Black Blood (Series of Blood Book 4)

by Emma Hamm

  “One of the journals,” she flipped it over in her hands to show him. “You said they were mine as well as yours. I have been reading them while you’ve been gone.”

  His chest heaved as he stared her down. “Yes I did. Didn’t I?”

  The questioned hovered between them. “Do you not remember saying it?”

  “I-” he paused to shovel his hand through his hair. A black lock fell in front of his forehead. “I do not know. I’ve been gone and when I returned you weren’t in your room.”

  “I don’t sleep all the time.”

  “Most times.”

  Her heart stung. “I’m doing my best to stay awake. It’s not as easy as you might think.”

  “I know that,” he said while his face flushed red. “I am embarrassed to even say the words. It is not easy to wait for you to awaken, either.”

  She wanted to tell him that it was more difficult being the one who was asleep. She wanted to scream that her nightmares would make an average man cry. They would bring him to his knees with the futures which could occur for this world.

  But a soft warmth in her soul made her hesitate. The anger lurking underneath her skin was tempered by a kindness blossoming in her heart. Sil’s magic, Sil’s memories, merged with everything that made Lydia who she was. It made her better.

  Perhaps he could see it in her face. Perhaps the golden light of magic was breaking through her skin.

  He reacted almost violently. The shadows he always kept tight against him burst outwards and hovered in the air before her like ink. Tendrils broke away from him until droplets of darkness floated all around them.

  “What were you reading?” he asked once more. His expression splintered and fractured until he was nearly unrecognizable. Cold indifference turned his usually smooth features into a mask.

  “One of the journals.” Lydia did not know why it felt so important that she not admit to him which journal. The lingering sense of her new found self insisted it was important. She believed it.

  He did not. His hand snapped toward her and yanked the finely bound book out of her grasp. He thumbed through the pages so forcefully that the pages threatened to tear.

  She knew the moment he found the lines. He stopped breathing, hovering between life and death. His eyes drifted shut and he inhaled one measured breath.

  “I did not want you to read this book yet,” he told her.

  “Why not?”

  “I did not want you to know.”

  “To know what happened or to know myself?”

  He did not seem to have an answer. Instead, he turned away from her and stared down at the book in his hands.

  “Pitch,” she began softly, “what happened to her? She was dying. Why?”

  Lydia knew the answer to the question. She had seen the thousands of ways Sil could die and knew all of them like the back of her hand. She knew the true death but also every single opportunity which had not been taken.

  The Goddess had spent many years avoiding death. It trailed her like a loyal dog until finally it was allowed to gather her into its arms.

  Lydia wanted to hear the words from Pitch’s mouth.

  Softly, she told herself. Easy. This was a man close to breaking and although the sense of hesitation was still prevalent inside her, she had to know the answer.

  He clenched his fists, the book creaked in his hand. Lydia gaped. He managed to bend a hardcover book in half merely by closing his hand.

  What had she gotten herself into? Or perhaps the better question was what had she released?

  “You should not have read this,” he growled.

  “Something happened. What happened? You are not acting like yourself.” She had to give him the benefit of the doubt. After everything he had done, he had earned that.

  “You do not know me.”

  “I have seen you in history and in present. I know your beginning, your middle, and your many ends. I know you, as no one else has known you before.”

  “You do not know me as she did.”

  “I am her,” Lydia insisted. “I know I told you time and time again that I am not, but I was wrong! I am her and more because I know what she did not know. I see the future she could not unravel through the web of time. I see you in the way she never comprehended, nor had the chance to see.”

  Darkness shattered all the stars in his eyes until they were swallowed by black holes. He was not her Pitch. He was a monster living in the skin of man.

  An unearthly sound of groaning earth and gnashing jaws broke free from within his chest. He whirled away from her and shadows began to grow fangs. Claws slashed at the air as he fled down the hallway.

  “Get up,” the warmth inside her urged. “Follow him. Do not let him break apart alone.”

  Her useless legs agreed to listen to her whims. Stumbling like a newborn calf, she used the walls as her crutches and threw herself after him.

  There was something wrong with the expression on his face after he saw the book in her hands. Not any of the journals, but that book specifically. There was more to it. He had ripped her from the memory already angry. Something had happened. Something she did not know and he would likely never admit.

  She followed him. Her aching feet bent at the wrong angles but she continued forward. The muscles in her legs burned. Agony blistered from her heels and rattled the bones of her spine. Yet, she did not stop. Not until she stumbled out of the hallway and found him standing alone next to the piano.

  Three stories of open space gave his shadows free reign. They swooped in the air all around him like birds of prey. They stretched long necks to the light and snapped at the beams they dueled.

  His hands hung loose at his sides. His sharp pressed suit fit to the lean muscles of his legs and shoulders, while the tie at his neck hung limp. A lock of hair dangled in front of his face. He stared at the ground and did not acknowledge her when the echoes of her footsteps surrounded them.

  “Pitch,” her voice ached as much as her heart. “What has happened?”

  His hand stretched out at his side. Shadows curled around it like a beloved pet. Except the shadows were stroking him. They were soothing him, or so it seemed. She watched as the dark smudge sank into Pitch’s skin and left behind veins of darkness wriggling toward his heart.

