Page 59 of Queen Takes Triune
My mouth watered. My fangs descended. My hair spiked, rising like an aggressive dog’s ruff. I didn’t shift, but I felt the massive black dog braced, ready to pounce.
Shadows curled around her, a black swirling tidal pool that came eagerly to lap the smallest drop of our queen’s blood.
She drew her silvered nail down her left wrist all the way to her elbow, providing a liberal offering of blood to splatter on the exposed ground and the eager shadows. Her blood glowed against the darkness, streams of shining magma spending across an obsidian landscape. Glowing molten rock, so bright and beautiful that my eyes watered.
I refused to look away. Or move a muscle. Even though I was slobbering at the mouth like a rabid dog.
She held her arm out over the dirt, letting her blood soak the ground. “Let’s see what kind of tree grows from blood in complete darkness.”
At first, the shadows were too thick to see anything. The ground groaned beneath our feet, making the stories of concrete and steel above us shift. I didn’t spare a glance up or around at the man-made walls. The tower had withstood the tsunami of power released from the blood circle that our queen had dropped around the building without even stepping it out. I was pretty sure it could handle a tree growing in the basement.
I hadn’t seen her grow the grove in Arkansas, though I felt her memory in the bond. She’d died on the heart tree that grew over the grotto. She’d only taken out my heart and then put it back inside its cavity. I never died—my heart had continued to beat eagerly in her hand. So death wasn’trequiredfor her to grow a grove tree.
However, as the first limbs appeared, an icy chill trickled down my spine. Bone-white and thin, the branches quivered as they strained to reach her. I’d gotten used to the sentient trees in the grove, but this new sprout seemed… off.
Maybe it was the corpse-like branches that looked more like bleached bones than wood. Or the eerie, low moan that my dog’s sensitive ears picked up. Like a distant, mournful winter wind, the wood groaned as it reached for her.
She smeared her blood on the smooth white wood, and red buds sprouted. Small flowers unfurled to dangle from the thin limb like living droplets of blood.
But only the limb that she’d touched.
She turned and held out her other hand to me. “The tree would like more of my blood.”
Rooted to the spot, I didn’t move a muscle. There were a million ways she could give the tree her blood and none of them involved me.
Certainly, none of those ways involved me raking claws down her arms and back while she rode me. Or me gripping her delicate throat in my jaws.
The dog her power had given me growled and slobbered, more monstrous than ever. A twisted hulking beast that barely even resembled a normal four-legged hound any longer. My mind flashed to the glittering black eyes of the demon child, cackling in the darkness. Had Tanza possessed me somehow? A remnant of her spirit contaminating me?
Shara said there was something in the darkness that called to me.
Sweat dripped down my forehead as I fought to contain the darkness rising inside me.
Without saying another word, my queen reached up to her shoulders and easily swiped the spaghetti straps down her arms. The gown slipped down her body to disappear in the shadows.
And I was lost.
* * *
SHARA
Goosebumps flared across my arms and not from the chill in the air. Thick velvety shadows caressed my bare skin, suddenly engulfing me in an embrace of darkness that stole my breath.
I stood in a flash flood of dark power that rushed and crashed through the underground tunnels. The currents swirled and pushed against me, dumping power through me that had nothing to do with the blood dripping from my wrist. This was the kind of power that I'd never have to bleed before touching.
The power of endless night and absolute darkness. My father's realm, and now mine.
I'd been born in darkness like this. It knew me, enveloping me in enthusiastic power surges that overloaded my system. Too many sensations. Too much information. Millions of bits of data rushing at me with the speed of a supersonic jet, dumping into my brain at once. I couldn't make sense of anything.
I lost my footing, swept away into chaotic riptides and endless chasms beneath the earth. I couldn't breathe. Think. For all the power filling me, I didn't know how to save myself and pull my mind back from the brink.
Strong arms seized me. Crushed me against a stone-hard chest. I clung to that body like a drowning woman lost at sea. I fought through the tastes of New York City and the multitude of humans living above to focus on the man. The dog. I could feel his black fur beneath my hands. His powerful jaws locked onto my nape and he lifted me, cradling me like a baby kitten in his vicious teeth. He dragged me back to the shore. Away from the tumbling darkness swallowing me up. Something hard pressed against my cheek. Smooth, sleek wood.
The tree. Finally, my mind refocused on my surroundings. I wasn't lost in an underground sea at all. Darkness still crashed around us like turbulent waves, but the tree anchored me. It gave me something to hang on to. It needed me, as much as I needed it.
Hot breath panted against my ear. "It needs your blood."
Yes, I remembered now. It took all my effort to peel back the overwhelming curtain of darkness to focus on the tree against me. The trunk had widened enough for me to wrap my arms around it, gripping branches on the other side for leverage. My bare toes dug into the soil, moistened with my blood.
