Page 4 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter Four

“ I t cannot be a mere coincidence,” I whispered. “But how…”

Gwen pushed away from the mantel and hovered. “What is it, Elspeth?”

“I’ve been employed by a vampire coven across the harbor for the past few months,” I explained, pacing across the rug, my mind working as fast as the words seemed to flow out of me. “As a charwoman. That’s the job I was returning home from when I was attacked. You know the old castle ruins on the edge of town?”

“Someone lives there ?” Gwen asked, incredulous.

“Go on, Elspeth,” Morrigan encouraged.

“It never bothered me that my employers were vampires—I’ve worked for vampire households before. And I thought, well, there couldn’t be anything that peculiar about their habits, either. They can be an eccentric sort, sometimes. And, yes, who indeed would be bold enough to live in such a haunted place?

“These ones keep to themselves. Our meetings are brief, mostly between myself and my employer. They leave my wages in the same place as always, and there are locked rooms and secret staircases I’m forbidden to clean. But they’re strict about one rule above all: the curtains are to remain drawn at all times. No exceptions.”

“Who’s your employer?” Josephine asked. “Whose coven is it?”

“Lady Tremaine. Lady Sonia Tremaine,” I replied. “Her coven hasn’t been kind. I don’t merit anything except their ridicule whenever they decide to pay attention to me. Otherwise, I’m invisible, which I often prefer.”

A palpable silence filled the room.

Josephine scoffed. “She’s giving herself titles now, is she?”

“Wretches,” Gwen all but spat. “Why would they come back?”

I stopped short. “You’re telling me,” I drew out the words slowly, “all this time I’ve been working for a coven strong enough to wield curses? A coven of a blood sorcerer ? It’s a wonder I hadn’t been killed months ago.”

“Sonia’s the sole vampire among them strong enough,” Morrigan answered. “None of the rest have her power. If you’ve been useful to her, doing the chores she thinks are beneath her station, then I don’t see a reason for her to have you killed.”

Gwen fluttered near the window. “They’ve been gone a long time. Are we not at least considering that she could have an entire coven’s worth of sorcerers since we’ve seen her last?”

“I’m doubtful to think so,” came Morrigan’s reply. “Sorcery was the one vice she could never give up—she tore us all apart to craft it in the manner she wanted. I can’t imagine she would make herself vulnerable in that way. It would leave her open to attack if she created new vampires with her own blood. Too many threads that could cut her down.”

“But,” Josephine said, “we must assume her coven has outgrown ours. She’ll be wanting strength in numbers. Vampires who’re desperate to be close to her power.”

“Vampires like the one who attacked me,” I agreed. “If she hadn’t planned to dispose of me, then you don’t think… she might’ve intended to have me Turned? To join her coven? ”

“That might be the likelier possibility,” Morrigan said. “And you’ve laid ruin to her plans.”

“She’ll be raving mad,” Gwen said. “I’d give anything to be the bat in her attic, hearing her shake the walls.”

“The curse would still pass down through their bloodlines. She can make all the vampires she likes, but they’ll still have a weakness,” Josephine said. “We designed it that way.”

“They would take the risk, if only to outnumber us,” Morrigan answered. “If she isn’t Turning anyone herself, she’d make the others do it for her. Their entire coven carries the burden of their curse. Clever as always, Jo—the one way she could never outwit you.”

“Of course not,” Josephine said, preening.

“If her plans hadn’t been spoiled, I’m afraid to think of what might have become of me. The monster she would’ve made.”

“Do you recall how many she has within her coven?” Morrigan asked.

I shook my head. “There seemed to be so many of them coming and going through the halls. A few of them entertained themselves by making my daily tasks more difficult. The others I rarely saw. But the castle has at least ten bedchambers still habitable, most of them occupied, some shared.”

“You’ve cleaned ten bedrooms? Per day? Per week?” Gwen wondered. “I hope she’d paid you well.”

“Not quite.” I sunk down onto the chaise at the end of the bed. “Sonia kept hers locked, with a few others. But six bedrooms every other week on top of scrubbing and mopping and doing the washing… it’s a lot to upkeep. For all the ruins that aren’t livable anymore, there’s still a lot of ground to cover.”

“Let’s see, twenty or thirty vampires and their despicable blood sorcerer against our scrappy, foolhardy coven… I like our odds,” Gwen mused.

