Black Blood (Series of Blood Book 4) Emma Hamm (popular novels txt) 📖

could see every wing, every word faded upon their delicate membranes. She could see the ripples they created in the air before he made time stop. Mid flap, they became ornaments rather than living creatures.

In the center of all this destruction, Pitch stood with his hands loose at his sides. He was a silhouette of self-control even as fractures cracked through him.

She was not afraid, Lydia told herself. Her useless bloody feet dragged across the floor. She remained standing.

No broken woman should show her weakness in the presence of a wounded man.

The soft sound of her bare feet was loud in the silence of the room. He did not move. He did not breathe. He did not allow time to continue in its great path as he waited to see what she would do.

Her hand raised. Her long fingers were now tipped in silver as she reached for his back. She smoothed her hand along the lean muscles and arches of bone that met her.

“Ease,” she whispered. “Let me help you.”

“You cannot.”

But she knew a way. Sil’s memories told her he was lying, even though it would be at great expense to herself. She took a deep breath, moved her aching feet, and slid her hand up his chest to press against his neck.

Anger. Hopelessness. A burning guilt that felt as though Heaven’s light had turned away from her forever. Uncontainable onyx power devouring her soul and replacing it with the deep expanse of the abyss.

It bubbled. It raged. It beat against the cage of her ribs until she could do little more than toss her head back and scream. Silence poured out of her mouth and the thinnest of silver fogs.

Her ruined legs collapsed. She fell onto the floor with the grace of a silken cloth let drift from a dancer’s hand. The white fabric of her nightgown pooled around her.

A mangled sound ruptured from his lips as he fell with her. His knees hit the wooden floor with a harsh snap. His arms curled around her shoulders and pulled her to his chest.

“Why,” he sighed as he brushed the hair from her face. “You only hurt yourself trying to save me.”

“Because you see yourself with a crown of broken glass,” she coughed. “But I see a battle worn man incapable of forgiving himself.”

She choked on his magic. Everything she had absorbed from him churned inside her stomach. It sought its way free from her body by seeping ink onto her tongue. It dribbled from the side of her lips and trailed a dark path down her throat.

His thumb followed the liquid to smear it upon her neck. A badge of honor, she thought. Her own bit of darkness, stolen from him.

“You cannot save me, if she could not,” he told her.

“I don’t want to save you. I just want to see you happy.”

“That choice was left behind me long ago.” He said the words, but his eyes were trailing across her features. “It is as if I have never seen you before.”

“I remember everything now. Maybe she was waiting until I was strong enough.”

“You aren’t.”

Feeling came back to her feet which rested like dying birds on the floor. “I am better than I have been in a long time.”

“But not well.”

“Well enough.”

Lydia coughed and another rush of darkness bubbled from her lips. It overflowed and poured down both sides of her cheeks. Not unlike drowning, she thought, but in a strangely calming way.

“Lydia,” his hands were cupped on either side of her head to catch the rivers of darkness he had caused. “I regret bringing you here, giving you her magic, and causing you so much pain.”

“I do not.”

“How can you not?”

Her hands framed his. She traced the ridges of his knuckles and seams between each strong finger. “What is the night sky without its stars? What is the threat of darkness without the promise of dreaming unknown worlds? You and I are two sides of a coin now.”

She watched his face crumple before a tortured growl wrangled from his throat. “I cannot love you as I loved her.”

“It was a consuming love you felt for her,” Lydia agreed as she traced the whorl of his ear. “I would not ask that of you again. I would settle for a mere shadow of that affection if it meant you looked at me.”

She hadn’t even admitted the thoughts to herself. Night after night, she found herself becoming more and more attached to him. Pitch had become important to her. A function of life, a necessity for happiness.

Early on, she had dismissed it as Stockholm Syndrome and told herself to grow up. Then she had berated herself for feeling this way about a man who had already pledged his life’s work to another. But she would not deny it any longer.

He did not need to tell her the same. She hadn’t blurted out the truth in hopes that she would catch him or force him to make a decision. The truth was that she was falling in love with him. With the darkness, with the nightmares, with every small shattered piece of him.

Pitch did not reply. His dark eyes searched hers until she could finally see the tiny sparks of light return to them.

“There you are,” she whispered. “Welcome back.”

He groaned and finally loosed his immense self-control.

Shadows exploded into movement all around them. Arching suddenly and then freezing in place before they shot back toward the ceiling, the walls, the floor. At the center of all this movement, Pitch’s hand tunneled into her hair.

One of his hands gripped the tines of her antlers to hold her in place. Her back arched uncomfortably as he forcibly tilted her.

But the pain disappeared as soon as his soft lips touched hers.

A man’s lips shouldn’t taste like this, she decided. He tasted like rust and roses. Like thorns that tangled down her throat. Like tragedy and the ashes of ancient kingdoms burning. He was sin and passion incarnate.

His hands trailed down her neck and