Page 24 of Irreverent (The Marked Saga #7)

The chandelier above the grand staircase flickered obscenely as I grabbed the banister and slowly made my way up the stairs. Painstakingly slow. Every step I took felt as though I were attempting to climb Mount Everest with a body made up entirely of broken bones. Every small movement sent a storm of agonizing shockwaves up and down my spine. The pain was coming in from every direction, and it only made my anger burn brighter and my head swim harder.

“Let me help you,”

said Gabriel, appearing suddenly behind me without sound or warning. He tried to take hold of my free arm, but I promptly shook him off.

“I think you’ve done enough,”

I bit out and then miscalculated the step in front of me before stumbling forward.

Gabriel’s hands whipped out as quick as lightning, stopping me from smashing face-first into the wooden edge of the stair. I stared down the length of my nose at it, a mere two inches from my face as I hung there, suspended in air before he pulled me back up into a standing position.

I turned my head to the side and met those grief-stricken eyes of his. “If you’re expecting some kind of thank you, you can forget it. I wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for you and my psychotic mother,”

I said and then slapped his hands away from my waist before continuing my way up the stairs again.

“It was the only way to get you to use your abilities, Jemma.”

I ignored his very valid argument. Frankly, I really wasn’t in the mood to hear it. Not with the excruciating agony I was in, or the pounding headache that was viciously assaulting my brain.

“You needed to be afraid for your life,”

he went on, his voice low and pleading.

I whipped around and faced him; to scream at him and tear him to shreds with my bare hands, but by the time I met those tortured green eyes of his, absolutely nothing came out. Because all I saw was pain and remorse and worry oozing out of his pores and skewing his features. In that split second, I realized that doing this to me had probably hurt Gabriel far more than it could have ever hurt me. He was such a softy that way.

“Well, mission accomplished, I guess.”

He squeezed his eyes shut as though my words had physically hurt him. “If there was another way—”

“Yeah, I know,”

I cut in despite myself because I did know. I was simply in too much pain and way too pissed off to see the situation clearly enough to discuss it at the moment. All I wanted to do was find the strength to make it up the remaining eight steps and then crawl my way into bed and die there.

“Let me heal you,”

he said speedily—desperately.

I met his eyes, my heart jumping into overdrive at just the mention of it. We hadn’t bloodshared in over a week. Not since the night he’d stopped us when things had begun to get a little too…complicated. I’d meant to talk to him about then, to find out where he stood, but then Trace fell into his eternal sleep and I stopped caring about everything else altogether.

“I thought you said you didn’t want to do that anymore?”

I searched his eyes for the answer before his mouth could supply the truth.

“That isn’t exactly what I said,”

he said, glancing away from me. “I just needed a break…to get my head on straight again. Besides, none of that matters anymore. You need this, Jemma.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to needing this at this moment due to my battered condition or if he meant in general in order to help me bring Dominic back. Either way, I was taking the offer.

I looked up at him from under my lashes and then nodded. “Fine. Heal me.”

The second the words left my mouth, Gabriel swooped me into his arms and carried me up the remaining stairs and then down the stretch of hallway, only setting me back down onto my feet when we had reached the privacy of my bedroom. With my heart thundering in my chest, I stood in the middle of the room on shaky legs as Gabriel locked my bedroom door and then crossed the room to me.

His expression sank as he took me in. I hadn’t bothered to look at myself in the mirror yet, but I’d run my fingers against my face and could feel the swollen welts and knots all over my body. I knew I was in bad shape and confirming it in the mirror would only make me angrier with the two of them.

He brought his wrist to his mouth and sank his elongated incisors into his skin before pulling back. Two inviting pebbles of blood blossomed in its place. “Take as much as you need,”

he said and then extended his wrist to me.

I didn’t need to be told twice. My fingernails dug into his skin as I dragged his wrist up to my face and covered the two puncture wounds with the whole of my mouth, sucking ravenously.

Within a few blinks of my almost-swollen-shut eyes, his restorative blood was swimming my system, healing and strengthening every broken cell and bruised part of my body like magic. With every mouthful, I felt the aches melt away, slowly at first and then all at once as though they had never been there to begin with.

My body swayed toward him, my belly pressing against his as I sucked down harder and without shame. He owed me this and I wasn’t letting go until every inch of my body was returned to the state it had been when I woke up this morning.

Gabriel stumbled back, taking several retreating steps until his legs hit the front of my bed and he dropped into a sitting position. I fell with him, my legs bending as I kneeled in front of him.

Still drinking.

Still taking all that I needed.

All that I wanted.

The longer I drank, the better I felt, but I could feel Gabriel weakening beneath me. I could literally feel him waning, withering like a beautiful rose without a drop of sunlight. And still, he didn’t protest or try to stop me. He was staying true to his words, giving me as much as I needed without any conditions or restraint.