“Our odds of becoming their blood-wine, you mean.” Josephine flew away from the window, the curtains rustling in her wake. “Sun’s coming up,” she warned. “We’ll be off, then, and leave the two of you alone. Lots of work ahead if our old friend’s dragging us into another fight.”

“ Friend .” Gwen snorted. “That’s too generous.”

I twisted a handful of my chemise in my fist. “I didn’t mean to stir up any trouble.”

“This isn’t your fault,” Morrigan said. “But you may have saved us from walking into an ambush.”

Gwen and Josephine fled the room, and somewhere, the distant beat of wings became bare footsteps slapping on stone. Before me, in a cloud of fog tinged with the strange yet familiar iron-scent and ether—that I guessed could only be vampiric sorcery—Morrigan’s body shifted from bat to vampire. Her limbs contorted as she hunched on the floor waiting for her muscles to relax, her skin glimmering with a film of misty perspiration. Her short hair had turned wavy and unkempt.

Every movement made her wince, no matter how gingerly or slow she took them. She rose from her crouch completely bare, and I could not find the decency within me to look away. Morrigan seemed unbothered while she stretched her long limbs and cracked some of her stiff bones.

Her beauty was ancient and unsettling, her grace like a predator’s. I crossed my legs to stifle the sudden desire, watching the sweat bead down the valley of her breasts, the ridges of muscle to her navel. She was almost completely bare between her thighs, too, except for a scattering of silver hair so light I could’ve hardly seen it with mortal eyes.

I suddenly remembered to close my mouth.

Morrigan threw on a silk dressing gown, tying the sash about her waist as she walked back toward me. This must have been her bedroom I’d been recovering in, her bed I’d occupied these past few nights, her perfume I’d scented on the air. I hoped the arrangement wasn’t an imposition on her or the coven despite their promise to care for me. But perhaps, given the height of their towering cliffside estate, I imagined it held nearly as many bedchambers as the castle’s ruins.

And from the sound of it, most of them were likely to be unused. A terribly small coven in such a massive home.

“Is it really that painful? After all this time?”

“My own curse to bear.” Morrigan rounded the side of the bed and dug under the linens. “For Gwen and Jo, the shifting is a painless instance.” She joined me at the chaise, a glass bottle in her hands. “How are you feeling?”

Whatever liquid the bottle held, it was thicker than water and had a shimmering, golden glow. Not quite candlelight or daylight, but somewhere between the two. It was warm to the touch when Morrigan passed it to me before she sat.

“Better,” I answered at last. “Strange.”

“You were shivering when the fever finally broke, so we had to warm you back up,” she explained. “Josephine can do all sorts of wonderful things with her alchemy.”

“She’s a blood alchemist?”

“The finest in the harbor,” Morrigan praised. “Though you shouldn’t go around telling the others I said so. They’re a competitive sort—not that our Jo has anything to worry about.”

Blood alchemy was a rare skill among vampires, difficult to master from what I’d heard. A cousin of mine had been lost in a laboratory accident while trying to complete his own alchemist’s education. So few of them resided in the harbor now, but their skills were highly coveted.

They had within them the power to transform blood into other elements, mostly metals. I’d known a family once—friends of my late parents, atrociously wealthy—that had commissioned a vampire alchemist to turn the blood of a deceased relative into a complete set of fine silverware. An heirloom, per their wishes. It wasn’t an uncommon request upon the deathbed if you could afford the extravagant expense. For those who could not, families would set aside wages in the hopes of carrying a small token of their loved one, a deathbed memento, around with them in their mourning.

I hadn’t spared a moment to mourn the life I’d left behind. Undeath was eternal, but I had still suffered a loss. There would be no trinkets made from my mortal blood, though I never could have scraped together the coin.

It didn’t matter now. This was a life. It had to be. It would be.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Morrigan said. “It must feel as if you’ve been thrown into the sea.”

“Yes, that. But there’s an important detail you forgot to mention.” My voice sounded tight. I hadn’t wanted to bring it up in front of Gwen and Josephine, but the revelation of Sonia being somehow tied to Morrigan had filled me with a dreadful unease. “Or you’d rather skip over it entirely.”

