Red Blood (Series of Blood Book 2), Emma Hamm [little red riding hood ebook free .TXT] 📗

It was just a kiss. She had done more with people she had known less but for some reason this one meant something. This was different.

“You taste like poison,” he whispered against her lips. He withdrew from her only to lean forward once more to press his forehead against hers. “What sorcery are you using upon me?”

“I should be asking you that. I’m a Siren. This doesn’t happen to Sirens.”

“I lost my soul a long time ago,” he said quietly. “I did not realize that I would find it again in you.”

She squeezed her eyes shut to prevent the flow of tears that suddenly pricked her eyes. This Red Blood was tearing her apart. She wasn’t the person she remembered. She wasn’t who she was supposed to be with him. She was so much more.

“Don’t put that on me. Please don’t make it seem like I’m your reason to be alive.”

“You are. I wasn’t alive before I met you. I was as dead as Mungus.”

Lyra smiled. “Charlie.”

“Fine then, Charlie. If that is what you wish.”

“I wish you would stop being so hard on yourself. If using magic so frequently is what has made you weaker then stop trying to impress me.”

“I would do anything to see you smile. I am sorry I yelled at you.”

“That was barely an argument, Wolfgang.”

She reached then to place her hands gently upon his wrists. When he froze, she remembered why he was always the one to touch her. He was so skittish that just her softest touch made him uncomfortable. He was too used to being viewed as the anomaly and the monster.

Didn’t he realize he was her monster?

“One last trick,” he said.

The palms against her cheeks began to glow. Butterfly wings tickled the edges of her cheeks and appeared at the edges of her vision. They peered from behind her ears and took flight around them. One became ten. Ten became a hundred. All around them colors and soft wings fluttered in a whirling dervish.

“Oh, Wolfgang,” she said with a sigh. Her hand raised to press his palm more firmly against her cheek. “It’s beautiful.”

His eyes widened in mere moments before his power seemed to grow impossibly and then burst from the two of them. Blue swept in a wave away from them and suddenly everything changed around them. A new scene surrounded her every time she blinked. A meadow. A lake. A busy city street. And all the while more and more butterflies were released into the air.

A burning sensation between her shoulder blades made her frown in confusion. She was no stranger to pain. Such a small thing would not make her flinch, but it was out of place.

Wolfgang wrenched himself away from her and the flickering pictures suddenly disappeared. He was breathing hard as he stared at his hands and then her in shock.

“What was that?” she asked. “I thought you said you were too weak to do big magic?”

“I was.”

He strode towards her again to place both of his hands against the sides of her neck. He pressed firmly and then she felt yet another burning high on the inside of her thigh. This time, the pain was much more intense. She felt as though a knife was carving a symbol into her flesh.

Fire engulfed the two of them. Flames licked up her sides but did not harm her. It did not appear they were harming Wolfgang either. She could feel the tendrils of heat brush against her arms and coiling around her legs like snakes.

She did not like it. She did not like the heat. Sirens were meant to be around water, not around flames.

“Wolfgang,” she tried to tell him how afraid she was. But the word wouldn’t come out of her mouth correctly. The garbled sound was anything but assertive.

The pain in her thigh twisted until it was nearly slicing into her bone. She could not feel blood soaking her pant leg, as it seemed the magic was using her blood. The amount of power needed to create this flame devoured her life force as penance for creating something that was not meant to be created.

Lyra wrenched herself away from Wolfgang’s grasp, and the fires immediately disappeared. They were both breathing hard as they stared at each other in shock. She reached behind her to feel the ease on her back and felt a raised scar in the shape of a rune.

“I knew there was a reason I was so enamored with you.” Wolfgang finally broke the silence.

“For power?” She was both stunned and angry. “That’s the only reason you can come up with?”

“No, no.” He shook his head. “Not that. Lyra, you are part of me. Just touching you makes both of us more powerful than we could have dreamed of.”

“We? It makes you more powerful, not me.”

“Together, we could do great things. Don’t you see the potential?”

“I see you asking for a business agreement.”

The words stung. They twisted in her heart as she realized she was once again being used by a man for his own purpose. She wasn’t his love. She wasn’t his other half. She was a means to an end for him.

“Am I not explaining this? I want you to be with me.” Wolfgang reached out for her. Lyra took a step away from him.

“You want to use me.”

He could not understand her past, despite having seen it. He had no way of knowing how afraid she was of being used again. She didn’t want to be at the beck and call of any man. Yet now she was being pulled in many different directions by many different men.

“Please.” The word he uttered paused her raging thoughts. “Do not flee when this knowledge has only just been uncovered. It is not an explanation of our feelings; it is a justification of them. We are two figureheads of the same coin.”

She should tell him that his magic had caused her pain. She should tell him that by touching her, he was transferring