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Amber laid on the bed, eyes on the ceiling, when he walked into the cell. Iron and rock and earth—soundless. No one could hear her scream.
She hadn’t stopped trying. But now she was tired.
She pinched the skin of her wrist, reached up to her throat, missing the necklace she lost that day.
Her tie to home.
Her connection to God.
Connection to the girl the gift came from.
She didn’t flinch when he came to her, naked, made of marble. White eyes open, seeing nothing.
She knew he wasn’t going to rape her. He hadn’t tried. He had no use for her in that way. Instead, he fed on her sorrow, her cries, and her family’s anguish as they mourned the young girl whoran away for a better life. The girl who got away from that small town.
He didn’t need to feed often, could go years without the drink…
Without a bite.
But it was time, and the strength it took to swat the fly that was Sorina was nothing he could spare. He had more important things to worry about.
A more important daughter to transform.
Valerie wouldn’t be like the rest. He wouldn’t let her mind sour, wouldn’t let her turn against him.
But he would have to separate her from the boy. He wasn’t part of the plan; notthatplan, anyway. And the crumbs the Deacon had left as he followed them across the land hadn’t been enough to convince Nicholas to run away. He wasn’t ready for him yet, but the free will he’d granted the boy was often unpredictable.
Dreams were potent, and he could plant them with his touch. And Deacon Rex had been many people on their journey. A stranger in a gas station. A hotel clerk. A sales associate at Kmart. Light touches, almost accidentally.Infections.And when Nicholas and Valerie looked at him then, he was many people, fading away as soon as their eyes left him. He shape-shifted, poking tiny holes into the fabric of their minds. Led her here to be devoured. Led him here to blot out the sun.
He needed the boy on task. He knew what Nicholas Hemming was. He’d set him loose with one purpose in mind. The boy’s fate—his destiny.
The Deacon closed his white eyes and turned his face to Amber. She nodded, although she didn’t know why. She knew his eyes were useless, but also knew he saw everything.
She rolled over, opened her legs, and exposed the flesh of her thigh.
He knelt to her, kissed her knee, then moved higher, biting. She closed her eyes, and only after a sharp cry, gave into the warmth. It spread from her thigh to her sex, to her nipples, to her throat. A warm hand around it.
The guilt would come later. She was the dirty thing her father preached about.
Vile girl, broken thing.
Deacon Rex didn’t care what she did as he fed. It didn’t arouse him when she touched herself or moaned when she came. She was cattle; she was meat. And when she was happy, even when his teeth made her feel like she was on a glittering drug, it didn’t feed him.
Later, his belly would be full of her as she sobbed in her cell, dirty with her desire. That’s when he grew hungry for something else, something primal. But he didn’t want her.
Not for that.
That was for the daughters. The scattered and fractured bloodlines he had created.Pure.A single line needed to remain pristine. One single line for the day his kind had to make a choice. Stay in the darkness, or feast on the herd in the daylight.
The time for the dead to hide would soon be over.
And he would be ready.
SEVEN
It was an awakening that night. A brutal assault on my senses. I waxed and felt like the crescent moon. So desperate for her. So desperate to please the girl with the red hair—a huntress, what a marvel she was in my dreams. The need to taste her was ingrained in me—a memory, a destiny of sorts.
I didn’t believe in that sort of thing then, not yet.