“I realize this is a lot to—”

“I’ve met Sonia,” I interrupted. “I’ve seen her, Morrigan, I’ve worked in her household for a few months now. I know what she looks like, so perhaps you might’ve mentioned, at least in passing, that she’s one of your relations.”

She stared at me, empty of thoughts, until finally she sputtered a laugh. “What are you talking about?”

“You look alike, the both of you,” I explained, exasperation rising. Rolling the warming bottle between my palms, I diverted my attention to its churning blood-gold. “The color of your hair, the crimson eyes. She could be your sister, for all I know.”

“I’m a blood sorcerer, Elspeth,” she said, laughter still clear in her gentling tone. “Just like Sonia. That alone tends to change one’s appearance over many, many years. It’s nothing more than that. There’s a furious vampiric power I carry in my veins—destructive, consuming magic. Power that you inherited when I turned you. Power is the only thing Sonia and I share. Don’t you feel it roiling inside you?”

Blood sorcery. In my veins. The same virulent power that once brought the fall of Dreadmist’s sorcerer royals. The sorcery that Sonia had been carrying within her, a resurrected ghost in the halls where the ancient monarchy used to torture and bleed their subjects. Why hadn’t I seen it before?

Father had taken those books away when they’d given me night terrors, too young to engross myself in pages detailing blood-torture and trickery. There were so few portraits left of the fallen sorcerer-royals, most of them had burned to ash.

I hadn’t realized—

“Oh, stars above.” I wondered if I’d gone paler. Every last drop of blood I’d drank from Morrigan seemed to flee, and I almost wished it would. My fingers chilled in spite of the bottle, the pit in my stomach weighing like solid iron.

“I know you didn’t ask for this. It’s a responsibility to hold it, to understand it. Wielding it properly takes time that mortals simply cannot comprehend.”

“Then you must be…”

“Very old?” Morrigan laughed again, gentle and rich. “Quite, in fact, but I’ve found the number of years, however daunting, hardly matter anymore.”

“But…you’ve no royal blood?”

Morrigan’s laugh was soft. “The monarchy died long before I got my fangs. I only studied the discipline.”

“I feel like… I’ve stolen a part of you.”

A part I wasn’t certain I actually wanted.

“It’s not your fault,” she replied. “None of it. You would have died otherwise. You haven’t stolen anything. What I gave you was a gift.”

“Such a sacrifice for a stranger,” I managed, swallowing around the apprehension that formed a lump in my throat. Of everything I had read about the long-lost blood sorcerers, Morrigan did not seem like a torturer addled by bloodlust. But I had yet to see much of her sorcery myself.

Morrigan’s blood-red eyes found mine when I looked over at her, the two of us only inches apart. “A stranger, perhaps, but one who trusted me.”

My face went bright and hot, the sudden, intense blush creeping to the tops of my ears and the hollow between my collarbones. “Oh, no,” I groaned, covering my cheeks. The warming bottle rolled from my palm onto the soft rug in front of the chaise. “Oh the things I asked of you while I’d been out of my mind! You’d barely learned my name not a few days ago, and we— we —and you —”

“I’m not regretful of anything we’ve done.”

“Really?” I stared at her, aghast. “Because I never… I’m not like this. I don’t—I mean, I do , but not so soon with someone I’ve just met.”

I’ve had a few dalliances here and there in the years since I’d taken up residence in the boarding house. A handsome barkeeper whose tavern I couldn’t visit anymore. A former neighbor upstairs who’d since sailed off to some distant coast, the memory of her left behind. But I’d never fallen into someone’s bed linens this quickly.

“You’ve changed,” Morrigan reminded. She reached over, pushing a wisp of hair behind my ear. “You’re not the person you were days ago. And I needed to do everything I could to care for you. It’s a vulnerable time, the Turning. It was important that you felt safe, your needs met. Whatever they happened to be.”

She must have sensed the hesitation within me. “I wanted to,” Morrigan amended quietly. “Not merely out of obligation, but because I want to get to know you, if you’ll let me. We’re entwined now, you and I, in ways that humans can never fathom. Even if you choose not to stay, you’ll always carry me here.” She tapped my chest, where my heart beat a frantic rhythm. “But I’ll leave the choice to you.”

Morrigan squeezed my hand, the warmth of her touch humming like magic through my spellbound veins. She padded quietly across the rug, the warming bottle forgotten as she started for the door. I stood—too quickly, my head whirling, my knees on the verge of collapse—and then fell unceremoniously onto the edge of the bed. She was almost gone and I still didn’t know how to ask, how to put my ceaseless vampiric hunger into words.

