Parker was suddenly lifted off the ground by the force of all the power flowing through him and before he could crash back down, Ondrej and Imre caught him.
As she collapsed, she felt the cold, dead hands of her father on her face and heard his voice from far away.
“Stay with us, my little sun-flower. Stay.”
His voice reached into the caverns of darkness and shook them with their might, but she couldn’t hold on.
“Stay with me, child, or I’ll send that dog to the afterlife with you.” His voice was softer than she’d ever heard it, still menacing—for here was the great Tirigan of the Asakku, a god in his own right, it seemed—but for a moment, he sounded like a father.
Belle was vaguely aware of being hoisted up from the ground and a comforting chill permeated her body. Indeed, that cold was death, but it wasn’t coming for her. It was protecting her.
It was Tirigan.
And she knew she was safe.
Not even the Grim Reaper would dare to pluck her from her father’s arms.
Emotions welled inside of her, and she had so much she wanted to say. Fear welled like a cancer underneath it all.
Fear that this was transient and as soon as she was well, he’d force her into the thing he wanted her to be.
But he hadn’t tried to force her to drink.
As if he could read her mind, he said, “You should drink. Animal blood, if that’s what you want, but I offer mine freely.”
He offered. He didn’t demand.
She found the strength to nod weakly.
He slid, with her in his arms, into the back of the Woolven limo.
“Parker,” she hissed.
“The pup will be well. The dragons have him. They’re flying to Aphelion.” And before she could try to speak again, “Yes, sunshine. I’m taking you there, too.”
Her body relaxed against the comforting chill, and she felt the press of his wrist against her lips. She knew another moment of fear, wondering what his blood would do to her. If it would change her.
If it would make her monster that much more monstrous.
Yet, today, she’d seen the benefit to the powerful darkness inside of her. It had saved Parker’s life, and possibly her own.
There’d been so much blood. So much death.
The part of her that pretended to be human wanted her to be horrified. Sickened. Only she wasn’t. She couldn’t pretend to be. She knew without any introspection that what she’d done today, she’d do a thousand times. A million. She’d drown herself in a river of their blood if they came for her or those she loved.
And that mousy little voice with human morality that squeaked inside of her head would just have to suck it up.
She opened her mouth and let her teeth sink deep into Tirigan’s wrist.
His blood was like a river of dark, bitter cacao. Perhaps that was why the werewolves though she smelled like chocolate instead of death. It poured over her tongue and she swallowed greedily, following the visions through the tunnel and back toward the light.
Memories lived in the blood.
Tirigan’s memories.
She saw Ur when the humans first began to build. The warmth of the sunshine on her father’s skin, how he found those grunting, fumbling, beasts to be amazing creatures.
She flashed forward to the darkness when the hunger had grown to be too much. How alone her father had been at the beginning. There had been no others of his kind. None like him, but him alone. Eternity had stretched before him a dark, gaping maw of hunger and isolation.
Belle saw a beautiful woman smiling at Tirigan. Her stomach was slightly rounded, and her dark skin glowed with life. “You will never be alone again,” she’d said to him in a language that Belle didn’t understand, but she knew the words because her father knew the words.
She also felt what her father felt in that moment.
The joy.
It punched her in the face with more force than the magic had.
Her creation had been no thing of darkness, no violation of the laws of nature for glory or… It had been love. That was her mother.
Belle wasn’t aware she’d stretched out her hand to touch the apparition until Tirigan took her hand and held it.
She saw herself as she was born, but the tenor of the memory changed to blood and darkness. A fury unlike any other. It was losing Belle’s mother that had changed him. That sense of the dark forever looming almost strangled her.
There was only one, tiny light.
The memory of a woman holding a child as the last of her life left her in a river of blood.
She wanted to speak, wanted to… but the vision changed again. Her view narrowed to the size of a pinprick.
And she was holding a baby, whispering words in that language she didn’t understand, but knew to mean, “I love you.”
The last breath to ever leave Siduri of Ur, high priestess of the Asakku, left in a kiss on her newborn daughter’s cheek.