Page 41 of Blood and Magic
Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
After what happened on the cliff, I told myself I wouldn’t touch her anymore. I couldn’t. She deserved better than me, better than someone cold and lifeless inside. My monster railed against my restraint, and it had taken everything I had not to pound her into the dirt on the riverbank. Eating her delicious cunt had been enough to sate me, but now…fuck. I wanted so much more than I should.
We were five days out from the full moon, and my urges had surpassed anything I’d ever lived through. My throat burned. My veins were dried up and shriveled. I could almost hear her heart pounding through the walls, a siren call beckoning me to come back to her, to finish what I’d started.
I pushed to my feet and sulked to the bathroom, turning the shower on as cold as it would go before tripping into it fully clothed. I sat under the spray and focused on my breath until the clawing need in my soul became a dying scream and finally a dull whimper.
Inhale…exhale…inhale…exhale.
When I could think straight again, I stripped out of my soaking clothes and dropped them on the bathroom floor before drying myself off. I dressed in sweats, purposely ignoring the muffled buzzing sound from her room.
Of course, I knew what that was, and I thought about the other night when I’d hacked into her computer to make sure she was okay. Licking my lips and telling myself I wasn’t that much of a fucking creep, I eyed my laptop across the room.
No. If I did that, I’d cross the imaginary moral boundary I’d set for myself. I’d only done what I did before for her safety…to make sure that she hadn’t become dinner for some bloodsucking Scorpion.
How about dinner for a Bastard?
Fuck! I pushed thoughts like those away, trying not to remember what Kodiak had said before I left.
“Fuck, brother. You died. You were brought back to life with magic. You’re not an idiot. You know what that sounds like. Are you sucking blood?”
No. It wasn’t like that. Not at all.
Morwyn should have let me die. They all should have let me die.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but it was worse than death. Worse than anything else that could have happened.
My phone vibrated, and I glanced at the name scrolling across the top.
Wyn.
Speak of the devil.
“Shit.” I took a deep breath to calm any tremor in my voice and answered. “Yeah?”
“Hello to you, too,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” I came out in the same growl I’d used weeks ago. “What’s going on? Is it Caelum? Is he?—”
“He’s okay,” she said. “I’m good, too; thanks for asking.”
I smirked. “Now, I know that’s a lie. You’re probably in your office, scribbling notes and looking at blood samples under a microscope.”
She scoffed but didn’t deny it, and her uncharacteristic silence told me everything I needed to know.
“You need a vacation,” I said. “Tell Kodiak to let you have some time off.”
“You need a vacation,” she threw back. “You’re the one whose heart stopped six months ago.”
Something rattled in the back of my mind, some kind of recognition that my wolf had picked up and the human hadn’t yet connected.
“This can’t be why you called,” I said. “What’s going on? What did you find?”
“Can’t a sister check in on her big brother?”
“Wyn.” I tried to keep the annoyance from my tone but failed miserably.
“Mill, your blood…it’s changing.” She sighed. “Shifter cells take longer to decay than humans. Comparatively, we’re practically immortal. I call it the magic ratio. Because of our other halves, we live longer, we age more slowly, we regenerate faster.”
