Page 31 of Demon Queen
He shook his head, bemused as he carefully eased my blade out. “I apologize, my queen. Also, my blood is incredibly toxic, and you are incredibly vulnerable, so try to make a point not to stab me in the future.”
“Ah, finally something that works for you. If you keep talking, I’ll make a point of drinking your poisonous blood and dying all dramatically on Dorian’s bed. Speaking of, where is it?”
He blinked his rainbow eyes at me. “What?”
“Dorian’s bed. I’m assuming he has one. He used to have two.” I wasn’t sleeping on the couch. There was no door I could close to the couch room.
“Ah. That door over there is his personal sleeping chamber. If you sleep there, he might join you.”
“Then I’ll stab him.”
“He’ll like it.”
I shrugged. I was hungry, but I needed to be alone. I needed to curl up in bed with a blanket over my head and be miserable. Also freak out about Roberta. Also take five million naps to rebuild the blood Lucy drank.
So I did.
The trouble is that I woke up with a demon standing next to me, mouth gaping open, tongue flicking in and out, eyes the color of glowing cinnamon, and wearing a tuxedo and a white knit hat with an orange pompom on it.
I inhaled to scream and he pressed his palm over my face, the smell of his skin rapturously delicious, like fresh cinnamon rolls mixed up with a freshly opened bag of strawberry licorice.
“I’m going to kill you slowly,” he purred back, licking his cherry-red lips. His skin was chalky, gray with green smudges. Maybe he was a zombie, but how could a zombie taste so good?
His hand came around the back of my head and I freaked out because I had a flashback of Dorian twisting off Roberta’s head.
I bit his palm as hard as I could, burying my teeth in his flesh, tasting his blood, but it was sweeter than cherry jam. So sweet. So absolutely delicious. I’d never tasted anything so good, and I was so hungry and…
The world went fuzzy and weird.
For a long time, everything was Candyland, and I was the Candy Queen. Until with a lurch I came out of the haze to find myself was sitting on the floor, in six inches of cherry jam.
Straldy was there, leaning down to grab my shoulders and shake me.
“What happened? You’re covered in blood! Are you okay?”
“Blood…” I looked down at the cherry jam and really saw what I was sitting in.
I croaked and struggled out of the viscous fluid coating everything. Blood. So. Much. Blood.
Straldi fished around in the blood and came up with an orange beanie. Not orange anymore. Then he pulled an arm up, mostly bone, stripped of its demon flesh.
I shrieked and scrambled away from him, the body, landing on the bed in a slither of black silk satin. I kept screaming and struggling until I got to the bathroom on the far side of the bed and got inside it and locked the door behind me.
I stared at my reflection in the mirror without seeing it for a long time.
It finally registered that my face had some color for the first time since Lucy. Oh. This must be me turning into a vampire. That explained me eating the demon.
Right. It was perfectly normal to turn into a vampire.
It went with Roberta being a fear demon, and Honey being a werewolf. Everything was totally fine. Completely uneventful. I was just…
I yanked my fingers down when I realized that I was licking the cherry jam off them. Not cherry jam, blood. I turned on the sink and started scrubbing, watching the water swirl pink down the drain. Finally it was clear.. Great. Fabulous. Absolutely perfect. Now I’d just go ahead and get the blood off the rest of me.
I stumbled into the shower and turned it on full blast. Cold. Icy cold that wasn’t cold enough. I sank down on the floor and watched the water run down the drain, red then pink, like a candy cane swirling over the gray tile.
This is what insanity looked like. Midlife crisis eat your heart out…No, actually don’t. Did I eat his heart? There was still arm bones and ligaments, so I didn’t eat the demon entirely. What about his brains? I didn’t notice cracking his skull open.
I shuddered hard and pressed my face to my knees. I was still wearing my lady tea skirt. The seam pressed a line into my forehead while I crouched there, trying to undo reality. Maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe I’d hallucinated eating the demon.
