Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 126570 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 633(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 422(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126570 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 633(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 422(@300wpm)
I may be a murderer, but I do have a heart for making things easy…
Dropping the body to the front stoop, I sigh loudly. The heat between my shoulders has become almost oppressive. I can feel the sun rising far enough in the eastern sky that it promises pain and weakness if I don’t get out of here soon.
Any other time, I’d laugh at fate’s sense of humor…
I’ve finally located my beloved, but there’s no time to properly welcome my future bride into my world.
Taking a deep breath, I sift through the layers of paint, mortar, drywall, carpeting, and tile. I smell her scent beneath the masking perfume she wears. It’s intoxicating, maddening, and divine. She is purity. Her scent is so heady and sensual… even the smell of blood pales in comparison.
I’m almost drunk from the smell of her, and this is with her hiding inside a house.
I fear she’ll break the very essence of my being when we finally stand before each other.
“Open. The. Door!” I shout.
I know she can hear my whispers, but time is fleeting so quickly from the night sky…
“No,” a tiny voice whispers back through all the layers.
Her small, delicate voice pierces my very heart with pain.
In all my years of a being alive and undead, I’ve never felt the ache as badly as I do now. Nine hundred and eighty-seven years, and one word all but shatters me.
“Open the door,” I rasp to her as I feel my body weakening from the first rays of sunlight breaking over the horizon.
It doesn’t matter if the rays are physically touching me or not—the sun breaks one of my kind all the same.
The sun doesn’t kill us like the myths love to tell, but it does severely weaken us until we’re nearly human. It also hurts us and causes pain, like a needle stabbing directly into every nerve and pore. Most of us have grown accustomed to such misery for short periods of time, but if I’m not careful I’ll be worthless when it comes to protecting her.
“You,” Chloe whispers over the dripping water of her sink, “can’t come in unless I invite you.”
One of the few myths about my kind that’s actually true.
“Chloe,” I say, slamming my fist into the door. “Open this door! I can’t protect you if you keep me out here all day!”
“No,” she whispers, and I hear her sniffling. The taste of salt stains the air. “Never.”
Tears.
She’s shedding tears because of me, and because of her programming.
Damn all of the Order.
Punching a fist into the wall beside her door, I look at the damage it causes to both the brick and my hand.
Blood weeps from my knuckles.
If this was but a half hour earlier, it wouldn’t have made a mark on my skin.
I can’t stay any longer…
No matter how much it kills me to leave her like this.
“Chloe,” I growl, “it took twenty years to track you down to this city, to this home. I have your scent. No matter where you go, I will find you.”
Looking at the gift I’ve brought her, I kick the lifeless corpse. What a waste of a perfectly good blood bag.
“Don’t leave here until I come back after nightfall,” I demand.
“Fuck off,” she growls at me.
If I wasn’t so fucking pissed at having to leave her, I’d laugh at her little act of defiance.
Two
Asher
The Past
20 years ago…
Springfield
The steady thrum of my captive’s heartbeat throbs in my ears as I lie back on my bed. The harmonic drip, drip, drip of her blood into my mouth feeling utterly decadent.
I’ll catch hell with Gregory in the morning when he discovers how much work he’ll have to do to clean my bedroom, but it’s worth it.
I could have done what most of my kind do and gone with a female ghoul to serve my daily needs, such as cleaning, but they’ve always seemed ghastly to me. That, and the last time I was at Raph’s house he had a ghoul strip dancing in the corner of his living room. I won’t soon forget her twirling around a pole and her hand disconnecting from her arm.
She fell yet the hand remained on the pole, just hanging on like nothing had happened.
I slowly tilt my head side to side, letting the blood drip onto my cheeks.
Smiling up at the young woman spinning above my head, I peer into her eyes.
Those eyes are losing all that fight that’s so fierce and futile. She’s still trying to plead with me, but the ball gag I have crammed in her mouth keeps her quiet, allowing me to enjoy my meal.
Her heartbeat is slowing though, and the blood that remains in her body isn’t going to last forever.
That saddens me.
All too often they just bleed out and I’m left with a throbbing erection. Feeding does that, and it’s infinitely frustrating. I could fuck her even though she’s human, and I do that frequently, but it doesn’t quite scratch the itch.