“Let’s go,” he said as he pushed himself onto his feet.
Ahmare thought he was going to make it to vertical because he was speaking coherently. Nope. He went down again, to a sitting position this time—and given that the plan had been for them to run? Not good.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He looked at his arms, flipping his hands from palm up to palm down. “Nothing is listening to the commands.”
Ahmare scanned the woods, noting that unlike the kudzu-choked forest that buffered the mountain’s approach, there was nothing but tree trunks and pine boughs to hide behind here at its base. Considering the lack of ground cover, they were sitting ducks, even though the moon was hazy and that cut down on its glow.
And then there was that anatomy exam of a body, no more than five feet away, a beacon for anyone with a halfway decent nose.
Duran made a second attempt to get up. A third.
As he fell back down that last time, she put two and two together and got an oh-hell as an answer.
“You need to feed,” she said roughly.
He recoiled. “No, I’ll be okay. I did about two weeks ago.”
Frowning, she asked, “Chalen gave you females?”
“It was the only way to keep me alive.” He glanced over at the two dead bodies. “And I took those veins just so I could be strong enough for my revenge.”
He seemed confused, as if feeding had been part of a bargain with destiny, and he’d kept his side—so why wasn’t he strong enough to keep going now?
She let herself go down to her knees and yanked up her sleeve. “Let’s do this.”
“No.” He frowned and pushed her arm away. “No, I’ll just—”
“You want to waste time trying to get up a fourth time? I’ve been counting in case you haven’t. And you may have fed fourteen nights ago—” God, she did not want to think of the particulars—and maybe he had been with a female before. Maybe she’d been wrong about that. “—but you know as well as I do that stress and physical exertion will drain the strength fast. And don’t try to tell me you didn’t just get one hell of a workout because I watched you.”
Duran looked off into the woods—as if the idea of her seeing him in that violent state, doing that damage, shamed him.
“Come on,” she said, holding her wrist to him again. “This is not a place to get caught, and I don’t want to have to drag you back to those boulders. I will if I have to, though.”
Ahmare was right.
He did need to feed. Getting away from Chalen, covering the distance, expending the energy he just had . . . it had taken his energy reserve to zero.
And then there was seeing Nexi again.
And Ahmare herself.
All moves on the abacus that had to be balanced by him taking a vein. It was the way biology worked, the setup the Scribe Virgin had created for the species, male taking from female, female taking from male.
“Just do it,” she prompted him. Then she rolled her eyes. “God, you’ve turned me into a Nike commercial.”
“What’s that?”
“The cult didn’t have TV, did it.” She brought her wrist to her mouth. “I’m done talking about this.”
He almost please-don’t-do-that’d her. Because he knew, even before the first scent of her blood hit the air and apparently hopped a ride on a torpedo straight into his nose, that she wasn’t going to stop.
And he wasn’t going to be able to say no.
Duran wasn’t even clear why denying himself her vein was so critical. He and Nexi had fed each other when they needed to, and they hadn’t even had sex. It had just been a no-big-deal exchange of the necessary, one for the other—well, at least on his side, it had been that way. And it should be that way with Ahmare, too—
Not. Even. Close.
As she scored herself and put her wrist directly onto his lips, it became immediately clear that “no big deal” was not at all applicable to Ahmare.
“Everything in the Whole Fucking World” might have covered it.
No, that didn’t go far enough. How about “Universe.”
Everything in the Whole Fucking Universe and an Infinity Past That.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, that barely described the first draw of her precious blood, the first welling inside his mouth . . . the first swallow down his throat. His body, once his own, became hers to control, an extension of her will and direction sure as if he were just another of her limbs, dictated by her and her alone, no part of him his own at this moment.
And forevermore, he suspected.
Which had been the true why of his “no.” On some level, probably the one closest to his survival skills, he had known that there was no going back now. The taste of her, the vitality that blasted through every cell in his body, the tingling, springing, full-tilt-and-then-some that flooded him was at once blinding and telescopically clarifying—
Moaning.
Something was moaning—it was him. Sounds were rising up his throat, and getting no further than that because he was too busy gulping down the wine, the beautiful wine, the astounding, incredible, transforming wine of her blood.
