Blood & Honey #1

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The liquid heat blazing through me gets encased by an arctic blast of ice that sends a biting chill down into the marrow of my bones. It's a welcoming sensation against the maddening hellfire that Kinley's blood unleashed.

When I open my eyes, the world feels like a new place and yet it hasn't changed at all. I look down at the black veins that now sit stationary on me. They are no longer striving to find their place. They have found their place, their home because I am finally free from the prison where I have been trapped for so long.

The Darkos bloodline, my own bloodline, sought to conceal me, but what they didn't understand is that I have been here all along. The Beast of the Damned and Tristan Darkos are the same person. The only difference is I have clarity of mind and can now access all the power that resides within me. I've been liberated and it feels so damn good.

I stand, flexing the muscles in my hands as I close my eyes feeling the wonderful surge of energy that now runs harmoniously through me as all my cells are now awake. It tingles in the best of ways.

The smell of cinnamon blood and the sounds of a frantically beating heart interrupt the pleasurable sensation I am experiencing. I'm no longer a being with a soul torn in half. After all these years, and even though I could only access the side of me that housed no memories of her, a part of me could never forget whom that sweet, smoldering scent belongs to.

That's the thing that happens when you tear a soul in half. It won't work if one half inexplicably belongs to another. Even the darkest of magic couldn't keep the trapped side of my soul from recognizing Kinley, the human my still heart bleeds for.

Sea-green eyes widen when I turn to face her. She is as beautiful to me as she was when I knew her thousands of years ago.

Looking at her and the way her dark curled tresses tumble down to the small of her back and spill across her shoulders, I know exactly how it is I came to love this human. She didn't give me a choice. She squirmed her way into my cold, black heart and it all started in that field of flowers.

I had never felt for another creature nor had I planned to. This human before me changed that. She changed everything.

"Oh, no. No. No. No. You really are a demon." Panic lines Kinley's voice as she keeps a hand clasped around her neck where I bit her, my true appearance upsetting to her as she has never seen it so clearly before.

Even from over here I can feel my cells reacting to the beat of her heart, pulsing in time with it. It's a feeling she alone generates in me.

When I take a step toward her, Kinley throws a pillow at me and she screams at me to stay away while she dashes for the door.

She doesn't get the knob turned before I have my hand on the door, keeping her from opening it. "Let me out. Let me out!"

Frantically, she tries to pull the door open, her body weakening more with each second that passes in her fright of me and the blood loss. I let it happen because it's what she needs.

"This isn't happening. This can't be happening. I'm trapped in a room with Satan." The tremors in her legs grow so intense she uses the door to keep herself upright as she mumbles to herself about this being a dream and how she needs to wake up or her parents need to pull the plug before "Satan" takes her soul.

I swallow the pain that the last statement inflicts. I've gone through six life cycles with Kinley. It doesn't matter if she starts out admiring me. It always ends the same. With her hating me. There were only two cycles where she didn't. The other cycles she viewed me as nothing more than a monster.

"I need you to calm down." I press myself against her, not to make her feel trapped, but to help stabilize her as her fear is threatening to make her knees buckle. "I must tend to your wound. If I don't, you are going to faint from the blood loss and distress."