Page 63

Fifty-Eight

HARLOW

The moment Alec commands me to move, I know what he’s about to do, so his attack on Cedric isn’t a surprise.

Once making it across the room, I scramble to my feet. Now, Alec is on top of Cedric, fist after fist coming down onto his face while being equally blocked with Cedric’s own hits.

Leave!

Realistically, I know I’m no good to him, especially like this.

The cup catches my eye and I run toward the broken fireplace.

Six months ago, I would have died before doing what I’m about to, but then again, six months ago I wasn’t the same person I am now.

It’s with very little thought that I place my lips to the cup at the same time a crash comes from behind me. The two vampires continue to throw one another around the small structure, evenly matched. I only hope that drinking the blood finalizes the change instantly and I can be some help to Alec.

Darkness cuffs my neck, making me shiver at its abrupt arrival. Drink , it demands, and I don’t hesitate to tip the cup back, swallowing every last drop of the earthy flavour that’s nothing like the sweetness of Alec’s blood. Welcome back, it whispers.

The blood pours into every corner of my body. Every nerve vibrates awake. Every sense becomes sharper, more aware. I can hear every curse, hiss, and grunt from the fighting vampires.

My hand lets the cup go, feeling oddly weak while the rest of me has never felt stronger.

My gums throb again, but this time, my incisors lengthen into full fangs. I reach up to touch the pointed ends, knowing later I’ll have time to dissect my new body.

For now, I turn back to my mate.

Just the sight of him has an impression snapping inside me. Something that makes me feel him—his rage while he battles. The grey connection I spotted after drinking from him strengthens into a brilliant bold colour, a myriad of black and purple.

I once said that while I was his Bride, witches don’t have mates.

Now, I’m a vampire. One of him.

His.

Darkness slithers around my body, a reminder it’s still here. My hands flex, heat surging into my palms. My magick never left; I was simply too drained to call upon it, but becoming a vampire has made me strong enough to control them.

The sight of Alec being slammed into a wall has red coating my vision. Fire ignites in one of my palms, a perfect little fireball to destroy the one threatening what’s mine.

Beneath my feet, the ground rumbles the same way my Darkness caused the cave-in. The same black tendrils wrap my arms, mingling with my flames and melding together, forming a black flame. Just as hot. Just as deadly.

You’re ours for good now, it whispers, but for once, I’m not frightened. I embrace it both as a witch who controls black magick and as a vampire who is a Dark creature.

Both vampires look up from their fight with different expressions. Cedric’s mouth slips open, his barely audible, “Shit!” heard as though I’m standing beside him. Alec smiles, his gaze hotter than the black flame. He backs up, leaving Cedric a rumpled, bloody mess on the ground who’s trying to regain his footing.

His lip curls. “You’re both idiots. You have no idea the mistake you’ve made, Sinclair. You’re the combination of a vampire and a witch—the exact weapon they’ll desire. Witches will follow you into Darkness, an army for the vampires. You’ll never have a side because you’re straddling the line of both. There’s nowhere you can hide where they won’t search.”

“Good thing it’s no longer your problem.”

I lift my hand, the black flame dancing around my fingers as I move them back and forth, almost thoughtfully. But his death isn’t mine, no matter what he’s done to me.

“What would you like done? He’s your best friend.”

My question seems to spark a bit of hope in Cedric who uses the wall to get partially upright. “Alec…don’t do this. You know how much Cora’s death broke me. I don’t blame you, not really.”

The plea rolls off Alec, who gives him a look of disgust, mingled with a bit of sorrow, but also encompassed in a lot of indifference. “He was my best friend, but he stopped being that the second he thought to take your life.”

“No!”

Striding over Cedric whose final escape attempt is hindered by Alec, I tip my hand to allow the fire to roll off my palm and onto his body, his scream for help shifting into a howl of death.

His body bursts into flames, a mirage of black and orange, and Alec yanks me away. My tendrils unwrap the flame and link themselves around Cedric, holding him still as the fire bursts rather than burns, the combustion throwing Alec and me backwards. Within a moment, Cedric’s body is a pile of ash and the crumbling home falls victim to silence.

