37. Is This What You Wanted?

They dragged him from his cell an hour early. He only knew because his guards complained about it as they yanked him by his cuffs.

He bit back a snarl as the metal dug in and reopened the thick black scabs. Still, he walked with them, as though beaten and downtrodden.

A wolf with its tail curled between its legs. He hoped Liora’s tail slid free and crushed their ribs. Bastards.

Perishable bastards. He hadn’t fought when they walked him down a white, brightly lit corridor.

He forced himself to remain docile, biting his cheek to keep from insulting them when they shoved him inside a freezing bathroom. And then into the tiny shower cubicle.

The water was absolutely boiling as he washed the grime and regret, soap scouring away the days of captivity. He couldn’t close his eyes and think about her, not here. He’d never leave the cubicle.

They’d poison him some more to get him out. She had to come soon. Maybe that’s why they’d hauled him out. Maybe she was already here.

He prayed that was true. They wanted him clean and undignified as his guards laughed and joked with each other.

His shower wasn’t what tipped him off. No, he knew their game, and this always, always happened. But the clothes they shoved at him were new.

“What? Do prisoners get a uniform now?”

The joke fell out of his mouth before he could stop it.

The impulse to eviscerate them, to tear down their self righteousness soared too high. And overrode his desire to perform compliance. He was only a leech whose delusions of grandeur had actually materialized.

His question earned him a smack. An open-handed blow across his left cheek. His skin stung. The stench of cheap cigarettes, menthol, and energy drink clung to his guards fingers.

Typical.

He laughed. “The succubus hits worse than that in bed. Try harder.”

He’d said similar to her. The ghost of her claws in his gut was a phantom wound opened for using their private language in this sterile Hell.

It was sacred, not a weapon to pierce their enemies.

Only he could speak that language with her. No one else could survive her. She was ruthless. Feral. He’d yet to see her wholly unleashed.

Perhaps he’d finally get to witness her at full strength. She even kept the safety on when she fucked him.

So as not to drain him dry. He needed her to hurt him, make him bleed for daring to get captured. Fuck.

His brain wouldn’t stay on track. He needed to feed before his control slipped. His captors didn’t answer him. They smirked and kept walking.

As they marched him inside lab number seventy-five, he almost tripped. His steps slowed.

Mind racing. His cadaver heart didn’t make a sound, but there was a frantic heartbeat running wild in the room.

His silver gaze appraised her in a blink. Another succubus. The missing one. Her long black hair had tangled.

It was dull under the fluorescents. Eyes, green like sea glass and shining, no. A glaze hazed her eyes.

He sniffed cautiously. Her scent smacked him like a punch in the teeth. All wrong.

He fought not to show it. Face attempting to screw up. Dead gut twisting into a tight knot. She smelled of gardenias and something resinous.

The smell wasn’t unpleasant. She just wasn’t Liora. They’d subdued this younger one with hexes and sedatives.

Her unfocused eyes welled with tears as her messy hair covered her elfin face. Dr. Veles stepped inside and strode toward them.

His hair was a pale grey band around the side and back of his head. The top was completely bald. Icicles speared from his pale blue eyes.

He looked around sixty-seven; he turned to Ash, arching an eyebrow at him. A satisfied nod made Ash’s fangs drop.

They sliced his tongue. Keeping him from blurting out what he really wanted.

“Subject 37-A, you’ve proven... durable.” He sighed. His eyes rolled as Ash glared. “Let’s see if your bond is as unique as Dr. Kerr claimed.”

Ash froze, but his guards shoved him into a steel chair. Head shaking and jaw tensing.

Understanding sank in as he stared at the man and then at the other succubus. He read the name on the bracelet on her wrist as she wiped a tear away.

No. No fucking way. She would never replace Liora. If the hunters thought they could replicate their bond, they were wrong.

He felt the tether inside him finally starting to melt. The ice turned brittle, and pieces broke away.

Anytime, Red. I need you to hurry it up a bit.

Liora had curled into the foetal position.

Darkness surrounded her on all sides. Her shadows were limp and meek. Reduced to dark water rippling around her pitiful form.

Her heart was a colony of bats flapping their wings behind her sternum. Her mind ran faster, as jagged memories surfaced and the insults, the centuries of conditioning, reached a boiling point.

Faces of men and women—ones she’d tried to love or used and discarded—slid through the morass bleating in her head. Her breath ached, fracturing in her lungs with every gasp and twitch of her limbs.

