“Hey, I don’t have victims; not anymore,” she protested weakly.
“The truth still holds. I smell different to you because I am different. I was not created to be your lunch.”
“I never said you were.” She meant her words to come out sounding snappy and kinda defensive. Instead her voice was faint, and her head felt strangely huge, like it was going to pop off her neck at any second and float up through the ground and into the clouds like a giant birthday balloon.
“Right-smelling or not, it’s blood. I owe you a life. So you will drink, and you will live.”
Stevie Rae cried out as Rephaim’s hand found her again and he pulled her against his body. She felt the skin of her burned arms and shoulders rip off and mix with the earth. Then she was resting on the softness of his feathers. She sighed deeply. It wouldn’t be so bad to die here in the earth, in a nest of feathers. As long as she didn’t move, it didn’t even hurt much.
She felt Rephaim move, though. And realized he’d sliced his beak across the gash that Kurtis had made in his bicep. It had stopped bleeding, but this new laceration immediately began to weep, filling their little pocket in the earth with the thick scarlet scent of his immortal blood.
Then he shifted again and suddenly his bleeding arm was pressed against her lips.
“Drink,” he said harshly. “Help me rid myself of this debt.”
She drank, automatically at first. His blood had, after all, been stinky. It’d smelled wrong, wrong, wrong.
Then it touched her tongue. Its taste was like nothing Stevie Rae could have imagined. It wasn’t like the scent of him; it wasn’t anything remotely like the scent of him. Instead it was an incredible surprise, filling her mouth and her soul with its rich complexity, its absolute difference from anything she’d ever experienced.
She heard him hiss, and the hand that had been on the back of her neck guiding her to his arm, tightened its grip on her. Stevie Rae moaned. Drinking from the Raven Mocker couldn’t be a sexual experience, but it wasn’t exactly not a sexual experience, either. Stevie Rae had the fleeting thought that she wished she’d had some kind of experience with guys—other than making out with Dallas in the dark—’cause she didn’t know what to think of all the stuff that was going through her mind and surging through her body. It felt good, all hot and tingly and powerful, but nothing like Dallas had made her feel.
She liked it, though. And there, for that heartbeat of a moment, Stevie Rae forgot that Rephaim was a mixture of immortal and beast, created from violence and lust. For that instant, she only knew the pleasure of his touch and the strength of his blood.
That was when her Imprint with Aphrodite shattered, and Stevie Rae, the first red vampyre High Priestess of Nyx, Imprinted with Rephaim, the favorite son of a fallen immortal.
That was also when she broke his grip on her head and pulled away from him. Neither of them said anything. The silence of their small, earthen room was filled only by the sounds of both of them gasping for breath.
“Earth, I need you again,” Stevie Rae spoke into the darkness. Her voice sounded normal again. Her body hurt. She could feel her burns and the rawness of her skin, but Rephaim’s blood had allowed her to begin to heal, and she understood all too well that she had been on the verge of dying.
Earth came to her, filling their space with the scents of a springtime meadow. Stevie Rae pointed up, to a spot as far from herself as she could get. “Open just a crack over there—enough to let in light, but not enough to burn me.”
Her element complied. The ground above them shivered, dirt raining down as it split, letting in a tiny crack of daylight.
Stevie Rae’s eyes adapted almost instantly, so she watched Rephaim blink in surprise as he tried to accustom himself to the sudden light. He was sitting close to her. He looked terrible—bloody and bruised. His broken wing had come completely loose from the towel bandage she’d fashioned for him and it lay helplessly down his back. She knew the instant his vision had cleared. Those human eyes, tinged with scarlet, found hers.
“Your wing’s messed up again,” she said.
He grunted, and she figured that was his guy word for agreeing with her.
“I better fix it again.” She started to get up and his lifted hand stopped her.
“You shouldn’t move. You should just rest against your earth and regain your strength.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m not one hundred percent, but I’m lots better.” She hesitated and then added, “Can’t you tell that?”
“Why would I—” The Raven Mocker’s words ended abruptly. Stevie Rae watched his eyes widen with understanding. “How is it possible?” he said.
“I dunno,” she said, getting up and beginning to unwind the messed-up strips of towels from around him. “I wouldn’t think it’d be possible. But, well, here we are, and here it is.”
“An Imprint,” he said.
“Between us,” she said.
Then neither of them said anything.
When she had the tangled mess of bandages straightened out, she told him, “Okay, I’m gonna set your wing back like I had it and re-wrap it. It’s gonna hurt again. Sorry. Of course this time it’ll hurt me, too.”
“Truly?” he said.
“Yeah, well, I kinda know how these Imprint things work, being as I used to have a human Imprinted to me. She knew all sorts of stuff about me. Now I’m Imprinted to you, so it stands to reason that I’ll be knowing stuff about you, which includes when you’re in excruciating pain.”
“Are you still Imprinted to her?”
Stevie Rae shook her head. “Nope, it’s gone, which, I’m sure, will tickle her pink.”
“Tickle pink?”
“Just an expression my mama used to use. It means she’ll be happy we’re not Imprinted anymore.”
“And you? What are you?”
Stevie Rae looked into his eyes and answered honestly. “I’m totally confused about us, but not sorry at all that I’m not Imprinted with Aphrodite anymore. Now, hold still and let me get this over with.” Rephaim stayed perfectly still while Stevie Rae reset his wing. It was she who did the gasping and made the painful exclamations. She who was white and shaky after it was all over. “Dang, wings hurt. Bad.”
Rephaim stared at her, shaking his head. “You did feel it, didn’t you?”
“Sadly, yep, I did. It was almost worse than almost dying.” She met his eyes. “Is it going to get well?”
“It will heal.”
“But?” She felt the word there at the end of his sentence.
“But I do not believe I will ever fly again.”
Stevie Rae’s gaze stayed steady on his. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Maybe it’ll heal better than you think. If you came back to the House of Night with me, I could—”
“I cannot go there.” He hadn’t raised his voice, but the words had a sense of finality to them.
Stevie Rae tried again. “That’s what I used to think, but I’m back there and they accept me. Well, some of them do.”
“It wouldn’t be like that for me, and you know it.”
Stevie Rae looked down. Her shoulders slumped. “You killed Professor Anastasia. She was really nice. Her mate, Dragon, is lost without her.”
“I did what I had to do for my father.”
“And he deserted you,” she said.
“I disappointed him.”
“You almost died!”
“He is still my father,” he said quietly.
“Rephaim, this Imprint. Does it feel like anything to you? Or is it just me who’s had a change?”
“A change?”
“Well, yeah. I couldn’t feel your pain before, and now I can. I can’t tell what you’re thinking, but I can sense things about you, like I think I’d know where you were and what was going on with you even if you were a long way away from me. It’s weird. It’s different than what I had with Aphrodite, but it’s definitely there. Is there anything at all different with you?”
He hesitated a long time before answering her, and when he did speak he sounded confused. “I feel protective of you.”