Page 74 of House of Crimson Kisses
Eleanor glances at me, her expression wide and startled. She glances at the nurse. “Is it my family?”
The nurse nods. “Healers took you off the sleeping meds thinking you’d be healed up enough to wake up. They called for your family. They’re here. And after what miss told me... I... Please, Cordelia...”
Eleanor grips my arm. “Go. Hide and don’t come back until the nurse collects you and tells you it’s safe.”
I lurch out of the bed, and then halt, grabbing Eleanor by the neck and pulling her back in for one deep kiss filled with everything I love and everything I’ve missed about her.
She kisses me back like I’m her medicine and my lips are the only thing that will heal her.
She kisses me, hard, then soft, then hard all over again.
“Miiisss,” the nurse hisses.
Eleanor breaks off. “Go.”
So I do. After weeks of searching for her, I am forced to leave all over again. But not before I risk one last glance as I dash from her room and pray that one day we can stop living like we’re nothing more than a filthy secret.
Chapter22
OCTAVIA
Red and I are in my office. It’s long past midnight, and we’ve cleaned ourselves up. She is in a soft hoodie and leggings now. But she’s right, I owe her an entire wardrobe. Not that I give a damn. I can’t stop fucking her even if I wanted to.
While we were busy, a book arrived from Gabriel; a gift he sent to each of the hunters. He found it in the library and thought it was the most comprehensive book on dhampirs that he’d found to date. Red has been absorbed in it since we sat down.
There’s a knock on the door and Amelia’s blonde hair peeks around its edge.
“Hey,” she says.
“Evening,” Red says and swings her legs off the arm of the chair to get up to hug her sister.
I swallow down the lump in my throat. My eyes flick to Amelia. When they meet, there’s a ripple in the air. It’s the heavy weight of the secret we share about the night I turned her. Red only knows part of the truth. A version we agreed was palatable. And then I forbade Amelia from telling Red the whole truth.
“You should sit down,” Amelia says to Red.
She does, and Amelia pulls a large grimoire out of her bag and places it on a coffee table in front of Red’s armchair.
Amelia pulls a chair up, and I move my office chair around to sit with them.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Amelia’s eyes dance between Red and I.
“It’s worse than we thought…” Amelia says, her fingers trailing to the book. “Or at least, I think it is.”
“You’re going to need to get to the point,” I say, tension ebbing into my tone.
Amelia chews her lip, running her fingers over the grimoire’s cover. “This is a book of predictions, all of them from blood monks. There’s a lot of theoretical discussion in here about the dhampir. We’re all already agreed that Red needs to embrace her vampire side in order to transition, right?” She looks up, her knee bouncing up and down, her fingers twisting and rubbing against each other.
“Amelia, what the hell is wrong?” Red says.
“There’s a lot of conjecture, but they’re all agreed on two things…”
“Which are?” I ask.
“The first is that, as Cordelia suggested, this is a new type of dhampir, a true hybrid form, unlike the witch-dhampirs of old. We know the original dhampirs only used blood in their magic, not that they consumed it or needed to feed on it like vampires. But when the witch-god created Cordelia, it required such an enormous amount of power that it severed all their magic. She literally slaughtered an entire species of dhampir, causing the extinction of magic.”
Red and I both nod. Some of this we know.