Her very bones felt as though they’d shatter if she so much as lifted her head to face herself in those damned mirrors. Fuck.

Why had she allowed herself to believe she could have something just for her?

Something that would never leave or fear her. That the world would let her keep it, despite all she knew. Her throat was raw, and she tasted copper on her wilted tongue as silence howled around her.

Inside, a riot raged and dragged her through the past. Rasputin cursed at her. He had hated her claws.

“Unnatural,” he’d hissed while binding her wrists with painful hexes.

Another voice slipped in behind that insult.

One she knew and had started believing before her own self-loathing trapped her. Even in memory, she felt his chill, heard the crackle of frost spreading over her flushed skin.

She listened as her past self asked him, “why aren’t you scared?”

His ragged, awed laugh had imprinted on her mind, her tattered, rotten soul. “Because you’re perfect... you’re the only real thing I’ve felt in years.”

His claims were little more than a gasped breath amidst the cacophony of all her failed attempts at forging a connection. It frittered away like ash in the wind, replaced by another horrid hurt that stabbed her right in her chest.

A hurt from centuries ago. She was back in 1862. The Queen’s chambers. Victoria had wanted to taste her.

The woman’s short fingers had slipped under her skirts as soon as Liora gave the go ahead. Her dormant magic made her able to withstand the potent bite of Liora’s venom without falling victim to its entrancement.

A tiny taste would only burn her tongue. Any more than that, she’d die. The monarch despised the fact that she was essentially mortal.

Latent magic was nothing worth bothering with. She’d die a human death. Liora had watched her from her prone position on a massive canopied bed.

Her insides had frozen and tangled to where breathing serrated her lungs at the wretched, nauseated expression on Victoria’s face. She was what they always said she was: too monstrous. Too sexually uninhibited.

She was good for a fuck, not for love or forever. The scent of hollow sex hung heavy in the air as Queen Victoria licked her stubby fingers clean.

“It is a corrupting sweetness. A proper woman’s essence is gentle and subtle. This...” she paused, fixing a loose curl that had escaped her regal hairstyle. “This is a vulgarity of nature. Your hunger is unladylike, no—it’s demonic.”

The hammer blow came next. A phrase she’d heard time after time. All her old lover’s voices coalesced to harmonise Victoria’s rejection.

“You will never be trusted or loved. You are no woman. I would rather consume a thousand poisons than another drop of your... venom.”

Days later, the Queen had sobbed and begged for mercy when Liora drained her favorite courtier in retaliation.

Then came Oscar Wilde, demanding another look in her obsidian mirror, the one that aged any mortal who gazed into it.

And it killed succubi once they were trapped within it. She had stolen it from the Vatican. She’d allowed Oscar one glance, and his affection for her stopped as his obsession with what he saw took over.

She understood he had never wanted her—he wanted her power. He’d penned a novel after she’d left him sobbing and begging. He sent her the first manuscript with a note inscribed inside:

For Liora, an immoral creature. Love is an illusion—shame is all you have. O.W.

She could hear his insipid tone every time she remembered it. The voices faded away, only the racket of her racing heartbeat filled her ears. The old ache throbbed as she dragged in a ragged inhale.

Bergamot and frost. A faint hint of it, soaked her lungs. It niggled at her memory, another declaration came forward. Louder this time.

“This is what you are, Liora... you’re not a monster. Not a saint. You’re need. Pure, undiluted, divine need.”

Her body shuddered violently. Her horns breached her temples as she panted into her hands still covering her face. Ash’s voice braided through the rejections.

Getting louder and louder until he yelled.

You’re magnificent.

They. Were. Weaklings.

You’re a masterpiece.

They’re not hideous. They’re stunning... they’re fucking art.

You’re precious.

Round and round and round they went. Her inner demon echoed him, shadows flicking at her curled-up form. Her ribs seemed as if they were fracturing. Burning.

Something behind her sternum sparked and warmed. The smell of Ash’s blood intensified as she gasped for air—that bergamot-pomegranate tang that flooded her mouth whenever she bit his lip and tasted his laughter.

It made scales burst free, sprinkling her neck and jaw. Her shaking muscles protested as she moved, an inch at a time at first. Her claws lengthened and screeched on the glass floor as she dared to push herself to her knees.

Her head hung low, talons piercing her thighs to ground herself. She clung to his scent even as his voice resounded off her skull.

“You’re a fucking supernova. Of course I want to burn with you.”

Her eyes swirled, amber and bruise-violet fault lines scoring in the black. Her succubus piped up.

