Page 28 of Fangs

Bite me

“Blake.”

The name falls from my lips before I can stop it.

It tastes familiar on my tongue. Like a memory I can’t quite reach.

The shadows at my feet answer first. Cold crashes over my skin hard enough to raise every hair. The air itself seems to hold its breath. The darkness in the corners of the balcony thickens, coalesces, takes shape.

I rush into the room and close the balcony door. But shadows follow me—they slip under the door like smoke, merging with the shadows of my own room.

He steps out of the shadows. His hair is nothing like the short dark crop from the portrait. It falls in long, liquid-silver waves past his shoulders in eerie silver waves, wild and luminous like liquid moonlight. His violet-blue eyes have crimson-ringed pupils—those impossible, burning eyes—they pin me with a hunger so absolute it punches the air straight from my lungs.

He stands impossibly tall. The shadows cling to him like a second skin, a living cloak of pure night. He wears the same archaic velvet jacket from the painting, the cut of a king who ruled centuries before this one.

He is devastating. Otherworldly. A nightmare given beautiful, lethal form.

I see the madness in the tight line of his jaw, in the flex of the long black shadow-claws at his sides, in the way his gaze drops to the frantic pulse hammering in my throat and stays locked there with naked hunger.

“Lucille ” My name on his lips sounds like a lethal weapon. “You should not have called me.”

“I…” My throat works uselessly. “I don’t know why I said it.”

Those crimson-ringed eyes burn into mine. “Liar.”

He advances. Every rational instinct shrieks at me to run, to scream for the Masters, to hurl myself off the balcony if that’s what it takes. My mind claws at the inside of my skull.

My feet stay rooted to the cold stone.

“The shadows,” he says, voice low and barely leashed. “They led you to me. They showed you my portrait. They answered the prayer already written in your blood.”

One shadow-claw lifts. I flinch, but he doesn’t strike. The long black talons hover a breath from my cheek, radiating a cold that sinks straight into bone. “I will not deny it any longer, Lucille. These shadows are my rawest instincts given form. And they want you.”

“You feel it,” he continues, deadlier. “The pull. The hunger. The need to know who I am.”

I shake my head, denial rising on my tongue. “I don’t —”

“You do.” His eyes bore into mine. “Your blood calls to me. You feel it in your veins, in your bones, in the space behind your ribs where your heart beats too fast.”

God help me, I do. A primal, dragging need coils low and vicious in my belly, an emptiness only his shadows seems shaped to fill. An ancient spark in my blood answers him like a slave answering its master.

This is wrong. This is madness. He is a monster, a legend of horror, a ghost from a portrait. And still my body leans toward him.

“For the first time, you are afraid,” he says, and his voice softens. “Good. You should be fucking terrified.”

He closes the last distance, and the shadows rise around us, blocking out the fading light. We are cocooned in darkness, and I can’t see anything but his purple eyes burning through the black.

“I can smell both,” he says, voice dropping into a rough caress. “Your fear and the wet heat between your legs. They’re tangled so tightly I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. You want this. You want me. And it scares the shit out of you.”

A shadow-claw tips my chin up, long black talons framing my jaw with lethal precision. The cold of his touch sends a violent shiver of pure heat straight between my thighs.

I shake my head. “This is not—I’m not—”

“Tell me to stop,” he orders. “Tell me you do not want this, and I will disappear. I will leave you here, and I will not come back. This is your only chance.”

I open my mouth. The words are right there. Stop. Please stop. This is wrong. You are a monster.

They die on my tongue.