“Vamps drain humans. Humans don’t drain vamps.”
“Sometimes... sometimes you gotta do the effed up thing, honey. Sometimes you have to sacrifice.”
He’d give his life for me. Or at least what passes for it. She moved her lips back to his neck and sucked again, the moans he made speaking of pleasure, not pain.Something so gross should not... seem less gross by the second.He huffed out gasps against her, one hand suddenly digging into the fabric belted at her waist. His hand, rigidity melting from his fingers as he pressed them against her hot body, found the hottest spot next to her mouth.
“Yessss!” She moaned around the liquid as fingers stroked her.Sex in a sleetstorm, blood and sex and... everything is wrong and so hot and maybe this is why vamps don’t give a damn about right and wrong. Brax just cares about who he’s with.
“We gotta stop. You’re warmin’ me back up. I didn’t think that was possible in this weather. You do the impossible, Penny.” He tore his head from hers, his hand from her, desperate as steam and sleet and sex surrounded them, some surreal landscape inside an evil demon’s snowglobe.
How can he have so much faith in me? I’m crazy, and half-naked, and biting him, and—argh! But he thinks I’m gonna do it. And...“I don’t know what else to do. It’s not working, Brax, it’s not working,” her voice was harried as she stepped back, wiping her lips with her hand. She took him by the arms and shook him. “I don’t know what to do, but we arenotgoing to die from this!She can’t win! She can’t kill this town, not when it’s the only place I know where even the evil monsters get a second chance—and they give me one, too.”
“Let me think for a minute.” Brax rubbed her back, bringing her in. He felt blood trickling down his neck and freezing on its surface in a sticky crimson line. Under her hand, the cut he’d fruitlessly made suddenly blossomed, dark red drops, closer to black, moving down his arm, slow and syrupy.
“When I’m near you, I can think better,” Penny nodded shakily. “I’m not burning as bad. You bring the fever down, at least a little.”
“I’ll stay with you out here as long as you need me. Until morning, until tomorrow morning, for a month of mornings, a year of mornings! If it keeps you cold and her sacrifice can’t burn... then that’s what we’ll do.”
“She’ll have to drink it soon, right? It said by dawn it reaches its full, whatever the hell that’s supposed to—” Penny suddenly stopped speaking. For the first time in hours, surrounded by a literal blizzard, her brain seemed to be working perfectly. The pain abruptly lessened, not paused, then completely, utterly vanished.
“I dunno exactly what the timeline is, but if she’s in New Orleans, we gotta account for the—” Brax picked up where she left off, only to be violently shushed by her.
“Shh! Stop! Something happened. My head doesn’t hurt. I can think. I can think. I can notice things.”
“Oh, well. That’s us finished, then, hmm?”
“If you weren’t already in huge amounts of pain, I’d slap you. Brax. Sacrifices must imbibe the blood of the ones frozen in the desolation.”
“You just did that.”
“I’m only half of the sacrifice! You’re the other one. You have to drink blood, too. Mine.”
“You’re not frozen, and I can’t, even if you were.”
Penny blinked at him—then yanked his knife up from where it had landed on the ice. “My blood might freeze, even if I can’t. Gimme the cup!”
“It’s back inside!”
“Hold out your hand, then!” Penny screeched and jerked the blade across the tip of her finger, a vicious slash that made her scream just once, and then drops started flowing, a dark crimson river that would definitely need stitches.
If they didn’t die.
BRAX WATCHED THE BLOODhit the ground, too slow to catch the first spill of fluid that smelled like pure ambrosia to his hungry demon.
And he watched it steam away, evaporating at once.
“What the hell?” he hissed.
Penny didn’t seem to notice. Or care. She jerked his hand, stiff and white with its blue-black myriad of spiderwebbing veins, underneath the faucet of scarlet.
And in his touch—it puddled. And stayed.
“I’m only able to cool down with you,” she whispered.
“And you’re the only one who can heal me, aren’t you?” he murmured, jaw aching. He stepped back, palm full. Ice crystals were forming on the surface, and he felt the blood cooling fast. Another step. Another. “Stay there, Pen.”
She nodded.
When it was frozen solid, when he could pass it from hand to hand, he popped it in his mouth and crushed it, another stab of cold adding to his misery. Blood should be warm, and soft, and trickle in like champagne, or go down in great gulps like sweet red wine, he thought as he forced himself to swallow the splintery red mess.