Stop letting them control you. They’re dead. You’re here. Live. Look at what you are. You can either let it break you, or get up.

Fight. There is only one way that gets you what you want.

Her shadows agreed, muttering in Dutch.

He stays, he promised, he stays.

Tears, hot and furious, slid down her freckled cheeks.

She bit down on the inside of her cheek until the skin gave and blood welled on her waiting tongue. The warm thing in her chest vibrated.

The world seemed to hold its breath as Liora panted and slowly, so slowly, lifted her head. The weight of her horns had never been more tangible.

It was as though she snapped her neck to meet her own ruinous gaze in the mirrors across from her. She quivered, cold sweat dripping down her back. Her hollowed cheeks as her glamourless face stared back made her heart palpitate.

The reflection wavered as her eyes turned glossy. She forced herself to look, even as every fiber of her screamed to run. Her chin trembled as she whimpered. Ash’s reverence looped in her mind and drowned out everything else.

Every moment he’d stayed. Every moment he’d refused to back down, proving himself as her equal.

The only one to walk beside her, not behind or away. Her shadows writhed and whipped the glass as her emotions shifted from despair to another kind of fuel.

Her lips pulled back, muscles and veins straining against her skin. Her vision turned red, ears pounding with the flow of fiery blood and adrenaline.

Her breath sawed in and out of her. Enough.

She’d suffered enough. Her shoulders went back, chin rising as her dark vipers rose in a wave. Liora screamed through her teeth as the wriggling mass of darkness crashed into the mirrors, shattering them.

Glass rained down, slicing her face and clenched hands as she climbed to her feet. It clattered and smashed on the floor. Her power swelled high inside her, lightning flickering at her talon tips and wreathing her horns.

She took one step toward the door that had appeared straight ahead of her when another scream rent the air.

One she knew. Ash.

Ten minutes earlier, Ash had sat in frozen terror. Strapped to a chair, the doctor had reclined. It was a dentist’s chair meets a medieval iron maiden.

Cold, polished steel burned beneath his bound frame. The restraints were of some kind of living straps. Metal and magic intertwined. They glowed crimson, tightening whenever he struggled.

The IV stand next to him appeared to be a standard medical device, but the glowing veins of amber fluid it held had his stomach turning. His parched throat threatened to close as his gaze returned to the worst contraption of all.

It was a large, arcane dialysis machine. Its two clear cylinders held two swirling luminous substances.

One shone pale blue; his essence, from the blood they extracted that night on the docks. Ash suppressed a shudder. The other essence was a deep magenta.

Mara’s. Between them, a complex filigree of glass tubes and copper wires crackled, energy sparkling off them. His flatlined heart gave a sharp spasm as the two fluids dripped into it.

Ash bared his fangs as lead replaced his bones, chains rattling. “You think feeding me knockoff succubus juice will make you a matchmaker? Cute.”

Dr. Veles injected Mara with a shimmering serum—a synthetic aphrodisiac meant to mimic Liora’s pheromones. The prick had taken great delight in explaining his invention. Ash’s nostrils flared as her scent flooded the room: gardenia, pomegranate, and rot.

Close, but it was not her. It was wrong. He recoiled and growled, the only thing he could do. Liora smelled of pomegranates and lightning. Mara would never be her.

His fangs ached as the smell drenched his senses, venom pooling, disgust settling in where arousal would flow for Liora. His skin drew too tight. He jerked as though trying to get away, but his restraints held him still.

He went rigid. Stopping his breathing to avoid the revolting fragrance. He imagined skinning every hunter alive to keep himself from panicking. His trapped hands fisted, ruined wrists weeping reeking pus.

His hollow veins were collapsing as hunger ate through his innards. Mara broke the suffocating silence as the doctor frowned at him.

“Please. I don’t want to die like this.”

Ash’s jaw clenched. “Neither do I, darling.”

Dr. Veles paid them no mind. He activated the IV drip and the other machine. The humming of all the generators grew so loud, Ash couldn’t hear his own thoughts. Mara’s essence gradually seeped into his veins.

His spine arched off the chair. Vessels in his eyes burst, staining his vision grey. There wasn’t a cell in him that accepted this intrusion.

They rebelled against it. Its effect had already sunk in. Obsidian veins crawled up his neck and branched at the corners of his eyes. It scorched like acid in his arteries.

“Get. It. Out,” he snarled, but it was too late.

His body convulsed, black bile and blood spewing onto the floor. It writhed like living oil—her shadows, the ones he’d stolen through their bond, reacting to the invasion.

