Vengeance (The Captive #6)(34)

“Who is Jack?”

“You may know him as Jericho, the youngest brother of the king.”

“Oh,” her rosebud mouth parted. “It’s so weird to hear someone talk of them so freely and with so much knowledge.”

“I imagine it is; I know I never thought I’d know them the way I do.”

“What was the war like?”

He should have known she wouldn’t so easily let her question go. Of course, she was curious about what had happened; he imagined many were. Looking away from her, his eyes focused on the shadows dancing across the wall. His hand instinctively grasped his thigh, where the scar from the spear that had punctured him during the war still marred his flesh. The screams that had echoed through the throne room resonated within his head. His own screams amongst those as the spear had pinned him like a bug and nearly crippled him.

“It was war,” he murmured as he rose to his feet once more.

“Was it…? It was awful.”

He glanced back at her as he began to pace again. The damn walls were beginning to grate on his nerves, or maybe it wasn’t the walls but the memories encompassing him that he couldn’t tolerate right now. “All war is. All death is.”

“I’m sorry.”

He rolled his shoulders, stretching his tense back. “Don’t be. The world is a better place because of what happened.”

That knowledge didn’t assuage the screams in his head or erase the cloying scent of blood in his nostrils. So many had fallen, not only at the raid on the palace, but also in Chippman, where he had finally lost his life. His hand ran over the puckered scar on his stomach before falling to his side. So many scars, but most of them were on the inside, invisible to the naked eye.

Walking to the back of the cave, he pulled out another canteen of blood, the last one. They’d gone through it faster than he’d anticipated. He returned to the main room and handed the canteen over to her. “That’s it,” he told her.

She waved it away. “We should probably save it then.”

“The storm will break soon.” He hoped. “Drink.”

“Sometimes they can last for a week or more.”

Ugh, he groaned inwardly, but he could do nothing about the weather. “Then I will go hunting for more. There’s not enough to last us another week; there’s no point in turning it down.”

The pale blue veins in the back of her hand were clearly visible when she took the canteen from him and unscrewed the cap. His fangs pricked at the sight of those veins; a heavy pressure built within his canines as she tilted it back and took a swallow of blood. The muscles in her throat and neck flexed; his eyes latched onto her throat as she consumed the liquid.

It had been months since he’d been with a woman, not since before he’d died. Between trying to adjust to his new life, what he’d become, and what he was now capable of, he’d had little time for women. And truth be told, he hadn’t known if he could trust himself not to hurt someone in the beginning. Didn’t know what would happen if he allowed himself to relinquish any of the unyielding restraint he’d been keeping himself under over the past five months.

He’d never felt the urge to drink from another vampire before, humans yes, but not a vampire. Desire for her slithered hotly through him and was far more intense than he’d experienced with anyone else before. He knew from Aria that vampires rarely shared blood with each other, but he was new, they were trapped in a cave together, and he was hungry. This was probably one more thing he would have to come to terms with now that he wasn’t human.

Her delicate features were striking, her silvery hair and doe colored eyes enticing. No wonder he was thinking about sinking his teeth and himself into her. Her alluring scent of fresh air and snow tickled his nose. “I always loved the winters, until now,” she murmured before tilting the canteen back to her mouth again.

William took a step away from her to put some distance between them. His mind searched for a way to distract himself from his growing hunger for her. “When we were children Aria, Daniel, and I would often build snowmen and forts in the winter. We’d also make snow angels.”

She lowered the canteen from her mouth and wiped away the blood staining her lips. She held it out to him. He took the half-filled canteen from her and took a gulp before capping it off again. Not much remained, but the last of it was for her.

“We did that too, often. Snow usually remains on the ground for about six months of the year in our valley.”

He laughed and placed the remaining blood on the ground beside her. “Luckily it didn’t last that long where we were,” he replied.

“What else did you do for fun?”

He rested his palm against the wall. “We’d go swimming, hunting, climb trees, and play jokes on each other and my father.”

The mention of his father didn’t bring the acute, nearly crippling grief it used to bring to his heart, but only a sense of melancholy at what could have been if he’d survived. So many things had happened he wished to share with him, so many conversations he longed to have. His father had been the wisest man he knew; there wasn’t a day he didn’t miss him. He often longed for just one more day, but it was not to be, and he’d come to accept that more over the last year and a half, though he knew he would miss him forever.

“It sounds like fun,” she said.