Page 93 of A Dose of Agony
The images halt, but my body is numb. My knees buckle. Jarron pulls me into his arms, wings spreading open and then folding behind his back.
“My love,” he murmurs so softly.
He carries my near limp body inside one of the rooms down the hall.For a moment, I think it’s his room back at Shadow Hills—it has the same four poster bed with a set of silver handcuffs hanging from one of them.
There is a large sliding glass door leading to a patio, except the world beyond is… wrong.
The sky is dark red and scattered with multicolored stars and two orange moons.
“How—”
“In time,” he tells me and lays me on a black silk bedspread, curling up beside me.
Above the headboard is an oil painting of a sandcastle at night, lit up by the moon. My eyelids flutter, remembering that image clearly. The day the vampire came up on the beach and I refused to abandon my sandcastle, despite the danger.
“It was me,” I say, voice breaking. “It was me.”
“Always, Candice. It was always you.”
* * *
Slowly, the shock of the mark and all the feels that came along with it settle into a soft humming beneath my skin. No longer the desperate screaming of before.
My body is stiff.
“I didn’t expect it to be that… intense,” I mutter, trying to push myself into a sitting position, despite my throbbing head.
“I should have warned you,” Jarron says, still in his demon form. “I was terrified you would push me away. Terrified I would lose you and I required that mark to survive. I needed to claim you.”
I can feel his need—this warm pressure over my body as he says those words. I feel it like it’s my own desperation, but it’s not. He caresses my mind somehow. A sensation like silk drifting over my chaos-filled thoughts, helping me relax.
“This feels like more than a small magical link,” I say. This is how I imagined a full bond to feel. This immersion of that person’s essence. A combination of two souls.
“This first mark is more intense for a demon and his chosen.”
My heart stops and then restarts at double speed. Butterflies soar through my stomach and chest.
Chosen.
“There is already a deep and powerful connection. You were simply unaware of it until now.”
I search in my heart for this feeling. Love. Desperate, clawing, all-consuming passion.
“Can I have all the answers now?” I’m somehow inside of his mind and heart.
But he just said chosenout loud.Did this mark unlock what has been barred from us?
“Anything you want. Anything.”
“Can you change forms?” I ask sheepishly. I like his demon form significantly more than I ever expected, but this conversation feels like it needs to be with the boy I fell for. Not the demon.
“Of course, bright one.” He runs the smooth backside of his talon across my cheek before his body shimmers. There is the sound of rushing water, and then the hands holding me are smooth tan. I curl tighter into his chest and breathe him in.
God, he smells good.
I want to know how he tastes too. Now that he’smine.
His body tenses beneath mine. “Feel free to find out any time you like.” He runs his nose along my collarbone.
