Pity I had not chosen finer garments for this moment. That I had not brought gifts. My beloved had always loved flowers. Beautiful horses. The scent of pine.
“Here you are, as gorgeous as I remember,” I murmured to her withered skull, gently placing my hip to the bed so her remains might not be disturbed. “How long I’ve waited. Countless centuries searching.”
Smoothing back hair that fell from her skull, I leaned over my darling one. “What it means to me to know you kept your promise…” Overfull with a sensation I’d almost completely forgotten, my voice shook. “You swore to me you’d be reborn. And here you are. Sleeping, waiting for me to find you.”
Under my nose for a century. Here where she could have been crushed and lost again while I’d let Jade wreak havoc on the building.
My own displeasure was shaking the foundations as it was. Setting a rainfall of dust motes to cloud the room. Leaning over to kiss her mouth—or where her lips would have been had they not shriveled back over her teeth, I tried so very hard to be gentle. “Tell me you knew I’d come?”
The corpse, eyes long ago withered, said nothing. Failed to move. Failed to do anything but lie on a bed stained with her blood. My poor beloved had been alone since Darius had been dismembered, and from the state of the room, alone and suffering. Perhaps I would go into the garden later and have more than a talk with the head on a pike.
Perhaps if the smells under the rot of this place were any sign of what he’d done to her, I’d crush that skull to jelly and eat it.
Blind, my love was blind. Her hearing, the eardrums, I suspected might be intact enough that she at least heard the cadence of my song to her. That she knew I was here, would never allow her from my sight again.
The nubs of her fangs far too short for the work of slicing through my flesh were inconsequential. My true worry was that any attempt to part her jaw might break it, desiccated as it was.
Problem easily solved. I kissed her mouth again then sliced my wrist with a quick flick of a black claw. “Drink and wake. Come back to me.”
My blood was poison, laced with nature’s contempt for our kind. Yet it contained eternal, monotonous, never-changing life. Pouring it down a throat that could not swallow, I sat with her for the endless hours it took to reinvigorate her, cell by cell.
Nothing was more glorious than seeing my gifts reconstitute lovely blue eyes.
They had been blue in her last life too.
Her daughter’s had been that very shade before I changed her into something more. A clue I should have recognized had I paid more attention to the fact that Darius kept my grandchild from my sight.
She took a breath that rattled her half-reformed ribcage. There was pain in those sky-blue eyes.
A flush to cheeks that were fair and high. Dark hair, long and luxurious.
She drank every drop I might squeeze from my veins, swallowed as I gathered her close.
And was so very afraid of me.
That wouldn’t do. So, ever the charmer, I spun our tale. Starting at the beginning—this new beginning. “Your name in this life is Pearl. Mine these days is Vladislov. And I have been waiting for you for an eternity.”
Chapter Two
Vladislov
Brittle in my arms—half corpse, half goddess—I carried my soul’s new form from dust-laden catacombs. As I was in a bit of a mood, any who happened upon me during our jaunt had the unfortunate luck of finding out what they too might one day become should they truly embrace what they were… what human nightmares were born from.
Leathery wings dragged upon the floor at my back, arched over my shoulders, protectively encasing what blindly fought to be free of my care.
It was not just the potency of my blood that had driven her mad. A great deal had been done to my bride. Horrors that were creative—that might have impressed me—had they been unleashed on another.
The lack of effort required to see just how mangled the mind, how traumatized the body, how wrecked the spirit… it was difficult to control my anger.
My gift of blood had left me with a thirst that had not burned the back of my throat in centuries. My veins were bone-dry, and still she was broken.
But I sought no meal. Such irrelevant urges could wait an eternity.
Those curious vampires peeking from their rooms saw what should not exist, and then they saw no more. It took less than a thought to pop their little skulls and leave a mess for another to clean once my path was happened upon. For my darling was too fragile—hundreds if not thousands of years away from learning how to mist through space. More fragile even than the rags on her body flaking away with every writhe as Pearl fought my hold.
She might as well have tried to fight a titan.
There would be explanations and apologies later. I would tend every wound that marked the flesh of her new body, be gentler with her than I had been with any creature since before time. Or at least time by history’s reckoning.
Screaming a great deal, despite how I pat. A mewling, toothless kitten, at once pushing the cracked inferno of my flesh and drawing away from the inhuman texture. Pitch-black flesh, my eyes a glow of red in my temper, in my elation, in suffering through a mix of emotion I’d forgotten existed.
All I had been over all the ages, all the battles, all the children, all the optimization of a species, had always
