A Cursed Bloodline
Page 12

He shoved my hand away from him and stepped back. A flicker of fire sparked from his core and spread, engulfing his large form in a blanket of flames.
I screamed over Aric’s agonized roars. The heat blistered my face and hands as I shoved him to the ground and swatted the blaze with my palms. The flames eventually died, leaving Aric crouched in the fetal position, naked and shivering. His entire body had been burned, every muscle raw, exposed, and horribly charred. Tears leaked from my eyes. “No, baby, no,” I whispered.
I tried to hold him, but he leapt to his feet and bolted away. The field around us erupted into an inferno. I chased him, calling his name, pleading for him to return. My legs grew heavy and weak, I couldn’t catch him. “Don’t leave me, Aric!” I begged. “Please, let me help you!”
Aric vanished into the thickening cloud of smoke. Behind me children screamed for their mother. I whipped around frantically. Three small children raced toward me with their arms outstretched. They had all been burned, they were all in pain, and they all resembled Aric.
Chapter Six
My screams woke me from my hellish nightmare. Emme’s voice called to me over the rising commotion around me. Strong arms grabbed me and held me down and hisses wafted above me. I forced my eyes open, my chest heaving from my attempt to shove the vampires holding me down.
One by one they released me when I stopped struggling. Sweat stuck the thin fabric of my T-shirt against my skin and dripped from my scalp.
“Celia, can you hear me?” Emme stood about ten feet away, held firmly in place by Misha. She was bleeding from deep gashes to her chest and arms. Misha’s vampires licked their lips greedily, turning their attention from me to her. Hank appeared especially ravenous.
Emme blushed before her soft yellow light erased the signs of her embarrassment and knitted her wounds closed. “Let me go to her, Misha.” He released her and she approached me slowly. “Celia, do you know where you are, honey?”
Her words were clear and I knew I should answer, but my lack of strength and the numbness wearing me down made it seem like an impossible demand.
Edith slinked toward her, protruding her chest and lengthening her incisors. “Maybe you should simply ask if she knows her name, sweet one,” she cooed. She reached her hand toward Emme’s face, but Hank forced his way between them.
“Emme isn’t yours to take,” he snapped.
Edith smiled sinfully. “Is she yours, then, Hank?”
Emme cleared her throat. “I’m not either of yours to…eat.”
Edith’s sultry eyes made Emme step back toward Misha. “We weren’t just talking about feeding from you, little one.”
Edith’s arrogance vanished at Misha’s hard stare. “Leave,” he ordered through clenched fangs.
The vamps obviously wanted to stay. While they could live forever, immortality tended to dispel excitement, and they grew restless with the monotony of everyday life. So they eagerly waited for anything out of the ordinary to spice up their so-called lives. Unfortunately, today I’d been the one to provide the entertainment.
Emme slipped onto the bed and crawled to the center, where I sat unmoving. “Can you hear me, Celia?”
“I didn’t mean to scratch you,” I responded in way of an answer.
She tried to smile. “It’s okay. It’s my fault. I should have called for help instead of approaching you in your sleep. You were thrashing around so violently I thought that if I could heal your fear, your panic would cease.”
My eyes scanned her blood-soaked sweater. “You were wrong.”
Misha suddenly appeared alongside me. “Celia, you need to…” He referred to me as Celia only in the direst of situations. “…you need to eat,” he finished quietly.
It was still daytime. The hazy spring sun shone softly against the window, just as it had before the start of my nap. “I just ate.” My stomach growled, insisting otherwise.
Emme shook her head. “That was yesterday, Celia.”
I had lost another day. “Oh. Then I guess I should eat.”
Once again, I ate enough to feed a legion then returned to bed almost immediately. I didn’t sleep. I was afraid to. I wanted to be with Aric. I longed to touch him and have him in bed with me, laughing and wrestling as we’d done countless times before our world fell apart. My new reality was too much to bear. My mind wandered to an intimate moment from our past, the first time I asked to see his wolf form.
“If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” I’d teased.
He adjusted his position above me, tickling me a little with his warm naked body. “I just saw yours, rather closely, I might add. Ohhh…you mean your beast form.”
I hadn’t fully adapted to being naked around him. And despite being in the familiar surroundings of my bedroom, my cheeks flushed and I squirmed beneath him. He smiled and bent his head to kiss me.
I moved his hand away when he cupped my breast and teased the nipple. “Ah, ah, ah. Not until you show me.”
Aric groaned and slipped out of my king-sized bed. “Fine. But I’m warning you, I’m rather intimidating.”
“I know.” My eyes traveled down his muscular torso and fixed on a certain spot before returning to meet his. His face reddened at my grin. Most males would’ve been rather pleased with themselves. Not Aric. But his modesty was one of the characteristics that made him so sexy. “I’ll tell you what, Aric. As soon as I see your big bad wolf, you can intimidate me some more.”
Aric’s body heated, this time for a different reason. “I’d like that,” he murmured gruffly.
He jumped into bed as a magnificent large gray wolf. Silver and black covered his head and back, while snow-white fur encased his underside. He wagged his tail when I stroked him. It felt strange being naked around him while he was a wolf, so I changed and licked his face. He rubbed his head against my neck, making me purr. Even as a beast, he felt good, soft…perfect. My bed threatened to break when he playfully flipped me onto my back, so we returned to our human forms. His skin was as warm as his fur against me. For a while neither of us moved, we just stared at each other, breathing heavily as the heat continued to rise between us. Slowly, he stroked my hair away from my face. “God, you’re beautiful,” he’d whispered.
He had kissed me, and within moments had me writhing in pleasure. I rolled onto my stomach and gripped my pillow against me. I missed Aric—not just the intimate moments between us, but how he made me feel. In his arms I’d never known fear.