Page 48 of Hunt the Dusk
I threw myself into the path of the destructive energy and on top of Ezekiel. Pain sliced through my back and down my sides. It dug claws into my head and tugged at my brain.
My scream died in my throat, humbled by agony as my body locked, all muscles screaming for release from the torture.
“No…” Ezekiel’s protest was a whisper. “Don’t…hurt…her.” His arms wrapped around me as the darkness inside me stirred and the hot needles in my blood turned to ice.
Rage burgeoned inside me, the beginning of a hurricane, because why should I have to take his pain for him? He was the monster. He was the one that deserved to writhe and scream, not me. My fingers curled against his biceps, digging in.
“No…” Emelie stumbled back a step. “Oh…” She clutched her head. “Stop!”
The shroud of talons digging into me was ripped away, and my body hissed in relief, sagging against Ezekiel.
“Go,” Emelie said. “What lies ahead for you is worse than anything we could do.” The wind howled one last time before falling silent. My misty breath dissipated as the temperature rose a notch.
Ezekiel’s heart beat slow and steady against my cheek for several achingly long seconds in which I found I didn’t have the energy to move. But in the next, he was moving for us both, gathering me up into his arms and standing as if he’d simply been resting not being assaulted by phantom blades and fiery needles.
“Orina, look at me,” he demanded. I did so from beneath heavy eyelids. He studied me for a beat. “You’ll live.”
My eyes fluttered closed, and when I opened them again, I was lying under a blanket in the carriage with Ezekiel watching me from the seat opposite.
We were in motion, the drapes cracked open a little to let in moonlight.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
I felt like I had a hangover. “Fine. You?”
“No permanent damage, at least nothing that a decent feeding won’t cure.” His jaw flexed. “However,youcould have been seriously hurt.”
“I took a gamble, and it paid off. I knew she wouldn’t kill an innocent.”
“Emelie’s hatred for me is much greater than her desire to save one innocent woman who she probably deemed complicit to my horrific nature by association. Your gamble didn’t pay off, Miss Lighthart. Emelie had a vision and that is what halted her attack.”
“A vision?”
“She was a seer, and it seems that she still is, even in death. It was the only reason I took her as a lover.”
“You dated her?”
“I courted her, yes. I deflowered her, made sure she was enamored with me in the hopes that she would see my future, but when she failed to give me what I wanted, I killed her.”
The way he recounted his actions…he might as well be reading out a fucking grocery list. “You killed her because she wouldn’t have a vision about you? Did she even have any control over them?”
“No. But it didn’t seem to matter at the time.”
“You’re something else, you know that?”
“I killed many people last century. Probably too many.”
Was that remorse in his tone? Wait a minute. “One murder is all it takes to be too many.”
“How ironic that it’s in death she finally sees my future.” He sighed. “And I do not have her confidence, therefore I will never know what she saw. A cutting punishment indeed.”
“It must be bad for her to stop her attack.”
He shrugged a shoulder.
“You don’t care anymore?”
“I’m not sure I ever truly did.”
