“It’s m-me. Lily.”
Silence was her response, but he seemed to vibrate with tension. She hoped that meant he was battling against the urge to eat her. She hoped he was winning that battle.
“I’m sorry I s-summoned you.” Her voice cracked with tremors. “I thought— Well, I didn’t think— But I hoped—”
Her babbling was cut short as he suddenly lunged off her. Scrambling away, she rolled over and sat up to find him crouched in the hallway, staring at her with wild eyes.
She took one look at him and gasped. If she’d had more air in her lungs, she would have screamed. And not because he was currently in the form of a huge, gray monster with sharp teeth, glowing yellow eyes, and leathery wings.
And a tail. She hadn’t seen that when he’d shifted the first time. Like a supple whip, it snapped in the air behind him.
But all that had become the least of her concerns.
“What happened to you!”
He was positively bathed in blood. It looked as though he’d taken a swim in a slaughterhouse sewer. His hair hung in wet clumps, and red ran in rivulets over his skin. Skin that was covered in wounds that looked like… burns?
His proud wings were full of holes as if they too had been burned, and, somehow worst of all, gray flecks of… something were stuck all over him, commingling with the blood.
It looked like brains from a zombie movie. Chunks clung to his mangled skin and dripping hair, and strings of sinew tangled with his claws like spiderwebs. The scent of gore fouled the air and turned Lily’s stomach.
Mist stared at her without recognition. If she’d been the prey fleeing the predator, then he’d been lost to the hunt. But as she watched, he blinked several times, eyes coming into focus, and she knew the moment he finally realized where he was.
“Lily?”
His voice was deeper than the Mist she knew but only slightly, and it was more than a little disconcerting hearing it coming from the sight before her.
“H-hi.”
He blinked some more, but each blink seemed to get heavier. “Lil… y?”
“It’s m— Oh my god!”
As she spoke, his eyes rolled back, and he toppled forward to land on the floorboards in a pool of blood.
* * *
Mist regainedconsciousness to a cool sensation against his brow. The wet, soft thing stroked several times, and then he heard the sound of water splashing and fabric being wrung out. The sensation returned, this time along his jaw.
His eyes snapped open with the speed of one who’d learned long ago never to be caught vulnerable. He heard a gasp and a shuffling sound, and his blurred vision showed him a shape lurching back instinctively.
He jolted upright to face the unknown foe, his head spinning and his movements sluggish. Everything shifted as he met a pair of wide green eyes. He saw round cheeks with a red flush and honey-blond hair, and then he finally remembered where he was.
On the floor in Lily’s apartment. Because she hadsummonedhim.
He swung his head around to stare at the remains of the seal, and then he swung it back to stare at her. In all his long existence, no human had ever achieved what she had.
He became aware of the bucket of red water, the stained, wet cloth in her hand, and the fact that he was significantly less bloody than he had been.
While he’d been unconscious, she had… cleaned him.
Now that his vision had focused fully, there was no mistaking the row of tiny punctures along the side of her throat in the shape of a bite mark.Hisbite mark. Because he’d been seconds from tearing out her throat. If he hadn’t taken that one instant to inhale before he bit down, causing that heady wild-flower scent to flood his senses, he would have killed her.
And yet, he couldn’t deny he liked the look of his mark on her skin.
“Lily,” he said again because he couldn’t seem to find other words.
“Hi.” It seemed she couldn’t find words either.
