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As I fell onto his chest, spent, I glanced into his eyes. He murmured softly and wrapped his arms around me.
“I want you to drink from me. I want the last fangs of the day in my body to be yours, not Lannan’s or . . .”
“Or whose?” Grieve looked at me expectantly.
I gave him a quick shake of the head. “Never mind. But feed—drink, even just a few drops, please. Make me remember who I truly belong to.”
Grieve sat up, pulling me astride his lap. The fire within me still raged but the most painful part had been quenched, at least for now. “You’re sure about this? I will not hurt you.”
“I want to feel you drink from me. I want you to mark me.”
He slowly licked his way up from my nipple to my neck, then, with closed eyes, sank his needle-sharp teeth into my flesh. I cried out, but this time it did not hurt. This time it was ecstasy. The passion of pain, the passion of being owned, of feeling my life force enter his body . . . it all fell into one kaleidoscopic orgy and I came again, laughing wantonly as Grieve coaxed the blood from my throat.
As we sat there in the snow, his erection rose again, hard and eager, and I slid onto him, straddling his lap, rocking gently as he drank in droplets of my blood. I felt like one of the sacred harlots, finding my communion through fucking, the divine and sacred joy of merging bodies and spirits.
And then, slowly, we eased down from the heights. Grieve’s eyes were dark—the obsidian of the vampires with the sparkling stars of the Vampiric Fae, and I lost myself in the swirl of galaxies. After what felt like forever, I could hear someone calling my name from the house.
“I’d better go. Won’t you please come with me now? We can lock you up, keep you from the light.”
He shook his head. “She would hurt you and I wouldn’t be able to stop her. Not yet. If you can find a way, I’ll come, but I can’t be around you when the light-induced rage hits—I would stand far too much chance of injuring you or your friends. And Cicely, if I hurt you, I might as well kill myself. It’s all I can do to keep myself in check now. I love you, but I’m not safe and you know it.”
He put the cloak around my shoulders and pushed me toward the open yard. “Go, I will make sure you get inside without being harmed. And then, I must hie myself away before Myst discovers where I am.”
And then he pulled back into the shadows. Unwilling, I headed toward the house. Rhia saw me coming first and raced into the yard barefooted to guide me toward the door. Leo insisted on wrapping his arms around me and carrying me inside. As soon as we hit the light, Rhia cried out.
“You were with Grieve!”
I gave her a long look. “I had to be . . . it was either that or return to Lannan. And so help me, if that happened . . .”
Kaylin was back, motioning from the living room. As Leo deposited me on the sofa, the cloak fell away and I grabbed for it.
“I’m naked, dude.”
He ignored me. “I could not find a healer willing to come, but one did give me this.” He handed me a small vial of orange liquid. “This will manage the blood fever until it burns itself out of your body.”
I stared at it. Part of me didn’t want to drink it. The intensity I’d felt with Lannan, with Grieve, as my owl self, begged me not to quench the fire. Now I understood the appeal of being a vampire—if life continually burned so brightly, if every sensation led to a shiver, the temptation would be hard to resist.
After a moment, I looked at him.
“I know your struggle,” he whispered. “I can feel it. You are torn.”
“Yeah.” I held up the vial. “Is this safe? Do you trust who made it?”
He nodded. “Yes. She is safe.”
With another pause, I flicked open the lid and upended it down my throat. As much as the blood fever beckoned, my common sense won out. As soon as I drank it, the pounding waves of my pulse began to subside almost immediately.
Cicely, can you hear me?
Ulean—it was Ulean. Yes, I can. Why?
Because while you were outside with Grieve, you could not. While you were deep in the blood fever, you couldn’t hear me, though I could feel you. Now I know why vampires don’t like Elementals. We can sense their moods, but they can’t sense when we’re around. That is an interesting piece of information we should not forget.
I glanced at the vial. “Is this a cure?”
“No, but it will keep you calm until the fever burns out. Muted like this, it will only last another fifteen to twenty hours. You drank from an old vampire. Lannan is many things, but he is not young and he wields more power than you would give him credit for.” Kaylin settled in, looking grim. “This will appease the blood fever but not the other ramifications of drinking from him.”
“What are those?” I couldn’t imagine much worse unless . . . “He didn’t enthrall me, did he?”
