pain moistened your eyes - and as my vision cleared, I saw Dontaine frozen like a literal statue behind the dainty golden demon, his sword angled for a downward thrust into her back, held unnaturally poised on the brink of that violence. And I knew it was not from obedience to my command - I would have been too late - but from the invisible power of her will. Her psychic powers were what held him immobile, a frozen prisoner in the tendrils of her invisible force. She didn't need physical touch to stop him. It was not just their physical strength that made demons greatly feared.
She stood, pulled her claws casually from the ground, from Tomas's pierced wrist as his face writhed with silent agony. With a thought, she held him immobile, too. A shimmer of that dark shadowy power, and that hideous claw shrank back down to just pointy nails. She licked each bloody tip, slowly sucking each digit clean, savoring it; her cheeks hollowed with each sucking pull, her lips pursing around her fingers like a puckered kiss, making the motions dangerously sensual. The flash of ivory fangs I glimpsed made her just plain dangerous. She swayed her way to me slowly, seductively, like death come to play.
She crouched down before me, looked into my eyes, those sharp nails freshly cleaned of Tomas's blood inches from my face. Curiosity was in those dark, dangerous eyes. "Halcyon's sister," she said, repeating my words. "What an odd creature you are to wish me no harm just because I am your lover's sister."
The tremors shaking my body were becoming wilder, stronger, with her near presence. It was as if my very skin tried to crawl off me, away from her. The skin on my back, shoulders, and arms rippled, moved, as if it had a will of its own. As if something beneath it was moving, struggling to come out, like a vulture's wings - Mona Louisa's other form. My skin burned as it stretched and I gasped at the pain, at the fight I had within myself just to stay planted there, not scramble away from her as every instinct in me was screaming to do.
"Me," I wheezed, fighting to take the breath back into my lungs that the pain had forced out of me. "Just me. Let my men go." I deserved to die, for so many reasons, not just one. They didn't.
"You would not still be living, breathing, had my brother not claimed you as his mate," Lucinda said, and her voice was no longer sensual. Just hard, as if all pretence had been stripped away. "My kind hunted and killed things like you long ago." Her eyes, dark like bittersweet chocolate, the one feature so like her brother, looked down at me with none of the affection, the warmth, usually in his. And I realized then how cold those eyes could be without emotion. "But he did, and my father spared you when he should have destroyed you after what you had done and become. I shall abide by his choice. For now." She stood and smiled, and it was not a friendly gesture. "I can always kill you later," she said like a soft promise, and walked away.
Like a breeze blowing cobwebs away, the invisible bonds holding my men vanished and they were free. They rushed to my side, crouched protectively in front of me. But she was truly gone, back into the night, a child of darkness. Demon dead. And suddenly all I could smell was blood. The rich heady scent of it, its pounding, throbbing call. I could almost taste it like sweet wine rolling down my tongue. My eyes, my body, my entire being was drawn to the man who stood to my left, slightly before me, the flexing of his hand gripping the sword, pushing the blood out of his wounded wrist, two gaping holes where Lucinda's claws had pierced through like Crucifixion nails. Fat drops of red blood fell to the ground like precious wine spilt wastefully, and an ache started in my body, in my soul, for that dripping blood. An ache that throbbed and grew with each spilling, hypnotic drop... plunck... plunck... plunck... A thirst that seemed enormous, unquenchable. I wanted to lap that blood up, take it into me like air, as if I would perish and die if I didn't have it. And it was not the hunger