Page 22 of Fangs

The shadows move around us like ropes, gluing our bodies together. Stupid, horny shadows!

She reaches up, tracing the hard line of my jaw. Her touch is a brand, searing through the numbness.

“If this is a dream,” she whispers, “then I’m going to do exactly what I dream.”

She rises onto her toes. An obedient shadow solidifies beneath her heel, lifting her the final inches until her mouth crashes against mine.

The world explodes.

Her taste is pure fire—everything I have lost and everything I have never been allowed to have.

“I should not—” I tear my mouth away, breathing in ragged gasps. “I cannot—”

“Please!” She smiles, radiant.

The shadows rise, swaddling us in a suffocating cocoon, and the ache in my fangs becomes an unbearable, throbbing yearning. I want to drink her fire; I want to consume everything she is..

“I will hurt you,” I warn.

“Then hurt me.”

A savage laugh tears from my throat.

“I am not gentle. I am not a gentleman.”

I am the monster, and she is the only thing in two hundred years that has made me feel alive.

“Fuck it,” I growl.

I take her lips again like a drowning man dragging in his first breath of air, and I cannot stop. My claws lock around her, crushing her soft heat against the hard plane of my chest.

She is the first soul who has not feared me. The first the shadows themselves have chosen. That alone makes her the most dangerous creature I have ever faced.

“Sleep,” I murmur against her lips, voice weighted with the full force of hypnotic command. “Sleep, and remember nothing of this. You dreamed. That is all.”

Her eyes flutter. Her body goes limp in my arms. I lower her to the bed and watch her breathe—slow, steady, alive.

She is alive.

For the first time I have not attacked a human.

She is safe.

And I am—

The shadows recede, slipping back into the corners of the room. The solid weight of my body vanishes, replaced by the familiar cold emptiness of my existence.

The kiss was real. The touch was real. She is real. But I am not.

I touch my lips and feel the ghost of her still burning there. The warmth. The fire.

I do not understand why this mortal woman holds such power over me. I do not know what she is, or why the shadows has been stalking her.

I stare at her face, peaceful in sleep, and I memorize every line of it.

“Mine,” the shadows whisper across the walls, voicing the word locked unspeakable in my throat.

With a final pulsing surge I dissolve into the dark.