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Three.Tarley took a deep breath.
“Just do it,” she told him. “Kill me, if that’s what you want.”
He hummed, his mouth near her ear. “So resigned? That doesn’t seem like the Tarley I’ve come to know.” His tongue ran over her skin, and he hummed. “I don’t want your death, not really.”
“I won’t be your ‘plaything.’”
He laughed. “But you already are.” The vibration of his laugh, his words, were an ugly thing that reverberated from his chest through her back. “Why can I see you now?”
“You saw me perfectly fine before–” Tarley tried to inch forward. “You stalked me daily.”
“Stop moving,” he growled against her skin, and she felt his teeth press down between her neck and shoulder. “I’ll only catch you again.” He licked the spot of skin where he’d pressed his teeth into and moaned. “Satiation is going to be good.”
He seemed content to talk for the time being, so Tarley stalled. “What do you mean you couldn’t see me?”
“You were hidden—your power was hidden.” He flicked her braid away from her neck.
“Power?”
He ran a finger along her spine from the top of her neck down. “Like one of those rocks you crack open to reveal the gems inside—the purple one. He said you’d have it–”
“Who?”
“My master.”
“You aren’t your own master?”
“I’m the master of some, but I answer to one, and he’s been looking–”
Then suddenly, Rufus’s weight disappeared. He snarled and fell with a thud, draped across her legs, which allowed her to twist out from under him.
“Get up,” a deep voice ordered. “Hurry. That won’t hold him–”
Tarley scrambled as whoever was behind her bashed Rufus once more with a grotesque, squelching thud.
Tarley glanced at Rufus, his face covered with blood, his mouth slick with it, and his head sunken in by a man she could only see in her periphery. She couldn’t look away from the gore, sick with it. Rufus blinked those terrible black eyes but didn’t move. Granules of black dust drifted from his bodily form and disappeared into the air around him as if he were breaking apart.
She swiped at her neck, slick with blood that wasn’t hers, and shuddered, a scream working its way up her throat.
The man who’d hit Rufus stepped forward and pulled her up to her feet by the binding around her wrists. “Come on, girl.”
She struggled up and scrambled after him. “Where–”
“No talking. We don’t have time for tea.” He led her through the brush away from the thing that had been Rufus. “That monster will heal itself and come hunting. It’s got you in its sights.” Tarley, forced to follow the man into the forest, limped as she went, knowing her feet were leaving a trail of blood. They stayed along the river, walking upstream, until they came to an inlet Tarley had fished in before.
“What was it?” she asked.
The man uncovered a small canoe. “In.” He assisted her into the boat, his touch surprisingly gentle. “It’s a darkling. Enough chat.”
She’d never heard of a darkling. “A vampire?”
The man climbed into the canoe behind her, shoved off from the shore, and started down the river. When they passed the inlet where she’d been trapped with the Rufus-monster, his body was still there, only partially disintegrated, the darkness more present, and floating like pollen in the sunshine as it peeked over the trees.
Darkness coalesced at the edge of her vision, then rushed toward her like a heavy curtain obscuring her sight and swallowing her whole. She heard crying and screams. When she blinked, she was back in the canoe on the river. Another vision but no headache. One small favor, it would seem.
“Like a vampire in some ways. Different in others. They heal themselves,” the man said after they’d passed. “You can incapacitate their human bodies when they’re in human form, but if they shift, you’re fucked.”
“How did you–”
