Page 33 of Veradel
I take a deep fucking breath. Mortal enemy or not, Saskia isn’t preying on innocent people or taking more than her body needs. In fact, shehelpsinnocent people and hasn’t turned to blood, even when hunger has probably been gnawing on her for days now. Her own father refused to drink any more from her mother—died from starvation—and her ancestor, the Thirteenth Guardian, tried to help my kind rebel against his fellow Guardians.
So I don’t care if the others hate me for this, rebuke me as their alpha, or want to kill me.
She’s not dying on my watch.
“Little nightmare,” I whisper, slipping into the bed beside her, wrapping one arm around her neck and lifting the forearm of my other to her mouth. “Drink.”
For the first time since she fainted, Saskia’s eyelashes flutter. Her lips press against my pulse, and she lets out a moan—
Moments before her teeth puncture my skin.
And as Taika returns with athump, thump, thumpof his cane, I feel her venom overtake me like a searing brand, setting me on fire, burning its way through my system.
Claiming me.
Relief floods through me as the warm liquid fills my mouth, parching all that thirst and starvation in my throat. There’s something vaguely bitter about it, like I’m swallowing the earth itself, but I don’t care. Not as the nightmare leaks away and all my senses slowly return to me.
Sound first. A rough, masculine voice saying, “That’s it. Keep drinking. There you go, baby.”
My eyebrows furrow as I obey instinctually, trying to understand who it is, what’s happening—and why I suddenly feel ashamed. But the hunger overpowers me, forcing me to keep drinking, to keep sucking on…
Then the sensation of touch, of metouching, jolts through me.
With a gasp, my eyes flash open, and I wrench myself away.
“Lucan!” I cry, blinking rapidly as my vision finally clears.
His face looms over mine, tight with concern and something else I can’t place at the moment. One of his arms circles my neck, and the other is heldout in front of me, two thick streams of blood trickling from his forearm and plopping onto my chest.
At the sight of that blood, a peculiar ferocity steals over me. Mine. This male ismine, and somebody fucking hurt him.
“Who?” I ask sharply, struggling to sit up.
“Who what, Saskia?” Lucan asks, a trace of amusement flickering over all the strain on his face.Pain. That’s the other expression I’m reading besides concern. Lucan’s in pain, despite the hardened mask he’s trying to wear for me right now.
“Who did this to you?” I hiss, nodding at his forearm and surprising myself with the venom spitting from my tone. My head pounds. My gums ache. And that hunger is welling up again, confusing me even though the knowledge from my nightmare begins to nudge at my brain.
Lucan exchanges a quick glance with Taika over his shoulder, then squints down at the blood streaming down his arm, eyebrows ticked up as if surprised. “Well,youdid. But it’s okay,” he adds quickly when my face crumples. “You need it.”
“No.”
The word is barely a breath wafting out of my lungs as everything comes crashing back. What I learned about myself from my dead mother who must have derived from a figment of my imagination. What I suspected about my lineage as soon as I read that last passage in the journal, right before I fainted.
But there’s no way. It’s not possible. I don’t need to drink blood to survive. I need a simple tray of food and water. Like a normal human. Like always.
I’m supposed to heal, not hurt.
My chest heaves as I drag in breath after shaky breath, and my mind spins with panic. I can’t take in enough oxygen, which only makes me more frantic, more lightheaded.
Maybe if I deny it hard enough, this will all go back to normal.
“No,” I say again, this time louder, and I hoist myself up so quickly that Lucan actually jerks back, letting me rise into a sitting position on the bed, even though he keeps his good arm around me. I look wildly around the room, as if a solution to this awful new reality might be hiding in the cracks of the windowsill or in the tears in the wallpaper surrounding us. My eyesland on the bedside table, where my necklace lays in a sad heap—the vial snapped off the chain.
How did that happen? I don’t know, can’t remember… but the brokenness of it seems to signify a severed bond between Lucan and me. How we can never go back to the way we were before.
I look at Taika, who only smiles at me sadly, then return my gaze to Lucan. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper.
“If you don’t,” he says plainly, the amber in his eyes cracking open with emotion, “you’ll die.”