I didn’t want to take anything else from Morrigan after all she had done for me.

But I was starving .

“Morrigan, wait,” I called. “I’m still a little unsteady on my legs.” It was an invitation, if she dared to accept. I wasn’t ready to be without her yet. Dawn had only just broken and this day had already revealed itself with a harrowing affair. “And I’m afraid I’m starting to feel hungry again.”

“You should have told me.” Morrigan leaned against the threshold of her bedroom, one lithe arm braced above her head. “You mustn’t be so hesitant to ask.”

“You’re in pain,” I reasoned. “It didn’t feel right to demand anything more from you.”

“Bloodlust is its own dreadful ache.”

“How come you’re not overwhelmed with it?”

Morrigan sauntered back to the bed, the train of her dressing gown gliding across the floor behind her like that of a bridal dress. The belt was cinched tightly, every curve silhouetted beneath the sumptuous fabric.

She settled beside me so we faced each other. “Well, unlike you, I’m not new at this. Ages have passed since my own Turning. I can go much longer without, even for an elder vampire like Josephine. The sorcery helps replenish quicker, most of the time. Similar to a mortal’s body.”

“But with magic.”

“So Josephine tells me,” she said. “She’s studied it herself. Endlessly. But I like to indulge her academic curiosity. It’s fun for us both. ”

Morrigan watched me, her head cocked to one side. “You can touch me, Elspeth. You can take whatever you hunger for.”

I untied her dressing gown with slow, trembling fingers, and slipped my hand to Morrigan’s waist. My knuckles grazed between her breasts, and I could hear what lay beneath. The sound of her heart, her rushing pulse. Morrigan trapped my hand there.

“I know,” she said. “It’s quite loud. You’ll get used to your sharpened senses. Give it time.”

“I do wonder… can such a relationship flourish on bloodlust?”

“For fledgling vampires, it can be quite common,” she explained. My hand glided along her ribs, knuckles skimming the underside of her breast. Morrigan’s breath hitched. “But they are usually acquainted with the vampire who Turns them. It’s not unheard of in the blood brothels for the bloodlust to come first.”

“And for us?” I wondered again. “I don’t know how much I can trust my feelings beyond this haze.”

“We can be whatever you want us to be.”

“You’re not simply saying that because I have your blood in me?”

“I want the chance to let this flourish.” She obliged me when I pushed the dressing gown off her shoulders and let it slip off into a silken tangle behind her. “I meant it—I’ve liked caring for you. I didn’t realize what purpose it would give me. To feel as if I’ve done something worthwhile for someone else.”

“It’ll take some getting used to. Letting myself be cared for.”

I couldn’t easily remember the last time I’d relied on someone else’s care. Even in the ravages of wintertime illness—which plagued me often—I had weathered it myself. I never wanted to be a bother to anyone, never wished to become a burden.

Morrigan’s eagerness had taken me aback.

Whatever feeling it had awakened within me was strong, though unfamiliar or perhaps dormant. A sort of bond that wasn’t quite love, not yet, but close enough. A beguiling connection that couldn’t be readily explained in our paltry mortal terms. It could’ve been that I had her blood running wild in me, or that she had saved my life at great sacrifice to her own power.

But at that moment, I would’ve bled the entire coast for her if she’d asked.

Was this a taste of the sorcery I’d claimed?

“It seems we’ll have much to learn together,” Morrigan said. “Blood sorcery can be a solitary path. My relationships in the past have been…fleeting.” A light press into her shoulders and she obliged me again to sprawl on the silk and linens. Her hair was still hopelessly mussed, a strand or two fallen in front of her eyes.

“Mine, too,” I confessed.

When I sat astride Morrigan’s hips, her hands found their way to my waist, her touch burning through the thin chemise.

Morrigan’s gaze fractured with worry. “I haven’t ever Turned anyone,” she continued. “I don’t know how this is supposed to happen for us, how fast or how slow, or if it will wane as your bloodlust recedes. I didn’t get my own fangs from a blood sorcerer. And we’ve found nothing written about a fledgling born of a sorcerer’s blood—we’ve looked through all the books in our library while you were recovering.”

