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“I will see that you pay.” I glared at Claria, then to Gildir, who still looked with shock at his sword, which had pierced through me. Where blood should have spilled, shadows danced in its stead. The forest bed beneath my feet withered and rotted.
“Take your death and leave,” Claria warned.
She spoke of Arlo. My death. My Arlo. I could not bring myself to look at him. If I did not look, then it was not real. Even if my shattered soul twisted into knots at the knowledge that he was lost to me.
“Do you wish to know why you could touch him?” Gildir said with a smile.
I looked back at him, shadows screaming for the chance to reach out and drain the golden glow of life that encased him. “I care little for your lies.”
“Did Myrinn never reveal what she so willingly told to us? How your dearest Arlo had been dying all along. His life was already entwined with yours, Faenir, even if you were too blind to see it.”
I hesitated. Gildir took this as his chance to spill more lies. Where his words did not hurt me before, these cut deep.
“He drank the blood of vampires, concealing his death but not stopping it.”
“Liar.”
I studied his face for proof that he had lied, the shifting of an eye, or the twitch of a lip.
“Even the very thing you command wishes to escape from you,” Gildir said, leaning forward slightly as though preparing to share the greatest secret of all. “And the worst part of it all was my attempts to see that Arlo died were in vain. When all that was required was waiting… patiently… as I have for this day all my life.”
My shadows flared like wings at my back. A roar filled my chest and exploded outward as another fleeting cry joined in chorus with me.
Gildir looked away from me, brows furrowing over narrowed eyes at the girl, Auriol, who held the unconscious body of my beloved. I followed suit.
She was standing, arms now empty, and her brother’s name carved into her cry.“Arlo!”She looked at Gildir, as Gildir looked at her; it was a strange encounter.
“Impossible…” Gildir muttered quietly, drawing my attention back to him.
My heart jolted in my chest, as though starting again after slumbering in the darkness.
Behind Gildir, with eyes glowing the purest of scarlet against pale, ivory skin, stood Arlo. Clawed fingers gripped Gildir’s shoulder, pinning him in place. Arlo’s mouth was parted, revealing two sharpened points of teeth that seemed to extend before my eyes.
Arlo regarded me like a predator. His pink tongue brushed against his pointed canines one by one.His attention then fell to Gildir’s exposed neck. Spit ran from the corners of his parted lips as though he was a starving hound looking upon a carving of raw meat.
“Darling?” I whispered.
Arlo did not reply, his focus locked elsewhere.
Gildir did not move. Could not move, no matter how he fidgeted beneath Arlo’s grip.
“This,” Arlo hissed, his voice different from before; it sounded harsh and forced, like nails pulled across stone, “is for themall.”
Claria could not so much as gather breath to shout in warning as Arlo threw back his head, opened his pale lips wide and dove his teeth into Gildir’s neck.
32
It was believed the kiss of the undead led to the spread of their disease, teeth sinking into skin, the drawing of blood from a victim until they were left an empty husk of flesh and bone. We were all wrong. I was proof that we were fools ever to believe such a thing. With the nectar-like liquid filling my cheeks and slithering down my throat, I had been brought back not because of a bite…It was the blood that I had drank willingly.
It had poisoned me.
Changed me.
And most of all, it did what Father had suggested, kept me from the grasp of death—now for an unfathomable amount of time.
Before me, Faenir was a creature to be feared. Wings of shadows spilt from his cloak. His golden stare was wide, his head cocked. It took tremendous effort not to close my eyes and give in to the euphoria that filled my body as I drained Gildir, who I had entrapped beneath my grasp. I was stronger than before. Renewed. Famished.Starving. I gave little room for Gildir to move, digging my nails through his shirt and into flesh until more sweet, divine blood spilt across his chest; every drop that did not grace my lips was a waste.
The hunger had its own voice, desperate and pleading, like a child locked in a cage in which the key had been long lost. The moment my eyes opened, and I saw Auriol, I almost wrapped my jaw around her arms. Even in my desperation, I knew not to, enough to press away from her and choose my victim. Gildir was the easiest one to pick. Even with the overwhelming thunder of hearts that chorused through my head, or the scent of blood that tickled within my nose, he was the one who called out to me above the rest.
