Hunger Embraced (The Hunger Series) (25 page)

I had dismissed those words, figuring they were more cryptic bullshit I didn’t need. But now I wondered if he had meant this thing—this strange construct, half-formed and staring at me with intelligence burning in white pupilless eyes. I chanced a step forward. It didn’t move, cocking its head to the side with the hand held out. I raised my right hand palm out and held it up where the creature could reach it. I didn’t want to, afraid that if it attained a grip it would yank me into its arms and devour me. But a touch, palm to palm, may tell me enough. I stepped forward again, and it adjusted its hand up so an inch or so of air was cushioned between us.

Sparking energy ballooned in the space, and it flared over my palm and down my arm with warmth and tingles. It felt like the heat of a shared bed, the languid melting my muscles experienced after orgasm, and sexual arousal. I gasped and then chuckled in delight. The creature imitated my smile, its eyes flashing with a flare of power when I punched my hand through the energy to touch its palm.

A blast of white light burst through me, whipped my hair back on a wind that held the smell of sex and vanilla, jasmine and honey. I shielded my eyes with my left hand. Colors and streamers swam behind my eyelids. When I was brave enough to open my eyes, I nearly fell on my ass.

The creature was no longer a slug-like, waxen thing that looked as though the gods had thrown it to the floor like a forgotten toy before they finished sculpting it. I stared into a mirror image of myself…if I was the physical representation of a sex goddess, that is.

“Finally.” It smiled with lips pinker and a smidge fuller than mine. Perfect teeth flashed, white, even, the small chip I’d had for years in my left incisor gone. I let my gaze wander down the body in front of me, envy burning. All the flaws I had were gone. Her breasts were symmetrical, the nipples perky and perfectly in line with each other, even her thighs thinner and firmer. My belly had never been Hollywood flat, but hers was.

Man, I hated this version of myself already. I bet she’d never even have a bad hair day.

“I have waited so long for you here. I was beginning to think you would never come and then you did only to run from me. But you’re back now. We can be as we are meant to be.”

“What do you mean?” I took a step back and tugged on the hand she gripped until she released it.

“You have been running from me for years. You put me here, and I have been starving, until I was reduced to that thing you saw the first time you came. When you fed, I was so relieved, because I knew that meant you must be beginning to accept your gift and would complete our bond.” She stepped toward me. I imagined her voice was what mine sounded like in the midst of sex—throaty, full, delivered with the full weight of my diaphragm behind it. “And now you have returned and given me form.”

“I don’t understand this. Any of this. My father said this was a place of forgetting. And now you say I put you here and let you starve.” A fine tremble worked its way up my body, and I felt like a damned bobble head with my neck letting my head flail around of its own accord.

She nodded and held her hands at her waist, clasped together with interlocking fingers. I’d never stood that way in my life.

“I have lived inside you since before you took root in your mother’s womb. The night we lost control and that child died, you excised me as much as you could and trapped me here with your fear and recrimination.”

“Tommy?” I paced to the left and back again.

“Yes. You call me the Hunger to others, but in your heart you call me other things. Parasite. Demon. Curse. I have heard them all and can deny none. I can only be that which you shape me to be. By locking me here, I had to resort to trickery and subterfuge to feed and then it was only scraps.”

Anger colored the words and her posture as she advanced toward me, hands on her hips, until her nose nearly touched mine. Now, that gesture was familiar.

“What do you mean by subterfuge? Is it because of you all those vamps have been hunting me down? I thought I was feeding them—”

“Yes, it was I that called to them. I was desperate. You left me with little choice. If the ceremony had gone as planned…well, it did not.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “And you did feed them; your blood is strong and can be addictive if taken by a weaker being. But it also allowed me to feed, even if it was only sips at the edge of the ocean. I took only the smallest of amounts and released the rest to them so you would not know what was going on and hurt me again.”