He fell back—either that or the earth came up to support him. And as a bed of soft, fragrant pine needles caught and held him, nature’s mattress, Ahmare accommodated the shift, moving closer, keeping the connection as he continued to drink.
Unlike him, she was not focused on the feeding.
She had oriented herself with her back to the mountain’s ascent, no doubt so that she could catch with her nose any scents carried down on the drafts from the summit. She had a gun in her free hand, and she was sweeping the muzzle in a slow panorama of what was to the left, right, and center of them. As the barrel moved, so, too, did her head, but the two went in opposite directions.
So that either her gun’s sight, or her eyesight, covered or could cover them.
In her watchful protection of him during this most vulnerable time, he knew to his core that she would get deadly if she had to defend him—and she would succeed. She was fierce, but not agitated. Alert, but not afraid. Aggressive, but only if she had to be.
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, and not just because someone was protecting him. It was because he hated that she was in a situation where such defenses needed to be put up. God, he wished he could have brought something to her life other than his body’s need . . . just after she’d been forced to watch his revenge manifest itself all over two other living things.
Even if those guards had been ones who had enjoyed hurting him.
“Keep taking,” she told him without looking down. “I only want to stop once for this.”
Duran closed his eyes and felt a stab in his heart. In the midst of his ecstatic spell, he would do well to keep in mind that this was not a beginning for them. A launching pad to grow closer. A foundation on which to build.
This was biology in wartime.
And when the hell had he gotten to be such a romantic, anyway?
21
AHMARE HAD TO GIVE him credit.
Duran took only what he needed, and then he lapped the wound closed with his tongue and got right to his feet. Usually after a feeding, there was a lull of laziness, a post-vein glow that floated anyone who had just been nourished in a placid pool of satiation. But he was clearly ignoring all that in favor of what she needed from him.
He required blood. She required movement.
So after he nodded to her—a thank-you, she guessed—he pointed to the west and started to run, going slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. Soon enough, the two of them were making an expert marathoner’s time through the forest.
With the wind in her face, and her body on exertion autopilot, her senses were alive, ready to find in the woodland landscape pursuers, aggressors, trackers . . . murderers. She searched what was to the sides of them, and to the rear, her eyes pulling shadows out from behind trees and large boulders, isolating trunks as possible covers, identifying hideouts in fallen logs and stumps.
Duran was doing the same, and the focus they needed on their environment was a good reminder of the reason they were together, of the purpose of this intersection of their lives. The forced intimacy of those daylight hours, which had led to some very naked skin on very naked skin, was exactly like that feeding just now.
A side step, not the ultimate goal.
And in a way, she was grateful. Otherwise, her brain, riding a high of chemicals cooked up by his mouth on her wrist, might have carried her off into an oblivion she could not afford to visit, much less live in—
“Over there,” he said. “That’s the entry.”
Those were the first words he’d spoken since they’d started running, and the fact that they were no more breathless than if he’d had his feet up on a sofa and a sleeping cat on his chest made her stupidly proud. But come on, like she had any control over the contents of her blood or how it nourished him?
Still, she felt as though she mattered, and not just in some ephemeral emotional sense, but in a nuts-and-bolts, chassis, gas-tank kind of way.
It seemed more reliable, more tangible, than what had happened between them in the bunker.
As they came up to an old hunting shack, a nothing-special relic that seemed more likely to have been built and abandoned centuries ago by humans hunting for food instead of sport, unease went through her—and it was a surprise to realize the anxiety didn’t have anything to do with the fact that they were about to break into a cult.
Duran was going to have to go back to Chalen, wasn’t he.
That had been the plan that she’d made with the conqueror. She had agreed that she would take the weapon he gave her, use it to get his female . . . and return it to him. If she didn’t, Ahlan wasn’t getting out of that castle alive.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Duran said as he opened a door that was more air hole than board and nail. When she didn’t immediately follow, he looked over his shoulder. “What?”
His return to that cell had been slightly less traumatic when she hadn’t cared about him. When she’d thought of him as “the prisoner.” Now, she knew she was going to lose one or the other: If she let Duran go free, her brother was dead, and bloodline always should win, right?