It burned in a way that would kill him. He’d let it. He didn’t want Mara. Ash wanted his demon. The doctor freed one of his hands to pull the cannula out.

He backed away, lips a flat white line. Ash’s fingers clawed at his throat, nails shredding scarred skin. “Liora!”

He hollered her name until his voice broke. He could hear the doctor panicking, yelling orders that fell flat as he thrashed and wailed. Mara had gone quiet. He smelled salt in the air.

Was she crying? Ash didn’t care. He wanted her out of him. Even if he had to rip it out himself.

He wrenched his eyes open, panting hard, gaze darting around the lab. The wall lined with shelves sagging with the weight of hundreds of specimen jars to his right shook.

He’d seen the atrocities they’d collected over the years so many times, they’d lost their horror. But he focused on them as his body revolted and pain scoured his nerves. A pair of iridescent fairy wings, pinned and splayed.

Another vampire’s fang, the root still bloody, suspended in violet gel. The glimmering glob in one jar was a dissolved ghost core if he remembered right. The shelves shook again as he stared and clenched his teeth to the point he heard a crack.

His eyes narrowed a second before the macabre collection exploded into the room. Shadows blasted through the air, and he laughed through the bile rising.

“You should have run. She likes to play with her toys,” he said, a whisper meant for Dr. Veles.

He blinked rapidly to clear the dark spots from his vision. Mara’s chair imploded, steel crumpled like paper as the doctor ran to a door her shadow tendrils had tied shut.

“You—you weren’t supposed to breach containment,” Dr. Veles said, fear clear in his voice as his wide eyes glued to the hole in the wall.

A familiar, dark and lovely laugh echoed from the other side of it. “You thought witch mirrors could hold me? Fool.”

Another surge of her power whipped the ceiling. The lab’s fluorescents shattered all at once. Glass shards hailed down on everyone in the room as the emergency lights kicked in.

They bathed everything in an eerie green light. The sound of heels clicking on tile neared as the broken jars and splintered wood settled.

He smelled her, the real her, before he saw her. More black vomit splashed onto the floor as his body rejected the other succubus.

Liora stormed into the room, copper braids crackling with static atop her head. Her eyes were red rimmed and so much blood coated her, he couldn’t tell the scents apart.

It dripped from her claws as her gaze flew to him.

“You look terrible,” she said, outrage and maleficent hunger flashing and clashing in her swirling eyes.

Her horns were out. Scales marked her jaw and neck. The sight of her was a balm to every sore spot and doubt that she wouldn’t come.

“You took your time Nyxarrah,” he rasped, grinning through the shudders wracking him.

Her shadows lashed out at his restraints as the Dr’s eyes widened at Ash’s use of her true name. Darkness sank into them.

The metal and magic shrieked as it melted and broke. His next thrash sent him over the side of his chair, landing on the floor so hard his bones yelped.

He coughed blood, gaze fastening on her as she approached. A veil of darkness had ensnared the doctor. Mara had curled into a ball on the floor amidst the debris.

He paid it no mind as his raging succubus grinned, grabbed him by his biceps and hauled him to his feet. Pain blitzed his nerves, and he couldn’t hold back his scream. She flinched.

Shadows wove around him, steadying him and encircling the wounds on his wrists. Their warmth seeped into him.

“Miss me, demon?”

She huffed. “I missed the sound of you shutting up.”

Her voice buckled, though. Her claws quivered as she flexed them. Liora’s gaze scanned him. Her scent was stronger than normal.

Or maybe he’d just missed it. His internal organs were shrivelling as Mara’s essence tried and failed to find a foothold. He watched as Liora caught her taint on him.

All traces of panic left her expression. Glorious fury returned to full strength as her shoulders tensed.

“You reek of her,” Liora hissed, nostrils flared and eyes roiled as she jerked away from him.

Ash wiped blood off his chin, chuckling. Stepping closer. “Jealous, Red?”

She stiffened. Her hand whipped up, claws nicking his throat.

Their warm, sweet sting was like returning home even as she said, “I should let them dissect you.”

“But you won’t,” he replied, a soft smile flirting with his mouth.

Her heartbeat stuttered and skittered. Her fingers moved, trembling on his jaw.

She leaned in, holding her breath. “Why?”

“Because I’m the only one who knows how you taste when you stop lying.”

Her shadows curled tighter around his wrists, looping hers, binding them together as silence buzzed. They eased the glacial pain. Her expression hardened. She gave a single nod.