  They weren’t soothing him at all. They were feeding his anger, his rage, his disappointment at the world although she could not understand why he was feeling this way.

  Silver sparks of light floated around her. Orbs created by her magic and need to heal him bounced from the tips of her fingers. This was not Sil’s magic, but Lydia’s. She had taken the golden heat of the past Goddess and tempered it with her own long lasting endurance.

  She did not know where the understanding originated, only that it was there. Her magic had proven difficult. Impossible, even, for her to use until Sil’s memories unlocked her mind.

  “Pitch,” she asked again. Her hand raised and the silver orbs danced. “Please.”

  “What do you want from me?” he asked in a lightning strike voice. “What could you possibly have to say to me?”

  “If you don’t want to talk about how she died-”

  “Her murder is something we will never speak of!” His shout boomed through the estate along with sparks that danced along her skin.

  He inhaled darkness until that was all he was. It wasn’t just fear, she realized, it was self-loathing radiating from him. He hated that Sil had died. He hated that he couldn’t stop it. And he hated what he had become in her absence.

  All that and more pulsed off of him until all she could taste was pomegranates and sour wine. Her mind was flooded with all the possibilities of what was and what may occur. A black eyed boy praying to the God he was supposed to be. A delusional young man flooding a prison with darkness and nightmares just to hear the screams. An ancient man with a broken soul and guilt so thick it drowned him.

  Then she saw it. She saw everything. The silver thread of present time tangling ar
ound his body like a net and sinking flashing hooks into his very soul.

  A face slack with eyes empty. A body not yet swollen with death but still reeking of fragile humanity.

  “You couldn’t have saved her,” she whispered. “She had taken too much. It wasn’t Juice, Pitch, it was heroin. You don’t deal human drugs.”

  “It was in my club.”

  “You cannot police everyone and everything that happens. You did not give it to her. It was not your fault.”

  She heard the snap before she felt it. The wave of black that poured over her body and through the entire house. It hesitated for mere heartbeats as she thought it blinded her. Then it snapped back at him and blasted through the roof of the mansion.

  The crunching sound was that of bone and flesh. A house made of magic was never meant to be harmed but he tore the roof from it like ripping out a spine. Lydia could hear it screaming and then the hollow emptiness as the power which had created this home drifted away into nothing.

  An answering rumble began as the roof caved inwards. Shingles fell only to freeze in midair. The moths that blanketed the walls erupted into movement. A great mass of white and grey that just as suddenly stopped.

  She 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 followed the path of her artery. A ghost of a touch leaving ink black stains on her opalesque skin. Only the tips of his fingers touched her, but she was burning.

  She gasped, swallowing more of his darkness. The taste of a god-like monster was as addicting as any drug had ever been. He smudged his guilt upon her skin and purged himself in her forgiveness. He let it wash over him and absolve this newest mistake he added to his collection.

  Lydia opened her eyes as she realized his hands were shaking. She pulled back to looked up into his gaze.

  He shook his head at her. “I am a loathsome creature. Cruel and unrelenting. I will tear you apart, starting with your heart and ending with your sorrow.”

  “You give yourself too much credit, Pitch, if you think I would ever allow you to do that to me.”

  She could feel the slick oiled darkness across her mouth. It was smudged in a painter’s stroke across his cheek from his mouth. This was the first time she had e
ver seen him look something other than perfectly put together.

  There was no small sense of pride in the knowledge she had done that to him. She had been the first, and likely the last, to ever shock him so much that he lost his self-control.

  “You are a dangerous woman.” He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a black kiss against her palm.

  “And you should remember that.”

  “I would be a fool if I did not.”

  He gathered her to his chest gently. She was surprised he could lift her so easily as he stood and began to walk up the stairs. It was probably silly that she was still surprised by his strength. She already knew the immense amount of power underneath his skin. But the body he had chosen was thin and wiry.

  The moths he held captive by time began to move. Their wings flapped once more, grey and white flashing by her vision. The swarming moths resembled snow as they settled back on the walls.

  “Pitch,” she said quietly as he turned down the second floor hallway. “This isn’t the way to my room.”

  “No it is not.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “I-”

  “It has been a very long time since I have slept in my own bed. I do not intend to get up every few hours to calm your nightmares.”

  “It’s not as though I can control them.”

  “No,” he agreed while he shouldered open the door to his room. “But I can.”

  He didn’t put her down until they reached his bed. She had seen the shadows of this room only once, and had not barged in since. The dark colors were still overpowering but less frightening than before. Now, the room felt heavy with serenity and quiet.

  She heard the flipping sound of quilts being yanked. Her feet touched his silken sheets first. The cold slide of expensive fabric against her skin was both decadent and wicked.

  “Are you-?”

  He interrupted her again as he pulled the blanket up to her neck. It was heavier than she expected. “Go to sleep, Lydia. Dream. And for once do not dance upon the web of time.”

  She felt the edge of the bed dip but would later not remember when he joined her. She sank into a deep dreamless sleep for the first time in centuries. Perhaps it was the darkness which guided her into the safety of the dreaming world.