“Is it really so bad if I feel your emotions? I mean—it’s meant to be that way, isn’t it?” I asked.
“I do not wish for my every reaction, every emotion, to be shared with you,” she replied.
“But why not? Do you not want to feel me?” I asked her.
She frowned.
“I’m not challenging you or being disrespectful,” I told her quickly.
She sighed.
“I know you’re not,” she said, and tugged me closer to her. “Some parts of ourselves are meant to remain separate. I do not want you to lose yourself in me. I want you to remain you. If you experienced everything that I did, the way I did—and I you—where would you end and I begin?” she asked.
“I want to bleed into you,” I told her.
I wanted to be one. To be whole. With her. It felt natural to me.
She smiled devilishly.
“You can bleed into me—for me, pet,” she smirked, and drew me in closer.
I smacked her arm playfully.
“Stop it. You know what I meant,” I told her. “But are you hungry?” I asked, worrying after Adamantia’s offer. Would she find a new source? Would blood bags stop being enough between feedings?
She hummed in the affirmative.
“You can have me,” I told her. It had been days. I was ready to give more blood.
“Are you offering because you worry that if you don’t, I will take up with one of Adamantia’s blood whores?” she asked.
I looked away.
Why did she have such a habit of voicing my worries?
“You need not worry,” she said, taking my chin and tilting my face upwards.
She leaned down to kiss me, but her head snapped in the direction of the maze.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I can hear her screaming. It’s so very faint,” she said, with a small, intrigued smile.
“Perhaps it’s part of the maze’s enchantments—to block sound,” I suggested.
“Yes, it must be,” she agreed. “This maze… I admit, fascinates me. Inter-coven magic always has. The legends of what it canproduce were always my favourite cautionary tales as a child. It’s almost a shame that it is outlawed. So much potential. Yet that much power in any hands always becomes deadly.”
“Will you tell me some of those stories?” I asked her.
“Certainly, pet,” she replied.
“I think you should kiss me now—like you were going to before you got distracted with death screams,” I said, and a part of me acknowledged that it wasn’t that long ago that I would have been disgusted to say such a sentence.
Yet here I was, asking for a kiss, on the same spot where I had watched a woman be thrown to her death.
I was changing. And I didn’t know if it was for the better.
I remembered the black death of my new magic, and I wondered if it was connected.
