“You’ve always saved me, Talon,” I whisper to the empty stairwell. “This time, it’s my turn.”
The narrow staircase winds downward beneath the old church, each step slick with centuries of damp. My boots skid once on the wet stone, but I don’t falter. I can’t. The air is heavy with mildew and incense and something older.
My power gathers and swells the further I descend. It’s different now. It’s not breaking free of me in panicked bursts, lashing out wildly. It’s rising because I call it. Because I want it. Because for the first time in my life, I’m not trying to choke it down.
I feed it fear. I feed it fury. I feed it every breath I take as I descend.
The curse doesn’t slither in serpent twists. It doesn’t coil anymore. It waits.
A mouth. Open. Starving.
I feel it now, gnashing beneath my ribs, pressing against my bones. Not trying to hurt me, trying to answer me. My hunger. My curse. The same thing. It aches to be fed.
For once, I don’t fight it.
I aim it. I shape it. I sharpen it.
I become the thing with the mouth, the thing with the hunger, the thing ready to bite back.
The arched doors at the base of the stairs blow inward, not from wind or force, but from my unleashed hunger. Power arcs from my skin in jagged streaks of pink light, licking the hinges, prying the heavy wood open with a sound like cracking bone.
The catacombs stretch before me, yawning open, cold and slick and thrumming with quiet violence. Not Mal’s. Mine.
I step forward, my cloak trailing behind me, my collar still locked around my throat, my hunger bared beneath my skin.
Power pulses under my skin, a second heartbeat. It hums through my ribs, licking along my spine. My fingers twitch, aching with it. My mouth waters with it. My curse isn’t inside me anymore. It’s riding just beneath the surface, eager, obedient.
The double doors at the far end blow open on another blast of my hunger. Candles gutter to life in ripples, bending toward me.
The vampires rear back, snarling. One lunges. Another bares fangs.
I don’t flinch.
Hunger moves faster than thought.
A crackle of pink arcs from my outstretched hand in an open maw that crashes down on the first vampire. It sinks in, deep. Ripping. Feeding. His eyes go wide with terror and rapture as hislife tears free of him in streams of light and heat, flowing into me.
It feels…good.
Not like Talon. Not like love. But like quenching a thirst I’ve carried in my marrow for years. Like filling the hollows I thought were permanent.
The vampires hesitate now, then come at me anyway.
Their skin withers, pleasure and life ripped from them in luminous streams of soul-light that pour into my veins. Their mouths stretch open in silent moans before they collapse, brittle and lifeless.
More vampires surge forward, drawn by instinct, by rage, by the overwhelming scent of power. Some rush to kill me.
Others…don’t.
They falter. Stumble. Their pupils dilate.
They want me. They can’t help it.
My skin glows now. Not just with magic, but withheat, withneed, with every ounce of hunger I’ve ever felt and now let free.
I become something radiant. Otherworldly. Sensual.
My hair lifts on an unseen breeze. The very air around me pulses in rhythm with my power.
