Page 49 of Lord of Ruin (The Age of Blood #2)

But none of it compared to what had happened to the poor thing’s face, when they could glimpse it through the matted fall of her hair.

Her eyeteeth had become fangs that hung over her lower lip, her tongue flicking between them as she scented the air with it.

Her pupils had vanished into pools of darkness, wide and unblinking, and Shan wondered if she could even see anymore.

With the way Mel tilted her head, following each and every movement Shan made, she doubted it even mattered.

Many creatures relied on senses more acute than human sight, and Shan felt awfully exposed.

“I wonder if her wings can carry her weight,” the King said, idly drumming his fingers on the notebook perched on his knee. “It doesn’t seem possible, but she did manage to get up there.”

Shan swallowed past the dryness of her throat, pleased that her voice betrayed none of her fear. “We cannot tell without releasing her to a wider pasture, and that seems unwise.”

“Quite unwise,” the King agreed, “but perhaps with the proper precautions…” Trailing off, he started scribbling in the notebook, leaving Shan to watch with a growing sense of disquiet.

This vampire had once been a Blood Worker, a person just like them, but now she was a feral creature with no signs of intelligence or humanity. And the King was just sitting there, chatting like they hadn’t done something so profane that they could never find forgiveness.

This was what she had wanted, wasn’t it?

Everything she had struggled so long for, gathering scraps of knowledge to build herself leverage that could threaten a kingdom.

She had killed for it, she had thrown away her life’s work for it, she had lost her brother for it.

She had twisted Isaac round her fingers to simply study a fraction of what they had done to this girl and potentially lost him in the process.

So why was she so afraid? Here she was with the most powerful man in the world, his most trusted adviser, balking at the first bit of unpleasantness.

No, she was stronger than that. She circled back, grabbing the small cage from under the table.

The rat within squeaked plaintively, but she steeled her heart.

It was just a stray beast, nabbed from the back alleys of Dameral, plump and overfed from the refuse that it had dug into.

This wasn’t a cruelty—it was merely pest control.

Shan still lied, even to herself. “Ready when you are.”

The King hummed, turning a page and setting his pen in place. “On you, Shan.”

The rat squealed again, seeming to sense that its end was coming soon, its cries escalating to shrieks with each step closer. It seemed that someone at least had the sense to fear the monster that they had created.

Shan slashed her palm open with her claw, pressing the bleeding wound to the ward around the cell—a recent safety measure, put in place after Mel had tried to reach through and bite the Eternal King during one of her fits of hunger.

It kept her secure, but from the way her nostrils flared, Shan was certain that she could smell the blood on the air.

It didn’t matter. Shan opened a small hole in the ward, and before she could second-guess herself, she upended the carrier, sending the rat scrambling through the hole before it landed hard on the marble floor inside the cell.

Pulling back, Shan let the ward seal as the rat twisted to its feet, back arched as it hopped back towards the edge of the cell only to hit the blood ward.

There was no way out, and Shan forced herself to watch.

Mel’s tongue flicked out, a low growl reverberating deep in her chest, a rumble unlike anything that Shan had ever heard before.

For a long moment Shan thought nothing was going to happen.

Hoped that nothing was going to happen. But then Mel launched herself off her corner, her strong legs pushing off the bars as she soared across the cell.

She caught the rat in one clawed hand, its frantic struggles unable to best the beast as Mel closed her fist. The crunch of its spine echoed through the room as the pest fell limp, but it was still alive.

Shan could see the sheer terror in its eyes as Mel sank her fangs into the soft pouch of its belly, tearing through fur and fat to the viscera beneath.

A messy affair as Mel drank the creature dry, damaging flesh and muscle in her artless quest for blood.

Bile rose in the back of Shan’s throat, acidic and harsh, but she did not say a word, the scratch of the King’s pen barely audible over the slurps and gnashing from the cage.

“Fascinating,” the King said at last, setting his notebook aside before moving closer to the cage. “I did not expect her hunger to be so… all-consuming.”

“It surprised me as well,” Shan said, her voice soft and dull, even to her own ears.

But the King didn’t seem to notice, eagerly watching as Mel stripped the carcass clean, her tongue rooting through the rat’s corpse, dragging out organs dripping in blood.

She ground them in her mouth with an excitement that twisted Shan’s stomach, squeezing out every drop of blood before discarding the pulped flesh back onto the floor.

He turned back to the girl, watching as she finished her feast, looking at the creature like it was some prized hound. But as her primal hunger was sated, Mel’s body started to shift again, the monstrous transformation receding back, the vampire fading away.

“Excellent,” the King breathed, wrapping his fingers around the bars as he leaned in to watch more closely. And Shan, despite the way acid churned in her stomach, leaned in as well.

There was something grotesque about the process, Mel’s body twisting and jerking in convulsions as she scrabbled against the marble floor.

The claws retracted back into her nail beds, the blunt tips of her fingers emerging as her back cracked, the curve straightening and the wings shrinking into nubs as Mel howled in pain.

Her cries echoed off the walls, sending shivers down Shan’s spine as she watched the girl sob quietly, awareness slowly coming back to her eyes.

Mel pressed one hand—one small, fragile, human hand—against the remains of the rat, before glancing up at the King. “What have you done to me?”

“Why,” the King replied with a smile so cold that he could have been carved from ice, “we’ve perfected you.”

The girl just blinked, and Shan watched as her entire world restructured around her.

Everything the young Blood Worker had believed, all her faith in the world and magic and her endless Eternal King crystallizing into something new.

She had wanted power, had thrilled in it as she supped blood from the vein, and now had been born into something completely new.

Mel looked up at them with a pout. “I want another.”

It earned a laugh from the King, an indulgent smile as he assured Mel that she would get her fill, but dread still curled dark in Shan’s heart as she was unable to deny what they had done any longer.

“It is something more than Blood Working now,” Shan whispered. “She’s… she’s a vampire.”

The King glanced at Shan, not contesting her assessment, head tilted to the side. His eyes were burning with curiosity, glinting like emeralds in the light. “Yes, she is,” the King breathed, his voice as soft as caress, “and I simply must know everything. Don’t you feel the same, Shan?”

Hells help her, but she did. What they had done to Mel was a blasphemous thing, but there was a part of her, deep down, that was curious.

That wanted to push Blood Working to new heights, that wanted to dissect Mel like the marvel that she was, that wanted to see if this experience could be replicated.

But…

The King seemed to sense her hesitation.

He turned his back on Mel and the remains of her meal, the full weight of his attention nearly overwhelming Shan.

She shuddered as he stepped closer, brushing the hair away from her face, trailing the back of his fingers against her cheek.

His touch was like a brand, burning his dominion onto her, but his words were kind.

“Do not be afraid of it, Shan. You are so much more than any of the other fools in my court, and nothing you want could ever disgust me.”

Shan closed her eyes as the King’s hand drifted further, sliding down her back to pull her close.

Blood and steel, she knew that this was wrong.

That was a betrayal in ways she did not even have words for.

This went beyond her designs to merely play the part the King wanted of her, this was an intimacy that she could never give him.

But he held her close like even her darkest parts were things to be cherished, and he was right about one thing.

Never once had he flinched away from the darkness within her, never once had he judged her for it. For all that she tried to deny it, they were cut from the same cloth, and he could understand in ways that Isaac never could.

That Samuel never could.

“I do want it,” she whispered, and she swore that she could feel the ghost of his lips on her.

But it was only him leaning into whisper, “There’s my girl.”