A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)(2)

“God,” I rasped, coughing up bubbles of blood. Tears sprang to my eyes, half horror, half reverence. I hardly knew who I was talking to. “God, help me.”

Drops of grey rain tumbled from the empty sky, splattering across my cheeks. I could barely feel them. I tightened my fingers into a fist, willing my heart to keep beating.

“So determined to live,” you breathed, as though you were witnessing something holy, as though I was a miracle. “I should call you Constanta. My steadfast Constanta.”

I shuddered as the rain began to pool around us, streaking through my hair and filling my gasping mouth. I know I had a name before that moment. It was a sturdy name, warm and wholesome like a loaf of dark bread fresh out of the oven. But the girl I had been disappeared the instant you pronounced me yours.

“You will not last long, steel-willed though you are,” you said, drawing closer. Your presence above me blocked out the sky, until all I could see was the battered metal insignia pinning your cloak closed at your throat. I had never seen clothes as fine as yours, or ones that looked so old. “They have broken you. Badly.”

I tried to speak, but the pain searing through my chest wouldn’t allow it. A broken rib, perhaps, or several. It was getting harder to drag air into my body. I heard a sick curdling sound with every inhale.

Fluid in the lungs, probably. Blood.

“God,” I rasped, managing a few meager words. “Save me. Please.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tears trickled out. You bent to kiss my eyelids, one after the other.

“I cannot save you, Constanta,” you murmured. “But I can help.”

“ Please. ”

What else could I have said? I didn’t know what I was asking for, besides begging not to be left alone in the dirt to drown in my own blood. If I had refused you, would you have left me there? Or was I already marked for you, my cooperation merely a bit of pomp and circumstance to mark the occasion?

You pulled aside my sopping hair and exposed the white flesh of my neck.

“This will hurt,” you murmured, lips tracing the words on my throat.

I grasped blindly, heart hammering in my chest as the world blurred at the edges. My fingers curled around the first thing they found; your forearm. A startled look crossed your face and I clung to you tightly, pulling you closer. I didn’t know what you were offering me, I just knew I was terrified that you were going to leave me.

You stared into my face, almost like you were seeing me for the first time.

“So strong,” you said, tilting your head to take me in the way a jeweler might a perfectly cut diamond. “Hold fast, Constanta. If you live through this, you will never know the sting of death again.”

You lowered your mouth to my throat. I felt two pinpricks, then a searing pain that radiated down my neck and shoulder. I writhed in your grasp, but your hands were strong as a vise on my shoulders, pinning me to the ground.

I had no words for it then, the way we take our strength from the veins of the living. But I knew I was being subjected to some unspeakable horror, something not meant to be carried out in the unforgiving light of day. A fragment of one of my grandmother’s stories flashed through my mind.

They feel no compassion, the moroi. Only hunger.

I never believed her tales of the dead who crawled out of the earth to sup the blood of the living. Not until then.

There wasn’t enough air left in my body to scream. My only protestation was silent tears streaming down my cheeks, my body a rictus of rigid pain as you drank your fill of me.

Pain hot as the blacksmith’s anvil burned through my veins down to the tips of my fingers and toes. You pushed me to the brink of death but refused to let me slip over the edge. Slowly, slowly bleeding me dry with the restraint only centuries taught.

Cold and limp and entirely spent, I was convinced my life was over. But then, just as my eyes slid shut, I felt the slick touch of wet skin against my mouth. My lips parted instinctively, and I coughed on the stinging, acrid taste of blood. It had no sweetness to me then, no depth or subtlety. All I tasted was red and wrong and burning.

“Drink,” you urged, pressing your bleeding wrist to my mouth. “If you don’t drink, you will die.”

I pressed my lips tightly together, though your blood had already passed my lips. I should have been dead long ago, but somehow I was still alive, renewed vigor rushing through my veins.

“I cannot make you,” you huffed, halfway between a plea and irritation. “The choice is yours.”

Grudgingly, I parted my lips and took your blood into my mouth like mother’s milk. If this was to be my only wretched salvation, so be it.

An indescribable fire bloomed in my chest, filling me with heat and light. It was a purifying kind of fire, like I was being scorched clean from the inside out. The ragged wound in my neck seared as though I had been bitten by something poisonous, but the agony of my bruised muscles and broken bones dulled and then, miraculously, disappeared.

Then the hunger started. Quietly at first, a stirring in the back of my mind, the gentle warmth of a watering mouth.

Suddenly it seized me, and there was no hope of denying it. I felt like I hadn’t tasted a drop of water in weeks, like I couldn’t even remember the taste of food. I needed the pulsing, salty nourishment streaming from your wrist, more and more of it.

I clamped my ice-cold fingers around your arm and dug my teeth into your skin, sucking the blood right out of your veins. I didn’t have my hunting teeth then, but I gave it my best attempt, even as you wrenched your wrist away from my slick mouth.