Page 14 of Wednesday
Morrow backed toward the center of the chamber, beckoning. I was helpless to resist. When I stood close enough, he extended one elongated arm, palm upward.
"Last time, the sharing was a mere taste." His eyes met mine. "True sharing requires... sacrifice."
Before I could ask what he meant, Morrow raised his other hand. With deliberate slowness, he used one blackened nail to slice his palm. Dark fluid, too viscous and purple-black to be called blood, welled from the wound.
"This carries the memories I've consumed," he explained. "The essence of Andrew Coleson, filtered through me."
I stared at the blood. "What do I do?"
In answer, Morrow grabbed my left hand, turning my palm upward. His touch was cool and dry, his fingers wrapping around my wrist and forearm with unsettling ease.
"This will hurt," he said, raising one blackened nail above my palm.
I hissed as his claw pierced my skin, drawing a thin line of blood that welled bright red against my palm. I fought the urge to pull away as the wound stung.
"Blood carries memory," Morrow said. "Yours. Mine. His."
He pressed his palm against mine, our blood mingling. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the world exploded behind my eyes.
Andrew Coleson's life flooded my mind. Not in chronological order, but in bursts of emotion and sensation. Making love to his wife on their honeymoon, her skin soft beneath his lips. The crushing grief when his brother died in a car accident. The quiet pride watching his daughter take her first steps. Betrayal discovering his business partner had been embezzling funds. The slow, agonizing deterioration as cancer ate him from within.
But these were not just images or sounds. I felt everything Andrew had felt. The pleasure of his honeymoon washed through my body as if it were happening to me, making my knees weak and my breath catch. The grief of his brother's death crushed my chest until I thought my ribs might crack. The pride, the betrayal, the pain. All of it became mine in that moment.
And beneath these memories, threading through them like a dark current, was something else. Something ancient and alien that could only be Morrow himself. His consciousness brushed against mine, vast and cool and hungry in ways I could not comprehend.
I was dimly aware of my physical body swaying, of Morrow's free arm circling my waist to keep me upright. Our joined hands remained pressed between us, blood flowing between worlds. His into mine, mine into his.
Andrew's memories intensified, focusing suddenly on physical sensations. The taste of expensive whiskey on his tongue. The burn of summer sun on bare shoulders. The exquisite pressure of his wife straddling him, taking him deep inside her.
This last memory hit me with unexpected force. Heat surged through my body, pooling low in my belly and between my thighs. I gasped, my phone falling from my hand as I clutched at Morrow for support.
His arm tightened around my waist, pulling me closer until I was pressed against the unnatural angles of his body. Through the haze of borrowed memories, I felt his form shift slightly, adapting to accommodate my human shape.
"Yes," he murmured, his grinding voice somehow inside my head. "Feel it all."
Andrew's memories continued to cascade through me. Chunks of a life I had never lived becoming part of my consciousness. But increasingly, I became aware of something else flowing through our joined blood: Morrow's own experiences, ancient and incomprehensible. Centuries of watching from shadows. The patient hunger of a predator who could afford to wait decades for a meal. The isolation of existing apart from both the living and the dead.
And beneath it all, something that felt almost like longing.
My body responded to the flood of sensations in the only way it knew how. With shuddering breaths and tightening muscles, with flushed skin and dampening thighs. What had begun as an exchange of memory had transformed into something undeniably erotic.
"You feel it," Morrow observed, his chest vibrating against me. "The pleasure in the memories. The life in death."
I nodded, unable to speak as another wave of Andrew's honeymoon memories crashed through me. I writhed, jerking my hips against the thigh that slipped between mine. My hips moved involuntarily, chasing the building pleasure.
Morrow's presence was all around me, his voice in my head. "Your kind fears death so deeply, yet the memories of the dead can bring such pleasure." His free hand moved to the small of my back, holding me more firmly against him, urging me to move faster. I whined his name.
"Feel how thin the boundary is, Carmen Ruiz. Life and death. Pleasure and pain. Monster and mate."
I came with a cry, jerking in his arms as my pussy clenched over and over. As the frantic pleasure began to fade, his words slowly registered. Mate?
Before I could question him, the flow of memories suddenly intensified. Andrew's death played out in excruciating detail. The hospital room, the morphine haze, the moment his heart finally stopped. I experienced his last breath as if it were my own, my lungs seizing, my vision narrowing to a point of light that gradually faded.
For one terrifying moment, I thought I was actually dying. Then Morrow's consciousness brushed against mine again, anchoring me to the present.
"Breathe," he commanded, his grinding voice pulling me back from the edge of the abyss.
I gasped, air flooding my lungs as Andrew's death released its hold on me. My knees buckled completely, but Morrow's arm kept me upright, pressed tight to his body. For a brief moment, his leg pressed against me through my pants. I bit back a moan, shuddering at the lingering pleasure.