Alec slowly turns toward me, his gaze wandering my face and then my body as he reaches for me. He grazes the spot on my neck Cedric gripped, a flash of fury coming through the bond, but he doesn’t linger for long, moving to stroke my cheek, following the line toward my mouth, thumb parting my lips. He pokes the tip of my new fangs, amazement brightening his eyes.

“Fuck, Hellion,” he breathes. “Look at you. Your eyes—one’s still purple and one’s black.”

A sign of both sides of me.

“You’re a vampire. Forever. You know what this means?”

“That your obsession gets to continue until the end of time. Which, according to Cedric, will be any year now.”

His expression doesn’t falter with my sarcasm. “I was always told as a vampire, we lost our ability to love, that the closest thing we can feel to that level of longing is obsession. Miss Sinclair, while I’ve been obsessed with you since the moment we met, obsessions, even for immortals, can be fleeting once satisfied. With you…I’ll never be satisfied. There is nothing that’ll ever fulfill this need inside me. Obsessions end, but you’ll never be my ending. You’re my middle, my forever, until eternity reaches a conclusion— if there is an end. What I feel for you now is different than when we first met, and if it is possible for an immortal to love, then this might be it, because obsession…obsession is too weak of a word. You were the unexpected in my life. My lungs inhale air only so I can take your scent inside me. I blink so each time my eyes open, I’ll see you all over. And if my heart could beat, it would beat to the rhythm yours used to. Now, it beats to you. Only you. All of you. I don’t know what to say, what words to use, what title to give it. Love, obsession, something grander. Not that it matters, because it doesn’t change the simple fact that you’re a part of me now. The best parts of me, and I’ll never let you go.”

The feeling of completion upon finishing the change wasn’t true completion because this right here, right now, my heart knitting its final few stiches together is true completion. A conclusion.

“You claimed to not know what words to use, but that was a lot of them. I’m no longer Harlow Sinclair, the witch with the cure. Are you okay with that?” Is the cure even still a part of me or did me dying end the curse for good? As an immortal, I’ll never have a child, so I’ll forever be the last of my line.

“You’ll always be my Sinclair.”

“I’m still a witch. Still have powers”

“You’re a fucking miracle. You’re perfect.” He angles my face up, his fingers sliding into my hair and keeping me trapped. “My feelings aren’t dependant on your magick and—” He stops abruptly, loosening his grip on my scalp to bring forward a chunk of hair, allowing me to see what he has.

My normally orange-red hair is mingled with black streaks, like a dye job. The Darkness within me chuckles before slithering back to sleep. It’s black like Violet and Arthur’s hair was before their deaths, which was obviously an effect from black magick, based on their early wedding photo where Violet’s hair was brown.

“What does this mean?”

“It means I’ve fully embraced black magick.” But not entirely, because I still retain my red. Violet and Arthur still used elemental magick right up until the end and they had no physical signs of it. So many questions that I might never have answers to, though perhaps Morgan knows something.

Morgan. Coven. Shit. If they barely could look at me after seeing what Violet and Arthur did to me, how will they take this? Alec may be my forever, but I don’t want to lose the family I’ve just gained.

“You’re a creature of Darkness in every sense of the word. How do you feel about that?”

Comforted in a way. Fulfilled in another. For so long, my fire was enough, but now my worries over going completely bad and losing myself seem so silly. Darkness is power, not evil.

“I feel perfect.”

“You are perfect,” he growls, hauling me closer. His body feels impenetrable. His scent is stronger. Everything about him is more . “You’re all mine, Sinclair.”

I feel it, I tell him in his head. The moment the change happened, I felt your emotions. Felt you. Guess you’re my mate too.

His eyes narrow. As though I’d allow another outcome.

“Earlier you mentioned being told vampires don’t feel love. If that was true, then what I felt for you this morning would have disappeared, maybe been replaced by something else. But it hasn’t. If anything, it’s more intense. A festering of need inside me I can’t ignore. I love you, Alec. I don’t have a big speech, though. Call it the shitty education of the twenty-first century, but we don’t profess our love with sonnets or anything like that. Just three simple words.”

