Page 91 of Flames and Blood

She takes my wrist and moves my hand away. Then she puts her own hand flat over the bite and holds it there and looks at me.

“I’m in you now,” she says.

I don’t answer. She doesn’t wait for one.

She pushes me back down onto the wrecked bed and stretches out along my side, one leg over mine, her head on my shoulder, her hair spread across half my chest. Her hand stays where it is on her throat. The other rests over me and closes over my hip.

Outside, the wind gets up and drops a load of snow off the roof with a soft collapse. The stove ticks. The room smells of her sweat and of sex and the copper of her blood, and under all of it, still, warm stone.

For weeks I’ve had the same picture. Her teeth. My throat. My blood.

Tonight went the other way, and the picture hasn’t moved.

I don’t know what that means.

Her breathing evens out. She doesn’t drift down into it. One minute she’s awake against my shoulder. The next she’s decided to sleep, and she’s asleep, all at once, complete.

I stay awake. It’s hours before the sky starts changing, and I wouldn’t sleep anyway.

Her heat soaks into my side. My skin is already cooling, giving back what her blood put into it, going back to being what it is.

I lift her hand off her throat to check the bite.

Her fingers come away wet. The punctures are still open and still going, slow, and the blood has run down under her jaw and pooled in the hollow at the base of her neck. She doesn’t stir when I touch it, or even when I kiss it away. The Kalli I know wakes up when the truck changes gears.

“Kalli?”

Nothing. The firelight moves on her face, and she doesn’t move at all.

“Kallista.”

Her lashes flicker, and her lip curls up. Scales shimmer along her cheekbone, and she pulls me closer. “Mmmm.”

I put two fingers back into the hollow of her throat, into her own blood, and hold them there.

And I realize that I don’t know who is sleeping against me.

Chapter 21

Kalli

The cold wakes me. That’s the first wrong thing, and I know it’s wrong before I’m fully awake. The stove has gone down to embers, and the blanket has slipped off my shoulder. I shouldn’t feel cold. I haven’t felt cold since I was a child. I slept on the stone floor of that cell through a winter and it never once woke me.

It’s waking me now.

What the hell happened?

I lie still and take stock of it.

I’m in a bed, and I’m naked, and I’m lying against a cool, motionless body. My thighs hurt when I shift my legs. There’s a deep, low soreness in my core, and I know what put it there before I let myself use the word. Two tender spots ache in my hip bones. My mouth hurts on the inside of the lower lip. My hair is a tangled mess.

I put my hand on my throat. There are punctures there. Two of them, closed over with a rough crust, sore when I press. The skin around the bite is a little bruised.

I hold my fingers over the bite and don’t move for a while.

He fed on me.

My body didn’t go anywhere last night. Whatever it did, it stayed here. And all I remember is my hand on the door, and then waking up here like this.