His essence weakened further as I continued drinking, my hold on his arm the only thing keeping him from dropping backward onto my bed. I could feel his emotions pouring out of him and into me as though an invisible funnel had sprung up between us. There was so much guilt and remorse and yearning. So much sadness and want and loneliness. But it was all mixed together in a maelstrom that had no heads or tails.

It was making my head spin.

Ripping my mouth from his wrist, I dropped his arm and straightened, taking several hurried steps backward, away from the scene of my crime. Gabriel’s lidded eyes fluttered before he flopped backward onto the bed, as though he didn’t even have enough energy to sit upright anymore. As though he’d just keeled over and died.

“Fuck,”

I hissed under my breath as I rushed back to the foot of the bed and leaned over him. “Gabriel? Are you okay?” I asked as I assessed his face. It was hard to tell in the dim light of my bedroom, but I swore his face seemed paler. Almost sickly.

Had I bled him out? Oh, god, please no!

“Gabriel!”

I called again, this time slapping his cheeks in an effort to wake him up in case he had simply passed out from the blood loss. Why did I have to be such a gluttonous cow? “Please don’t be dead,” I said, a strangled cry scratching against the bottom of my throat.

His lips moved as though he had said something, but I hadn’t caught a word of it.

“What did you say?”

I asked, as I lowered my ear to his mouth and waited.

“I’m…not…dead,”

he whispered, his voice so low and gravelly, it hardly sounded like his own. “I need…”

“You need? You need what?”

I asked in a panic and then pulled back to examine him. His hair was damp and stuck to his forehead and his eyes were all the way closed, giving no sign of those kind, moss-green eyes that made the world a better place. “Tell me what to do!”

“Blood.”

“Blood!”

Of course, he needed blood! He was a freaking vampire for crying out loud. As great as their healing ability was, it was useless to them if they were injured or, you know, almost completely drained of their blood. They would first need to feed, to replenish their body’s life source, and only then would they be able to fully heal.

Duh.

I hopped onto the bed and then crawled over to the right side of it. Sitting back on my legs, I lifted my left arm above his head and then brought my wrist down to his lips, waving it around as though trying to entice a dog with a piece of meat.

“Come on, Gabriel. Bite,”

I pleaded, but all he did was lay there looking gaunt and dead.

For fuck’s sake.

Only I could manage to get three unconscious men in my house at the same time. Like you seriously needed to be a special brand of bad omen to accomplish something like that and yet I managed to do it so effortlessly.

“Gabriel, you have to drop your fangs,”

I pleaded, trying to jam my wrist past his lips, but all I managed to do was rub my skin against his teeth. And not even the pointed ones.

Realizing he was way too out of it to even drop his fangs, I hopped off the bed and made a beeline for my jacket hanging on the back of my chair. I grabbed one of the smaller pocketknives I carried as a backup and then rushed back to the bed beside him. Twisting it open, I brought the blade to my skin and then winced as I sliced a tiny cut against my vein.

Blood immediately flowed out from the wound.

Biting down on my lip, I brought my wrist above his face again and let the blood dribble down from my wound to his mouth. Within seconds, his lids began to flap as though slowly coming back to life before he slapped his hand around my wrist and jerked it down to his mouth, dragging my whole body right along with it.

My right hand came down onto his chest just in time to stop myself from collapsing on top of him. Properly braced above him, I looked down and watched him as he drank my blood, feeling his energy slowly returning to him through our connection. I didn’t feel much else though, and especially not the deliciousness that comes from a vampire bite because he wasn’t actually biting me, nor were his fangs inside me. Apparently, that was an important part of the whole reaching-nirvana thing.

“Feeling better?”

I asked when his eyes finally opened. His pupils were still greedily swallowing up every spec of green in his eyes, leaving only the boundlessness of the feeding beast, but at least his eyes were open now.

Gabriel didn’t answer.

A shiver prickled down the back of my neck as I stared down into the dark void of his eyes. “Okay, that’s enough,”

I decided, feeling a little uncomfortable and lightheaded. “You can heal the rest of the way on your own,” I said and then tried to pull my wrist away.

Gabriel, however, had other plans.

Instead of releasing my wrist, he clamped down harder and then clicked out his fangs, plunging them into my wrist as he sucked down against the open wound, and just like that, all the uncomfortable feelings I had disappeared into thin air. Suddenly, it was me that was swaying, eyes fluttering, fingers digging into the thin fabric of his dark, fitted t-shirt as though I couldn’t get close enough to him.

The deeper his fangs burrowed, the harder his venom hit me until I was lifting, floating, sailing above the wreckage that had become my life. In that tiny, magical moment, nothing mattered. Nothing hurt. I was weightless and untouchable in a reverie that had no beginning and no end.

My body weakened and I crumbled to the bed beside him, curling against him with my left arm still pressed against his mouth. A growl vibrated from somewhere deep in his chest as I nuzzled my face against his neck and closed my eyes.

It was the last thing I remembered.