I stared down at her, a little breathless. I was sure that I heard Morrigan’s blood thrumming through her. It wasn’t much different from the sea crashing ashore. “So I am…?”

“You are fine as you are,” she assured. “A fledgling blood sorcerer, by my own account. I cannot promise it’ll be this blissful all the time, Elspeth. I know this goes far beyond accepting your own undeath.” Her fingers traced around my hipbones while she searched my face for regret, for hesitation. “But what I can promise is a safe home, a coven who will shelter you through any storm.”

Home.

A place I’d once thought unreachable. I wondered, given the chance, if this sea-swept estate would fill my heart as Morrigan’s blood had.

Morrigan’s exhales shuddered out of her, shallow and quaking, as I leaned across her body. A tug of impatient craving led me to her, Morrigan’s heart beating so close that it was all I heard. I dragged my tongue over the peak of her breast and she gave a sigh that I felt at the center of me, arousal stirring.

Rolling the tip of my tongue along her hardened nipple, Morrigan’s body responded in kind—a questing buck of her hips, a sigh that became an urgent cry. I took her other breast in my palm, massaging her, thumbing her nipple while I tasted her skin. She was moonlight and ocean brine and autumn air in my mouth, as though she had taken a turn above the beach before I had drifted back into consciousness.

Morrigan’s fingers clawed into my hair. Her hips moved against mine, desperate for friction. I pulled her nipple into my mouth—her heart drumming restless—and accidentally grazed the sensitive, taut skin with a fang. Morrigan’s moaning was decadent as wine, her fingers gripped in my hair, nails biting my scalp. I devoured her, teasing and sucking, until my fangs finally punctured the soft rise of her breast. She held me there, her hand cupped at the back of my head, while I drank, greedily pulling in mouthfuls of her sanguine heat. Morrigan’s moaning only grew louder, keener, as I lapped up the excess, stray drops pattering between her breasts, dotting her muscled stomach.

“Stars above,” I exhaled, palming her breast, feeling its supple weight spill between my fingers as I caught an errant drop running toward her navel, “I can taste your desire.”

I could scent it, too. A little more heady than Morrigan’s blood but no less tempting. The skirt of my chemise bore a wet stain where she had been rutting into me. Pulling up the hem, I shifted over so my thigh rested between Morrigan’s legs. She was pliant and unbearably hot and that slight taunting caress made her arch into me .

“Elspeth,” she breathed. There seemed to be a question knotted up in it.

“I am simply,” I only paused to glance up at her, “repaying your favor.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Oh, but I want to.”

And she let me.

Gripping fistfuls of my chemise for lack of anything else to cling to, she found a merciless rhythm, rubbing herself against the toned muscle of my thigh. Her head tilted back, exposing the silvery-pale column of her throat, her collarbones doused in sweat. Every cry rang across stone, every pump of her heart let Morrigan’s sweet blood drip from my bite. I could feel her getting closer—my skin and hers sticky with her arousal, the scent of it clear as the blood that trickled from my chin.

Propping myself up on my hands, I watched a few scarlet drops land above Morrigan’s navel. She gave a whine of protest when I moved my thigh from between her legs, fingers twisting in my hair. My mouth descended on her once more, lapping up the spent blood, making her writhe beneath me, her hips lifting with desperate want. Another whine, this one tangled up in my name while her lacquered nails scraped along my scalp.

Sliding down, I settled between her opened thighs and took a moment to look at her—all of her—for the first time. Her lean, wiry muscle. The drying stains of dark red I’d left on her skin. Eyes closed tightly in pleasure, her heart dancing with it. My fingertips grasping her inner thighs, I smeared more red on her skin as I took her into my mouth. I tried be careful, not yet used to my own fangs. But Morrigan did not seem to mind their roughness, their prickling. She opened herself up to me, parting herself with trembling fingers while my tongue stroked and circled, laving over her. The taste of her was overwhelming, iron-sharp and wine-sweet. I craved more of it as I had with her blood .

“Elspeth,” she pleaded, a breathy whine.

Morrigan was so close now, her muscles quivering against the flat of my tongue. I pulled her in deeper again, teasing the tip of it over her aching bud in quickening circles and strokes, and Morrigan’s pleasure finally crested with abandon. A gush of her desire flooded my mouth. I drank it down like the tide of her blood, eager and starved for its divine sweetness and musk. My fingernails left half-moons in her arched knees while I held her steady in the writhing throes of her release, until at last she calmed.