“Did my father know this would happen?” He must have known about this, he was an Incubi himself. Anger rose from the pit of my abdomen and heat flooded my cheeks. An irrational part of me wondered if he and this thing—what was she exactly anyway? A magical power given form, a demon, a parasitic growth inside me I was somehow confronting here in this vision place?—had planned everything from the beginning, from the terrible night I’d accidently killed the boy I’d lost my virginity to.

But it didn’t add up, didn’t make sense. She said she had only been here since that night, not before it.

“He is Incubi, like you. He has within himself a shadow of what I am.” She shrugged.

“What? Are you special? Different from all the other little Incubi par—powers?” That would have been a nasty little slip. The look on her face told me she’d caught it and wasn’t happy, but she ignored me.

“Yes,
we
are special, Miranda. Most of the vampires now living were turned, not born. There was a time that all were born, but no longer. So when you were born it was a cause for great celebration. When your father refused to have you take your place at court as you were meant to, he sacrificed much.”

I shook my head. “How do you know these things? How can you know more than I do?”

“I may have been inside you, but I was free to leave as I wished, when it suited me. Think of me as magic with sentience.”

“Uh-huh. Maybe it would be better if you could continue to do that. You know, roam around whenever you want, and not being stuck with boring old me all the time. In fact, perhaps you could just go away altogether.”

Anger flashed in her eyes, and she flushed magenta. Only on her, it looked magnificent. I looked like an overgrown eggplant when I got mad. I added it to my list of Reasons to Hate My Parasite.

“We are meant to be one. The gods themselves ordained it so. I am sorry if my presence is of a conflicting nature to your desires for life. I haven’t exactly been enjoying the last seven years myself.” She turned her back and paced to the far side of the circle of light, muttering under her breath.

I didn’t catch any of it, busy stamping my feet against the cold stones and warming my hands under my armpits. After standing still for a few minutes, the cold seeped into my bones.

“So, we’re stuck with each other, is that what you’re saying? How do we maintain our own selves, our own identities?”

She turned to face me. “I
am
you, you fool. Just as you are me. I am a part of your soul given physical form and shape in this place. It is not normal, not at all, although I don’t think anything about you—us—has ever been normal.” Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t even think about trying to get out of the ceremony again. I know you’re thinking it.”

People liked to claim that Sybil lied about her personalities. I felt her pain.

“If I do it, what happens to you? I just absorb you like a sponge or something? Suck you up—slurp—until you’re all assimilated? And then what? You disappear inside me? I don’t think you’re really going to like that all that much. I don’t think I’ll like it all that much either.”

“Before you took off on your little vacation, I was inside you. I was as much a part of you as your stubborn belief I am some sort of evil monster hell-bent on destruction.”

“I don’t believe you’re evil. I’m just scared of what can happen.” I stubbed my toe on the ground and met her eyes. “I don’t want to be a pawn. Surely you can understand that. I don’t think I have a choice about the ceremony at this point, but all this crap about fated couples and that jerk Adrian as my king?” I shuddered.

She nodded and came back to touching distance again. “I don’t care for him either. I felt it when he used you for his own devices. He will seek to control and use you as a weapon. I don’t know much about this nonsense of kings, but I do know I did not care for the way he tasted. The other one, however, he is delicious.” She licked her lips and smiled.

“Yeah, well, he is on some sort of mission of denial where I’m concerned.” The frustration rose up unbidden, and I had to squash it down. “Ever glean anything about the Council or Guardians or the workings of a coven?”

“No, not really. Your father’s court was insular, it seemed to be run fairly, and the vampires in it were comfortable. There was only the one visit by an outside vampire other than the occasional Guardian, and they used spells to keep eavesdroppers from their private meetings.”

“Was it Daniel? In a super secret meeting?” My heart leaped into my throat at the thought.

“No, it was the other. The one who claims you as his queen. When you were nearing the age of Transition, I sensed a powerful vampire in the area and snooped.”

Relief swept me. “That must have been when they struck the betrothal deal.” I chewed my lip. “Have you always had your own, I don’t know, personality? You are magic, right? Are you a being that has chosen to fuse itself to my soul or something else? I mean, how were you able to just leave me whenever it suited you and come back again?”