Three simple words are all I want from you, Hellion.

I love you.

He growls again before my back is shoved against the wall, the aged stone cracking beneath the force. What would have broken my back hours ago feels like nothing more than me leaning. Such a strange thing, to gain so much strength within minutes.

He yanks me up until I’m suspended in his arms, his hands splaying along my ass. His mouth clashes with mine, his kiss hard and possessive, teeth nicking my bottom lip. His tongue lays his claim as surely as his speech moments ago.

I no longer have to be gentle with you. Even his inner voice holds a sense of wonder to it.

You’ve been gentle ? Each time with him hasn’t been hearts and flowers—not that I wanted it to be—but I can’t imagine harder.

Introducing to you every aspect of immortality will be my undoing, Hellion. He pulls back from the kiss to rest his forehead on mine. “I’m still trying to convince myself you’re real. That all of this is real.” His finger strokes the side of my face before pausing, his hand flattening on both cheeks as he lifts away, a slight shake making his hair bounce. “Harlow, I felt you die. I died too, only returning to life when you did.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I had to kill them. I remembered your blood was still in my body, though I wasn’t sure if it’d work considering I know next to nothing about the process, and took a gamble that paid off.

“You knew you’d transition.” His hold tightens on my face. “You chose it anyway.”

“I chose you .”

His eyes ignite into black molten, but before he reacts on it, he asks, “Who took you? By the time I arrived, the witches who kidnapped you were already dead and gone.”

“My parents.”

His hand slips from my hair, the vein at his wrist gaining my attention. My gums throb again, this time with the memory of the taste of his blood. Craving strikes me, one driven by newly discovered bloodlust, not mortal curiosity.

“What—”

“Shh.” I turn his hand so the meaty part is facing me. “Later.”

And then I sink my fangs into his hand, this time truly tasting him. Beneath the metal flavour, there’s power. A dominance that comes through his blood, demanding I drink, to never stop drinking.

He groans, shifting his hips, and makes another kind of craving quickly escalate. He mentioned no longer having to be gentle with me, so now I want proof of it.

“This feels fucking fantastic,” he groans. “I never imagined…”

He’s an old vampire; surely at some point over the centuries he would have drank from another?

I lift my fangs from his skin. “You’ve never…?”

“From them, yes,” he replies, and instantly I despise the unknown vampire who once had Alec’s mouth on them, “but never allowed them from me. Allowing another to feed from you is a vulnerability, and I never trusted anyone enough for that.”

His attention falls to his bleeding hand, his unspoken words louder than anything he could say. He lowers his hand to the side but disappointment doesn’t hover for long before he’s pulling me close and baring his neck.

Feed from here.

My fangs break the skin where his pulse, had he still had one, would beat.

As his blood flows into me, connecting us in other ways than anything prior, he brings my wrist to his mouth, his bite nothing more than a tickle. Any of that mortal discomfort at having my skin broken into is gone. Now, there’s nothing righter.

No one will ever touch you, Harlow. I dare anyone—witch, vampire, or otherwise—to attempt to take you from me again.

If someone tries, I’ll burn them alive. I don’t like the idea of you being harmed either.

He removes his teeth from my wrist and I pull away when his hands slide between us. My legs tighten around his waist and he unzips his pants before tearing mine.

Carina’s gonna kill you if you keep ruining her clothes.

I’ll buy her a whole fucking mall if it keeps her quiet, as long as I can keep doing this.

He braces at my centre before sliding cleanly in and— holy fuck.

He chuckles, and I realize my exclamation wasn’t only in my head. Different than before, he comments.

“Mhm.” So much more.

An intense amount more. I feel every little ridge of his cock sliding against my walls. Sex as an immortal feels like what I do after multiple orgasms as a mortal, when I’m hypersensitive and tight, any little movement able to shove me over the edge. As a vampire, I’m already on the edge, despite the increased stamina.

Show me how a vampire fucks, Alec.

My pleasure, Hellion.