Page 41 of Guardian Falling
It tastes like iron filings dissolved in something that once was fresh and is very much no longer fresh, like the memory of something nourishing that has been filtered through every stage of not quite right before arriving at the bottom of a container with my name metaphorically written on it. It coats the back of my throat with the texture that belongs to an entirelydifferent food chain, and my body receives it with a grudging acknowledgment that falls significantly short of enthusiasm.
But the screaming quiets.
Not entirely.
Not down to silence.
But from a sustained, all-consuming roar to something closer to a persistent, sullen ache, manageable enough that I can sit with it rather than be consumed by it, and the relief of that, even filtered through the indignity of what I just willingly put in my mouth, is enormous enough to embarrass me.
I sit back, dragging my hand across my lips, deeply unimpressed with my own life.
The fire pops, the silence resettles, and then, because my brain is apparently not interested in mercy, it delivers Rogue’s scent to me again through the thin space under the door. My whole system responds to it with a complicated attention that has nothing to do with the cow’s blood and everything to do with the fact that whatever he smells like—warm, layered, and carrying something underneath it that goes straight past the hunger into some other register entirely—he smells extraordinary.
Not the way blood has been smelling to me since I turned, the way every human I’ve passed has carried that particular copper-bright pull that makes me aware of exactly how close their skin is and exactly how thin. This is different, richer and more complex. The hunger knows what it’s reaching for but can’t articulate it cleanly, the way you reach for a word in a language you’re still learning and find yourself stalled in the gap between knowing what you mean and knowing how to say it.
I wonder what he would taste like.
The thought lands without permission and refuses to move. I stare at the door for a second, fully aware I’ve just betrayed myself.
I look back at the container.
And I drink more.
It is still absolutely terrible, a fact I maintain with conviction across every one of my newly enhanced senses, like drinking something dredged from the bottom of a cold, cheerless place where flavor goes to retire. My face communicates this clearly to no one in particular. Somewhere on the other side of that door is a man who smells like everything my body has decided it needs, and my response to that is to sit here voluntarily consuming farm-grade consolation prizes and practicing what I can only describe as aggressive self-deprivation.
I am not going to eat Rogue,I tell myself, with a firmness that should not need to be made explicitly.
I am not going to eat Rogue because he is a person.
With feelings.
And presumably opinions about being eaten, all of which are likely negative.
And also because I have standards.
Terrible circumstances notwithstanding, I have standards, and those standards include not dining on the only individual currently standing between me and a supernatural execution, regardless of how unreasonably good he smells.
I take another drink. Another deeply uncharitable assessment of the flavor experience.
Right. Not eating Rogue. Definitely not. Absolutely not. Not even a little. Not even if that warmth of his reaches me from two rooms away and slides under my skin in a way that has nothing to do with blood.
I press the back of my wrist to my mouth and breathe through it, try to separate instinct from… whatever this is becoming.
Because the problem, the genuinely inconvenient complication developing in my chest, is that the way I’m thinking about him isn’t only hunger anymore. It hasn’t beenonly hunger since he came into that basement room and held my panic as if it were tangible. Since his hands wrapped around my arms and steadied me, firm without hurting, unmovable without being cruel.
I remember the shape of his biceps beneath my fingers when I grabbed him, and he didn’t flinch. He didn’t pull away.
I remember the way he lifted me off the floor when my knees failed. The way his body aligned with mine, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, the hard length of him an unmistakable presence even through layers of fabric.
Not accidental.
Not imagined.
My stomach flips.
That wasn’t bloodlust.
That was something else.