“I am magic. I believe I have become a being of sorts, although I did not start out that way. I have, as humans like to say, evolved. The older you got, the older I got. Your body grew, and so did I, until I realized one day I could slip away unnoticed and decided to go adventuring.”

“It doesn’t bother you to think you may lose your personality, or whatever, when we merge?” I curled a length of hair around my finger.

“It bothers me more to think of a lifetime spent here, in this place, slowly starving and going mad. You’re going to live a long time, longer than a human lifespan, and I do not want to be tethered to this place for that length of time.”

“I’m sorry I put you here. But surely you understand why I reacted so badly?”

She shrugged and tipped her head to the side. “It is difficult for me to think as a human would. Your body was injured, and you needed to heal. I gave you the means to do that. I know it caused you pain that the boy died, but he was food. It is not much different than what the humans do to cows.”

I opened my mouth to protest and shut it again. She wouldn’t understand. Because even though I had started to think of her as a person, she wasn’t. She was some sort of being, and while not inherently evil, thought more like an animal. It made me think of having a staring contest with a shark at the aquarium. If I fell in the tank it would eat me because that was its nature, and it wouldn’t offer an apology.

What would happen when I completed my ceremony and she lived inside me fully? I knew what happened with only the small root I hadn’t been able to excise. The possibilities with the entire scary package were vast and terrifying. I sat on the ground, suddenly exhausted, and my chin met my chest. I thought I heard my name on the wind.

“He calls you.” She sat down opposite me and folded her legs under.

My eyelids fluttered closed.

Chapter Sixteen

My brain bounced off the inside of my skull from the force of Daniel shaking me. He crouched over my body with a look of panic on his face, muttering under his breath in a mix of English and Italian.

“Wake up, wake up
dannazione! Mi hanno mai lasciato solo lei. Prego cara
—”

“Hi.”

He looked at my eyes and crushed me to his chest. I couldn’t breathe well, but I didn’t have it in me to complain. I inhaled the scent of his skin and let my head rest between his shoulder and neck. Even if I had a headache now from being shaken all to hell, it wasn’t a bad way to wake up. He kept muttering against my hair in Italian. It was pretty, lyrical, and liquid. It reminded me of water rushing over rocks.

“Ho pensato che lo avessi perso, oh dio, ho denominato ed eravate oltre la mia portata. Come accenderei senza voi interrompere i miei programmi attenti?”

“I don’t speak that language. I don’t think you’re berating me, but I can’t understand you. Care to translate?”

He squeezed me again, and I squeaked. He retreated and stared into my eyes, his hand shaking when he reached up and pushed my hair off my forehead. I grabbed the hand and kissed his palm. Daniel looked pale under his tan.

“You had frost all over your body and were barely breathing. Don’t ever do that again.” His forehead touched mine when he finished. “I said ‘I thought I had lost you, oh God, I called and you were beyond my reach. How would I go on without you to disrupt my careful plans?’”

“Oh.” I blushed and bit my lip, then kissed him and leaned back against the pillows.

I realized then I did seem to be not wet, but damp. My hair plastered to my face in clinging strands. Strange. I wondered if I had physically traveled to that other place or if it had been such an intense vision that the cold of it manifested on my body. I’d thought I’d determined it wasn’t a vision space because I couldn’t manifest clothing. But if I’d gone there physically, Daniel wouldn’t have been able to shake me.

“I don’t have much control over it when it happens, Daniel. That’s the second time it has, and the first time I definitely didn’t come back all wet and cold.” I whispered the words, afraid if I spoke too loudly he would spook and pull away. I could sit here looking at his eyes for hours, no days, and never want to move. They reminded me of star sapphires. The lashes were thick and long but hard to see because they were the same color as his hair.

“Where did you go?” His thigh settled against my hip through the comforter.

“My father told me it was a ‘place of forgetting.’ I don’t really know what it is. But I’m pretty sure I created it or I somehow accessed it a long time ago and have only recently been able to get back into it.” I shrugged and brought my finger to his lips, traced the soft, pliant skin top to bottom.