Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXXIV⎮A Question Of Price

The blood welled thick and vinous from his wrist, so dark a crimson it was nigh as black as the midnight roses in his garden.

Emma tore her gaze from the wound and relinquished it to his. The vampire was preternatural in his stillness. It was only the tremble of the firelight shifting his shadow on the wall that animated him. His incisive black eyes transfixed her so completely that it seemed an age before she felt herself capable of stirring her mouth to speak.

"What will become of me if"—she licked the dryness from her under lip—"I drink your blood?"

Still, he made no movement, not even to breathe, his words leaving his mouth as though disembodied and far-flung, seeming to echo in her very bones from a bygone era. "I offer knowledge." Then, finally, his lips compressed with an unearthly and frightening smile; narrow was the movement that defined it, but, for all that, it was an omniscient display of sentience that bespoke too much of his ancient past—decadence; poignancy; bitterness; and infinite world-weariness. "But, I warn you, knowledge comes at a price."

"What price?"

He gave a humorless grunt. "That is for the fates to know—or the Trinity, if you like—and for us merely to hazard the risk, my dear."

Once more her eyes fell to his proffered wrist, the deep sanguinary color so evocative of the Edenic fruit of knowledge and disgrace. Would she, like Eve before her, fall from what little grace she still possessed. Would she fall as Markus had fallen? "Will your blood make of me a daemon?" She could feel how heavily his eyes pressed upon her soul. "Like it did Victoria."

"I would need to take from your veins every last bit of warmth before such would betide you. Your heart must beat its last ere mine can fill it with new life."

"You must mean death."

"Immortality is hardly death." There was a soft and tenebrous rage implied in his whisper. "And, little though you think of me, I do not, and have never, forced that upon the unwilling." His chest rumbled with impatience, startling her. "Come now, my dear, the wound is closing and my patience wearing thin. Either take it or refuse it, but do one or the other, for this is an offer I make only once."

What knowledge would his blood impart? And was she not safer being ignorant? Extraneously, as though witnessing someone other than herself, she perceived her hand moving—her fingers wrapping themselves around his wrist. The other followed shortly thereafter until she could feel his sinews tense beneath each of her palms and all her fingertips. He was all mystery to her, she thought as she lowered her mouth to hover over the puncture wounds, her breath hesitant as it left her lips. There was much to know, but the existential and all-consuming question of his downfall held primacy in her mind tonight. She licked her lips once more, eliciting an answering growl of anticipation from the creature that had bled for these waiting answers. "I want to know who you are."

"Yes."

"I want to know why you fell." Anna had only touched on the subject, but never actually gotten around to satisfying Emma's hungry heart.

In answer, he moved to stand behind her, drawing her curtain of hair from her neck, his trailing fingers rousing the fine hairs at her nape. "Then drink," he whispered at her back, clenching his fist so that the wound wept anew.

With her spine flush against Winterly, Emma lifted his forearm for that final indelible kiss, closing her mouth over the wellspring of truth.

Short chapter, I know! *ducks to avoid flying vegetables* I'm sorry! #notsorry Next chapter is from Winterly's POV. Have patience, my lovelies.