Her panting became laughter. “Josephine was right,” she exhaled heavily. “New vampires are dangerous creatures. Insatiable. Troublesome.”

Morrigan sat up, but the sight of me attempting to wipe the blood and her arousal from my chin made her groan. A tremor worked through her legs. She pressed two fingers to her clit, rubbing absently to soothe the ache that seemed to linger. I watched, the need to push her hand away and relieve it myself rising, to undo her again and again until she couldn’t anymore. My own ache seemed to answer hers, a pulsing between my spread thighs. Relentless bloodlust woven into desire.

“What am I to do with you?”

I think I could do this for an eternity. But the panic wasn’t exactly quelled. Were we moving together too fast, solely on blood and immortal lust? I knew very little of intimate vampire relationships. What I had seen from afar had been either well-established partnerships or casual dalliances reserved for the blood brothels scattered about the harbor.

Climbing back up her prone body on my elbows and knees, I sat astride her lap again, the two of us a damp, sticky, bloody mess. “I don’t know. I think you liked it.”

“You’ve surprised me,” she admitted. “How quickly you’ve taken to all of this.”

“I hardly understand it. ”

“You don’t have to,” Morrigan assured. She was still trying to settle her breathing, her limbs a little more weary now. “The flow of time looks different in an immortal’s gaze. We don’t concern ourselves with social and romantic norms of the mortal set. The bite of a vampire doesn’t heed propriety—it never has. A vampire’s heart chases what it wants. Recklessly, sometimes, but always without shame. Once you’ve drank another’s blood, every other intimacy isn’t so delicate…or hesitant.”

“Emotions are sharper, closer…bolder,” I finished. “Like every other sense?”

Morrigan appraised me. “You learn rather fast.”

Before I could say another word, Morrigan had switched our positions, holding me pinned to the bed underneath her. She’d had me fooled—I thought I’d wrung the strength from her. “I never thought I’d enjoy this part as much as I have.”

“What?” Though I tried to stop it, my cheeks colored with a furious blush.

“Watching you sate yourself on my blood,” she said, her nose buried in the hollow of my throat. “Letting it fill you…listening to its pulse in your heart and moving through your veins.”

“You can hear it?”

Morrigan nodded. “I’ll teach you all about it, if you’d like. But we can worry about that later.” Her lips brushed, languid and soft, across my collarbone. “Much later.”

“Would it be all right,” Morrigan drawled, her eyes dark, glittering like jewels, “if I kissed you?”

She ran her thumb across my mouth, dragging my bottom lip down, painting it red. Before she could ask again, I lifted my head to chase her mouth. Not a delicate test, a hesitant brush of a stranger’s lips, but urgent, curious, the desperation of two souls thrown together by fate, by another’s violence. She moaned into my kiss, indulging in the profane taste of her own blood and arousal on my tongue.

Her hips moved into my mine, and the contact sent a bolt of lightning through my veins. Renewed by her blood, even the slightest sensation made me weak. I wrapped my legs around Morrigan’s waist to lock her in closer. She did not stop me.

“I didn’t realize these cravings would be affecting me like this. Blood-sharing brings desire easily enough, but with you…it’s so much more…devouring.” Morrigan chased the dregs of our kiss, nipping at my lips with a show of her fangs. “Are you still hungry, darling?”

All I managed was a nod. The weight of her, brushing warm between my thighs, had driven me to the brink. Morrigan cupped my cheek, then turned her hand over, her ocean-colored ring caressing with a cool bite as she smoothed her knuckles down to my jaw. I was still aching for her—for her blood, for my vampiric-lust craven body to come on those long, devious fingers. Morrigan’s mouth quirked at one corner. I had no doubt at all that she could read whatever I desired from the beating of my heart as I had tasted hers.

Something stirred the air, the flames in the hearth responding to its shifting gust. And though I was wrapped around Morrigan’s sweating body, there was something else to the heat that crept between us. A thrumming, a molten prickle as if I’d sat to close to a fire, the scent of copper suddenly warming.

A gash opened up above Morrigan’s wrist.

I gasped, a question nearly forming on my lips when she hushed me.

