Page 89 of Blood and Magic
“You ripped a vampire’s heart out,” Sol said with a laugh. “And then tore off his head.”
“You’re a regular badass,” Fenris added.
I started to smile, but then the thought of who had been abducted with me hit me like a freight train. I started to struggle, trying to sit up. “Ginny!”
“She’s okay,” Guin said, holding me down, forcing me against the hospital bed. “She’s just fine. Kodiak found her before anything serious happened.”
“You’re the one with the injuries,” Morwyn said. “You need to rest.”
I relaxed at hearing she had survived and held up my hand to wipe my face. I had bite marks up and down my forearm in deep red circles. A sob poured out of my chest before I could stop it, and I glanced down at my body, where even more wounds marred my skin.
“You’ll heal,” Morwyn said. “I promise. They’ll fade.”
“Am I a vampire now?” I asked through broken cries. The last thing I remembered was those sick fuckers casting some spell and Marx forcing his blood down my throat.
“No,” Morwyn said. “No, Maeve. We got there in time.”
“Mill saved you,” Kodiak said, suddenly appearing in the doorway to the room. “Whatever was being done to you, he pushed it out.”
“I think it was the…blood sharing…that made your connection so strong,” Morwyn explained. “But, we’ll talk about that later, okay?” She turned to my family. “Everyone out. They need to rest.”
I let my eyes close, and I drifted back into unconsciousness.
Days passed like centuries after that. It was a long road to healing, and not just because I’d been drained of blood and forced into some vampiric ritual. Mill had given me so much of his strength that we’d yet to find an equilibrium between us again. The connection between us had been ripped open, turning a rope into a tunnel, making each of our bodies weaker. He would get better and try to send it to me. I would feel better and send it back to him.
There was a particular kind of intimacy in that, I supposed. No other set of mates so strongly shared magic, but Morwyn warned us that it could be detrimental. She wouldn’t leave us alone until we were back to a more typical homeostasis. We were released from the infirmary once we both could walk, but it could be weeks or months until we returned to normal.
I spent my days sketching and sleeping…sleeping and sketching. I did portraits of anyone I could, trying to heal the neural pathways between my fingers and brain. My hands didn’t work like before, but Morwyn assured me they would get there. I just had to keep trying. My favorite was when Mill was relaxed in his post-climax glow with a slight smile on his lips, his hair tussled, and that sated look in his eyes.
“That’s creepy, you know,” he said, looking down at my drawing of him. “You sketching me all the time.”
I raised an eyebrow. “This coming from the guy who tracked my phone and hijacked my computer?”
He’d told me how he found us, that he’d been running surveillance on my electronics and eventually hacked into Ginny’s computer to track her smartwatch. I probably should have been upset about the invasion of privacy, but after everything, I didn’t mind so much. Secretly, I kind of liked the idea of him watching me, especially during those more intimate moments. That conversation had led to this most recent round of lovemaking, and there was no greater pleasure than being in his bed…our bed.
Mill chuckled and kissed my temple.
“You’re my favorite muse, big bad wolf.”
We tried to move on. But the nightmares came almost every night. Vampires ripped me to pieces. Fangs pierced my skin. I screamed and sobbed and tried to get away, only to wake up crying in Vermillion’s arms.
“It’s okay,” he said, kissing the tears from my cheeks, pulling me tighter to his body. “You’re here. It was just a dream.”
I was thankful we weren’t sharing those. I’d come to rely on him to bring me out of them. More than once, he’d roll on top of me and slot himself between my legs and bring me such intense pleasure that the bad memories drifted away to ancient history.
But all was not well with my knight in shining armor. He struggled to regain what he lost, and in the days immediately afterward, he could hardly lift anything over fifty pounds.
“I’ll be back to normal after the next moon,” he insisted. “The moon always heals.”
I worried he might not even survive it. In the heat of the attack, Mill had given me all of his strength and magic. It was what gave me the power to get to my feet and kill Marx. But in doing so, Mill had made himself vulnerable. If I could return the favor, I would.
“Do you need to feed from me?” I asked him one night after an intense orgasm. He’d collapsed on top of me and shook so badly, I thought he might be having a seizure.
He lifted his head and stared at me with eyes nearly as red as his wolf’s. “No.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I know it’s you.”
Maybe I should have been more scared of him drinking my blood, especially given the trauma I survived, but the difference between my mate and the Scorpions was so vast, I could clearly distinguish between them. Mill would never hurt me like them. He would never make me feel powerless. If anything, the blood tie between us strengthened us both, and I adored that part of our relationship.
