Page 60 of Kazimir

I forced myself to stop drinking before sense failed me. I sealed the punctures with my tongue, licking slow until the last of the sting dulled and the skin knit fine and clean. Her pulse steadied against my mouth. My own pulse—that old ghost—moved in every limb, not beating so much as reminding me that undeath had rules it could bend for a price.

I leaned back, panting like a man who had run too far and been rewarded with the finish line he did not believe existed. Light still gathered around us in soft swells, then began to retreat the way tides do when a moon decides it has made its point. In its wake, a different recognition rose in me. My senses sharpened past their usual cruel edge. The wards around the office, old and stubborn, tasted like fresh-minted coins. The distant sounds from the club stacked themselves by species and intent. If power had a flavor, I had just swallowed a mouthful. It did not rage. It sang, a clean note that set my bones humming.

She turned in my lap. I was still inside her. I felt that before I registered the color draining from her face. Her eyes, those aquamarine marvels, went owlish; unfocused. Her fingers trembled where they found my jaw.

“Kazimir,” she said, unsteady. “I think—” She swallowed. “I need…your blood.”

I had lived long enough to be cautious about surprises. It can kill. But astonishment broke through, clean as ice. Angels drinking vampire blood sat poorly with every story I had ever heard. We did not mix in that direction. I almost said as much. Then I watched her mouth go pale and the tremor worsen. The decision took no time at all.

“Hold on,” I said, and brought my wrist to my mouth. The skin there was an old scar; it parted easily. The first pulse of my blood was deep and black-red against her light. It steamed slightly in the cooler room air. I held it to her lips.

She did not sip. She drank like a woman who’d been thirsty too long.

The pull of it was different from any human mouth, from any witch, even from my sons when they had needed me long ago. It felt like a tide exchanging, not taking. She latched and drew, eyes closing, a low sound in her chest that did not frighten me because I understood it instantly—relief edged with animal fear. I stroked her hair back with my free hand, held her head against me, and counted silently to keep myself honest. Five swallows. Six. Seven. Her color returned—not flush, but certainty returning to skin.

“Enough,” I said softly. She did not stop.

I shifted my voice to the one that had made rooms of men fall to their knees. “Devon. Stop.”

She froze on the syllables as if her name were a hand on her shoulder. She released my wrist and licked the last drop from the bite with a delicacy that nearly undid me again. I pressed my thumb over the wound and sealed it with a thought and a smear of my tongue. The flesh knit, clean and faintly tender.

Her eyes opened. Color had returned to her lips. The tremor had stilled. She looked dazed and lovely, robe-less, slick with us, hair tangled, eyes bright with apology and something like shame. I shook my head once to cut that last part off before it took root.

“No,” I said aloud. “There will be no shame in this room.”

She nodded like I had removed a weight from her chest. I lifted her carefully, easing free of her with a care I had not offered myself in a century, and set her on the sofa’s cool leather. Her body made a small, contented sound I wanted to keep in a box. I crossed to the armoire and pulled out two robes—mine, a dark charcoal silk lined with something softer; and one I had kept for guests who mattered, black with a subtle sheen. I wrapped her in it first, lifting her arms, sliding the fabric over her shoulders. Then I tied my own and fetched a glass of water from the sideboard. Crystal clinked; the mundanity steadied the air.

She drank greedily, then slower. When she finished half, I took it, topped it, and handed it back. Her color improved while I watched, my relief as physical as any wound closing.

“What did you feel?” I asked finally, settling beside her, thigh to thigh. I did not turn the glass wall clear. This belonged only to us.

She tipped her head against the back of the sofa and looked at me from under her lashes. “When you bit me,” she said, voice thoughtful, not fragile, “I felt like I was being…lit from the inside. It was—right. Too right. And then it kept going. I thought I could ride it. And I did. But afterward, it was like I had spent something I didn’t know was in a wallet, and when I reached for it again, there was nothing there.” She lifted her hand; wiggled her fingers. “Everything went floaty on the edges. I felt like if I didn’t take you back in, I would…fade.” She frowned softly, searching. “Die isn’t the right word. Unmake.”

I absorbed that without comment for a moment. “And now?”

Her mouth quirked into a slow smile that had blood on it and light. “Now I feel like I could run to the river and back and then read three books while the coffee brews.”

I grunted, something like amusement and something not. “Good.” I brushed a thumb along her jaw, down her throat to where I had closed my mark moments before. The skin was smooth and unbroken, with a heat that had nothing to do with fever. “We will learn your limits together. And mine.”

She nodded once, solemn as an oath.

A thought pressed at my mouth. I did not speak it. I pressed it into the place I had heard her a few minutes ago and let it travel the new road I had not known we had built.

“Svetoch,” I thought in the voice I had heard was possible between the most blessed of fated mates. “Look at me.”

Her head snapped up. The glass in her hand sloshed, startled waves against the side. Her eyes widened, pupils suddenly huge. “Say that again,” she whispered, staring at my lips.

I did not move my mouth. I sent it again, slower. “Little light,” I said. “My light. Look at me.”

She did. Her breath stuttered. Her eyes filled—not with panic, but with the raw overflow of a truth she had denied and suddenly possessed in both hands. “I heard you,” she said, awed, her voice breaking like a laugh that could not decide to be tears. “I heard you without you saying anything. Inside.”

I nodded once. I did not smile because my face had not yet learned how to hold this kind of softness without breaking; but I let my hand curl around the back of her neck and rest there, the universal human gesture that says home even in languages that have forgotten the word. “Good,” I said, and meant something larger. “It is rare among any fated mates. It is the most coveted ability.” I exhaled. “I did not know if celestials were among those who experienced this.”

She nodded fiercely, as if she would fight anyone who tried to steal so much as a thread of it. “It belongs only to us,” she echoed, the agreement setting its hooks in the world.

Then I heard her voice. “I love you. Please tell me you can hear me.”

I kissed her nose. “Yes, kiska. You are mine. I can hear you.”