Chapter Twelve
Eva felt the sinking of his teeth like a vice that broke the skin, tight, hard, and deep. She inhaled sharply with pain and attempted to pull away, but Arach simply turned with her, knocking her off her feet before taking her to the hard, marble floor. She hit with bruising force, the impact knocking the wind from her lungs and setting stars flying in her vision. She was encompassed in a cocoon of pain.
Distantly, she felt him pull the blood from her vein, drawing it to the surface and drinking deep. Her mind reeled, and motes of unconsciousness threatened at her outer edges. She almost moaned in misery, but managed to stifle it. “What are you?” she asked instead, her voice pained and raspy, filled with the weakness he was worsening within her.
He slowly withdrew his fangs before sending his tongue over her wounds in a sick display of sexual delight. She closed her blurring eyes and turned away, wondering why she had suddenly found herself in such a helpless position. This wasn’t like her.
She was Evangeline. She was strong.
“I am many things, Eva,” he told her. His voice had deepened further. “And you will come to know them all.” Then he stood, and Eva suddenly found herself being lifted whiplash fast, and thrown back onto her long legs. The stars in her vision exploded, and she immediately began to topple, but Arach righted her once more.
She closed her eyes and focused, sending strength into her limbs.
“Come come, Eva,” Arach scolded her. “If you’re this weak, you know you can’t afford to fight me.” He slowly released her, and Eva forced herself to stay standing. “It only hurts you, believe me. I have all the time in the world.” He was utterly composed, completely in control. She had expected something raging. She had not expected a man who was anything but at the verge of losing his temper. He was exacting, but calm about the torture he unleashed. For some reason, this was far more frightening.
She had no idea how to deal with this. She had no idea what to expect from him. She certainly hadn’t expected him to behave like a vampire. Dragons had fangs, to be sure. Dragons were ancient, and ancient was primal. And nothing was more primal than sharp teeth.
But he was using them against her, drinking her in a way that was different. He felt entirely deadly, and he’d never felt that way to her before. She hugged herself hard despite the pain in her wrist and licked her lips. “What are you going to do with me, Arach? You have to know that I will never accept an existence with you.”
“Never is a long time, Legendary.” Arach walked away, heading back to the kitchen to leave her where he’d pulled her up from the floor. He turned once to smile at her over his shoulder, flashing those white fangs. Eva looked down at her wrist. The wounds were tiny pinpricks now, half healed. But bruising was already forming around them. And her wrist hurt. A dragon bite would have healed at once. It was one of the benefits of being a dragon. This wound, however, lingered and pulsed, a throbbing reminder of how he’d changed.
“Now you begin to see how little good it will do to resist me,” he told her frankly, taking the tray from the kitchen counter and approaching her with it once more. “Let’s try this again, shall we?” He held the tray of sweets up for her. “Eva, I think you should eat something.”
Eva looked from the tray to him and back again. She was going cold inside with realizations. They were hitting her like blocks of dry ice, freezing her from the inside out.
Arach had effectively just punished her for not obeying her. And that was how it was going to be with him. Forever. Which he was right about; it was a long time.
Unless she broke free. Right now.
Eva blinked. She stared at the strawberry he’d bitten into. She noted the indentations of his teeth. She thought of her wrist, of the way he’d slipped his teeth into it as well. She thought of the way he treated people, like objects or food. She thought… of her mother.
The man who killed my father is behind me. But before me stands the man who killed my mother. It was a younger voice making the sudden realization within her. And yet she spoke of it with the simple clarity of someone much, much older.
And something inside Evangeline, in that very strange moment, just… snapped. She almost heard it. Like a twig in the forest or an elastic band.
SNAP.
Evangeline was a rare dragon, half Legendary and half Nomad. But what was more rare was that, even after thousands of years, she had yet to transform fully into her true dragon form. She’d changed bits of herself here and there, from eyes to fangs to her clothing, but there were aspects to her dragon self she had yet to discover. She wasn’t sure why. That was just the way she was.
Now, as she heard that distinctive cracking sound in her soul and her gaze shifted into shades of red, some long lost aspect of her inner dragon was at last and all at once released.
Like lightning, Eva knocked the silver tray out of Arach’s grip. In the next second, a stream of something black and purple instantly and violently erupted from her outstretched arms, sucking the light out of the room as if it were a black hole. That crackling, sparkling, spinning black hole stream shot through Arach’s chest like a cannon ball, sending him flying across the room to slam into the opposite wall. At the same time, the blast was so catastrophic, the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows all along one wall of the room shattered. Beyond the shattered glass, the water in the Olympic sized swimming pool began to instantaneously boil.
Eva stared through terrified, wide eyes at the destruction she was letting loose. She thought, for half a second, about trying to reel it in. But there was something else in charge now, something not the least bit related to logic or conscious thought. It was something primal and furious.
The black hole stream died, and the lights in the room flickered, brightening once more. Without stopping to think about it, Eva wrapped her arms around herself and called up a transport spell. She felt weakness warring with wrath inside her, struggling for control of her form. Lucky for her, wrath was still in charge.
But the wind kicked up, and the transport portal began to form in front of her – and then quickly died again.
Evangeline felt the remaining anger coarse through her like tiny sparks left over after a lightning strike. They rode over her nerve endings, pricked her skin into goosebumps, and then flickered away altogether, leaving her utterly and completely drained.
I can’t leave, she thought hopelessly. His words returned to her.
It won’t hold me, Arach.
Oh, I think you’ll find it will.
He’d been right. There was something about the house that she couldn’t escape. She looked up toward the opposite end of the room, where she’d thrown her captor. He wasn’t there any longer. But her confusion was overridden by the fact that she realized she’d fallen to her knees. She had nothing left.
A shoe click to her right drew her attention to her side. She turned and looked up once more.
Arach’s chest smoked, his clothing burned away to reveal a ripped and strong physique underneath. But aside from this clear sign of recent distress, he looked unharmed and unfazed by her attack.
Outside, the pool’s water slowed in its roiling as it gradually cooled.
Arach’s eyes glowed blood red. “You’ve made quite a mess of things, Eva,” he told her in his strange and powerful voice. “And you’ve left me in a quandary.”
He knelt down beside her, placing his forefinger beneath her chin to ensure she maintained eye contact. His own eyes flashed with unspent lightning. “Your outburst demands punishment. And your gilded cage requires cleaning.”
He moved again with that fluid and unnatural grace, and Eva closed her eyes as his hand circled her throat. He used this terrible hold on her to lift her from the ground. Her hands wrapped around his wrist in a faint effort to dislodge him. But of course, she was absolutely ineffective. The wrath that had given her untold and unanticipated strength only moments earlier had effectively done nothing but poked the bear. It left her abandoned and spent, betraying her to the cruel grip of a pissed-off madman.
“You need a whipping boy and a maid.” He pulled her closer, so that his next words whispered across her lips. “Perhaps your little friend Mimi would make an excellent use for both. Would do her some good to learn a little respect.”
Eva’s heart went cold.
Arach’s mouth curled into a knowing smile. “Let’s fetch her and find out, shall we?”