Tempted

“Aphrodite?” I tried unsuccessfully to keep the tears from my voice. How could Stevie Rae really be dead? What was I going to do now, a world away from her and completely in over my head? “Is Stevie Rae dead?”

I could hear the Twins crying, and I saw Damien take Jack in his arms. Aphrodite lifted her face from her hands, and I was shocked to see her old, sarcastic grin shine through her tears.

“Dead? Hell no, she’s not dead. She’s just Imprinted with someone else!”

CHAPTER 37

Stevie Rae

The earth swallowed her, and for a moment it seemed like everything would be okay. The cool darkness was a relief for her burned skin, and she moaned softly.

“Red One? Stevie Rae?”

It wasn’t until he spoke that she realized she was still locked in Rephaim’s arms. She unwrapped herself from him and moved away, only to cry out in pain as her back touched the earthen wall of the pocket in the ground her element had opened to shield her, and then closed again.

“Are you well? I–I cannot see you,” Rephaim said.

“I’m okay. I think.” Her voice surprised her. It sounded so weak, so outside the norm that it was her first hint that even though she’d escaped the sun, she might not have escaped its effects.

“I cannot see anything,” he said.

“It’s because the earth sealed itself over us to shield me from the sun.”

“We’re trapped here?” His voice wasn’t panicky, but it wasn’t exactly calm either.

“No, I can get us out whenever I want,” she explained. Then, on second thought, she added, “And, well, the earth over us isn’t very deep. If I drop dead you could dig out pretty easily. How are you? That wing must really hurt.”

“Do you feel as if you might die?” he asked, ignoring her question about his wing.

“I don’t think so. Okay, actually, I don’t know. I feel kinda funny.”

“Funny? Explain that.”

“Like I’m not really attached to my body.”

“Does your body hurt?”

Stevie Rae thought about it, and was surprised by what she discovered. “No. Actually, I don’t hurt at all.” It was weird, though, that her voice kept getting weaker and weaker.

Suddenly his hand was touching her face, sliding down to her neck and arm and—

“Ouch! You’re hurting me.”

“You’re burned badly. I can feel it. You need help.”

“Can’t leave here or I’ll finish burning up,” she said, wondering why the earth seemed to be spinning around beneath her.

“What can I do to help you?”

“Well, you can get a big tarp or somethin’ and put it over me while you take me to the blood bank downtown. That sounds really good right now.” Stevie Rae lay there, thinking she’d never been so thirsty in her life. She wondered, with a detached sense of curiosity, if she was really going to die. It seemed a shame, after all that Rephaim had gone through to help her.

“Blood is what you need?”

“Blood is all I need. It’s what makes me tick, which is more than kinda gross, but still. It’s the truth. Cross my heart and hope to die.” She giggled a little hysterically, and then sobered. “Wait, that’s not really very funny.”

“If you don’t get blood, you’ll die?”

“I think I might,” she said, finding it hard to care too much.

“Then if blood will heal you, take mine. I owe you a life. That’s why I saved you on the roof, but if you die here, you die without my debt being repaid. So if you need blood, take mine,” he repeated.

“But you don’t smell right,” she blurted.

From the darkness he sounded irritated and offended. “That is what the red fledglings said, too. My blood does not smell right to you because I’m not meant to be one of your prey. I am the son of an immortal. I’m not your victim.”

“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