Dark Possession - Aja James Page 0,105
head, but it was more of a muscle twitch, for her words had completely paralyzed him.
“This.”
She pressed their still entwined hands upon his chest, directly over his heart.
“This is what I want. You are what I need. I even have Pure female fangs to prove it.”
She put up a hand to stall him when his brows drew together.
“Before you attribute my need to something chemical or biological or pathological, let me be clear: I’m irrevocably, madly, eternally in love with you. I want to possess you totally, and be wholly possessed by you. I don’t know what this means for the alliance between our Kinds, or the impact it might have on your internal politics. We can figure all that out together. This is us. The rest is just ceremony.”
As she spoke her words, Ramses felt his heart throb with gladness and his soul take flight. He was forever transformed in this moment and for every moment hereafter.
“Now can I please have what I want?” she demanded with all the politeness she could muster, though her expression conveyed the grievousness of her impatience.
“I’m hungry. Feed me, sausage stud!”
“In the end of days, a leader will rise. A Queen of queens. A King of kings. A Sovereign of All Kinds, to defeat the Foe. Or be defeated, when the stars turn cold…”
—From the hidden sections of the Ecliptic Scrolls (recently destroyed in a flaming toss)
Chapter Nineteen
The tech master absently twirled his laser pen with the fingers of his right hand as he clicked and scrolled through a display of codes with his left.
In the periphery of his vision, he tracked the dozen or so monitors with various video feeds showing several, but not all, of the Mistress’s machinations in progress.
It was a demanding job that paid him excessively well. But he didn’t need the money.
With what he’d siphoned from the world’s top one percent of wealthy individuals and corporations as a teenager, just pennies here and there, but accumulating to an astronomical amount in aggregate, he’d never be able to spend all the money he had. Not even in perpetuity, because the compounding interest of his investments ensured that he always had more coming in than going out.
It was one of the nasty, age-old quirks of money—the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer.
No, he did this job for the challenge. (And the lesser known fact that Medusa had him by the balls.) Even now, with his left hand, he was writing codes to combat the cyber-attack the New England vampire hive’s tech master had launched on Medusa’s network.
Grace Darling was his nemesis’ name. And her sidekick, Devlin Sinclair.
She was good. Very good.
A corner of his mouth ticked up. But he was better.
He didn’t know what drew his attention, but he shifted his eyes to one of the far-right monitors. It showed the aerial view of Mount St. Helens on one side, and the ground view on the other. It had been days since the volcano eruption. The air was still somewhat hazy, but it had cleared enough to transmit high-resolution images of whatever activity was taking place on the mountaintop.
Which was nothing. Nothing happened during these days. Everything was burnt to a crisp and still as death.
And then he saw it.
A slight movement that looked like ashes shifting in the wind, nothing remarkable. But the tech master’s infallible instincts told him to zoom in on the image.
After a few more minutes of stillness, during which he thought he’d imagined it, the ashes shifted again. And kept on shifting until a lump that looked like the charred remains of a rock began to elongate and stretch into something else.
A man.
The tech master blinked and dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, rubbing his disbelieving eyes to be sure of what he was seeing.
Definitely a man. A colossus of one, by the looks of him. He was naked and covered in soot, his features hard to make out no matter how the tech master zoomed in and cleaned up the image. He took deep, bracing breaths, his stance wide, his face raised to the skies.
And then he roared.
The tech master almost fell off his seat at the thunderous sound.
An inhuman sound. For it transformed from the deep-throated cry of pain or triumph or fury into the shrill scream of a bird of prey.
Before the tech master’s wide, mesmerized eyes, the man in the screen metamorphosed into a giant eagle.
No. Not an eagle.
It was unlike any aerial predator the