Silver Blood (Series of Blood Book 1), Emma Hamm [free novels txt] 📗

shadows had been listening to her. Waiting for those very words to be whispered. They reached towards her with long fingers that wanted to bury themselves inside of her soul.

“That’s not an option,” Jiminy replied.

“But it is,” she murmured. “You didn’t see him. I did. There was something not right with him, Jiminy. Something horrible.”

“Considering that he’s trying to end the world as we know it, I’m not surprised,” he said with a chuckle.

“How can you laugh in a time like this?” The question burst from her lips with vehemence. “We don’t even know what his plan is, other than he wanted to hurt people. Or so the Five say. You’re all very lucky that I happened to see him and feel how wrong he was. Otherwise I would have thought you were all insane.”

The shiver was in her spine again as she opened the door to her apartment. The last time she had been here someone had kidnapped her.

She couldn’t help but feel as though something awful was going to happen again.

Had they ruined her home for her? Every memory she had in this place had been good. She had rented the shambles of the building when she was eighteen and had raised enough money to buy it by the time she was twenty.

Every board that had been replaced was by her hand. Every crack in the wall had been fixed by her dedication and spirit. All the green plants that were growing had been planted as seeds and lovingly coaxed into growth by her attention.

“My plants,” she said with a moan.

They were all wilted and reaching for the window as though they knew it was out there where salvation lay.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered as she rushed towards the sink. Pots and pans were filled to the brim with water as she dashed from the sink to each plant. Instantly, they appeared happier as she turned the dry soil dark with water.

Wren pet the large leaves and murmured to each stem as she rushed to provide them with the attention they needed. All the while, Jiminy watched with an amused expression on his face as he leaned against her doorjam.

He cleared his throat as she neared the end of the line. “They’re important to you, I take it?”

“Of course they are. I gave them life. It’s my job to take care of them.”

He noticed a bit of the white marble look in her eyes and realized E also found the plants to be important. He wasn’t going to argue with both her and the creature. “We can have them brought to Haven if you’d like.”

“We can?”

She paused in the middle of the room, and he was struck with how wild she looked in that moment. Her bubblegum pink hair was frizzed around her head like a cloud of smoke. Her clothing far too big for her. A streak of dirt was smeared across her forehead.

She looked otherworldly. Wren had always seemed like some kind of unreachable creature to him, but now he could see that she simply wasn’t meant to be here. She was, without a doubt, a creature from another dimension.

If he had ever wondered what the magical creatures had looked like in their own home, he now knew.

“Wren-” he started to speak before stopping himself. One of his hands fisted in his pocket as though catching hold of his wayward thoughts and stuffing them back where they belonged. “Of course you can.”

She gave him an odd look but nodded. “That would make things easier.”

He tried to hold himself still. He wanted to give her time to think, to breathe, to settle back into herself. But somehow it felt all the more important that he hold her.

His eyes slowly closed as thoughts she could not read played across his face. And then he wasn’t at the door. He had moved so quickly forward to yank her against him that she hadn’t seen him move.

One of his strong hands wrapped around the indent of her waist, and the other tunneled deep into the strands of her hair. Burked pulled her so close to him that she could taste his breath on her tongue. Their foreheads touched as he rolled his head back and forth.

He appeared to be breathing her in. Every moment he drank from the essence of her life as though he thought he might never see her again.

He would. But it very well might only be her physical body that he saw.

“I thought I was going to lose you forever.”

“You never had me,” she whispered.

“I will.”

Wren didn’t know which one of them leaned forward. One moment they were staring at each other over the gap that his words had made. And the next, his lips were soothing her mouth, and his tongue tangled with hers.

Her fingers curled into her palms as she pressed her fists against his shoulders. This was different than the dream. She remembered this yet nothing like this at all. He was warm and comforting as he curled around her body. He was warm and gentle against her. Yet fierce as he conquered her mouth and nearly her soul.

Burke pulled away from her with an unhappy grumble. “This isn’t a dream, Wren. Touch me damnit.”

She hadn’t been. She hadn’t been touching him and instead had been letting him do all the work. Did she not know how to do this? Wren didn’t really know.

Her eyes danced over the lines of his face. They lingered on the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes that she had never noticed before. Her hand raised to brush along the day old stubble that darkened the shadow of his jaw.

Wren watched with rapt attention as his eyes drifted shut while she explored the valleys and mountains of his face. “You feel different here,” she whispered.

His eyes opened then, and she was struck with the passion that burned in them. He had never looked at her like this before. “You taste different here.”

He swooped down once more