“You’re mine. Act like it,” she said, a sharp command that ricocheted through his cold bones and settled deep in his marrow. He wanted to sink into her wildfire heat.

He would’ve stayed like that, able to fill his lungs with her singular fragrance, to be near her after all the drama here. But the drumming of steel-toed boots racing toward the lab drew her attention.

The remaining hunters stumbled through the gaping hole in the wall and cursed bullets flew for their chests. She lifted a hand, and her shadows formed a shield between them and the death they planned for him.

If they couldn’t have him, no one could. He laughed as Liora turned to him and grabbed his hand.

Her palm was already slit, and her clawed finger hovered over his. He nearly yanked it back.

“They starved me for three days. I don’t have any to give you.”

She rolled her eyes, and she sliced his hand open. He let her, too curious to know what she planned. He noted the hunter blood staining her skin, rivulets of it embossing her leathers, and dried in her hair.

Mirror shards glinted among the copper braids. She’d bled at some point, too, his mouth watered as he caught a hint of it. She looked... stronger than ever.

Had she finally seen her own magnificence? His brain was slow on the draw. Mara’s essence made him feel drunk. A small line of his black blood welled on his palm.

Liora frowned at it, but nodded. Only seconds had passed, but it dragged as if everything was in slow motion. She sighed.

Meeting his eye at last. Searching for something, he thought, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Let her see the dancing ghosts three days apart had created in his eyes.

She must’ve found it because her shoulders relaxed a bit, and she moved without hesitation. Her fingers entwined through his as she inhaled deeply. Her cut palm pressed against his wounded one.

He frowned as nothing happened for a second. Then, power, pain, and pleasure flooded him with the force of a missile strike.

He rocked back on his heels, knees buckling. Only the shadows kept him from collapsing under its impact.

“Shit. What the fuck are you doing?”

She had gone deadly still. Her irises contained no onyx. Flames of amber and gold licked at the violet as more scales unfurled along her cheekbones.

He almost saw it as Liora’s every mental wall that he hadn’t yet climbed disintegrated.

Power wasn’t the only thing rattling through him. His thoughts shouted.

She’s giving me her life-force.

The one thing he hadn’t stolen from her.

It jumpstarted his deadened, polluted veins. Frost replaced the Silverthorn infection as the bond flared inside him. The tether between them solidified and came back to life as she strengthened him.

He nearly dropped to his knees, the impulse to laugh and grab her and kiss her almost impossible to resist. The lack of connection to her had cleaved him open.

She appeared just as glad. Her heart slowed a little, mouth softening a shade. Her gaze never fell from his as he sensed something else tied to the bond. Something that had been there a while.

It was web-thin and nearly invisible, but it was there. A thread that was tied around his undead heart and led to hers. It knotted around her aorta. One tug and... the realization detonated.

I’m her killswitch. Her extinction event. They can’t kill her. She turned me into her trigger.

His marrow turned to rust. His head shook as a fluttering sensation began in his gut.

He could unspool her now, if he wanted.

If he cut the thread, it would sever the bond, and she would crumble. The idea was a gelid blade against his throat. Her shadows coiled up his arms, warm and gentle and trusting as they rested against his pulse point.

Begging him. No.

Never. He would never betray her. He gritted his teeth as her life force, heartbeat, and thoughts merged with his. His heart still didn’t beat, but the hot echo of hers rang inside it.

“You trusted me. Before that night with the hunter’s heart, you trusted me. You gave me that weapon when you thought I’d leave.” It wasn’t a question, but she answered him.

“You’re the only weapon I don’t fear.”

He snorted, head shaking. “And you know I’d never use it.”

She shrugged. Eyes bright and full of a life he hoped they got to live together. “Semantics.”

“... Sentimental fool.” He couldn’t stop himself from teasing her.

“One day you’ll hate me enough to pull the trigger.” She paused, head tilting as she smirked. “Make it art, Leech.”

The hunters had regrouped as she gave him enough strength to fight their way out. They gathered at every exit as Liora pulled free of his hold. His skin tingled as frost coated his fingers.

“You don’t get to die, Red. Not on my watch.”

She scoffed but didn’t move away. “You’ll die when I say you can. Until then, you’ll fight.”

He nodded. Still shaking, but able to stand to his full height. They stood side by side, turning as one to face the crowd of hunters hoping to end them.

Liora let the shadow shield drop, and chaos reigned. He grinned, all fangs. She glared.

Then, they moved.