Void(60)

“Yeah? Well, me fuckin’ thinks you’re about two seconds from having me tear out your godsdamn throat,” Gritt replied.

The combination of their angry powers had me suddenly salivating. The amulet on my chest started to vibrate, and I knew with the amount of barely-contained hunger running through my system that it was glowing. “She needs to feed. She practiced on me before. I can handle it.”

Panic thumped in my chest. I tried to protest, to sit up, to do something, but it was like all of my limbs were filled with cotton. I was a puppet without strings.

“Are you sure about this?” I heard Quade ask.

I had no idea how I’d gotten here, surrounded by all four paragons, but their power was too much when I was so weak. It was like smelling food cooking when you were starving. Even with the amulet, my Void was practically drooling, pushing against my skin from the inside out. It wanted to unleash and help my body cope with what had been done to me. Gritt was right; I needed to feed.

“I can handle it,” Gritt repeated.

I felt fingers on my neck, strong hands trembling slightly at the clasp of my necklace.

“No…” I tried to protest, to warn him. I was way too weak to hold the Void back. If they took off my necklace, I was going to destroy him. Probably all of them.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Quade muttered right before Gritt finally got the clasp unhooked.

And then, my amulet was yanked away, and my Void expelled out of me.

It was like lying flat on my back on a sandy beach while the tide came. Water overtook me, submerging me entirely, dragging me back out to the depthless ocean.

When a hot hand pressed against my chest and collarbone, that smoky tide of my power washed up my body and into his hand. My eyes snapped open, and all I could see were Gritt’s vibrant green eyes and his mane of blond hair as my black smoke surrounded him. His expression was intense and full of anger, but I didn’t know if that anger was directed at me or something else.

My smoke latched onto him, and his body shuddered as my power drank from him. My Void was starved because my body was abused. The more I drank, the better I felt. His powers entered me in a constant stream, but it wasn’t painful. Just like the first time I’d fed off him, it filled me with a heady, almost erotic pleasure. My chest started to rise and fall in rapid breaths.

“Let...go…” I begged him.

He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “Not yet. You need more.”

I couldn’t ask him how he knew that, because my eyes rolled to the back of my head as I felt another powerful wave of his shifter power push into me. It felt so fucking good.

His hand dug into my skin, probably leaving marks, but I barely felt it. When I looked at him again, his expression had softened to something indescribable, and there was a definite heat in his gaze. One that promised to stoke the flames that had ignited in us both.

After another moment, I nodded at him. “It’s okay. That’s enough.”

With great effort, he pulled his hand away, but he didn’t back up. Instead, he leaned forward, bringing my smoke with him. But instead of latching onto his skin or polluting his eyes and ears and mouth, my Void was slowly caressing him, the vapor brushing against him almost with tenderness.

“It worked.”

It took me a moment for his words to sink in because I was so lost in the depths of his eyes. But he was right. It had worked. My Void had drunk from him without draining him. In fact, it had already pulled away, one last sip of his power to quench the last of my needs. But I hadn’t done anything. My Void had done it all on its own. It’s like it knew not to hurt Gritt—like it remembered how I’d taught it constraint the last time. My mind whirled with questions that I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what this meant, but I knew it was important.

Slowly, he brought up my amulet, and his hand gently cupped the back of my head to lift it. He re-clasped the necklace around my neck once more, and I noticed that his canines had elongated, and his expression was slightly animalistic. The last of my smoke evaporated, and I breathed in a shaky breath.

“It seems our shifter likes when she takes a sip from him,” I heard Hyde say.

I sat up, only feeling slightly dizzy at the movement. When I looked down at my body, I saw dozens of fang marks all over me, the telltale pink and red smears of my own blood dyeing my skin. But Render had obviously licked each bite, because they were all slowly closing up. Still, to see the evidence of my attack made me wince. I’d come very, very close to dying, and that fact was like having an ice-cold water dumped over me. I never expected for the level of hatred to come to that. I was wrong.

Gritt pulled a blanket off the back of a chair and wrapped it around me. I took it gratefully and looked around, but I didn’t recognize the bedroom we were in. There was a deep red comforter over a four poster bed, and everything inside—the desk, the side tables, the bedframe, even the widows—were all made of matching dark wood that played off the stone flooring.

“Where am I?” I asked.

My hands smoothed over the leather chaise I was sitting on, and I looked over at the four paragons around me. Render was leaning against the wall with one ankle crossed over the other, his dark hair slightly disheveled. Quade was perched on the desk, a scowl in place. Hyde was...resurrecting a beetle by the looks of it, and Gritt was still sitting next to me, his relieved and heated stare licking up at my soul.