Pure Destiny (PureDark Ones #12) - Aja James Page 0,39

he’d been.

Which was why, when he took her bare arm in his hands, pulled her wrist to his mouth and bit into her vein, he didn’t even notice her. He hardly recalled she was there when a human woman dressed in white wove her way through the tightly-packed throng.

With her light blond hair piled in waves on top of her head, pale skin and clingy white dress, the dim laser lights caught the human’s form more than others. She was like a ghostly moon floating across dangerous dark waters.

The Creature had been in a young man’s form, a random, albeit beautiful body he assumed to disguise the monster within. He sat in an open lounge reserved for exclusive patrons of the club with Lilith, one level above the common rabble below, a position that allowed him to survey the masses like a king on a throne.

It was one of a handful of times, in the millennia that she’d watched him, that Lilith recalled the Creature fixing his gaze on one particular human with interest…and something else blazing in his blood-red eyes. She watched as those glowing obsidian orbs tracked the woman in white’s movements across the floor.

As far as beauty went, the human was hardly the most beautiful Lilith had ever seen. But then, when one regularly interacted with Immortals, when one was one of those Immortals, humans tended to compare poorly as a rule.

Lilith couldn’t deny, however, that there was something about this human. She was very young, for one thing. Probably got into the club with a fake ID. The glow and vitality of untainted youth created a halo of light around her, making her practically pulse with energy. If Lilith hadn’t been in her last skin, she might have been tempted to take this human’s body instead.

It had been…tantalizing.

The Creature felt a similar draw, for his eyes narrowed and homed in on the human woman. He discarded Lilith’s wrist, not bothering to lick the puncture wounds closed, and stalked down from the elevated lounge, his black-clothed form immediately getting lost in the sea of people.

For some reason, Lilith stayed and observed. She had nothing pressing to attend to, and she was curious to see what could have motivated the normally jaded, careless Creature into action.

She watched him reach the human woman like a bullet finding its target.

The girl gasped in surprise when he turned her around and trapped her in his arms until their fronts were plastered together. Without a word, he moved them together in an erotic rhythm, their bodies one, mimicking copulation so explicitly, others around them noticed too and slowed their own dancing to ogle.

The young woman closed her eyes and arched her long, pale neck, her cheeks flushed with passion. Lilith and everyone else saw it too—she was orgasming right there on the dance floor. Continuously. Endlessly. Shuddering and moaning helplessly.

Until finally, the Creature whispered something in her ear, his face hidden in her hair. Her eyelashes fluttered in acquiescence. And together, they disappeared.

The next time Lilith saw the Creature, he was in one of his preferred forms, a darkly beautiful thing of indeterminate gender. She asked him what happened to his little human morsel from weeks ago, and he replied in his usual tone of ennui that he didn’t know and didn’t care.

“I drank her blood and took her soul…half of it anyway before I stopped myself. She’s probably dead by now,” he’d said emotionlessly.

But the human hadn’t died.

Lilith kept track. She had a good sense of “fate”; it served her well and helped her survive as long as she had—the weakest of all Immortal creatures. A parasite, really. Fox spirits lived by cunning and deception.

She recognized the importance of the encounter even if the Creature hadn’t. She discovered that the human woman’s name was Olivia. And she would bear a son:

Benjamin.

Presently, Lilith smiled a serpentine smile.

All these millennia, Medusa had plotted. With her ever expanding networks of power, violence, manipulation and greed. She’d amassed mortal and immortal soldiers alike, used Lilith’s science to turn them.

To what end? Lilith always wondered.

Medusa had always been driven by her emotions, gods rest her dead-as-dust-never-to-be-resurrected soul. Only Pure souls could be reborn; the rest of them had only one spiritual shot at existence. Medusa had wasted hers.

She plotted to overthrow Queen Ashlu’s rule because she was no longer the prophesized Princess to inherit the throne. She imprisoned and tortured Tal-Telal for over four millennia as petty revenge against her sister, Ishtar Anshar. She started wars