As I tugged and begged, the pain stopped. For an instant, I thought I had reached the threshold of death, where sensation ends as the body gives up, but I was still writhing, still alive, however frail. I felt him hesitate, his mouth touching my torn wrist, but still now.
I felt the word against my skin as much as heard it. “Blaine.”
“Yes.” I sighed, slumping a little in relief from the ache and terror that had held me. I tried again to draw my arm away, but he held it firm.
“Not yet.”
“No,” I protested, trying to rear back from him. If he drew another drop from me, I was sure I would die, and my mind went numb at the thought of what might happen to me in the state between Greywalker and vampire. What new horror would I become?
But the sensation on my ripped flesh now was not the tearing and torment of his bite, but a silk-soft brushing and a touch of cold breath. Finally, he let me go and I drew my wrist back to cradle it against my chest as I moved away from him, scraping against the stones of the earthquake-shattered church.
I pulled free of his weight and squirmed into a corner, feeling too weak and shocked to support myself any longer, and bent over my savaged arm that tingled with a strange flushing sensation of cold followed by heat and then the harsh prickling of flesh knitting together in a fire of magic.
Carlos had slumped to the side as I sidled away. Now he pulled himself up again to lean against the wall beside me, his movements rough jerks. He closed his eyes as if exhausted by the effort and seemed to be panting.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “I’m in your debt. Yet again.”
“I thought you were going to kill me,” I whispered, still pressing my throbbing wrist between my breasts, harder than I may have needed to.
“I might have, had I not realized it was you.”
“That would be some thanks for coming to save you.”
He made a coughing sound and sighed. “It is our nature to take what we need. I apologize for frightening you. How did you come to find me?”
“Amélia. How did she know you were in trouble?”
He gave a weak, lopsided shrug. “She was my wife and it appears she cares for me still, though I was the worst sort of human monster to her.” He twitched and frowned. He took a breath. Then he raised a shaking hand to his own chest. “How . . . strange that feels.”
“What?” I asked, finally daring a glance down at my wrist. The moonlight revealed only a set of faint lines on the inside as if I’d worn tight sleeves that pressed their seams and wrinkles into my skin. I stared at the soft, whole flesh, too surprised to speak, almost too surprised to listen, except that his words cut through my daze.
“My heart . . . is beating.”
“Doesn’t it always?” I asked, recalling the way I’d seen it once, a torpid red gleam in his chest that pulsed less than once a minute.
“Very slowly, yes. Not like this. Not like yours.”
Carlos reached for me and had to crawl to close the distance between us. He stopped and remained on his knees, leaning against the wall as he put out his hand. “Please. Your hand. Only for a moment.”
I held out my right, since it was closer to him and seemed less vulnerable. He took my hand in his, rubbing his thumb across my palm as if he’d never touched skin before. Then he pressed it against his chest, above the scar I knew lay there, scribed into his skin almost two hundred sixty years earlier.
I could feel throbbing, like a distant, uneven drumroll beneath his cold flesh. His heart beat like the reflection of my own. I looked at him in confusion.
“It’s been almost three centuries. . . . I didn’t think that I had missed it.” He frowned, thinking. His face went blank and dark and he peered at me from the corner of his eye. For just a moment, the edge of a cruel smile danced along his lips, his grip tightening on my hand until the bones ground together, keeping me close. Then he let me go and slid away, sitting back against the wall again at a short distance and no longer looking at me. Through the Grey, I could see shades of darkness and pinpricks of light gathering around him like a constellation slowly burning into being.
NINETEEN
I watched his power reassemble around him, changed and yet the same: dark as night, but no longer blood streaked.
He seemed surprised. “I cannot fathom what has happened. I feel. This blood moving within my veins, pumped by a heart that has not beaten thus in centuries, demands breath like a babe howling newborn from the womb. I feel all this, and memory of how precious it is brings me shame that for even a second I thought of killing you. Thought of consuming you and drawing this from you for my own selfishness.”
“For the sake of a heartbeat, for breath?” I asked. I was afraid, but it wouldn’t do me any good to give in to it. “For a mortal thing that can stop like an unwound watch?”
He turned his head toward me. “You do not appreciate what it is to feel this after so long.”
“No,” I agreed. “But to feel my heart stop, to die, I know that. And the surge of my heart beating again, my lungs hungering for air, my body wanting to live, however broken it is, I know that, too. I die and I wake changed, and hope it won’t happen again, over and over. How many times have you died, Carlos?”
“In my own body, but once, and very nearly a dozen times more. But every life I take, I feel as if it were my own death and rebirth. Like you. But you live—truly alive—from heartbeat to heartbeat, and I exist in the bitterness of death,” he said. “But I had forgotten life’s tang, how sweet and sharp, like the taste of your blood on my tongue.”
His gaze on me burned with conflicting desires that sent chill and sorrow through me. I turned my head away and let it fall forward, tired and weak and unable to fight if it came to it. “If you’re going to . . . at least make sure I’m really dead this time. I don’t want to know what happens after this. After we fail.”
The small sound that came from him was not a laugh. “Oh, Blaine, you mistake me. I forfeited my soul for power, my life for knowledge and existence beyond my due years. Tonight I reached again into the abyss of that power, but I miscalculated and should have died. Because of you, I have survived. No, I live! Every fiber of my being cries to cleave to this sensation and I know it is nothing more than a fleeting semblance that will fall away, but that does not cheapen the gift, nor change my gratitude to you. For now, I feel the phantom of your heat in my body, my heart beating, my lungs striving for breath, and I know to whom I owe this. If what you see in my eyes is an unholy desire, it is only because I am an unholy creature.”
“That does still leave desire,” I said, still feeling weak and small and uncertain.
“I’ve never made a secret of my interest in you.”
“Yes, but your interest never looked like lust before.”
“I am too hungry to disguise all my appetites, at the moment, but where you are concerned, I promise, they are not of the flesh. Mostly.”
I laughed, but it was strained, and I looked at him again. “Oh, you wouldn’t. . . .”
“Wouldn’t I?
“Not with me, you wouldn’t.”
He sighed and leaned his head against the white marble wall. “Alas, true. Though not, perhaps, for the reasons you imagine.”
“I imagine that you forgo forcing yourself on me because our friendship precludes any action that . . . transgressive. And you are the one who has several times pointed out I’m married, even if not in the eyes of the law, and bound to others as well as the Guardian Beast.”
He grunted. “And now how shall we go on?”
“You mean as friends, or ‘how do we get out of here’?”
“The latter. I don’t think I’ve laid waste to our rapport by acknowledging that I have no interest in raping you.”
“Goody. Because I have no idea how to get out of here. I had to walk through the earthquake to get to you. I’d prefer not to return by the same route. Also, I don’t know if I can stand up on my own yet.”