“Drink, Elspeth.” She held her bleeding wrist above me and I opened my mouth without being asked again, ready for her. Her eyes darkened under a veil of lust, but the irises glowed a luminous pomegranate-red. “Let me worry over the rest.”

Her blood rained hot onto my tongue. A steady trickle down my throat that nourished as much as it kindled the searing, blood-soaked desire. I thought I scented more of Morrigan’s blood magic, but it was a passing thing on the edge of my thoughts. I was too preoccupied swallowing every mouthful she fed me, my tongue darting out over my bottom lip to steal the dripping excess.

And then the heat of her cunning sorcery seemed to flare between my thighs. A warm, teasing breath on my clit. Yet…Morrigan’s fingers were clasped lightly around my chin while I drank. She hadn’t let her hands wander off.

Glorious heat licked at me. I stuttered a cry, her blood streaming from the corner of my mouth in a thin, glimmering ribbon.

“How are you—”

Morrigan laughed before she hushed me again, her eyes wide with mischief. “Magic.”

“I can feel your pulse,” she continued. “Yes—even right there. Your blood throbbing, those delicate muscles fluttering with the ache.”

“… Morrigan .”

“Sorcery isn’t all torture and bloodshed,” she explained. “Sometimes it’s coaxing your body to come for me.”

I tried for words, but none of them were coherent. She brushed the edge of her thumb over my bottom lip to collect some errant blood and let me suck it from her skin while her sorcery flittered and sighed, a growing pressure, a maddening heat. Morrigan stretched out alongside me, her fingers curling into my hair fanned out across her bed linens, watching me rock my hips into her ethereal sorcerer’s touch. Deftly, she stroked me with magic alone, chasing the pulse that throbbed through me, bringing my pleasure to the edge.

“So…will you?”she whispered against my ear.

It felt as if her fingers and tongue were working in tandem—not torture as I’d known it in those old stories, but a torture all the same. Another devious lick of sanguine flame with just the right tease of pressure, and my legs writhed, wanting to close against its intense swell. Morrigan pushed my knee flat to the bed with her own, her nails scratching my scalp. The tight pleasure glowing inside me finally snapped, imploding, glittering and wild, spreading like wildfire. Morrigan soothed me through it with soft touches and a hand spread over my stomach, helping my body back down from its intense bliss.

I rolled over onto my stomach, a prolonged, weary groan escaping somewhere through light laughter. She’d left me utterly spent and, for the moment, satiated. “You’re going to have to teach me that trick.”

Morrigan’s fingers returned to my hair, brushing it off my nape. “Perhaps some other time. You need another day’s rest, perhaps two.”

I suddenly remembered myself once the glittering pleasure waned. With a start, I pushed up onto my hands. “Oh—your sheets,” I cried, feeling a bit foolish but regretful of my carelessness in the throes of fledgling bloodlust. “We’ve ruined them. Do you know how difficult it is to get blood out of linens? Oh, of course you do—what am I thinking? You’re a vampire, you must—”

“Elspeth,” she cut in, a smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth, “you must relax. It’s easily fixed.”

Something within her expression pinched for barely a moment, a slight wince perhaps that stayed at the creases between her brows. But Morrigan gestured broadly over the bed, her fingers curled slightly, elegant and sweeping in motion. Her blood magic returned to the air and riled new embers from the hearth’s simmering fire. And, eyes round with spellbound awe, I watched the bloodstains on the sheets evaporate before me. A thin, vaporous mist that became one with the ether.

“How else do you think I cleaned the carpets downstairs after you bled all over them?”

“And here I was, ready to give away my professional expertise,” I said, my chin propped onto my fist. “Only for you to show me up.”

“You have sorcery in your blood now, my dear,” Morrigan reminded with a gentle laugh. “No more scrubbing or laundering required in those matters.”

I couldn’t help my shock at the mundane use of blood sorcery in such a casual way. As Morrigan had said, I’d always envisioned it with violence and conquest, but now I knew its capabilities had a greater, less dramatic scope.

It would have been quite useful in my work.

“Rest, now,” she said again, pushing the clean linens aside so we could slide beneath them, “then we’ll think of lessons in sorcery. We’ll need to deal with your would-be killer. I don’t intend to let that go unpunished.”

But I was too blissful from pleasure, too warm from her blood to have nightmares about my undeath. For the first time in days, I slept soundly.