouse or to an early grave. But my blood countervails even spider venom.”
Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1) Page 38