Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXXIV⎮Memento Mori

She was straddling a latent dragon with nothing but a toothpick to defend herself! The quiet of the library was so absolute and dreadful that it disturbed nature herself. The want of birdsong stirring outside was as discordant as the shriek of fright that froze in Emma's pipes and palsied every nerve. Markus beheld her with a fixed and terrible stare such as could freeze hell itself.

"Do you weep for me," he asked at last, "or for yourself?" The sound of his voice, detached and cold-blooded, instantly shattered the prodigious silence that had held her in catalepsy.

Though she could breathe again, she could not tear away her gaping eyes, for they were snared by his. Her horror was multiform, the greatest of which was for herself and the guilty hand interposed between them. Why had he not struck her yet or seized hold of the weapon? And why could she do naught but gawp stupidly at him?

"It behooves you to act with great dispatch if you wish to kill me." Notwithstanding his dilating nostrils, he made no move against her, nor undertook to extricate himself from her reach. "Come, Emma, you are wasting my patience. Make a choice or I will make it for you." The latter was said in deadly tones.

It was warning enough to spark her limbs into frenzied action. She scrambled backward, sick with fright and disgust, her movements careless. Her escape was, however, foiled by the abrupt entanglement of the blanket around her legs, coiling about her like a snake. The unexpected cumber tore her screams from their bridles as she fell, flailing hopelessly. The ground came fast to meet her and with it a blow so stunning that she felt her chest sunder with a sickening knell. The pain was piercing and instant! The shock of impalement more so. It choked the breath from her so that she could neither breathe nor scream.

"Emma!" Iron fingers suddenly clamped her arm—a fact which she was only barely aware of— and turned her over onto her back.

She shut her eyes against the fell look upon Markus's face, her mouth agape in silent screams, her pain omnipotent. Whatever he said thereafter was suffocated by the peel of thunder in her ears as the blood pummeled her drums.

At the sudden vice grip on her shoulder, however, her lids sprung apart, and the agony endured heretofore was nothing to the throes suffered as he wrenched the stake from the sheath it had found betwixt her ribs. It was with renewed terror that she watched the blackness flood his eyes, his wings rampant overhead like some diabolical halo. But these were only fleeting minutiae in the face of greater danger—his head was descending swiftly, his face contorted, and his fangs bared for the strike; as it had done in the blood memory that had so tortured her. Over and over she had witnessed that scene!

Was this too only a cruel phantasmagoria or was this earthly moment the last of her life? Was she, like Cleopatra, to die beneath this angel of death—her lover from whose sanguinary kisses she would nevermore awaken? Were the wolfish sounds of his kisses to be the last sounds to touch her ears? These, the last thoughts of waning sentience, prefaced gentler reflections, the foremost of which were for her parents, her aunt and uncle, and for dear Milli most of all. Even as death loomed, she was most afeared for her beautiful sister.

But the violent cessation of his gorging swiftly tugged her back from the gathering darkness. The last thing on earth she had expected was for him to turn and purge all the lifeblood he had siphoned from her heart! An instant thereafter, his fangs were brutally employed in opening the veins in his wrist, which he promptly held to her slackening jaw. "Drink!"

Emma was too shocked to do more than swallow the hot spurting ichor. Although, had she been given a choice, she'd have done so readily, for, upon standing at the precipice of death, she'd found that she desperately wished to live! Not even for the sake of mankind could she have done away with herself and she certainly wasn't capable of slaying dragons.