Demon magic.
I went back to the bedroom, and that’s when I saw his legs peeking out from behind the bathroom door. Pulling out my katana, I steeled myself, pushing the door open wider.
When my gaze fell onto his body, crumpled on the floor, I faltered.
Luka looked up at me from where he lay on the tile floor surrounded by black, bloody vomit. “Aspen … I knew you’d come back for me,” he whispered, teeth chattering.
I froze. His voice … was so tender. The way he said my name was the way you’d speak about a beloved. It … gave me pause. This wasn’t a hissing creature from hell trying to kill me.
I didn’t know what to do with this guy.
The black, bloody vomit told me he’d fed from someone, someone that wasn’t me. He was poisoning himself and probably didn’t even know it.
I swallowed hard.
I never asked for this, I didn’t want this! Holding my sword high, I leveled it over his neck.
“I’m sorry,” I whimpered.
He looked up at me with complete and total acceptance in his piercing golden gaze, black at the rim. That’s when my eyes fell to one of the many tattoos littered across his body. I stared at the word, “Family,” inside of a heart. He was so … human-like.
‘Do it. I’m dying anyway,’he spoke weakly into my mind.
I’d killed vampires before, over seventy of them to be exact. In the back, while they were sleeping, while they were screwing, I had no morals about it. A mark was a mark, a vampire was a demon. Evil and without a soul.
But him … he’d saved my life, he’d carried me out of that bar unconscious while he was injured and bleeding and set me in his very own bed. He took off my shoes and laid them nicely against the wall before he collapsed onto the couch and nearly died…
Thisfelt like murder. You couldn’t murder a demon, they were evil, so it didn’t count, but … Luka, I just didn’t sense any evil in him, and my convictions faltered.
My sword clattered to the floor as my throat constricted with emotion.
Dammit!
“Regenerate! You’re a vampire, that’s what you do!” I screamed at him, even though I knew why he wasn’t.
He grasped for me and I steeled myself, thinking he meant to grab my arm and take my blood by force, but when I crouched down to be closer to him, he took a lock of my hair between his fingers. “I … like … the red better.”
What?
Oh, the wig.
This guy was on death’s doorstep and he was commenting on my hair?
I sighed, feeling the moment my soul chose the darkness in him over the light of the hunter code. I was probably going to hell for this.
“Go on. It will heal you.” I pressed my wrist to his mouth.
He looked up at me, wide-eyed. “How … do you know? I tried a feeder an hour ago, I just got sicker.”
“Just do it. Trust me,” I said.
I wanted so badly to read his mind, to know what he was thinking right now. Propping up on his elbow, he took my hand, bringing my wrist closer to his mouth. As his fangs sliced into my tender flesh, that wave of pleasure rushed through me, but it was less intense this time, still consuming but not completely. He sucked greedily from me and I watched him, completely enraptured and hating myself. He was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. His long dark eyelashes, full, blood-red tinged lips … I could do worse. If I was going to be tied to a vampire, at least he was hot.
Where did those thoughts come from?
Vampires were evil, demons. I felt enthralled. He had me under a spell or something.
Demon magic.
