Page 43 of Amethyst and Iron
I just needed a few moments for my healing to kick in.
Footsteps sounded.
Steady, determined, ominous as shit.
I felt my wrist heal.
The footsteps drew closer.
Come on. Come on. Faster… heal faster.
“I have to commend you, Lazriel, evading the protection of The Shadowed is not an easy thing to accomplish. It takes tremendous skill. Yet, you have succeeded. They have been searching for you, fighting to get a lock on you, for nearly three hours. Theyarenear now.” With a flash of speed, he came into view, standing just ten feet from me and looking so fucking casual about it. “But not near enough.” He crouched down and grinned creepily. “So, do not fret. We will not be interrupted by them.”
With a burst of speed, I shot back to my feet, but staggered unsteadily the moment my boots hit the ground.
Shit.
Victor’s lips quirked.
“What do you want?” I rasped, hating that I had to spit up my own blood in front of him, just to get my next words out. “You said it’s not time to kill me. No doubt, for some fucked-up purist fanatic reason.”
“Ah, yes, you largely discount your vampire side when it suits you.” He cocked his head to the side. “There is much more than just the kill that arouses and sustains a true vampire, youngling. There is the hunt. Inciting fear. Thepunishment.”He took a step closer, making me tense. “But in this specific case? Pretty thing, I mean to break you.”
His words to me the first time I’d encountered him played on my mind.
“That’s right, hybrid bitch, look at me with all that terror. I do love demonstrating to perceived apex predators that they’re really the prey. That fear will grow. It will drive you to the point of paranoia and near insanity.”
“All youPuritasmembers are fucking psychos to the core.”
His eye twitched.
A crack? Small, but something. And from what I’d already come to know of him, it wouldn’t besmallto him.
“Blood calls to blood, I see.”
What the—
“Still not healed.” He tutted as he took in the sight of the gashes in my head still bleeding, that wheezing sounding from my ruptured lung, and me struggling to stand steadily and remain in one spot from the dizziness of it all. “Your healing abilities can seem like such an asset when standing against lesser beings who do not possess your physical durability. Even magic-wielders. You’ve come to believe that from your antics at Graverun. However, there is alsothis.”He held up his right hand and jerked two of his fingers to the side, snapping them. He didn’t show a single sign of pain, not even a flinch. And in a split-second, they healed. “Not convincing enough? Hmm.” He had me jolting as he pulled a stake from the inside pocket of his charcoal suit jacket. He spun it rapid-fire in his hand, then suddenly shoved it through his shirt and deep into his gut.
He grinned as he twisted it, widening the wound, then ripped it out.
Still not even a flinch.
He lifted his shirt and I watched the wound seal in less than a second.
“Thisis what you are up against.” He winked at me. “By the way, when I drove this stake into my gut was your one advantage against me. But you’re still so compromised that you couldn’t even make the move needed.”
He caught my gaze dropping to the stake he was leisurely spinning in his hand.
“Not a chance,” he said with a laugh, stowing it back inside his jacket pocket. “That wasn’t for you. It’s for The Shadowed when they arrive after we’re done here. A little message to make it clear that even attempting to interrupt my time with you was a fatal mistake.”
“What exactly is your obsession here?”
“So much you don’t know. All because of your whore mother.”
I snarled, my fangs dropping involuntarily.
“There’s the vampire coming out to play. Yes. Between this and our last encounter, now I see how it works with you.”
