Page 84 of Blood Feast

He thrust inside her one more time, pinning her against the wall. The anger in his blood heated to ecstasy. The taste of his climax drove her over the edge as he surged into her. She screamed in the back of her throat, gripping him hard inside her to feel every pulse of his release.

He held her there until she drank her fill and her fangs receded. She went limp, her belly warm and full, her core still stretched around him. She rested her face on his bloodstained shoulder.

Orthros was closed to them. And yet in this moment, she felt like she was home.

“Now do you understand?” His anger had banked, but it was still there, simmering. “It wasn’t even a choice, Cassia. Of course I left everything else behind for you.”

She could only pray there would not come a night when he regretted it.

FORGOTTEN RITUALS

Cassia watched Lio straightenhis robes. The same festival robes they had danced in hours ago. She interrupted his precise, efficient movements to do up the fasteners over his chest for him. Or rather, she tried to. She had broken some of them.

He left his collar open in a deep vee and tied his hair back at the nape of his neck. “Now that you’re well fed, do you feel ready to search the area with your magical senses?”

She shook her head. “I knew I shouldn’t have tried any spells after what happened with the weapons. When I opened the portal, I may as well have raised a banner over our location.”

“Not necessarily. Aunt Lyta was on watch for your roses at the border. That doesn’t mean Hesperines errant will always notice you casting any spell anywhere in Tenebra.”

“And what of Gift Collectors with a bounty on us?”

Lio’s gaze hardened. “Whoever may be waiting for us when we leave the passages, we’ll be ready. The more you practice before that confrontation, the better. This is a safe place for you to work on your spellcasting.”

“If the Lustra alerts me to anything, I shall tell you.”

He paused, a furrow between his brows. Not the answer he wanted, she knew.

Before her refusal could turn into another debate against the wall, the scratching of Knight’s paws interrupted them. She turned to see him digging in the corner of the chamber.

Lio sighed at the hound. “Are you and Freckles both determined to turn history into chew toys?”

Knight ignored him, nose in the dirt. Then he lifted his head, his prize in his jaws, and offered it to Cassia.

“Oedann,” she praised him. “My good sir, what have you found?”

When she took the dirt-covered object from him, she assumed it was a stick. But the instant she touched it, she knew. A shiver moved through her.

She was holding a bone. A piece of something…someone…that had once lived. She could feel the emptiness in it. The whiff of minerals and decay should not remind her of the smell of blood in the snow in Martyr’s Pass, but it did.

The heart hunter she had killed would one day be bones, too.

“Cassia? What is it?” Lio drew nearer to her, then went still. “Oh. I see.”

He held out his hands, but she did not surrender her burden to him. “I used things made from bone all the time as a mortal. I combed my hair with pieces of dead creatures. It feels so different now.”

“Yes.”

The long, yellowed bone was about the size of her own forearm. “Lio, am I imagining it, or…is this human?”

“I feel that too,” he confirmed.

Who had this person been? How had this piece of their existence come to rest here for her to find all these years later? “Is this place a tomb?”

“No…” He turned the bone in her hands, gently smudging away some of the dirt. “Look at these markings.”

She squinted at the carvings and gasped. “These look like the runes on my pendant.”

“This appears to be a ritual object used in spellcasting.”

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