She throws it down, where it shatters.
A woman nearby shrieks and shies away. Sabine briefly comes back to herself, eyes widening at the woman’s fear, but then her stomach growls again, and she pivots sharply back to her altar.
Her fingers tear anxiously over bolts of woven cloth, golden coins, tapered candles. Nothing she touches seems to satisfy the frenzy in her eyes.
All around us, townspeople stand rooted to the stone steps, their offerings nearly forgotten in their arms. The air in theamphitheater feels like it’s holding its breath. Hardly anyone moves, except to lean forward, straining to make sense of the sight.
At the top of the stairs, Vale watches with a hooded expression. Iyre smirks as she packs a plug of Wicked Weed into a long-handled pipe.
The only people not focused on Sabine are the redheaded human twins who serve Samaur as his acolytes. They saunter up to him and try to loop their arms through his, but he swats them away.
“Not now,” he chides.
A memory shoots back to me: watching his lips latched to their necks one at a time, teeth to their jugulars, throat bobbing as he took turns drinking down their freely offered blood.
Is that what Sabine needs? A blood sacrifice?
It’s so damn twisted.
Wicked.
Positively fucking obscene.
Hesitant, I rub my palm over the rough scars on my left forearm where, weeks ago, I carved Sabine’s name into my flesh. The bottom loop of the “e” skims over my wrist’s thick blue vein, almost like a map.
A drip of sweat slides down my temple.
“Sabine.” I roll my sleeve cuff back to my elbow, fully exposing my forearm. “Sabine. Hey—look at me. Try this.”
She’s so busy tearing into a greasy pork chop that I have to grip her by the chin and force her attention on me. Her eyes are wild, frenzied. The sharp points of her new incisors dig into her bottom lip, pricking silver blood.
I draw my hunting knife with my opposite hand.
“Look,” I prompt her. “Here. I think this is what you need.”
I set the blade’s tip against my throbbing blue vein. Realization of what I’m about to do hits her, and Sabine’s eyes suddenly snap into focus.
She pounces on the knife in my hand.
“Basten, stop! What are you doing? Have you gone mad?”
“Sweetheart, you’re changing. Gloaming—whatever it’s called. Wine and bread aren’t going to get you through this.” I drop my voice. “You know the stories, just as I do.”
For the span of a long breath, she stares at me, wide-eyed as a doe. Her bottom lip trembles. I can see the indecision in her gaze as it bounces back and forth between my face and my wrist.
Fuck it.
I make the cut. It’s a small but deep gash. Dark red blood spills out.
I growl softly, “Use me, little violet.”
Something shifts in her face. The doe disappears, overtaken by a predator. Her pink tongue snakes out to lick the drop of silver blood off her lips. Her eyes lock onto my wrist. She takes a hesitant, jerky step toward me, dropping her lip to hover over the wound but holding back.
Warring with herself.
I flinch, struck by an electric shiver.She did this before,I realize.She told me about it. We were in the woods outside Duren. She said she sucked on my cut thumb on impulse, no idea why.
But now I’m wondering if this was why. Maybe it’s more than a coincidence. It could be a pattern, history looping back on itself like a snake eating its tail.
