Page 56 of Fangs

Blake stands before me.

Not the ghost. The real Blake. The one from the portrait. His hair is short and dark. His eyes are ocean blue. He looks younger, healthier, more alive than I have ever seen him.

But his eyes—

They are not the eyes of the man I love. They are flat. Cold. Empty.

“Lucille.” His voice is strange. Hollow. “You should not have come here.”

I step toward him. “Blake, I—”

“Do not.” He holds up a hand, and I stop. “You do not understand what you have done.”

“Then explain it to me.” My voice shakes. “Tell me what is happening. Tell me how to save you.”

He stares at me for a long moment. Then he laughs—a broken, bitter sound.

“Save me?” He shakes his head. “You cannot save me, Lucille. You can only damn yourself.”

Traitor

“Lucy.”

The name drags me violently upward through fathoms of black, suffocating water. My eyelids claw open, and the world swims into sharp, agonizing focus.

I’m slumped in a straight-backed chair, pinned.

Cain looms directly over me, his angular, alabaster face inches from mine. His obsidian eyes bore into my skull with a predatory intensity that makes my nervous system scream. My body feels entirely foreign—weighted, drained, hollowed out to a brittle husk.

I’m drenched in blood.

It cakes my dress, streaks my shivering arms, and paints my skin in jagged, rust-colored rivers. My throat burns with a raw, blistering ache, and my tongue coats my mouth in the heavy, metallic taste of copper.

Cain extends his wrist directly before my parted lips. Blood wells sluggishly from a deep gash in his pale skin, dark, viscous, and sickeningly sweet.

“Drink,” he commands, his voice dangerously level, stripped of all warmth. “Take only another drink.”

My autonomy vanishes. My body betrays me, lunging forward without permission as my lips seal over the torn flesh and swallow.

His blood floods my mouth—scalding, thick, and violently alive. It is nectar and poison all at once, rushing down my throat to fill the abyssal ache in my chest and silence the static screaming in my mind. I swallow again. And again. I lose count, entirely lost in the intoxicating rush. I never want it to stop.

“Enough.” He yanks his wrist back, severing the connection. “Greedy girl.”

I gasp, my lungs heaving as my entire frame trembles violently. The taste of his blood clings ruthlessly to my tongue, and I crave more with a feral hunger. I want to claw at his sleeve, drag his arm back to my mouth, and drink until the emptiness inside me finally ceases.

I force my gaze away from his wrist, dragging my eyes upward toward the wall. The portrait is gone.

The frame hangs empty. The mirror is destroyed.

Thousands of jagged glass shards litter the floorboards around the empty, ornate frame, catching the erratic candlelight and reflecting my bloodied face back at me in a thousand shattered fractions. A massive, horrifying pool of my own blood spreads dark and wet across the wood beneath the chair.

“Blake.” The name scrapes raw and agonizing out of my ruined throat. “Where is he?”

Cain’s dark eyes lock onto mine, devoid of pity. “He is gone, Lucy.”

“Gone?” I try to lurch upward, desperate to drag myself toward the empty frame, but my limbs refuse to cooperate. They are leaden, unresponsive. Cain’s heavy palm presses flat against my shoulder, pinning me hard against the chair.

“The mirror is shattered,” he says, his voice flat as a tombstone. “The painting was the only thing anchoring him to this physical plane.”