Page 173 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

I touched Rose’s cheeks, and did I imagine it, or did I feel the golem’s head strain towards me, every line of her body screaming to be released?

Blood. My throat burned, a dusty, aching fire begging to be quenched. First—to save Cirri’s life, I had to take life.

The guards returned to the wall, keeping wary eyes on the golems.

I went to the dungeons.

The Ark was still warm, heating the cool stones of this miserable place. The warden, a vampire woman with hair the color of fresh-churned butter and a face chiseled from stone, stood from her post and bowed to me. Her brown eyes were usually as cold as frozen Nordrin earth, but there was a touch of confusion in them at my presence.

“There have been no orders to prepare a harvest, my Lord—” she began, but I held up a hand.

“Quickly now,” I said, casting my gaze down the lines of cells. How many prisoners did we have? Almost forty, at my last recall, but I wouldn’t need them all. This was not a full transformation, merely a glut. “Begin with the worst of them—the child killers. Bring them to me directly, as quick as you can. Do not stop until I tell you otherwise.”

She stared at me, the little color in her porcelain face blanching away.

All vampires knew what this meant. I wondered if it was simple disgust with fiend appetites that put them off, or envy that they were forbidden from doing the same while they fed.

I didn’t look in the cells or observe the prisoners as I passed them. I would look into their eyes soon enough, and drain them dry without so much as a last word.

Thus I would begin with those whose lives had caused the most pain, the deepest damage to others; now their blood would serve some purpose besides keeping those miserable hearts pumping.

I stepped into the room with the Ark, the heat still radiating from Ellena’s pyre. Their corpses could fill its iron gut for its next meal.

The warden shoved a human man through the door.

He was filthy, in chains, his hands clasped behind his back in shackles; she kicked out the backs of his knees, sending him to the floor, and turned her back on him even as he babbled through tears, begging her for another chance.

“Please, please,” he gasped, and I gripped him, claws sinking into the meat of his shoulder, cutting through his scalp, and wrenched his head to the side, exposing his corded neck. His pleas became cries of pain.

A shudder of disgust went through me as my teeth sank in, cutting off his sobbing screams. After Cirri’s sweetness, it was like drinking sewage, unclean and filthy.

But now he could do some good with his worthless life. Remorseless, unfeeling, I drained him dry, and waited for the next.

The world was tornbetween satiation and agony.

The soothing warmth of blood in my throat, overridden by the pain of my body melting, warping, expanding; and then my teeth would batten on another throat, a new hot flood, andthe relief of the blood would soothe the pain—only to fuel my transformation further, a fresh wave of agony swamping the relief.

In this form, the world was simple.

It was a tapestry of scents, rich and abounding, from the cooling ashes of the furnace to the chill stone, the sharp fear-sweat of the prisoners, the warden’s floral perfume mixing with the musty scent of her anxiety at being near me.

From this killing ground I smelled the fever slowly killing a man, the dusty pages of a book, the faintest aroma of baking bread from the kitchens far above.

I tossed aside the dry bundle of bones and meat I’d been clutching, drawing from greedily, and sat upright on my haunches.

Nothing could destroy me; I was the deliverer of death, the hand of punishment, every muscle corded with strength, my body a bristling tower of organic armor. Let the wolves come; I would have her back, and gorge myself on their blood.

The warden moved aside, eyes averted, as I prowled from the dank pit where I’d had my feast.

None would look upon me without disgust, without terror, but let them see. Let them fear.

None mattered but the woman, my mate, the one who was lost. I washermonster, her creature, and it seemed to me now that it was futile to resist this fate. Why had I wanted to pretend to be a man?

Thiswas what she needed.

I climbed into the world above, where the sun just touched the horizon. The golems were nearly at the gates, still forcing themselves headlong against a binding of commands.

Pain slivered through my back, muscles quivering as new appendages tried to tear themselves free.No, not yet. Hunt by land, find her scent, follow it.

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