And then there was that anatomy exam of a body, no more than five feet away, a beacon for anyone with a halfway decent nose.
Duran made a second attempt to get up. A third.
As he fell back down that last time, she put two and two together and got an oh-hell as an answer.
“You need to feed,” she said roughly.
He recoiled. “No, I’ll be okay. I did about two weeks ago.”
Frowning, she asked, “Chalen gave you females?”
“It was the only way to keep me alive.” He glanced over at the two dead bodies. “And I took those veins just so I could be strong enough for my revenge.”
He seemed confused, as if feeding had been part of a bargain with destiny, and he’d kept his side—so why wasn’t he strong enough to keep going now?
She let herself go down to her knees and yanked up her sleeve. “Let’s do this.”
“No.” He frowned and pushed her arm away. “No, I’ll just—”
“You want to waste time trying to get up a fourth time? I’ve been counting in case you haven’t. And you may have fed fourteen nights ago—” God, she did not want to think of the particulars—and maybe he had been with a female before. Maybe she’d been wrong about that. “—but you know as well as I do that stress and physical exertion will drain the strength fast. And don’t try to tell me you didn’t just get one hell of a workout because I watched you.”
Duran looked off into the woods—as if the idea of her seeing him in that violent state, doing that damage, shamed him.
“Come on,” she said, holding her wrist to him again. “This is not a place to get caught, and I don’t want to have to drag you back to those boulders. I will if I have to, though.”
Ahmare was right.
He did need to feed. Getting away from Chalen, covering the distance, expending the energy he just had . . . it had taken his energy reserve to zero.
And then there was seeing Nexi again.
And Ahmare herself.
All moves on the abacus that had to be balanced by him taking a vein. It was the way biology worked, the setup the Scribe Virgin had created for the species, male taking from female, female taking from male.
“Just do it,” she prompted him. Then she rolled her eyes. “God, you’ve turned me into a Nike commercial.”
“What’s that?”
“The cult didn’t have TV, did it.” She brought her wrist to her mouth. “I’m done talking about this.”
He almost please-don’t-do-that’d her. Because he knew, even before the first scent of her blood hit the air and apparently hopped a ride on a torpedo straight into his nose, that she wasn’t going to stop.
And he wasn’t going to be able to say no.
Duran wasn’t even clear why denying himself her vein was so critical. He and Nexi had fed each other when they needed to, and they hadn’t even had sex. It had just been a no-big-deal exchange of the necessary, one for the other—well, at least on his side, it had been that way. And it should be that way with Ahmare, too—
Not. Even. Close.
As she scored herself and put her wrist directly onto his lips, it became immediately clear that “no big deal” was not at all applicable to Ahmare.
“Everything in the Whole Fucking World” might have covered it.
No, that didn’t go far enough. How about “Universe.”
Everything in the Whole Fucking Universe and an Infinity Past That.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, that barely described the first draw of her precious blood, the first welling inside his mouth . . . the first swallow down his throat. His body, once his own, became hers to control, an extension of her will and direction sure as if he were just another of her limbs, dictated by her and her alone, no part of him his own at this moment.
And forevermore, he suspected.
Which had been the true why of his “no.” On some level, probably the one closest to his survival skills, he had known that there was no going back now. The taste of her, the vitality that blasted through every cell in his body, the tingling, springing, full-tilt-and-then-some that flooded him was at once blinding and telescopically clarifying—
Moaning.
Something was moaning—it was him. Sounds were rising up his throat, and getting no further than that because he was too busy gulping down the wine, the beautiful wine, the astounding, incredible, transforming wine of her blood.
He fell back—either that or the earth came up to support him. And as a bed of soft, fragrant pine needles caught and held him, nature’s mattress, Ahmare accommodated the shift, moving closer, keeping the connection as he continued to drink.
Unlike him, she was not focused on the feeding.
She had oriented herself with her back to the mountain’s ascent, no doubt so that she could catch with her nose any scents carried down on the drafts from the summit. She had a gun in her free hand, and she was sweeping the muzzle in a slow panorama of what was to the left, right, and center of them. As the barrel moved, so, too, did her head, but the two went in opposite directions.