Her eyes drifted closed again as she felt the aftershocks of her release fade. Dimly, she felt her Master kissing her forehead. She protested drowsily when she felt him pulling away, but it didn’t stop him, her Master only chuckling and pressing a kiss on her lips. She could have sworn he whispered he wouldn’t leave her, but she was too tired, too sleepy, to be sure.
When she woke up, her Master was gone. Panic bubbled inside her, but she forced it down, trying to keep herself calm as she reached for her phone. She only wanted to check if she had a message from Alexandru, but instead the dead came calling, sending a vision so horrid it had her crying.
GREEN.
The color of leaves above him as the world started to blur. Someone was drinking from his neck, and because Zari was inside him, this man who was dying, she felt like that person was drinking from her.
It hurt, so much because it had taken his (her) killer fifteen painful minutes to rip a hole in his neck. God, if he (she) had known, he (she) would have given his (her) attacker his (her) own knife instead.
Kill me now. That was what he (she) wanted to say.
Pain merged their thoughts, his and hers, and the green leaves around him seemed to merge as well, or maybe it was just because they were dying, making their imaginations start to play tricks on their minds.
A shadow fell over them, the world temporarily losing its greenness.
Now, the world had the face of their killer.
And it was not Rhapsody.
Chapter Three
The door was open, allowing him to enter the workshop without knocking. He found her bent over the desk, several open books before her. Her long blonde hair fell against one shoulder, exposing the lovely slim column of her throat. The sight of it had his fangs coming out, and memories of the taste of her blood had his body hardening. There just wasn’t any pleasure that could match what he felt when drinking from her.
His presence masked, he was able to stand directly behind her without her hearing a thing. He cupped her nape, and as she gasped in surprise, he already had her facing him and stealing a kiss from her sweet lips.
When he pulled away, the way she looked at him had Alexandru kissing her again and again, until both of them were panting, bodies straining against each other.
“You shouldn’t be doing that,” she said breathlessly when he lifted his head.
“Then don’t look at me like that. Like you want me but can’t have me.” He brought her hand to his cheek, and turning his head slightly, he brushed his lips against her palm. It was made coarse by hard work, but it didn’t repel him. Rather, it made him proud, the way she fought so hard to be independent and carve an identity for herself. This coarseness was the result of the many people she had helped, of lives she had saved with her very own hands.
“You have me,” Alexandru whispered. “You always had me. Just say the word and I’ll let everyone know who owns me.”
Lord Erou Damaschin stood next to her in the forest, his boyishly handsome face sober as he studied the outline on the ground. Or at least that was what he had said. The outline of where the corpse had been found was drawn using a special ink, one only otherworlders could see.
Zari tried to keep still as she waited for Erou’s conclusions. With golden hair and eyes, fair skin, and a gentlemanly air about him, he looked every inch the nobleman that he was, being the son of the Earl of Avere. If not for the soldier’s uniform he was wearing, no one would have guessed what his chosen profession was.
“To reach this spot,” Erou murmured, “you would either have to come from the school or the other end of the forest, which borders the town proper.”
“I don’t think he’d have been able to enter and exit the school without anyone noticing,” Zari said.
“I think so, too.”
“But…” Zari glanced at the forest, which she herself hadn’t ventured into. “He couldn’t have made it here through that, could he? Unless all those stories about poisonous plants are just stories?”
‘Creepy’ didn’t just cover it. The trees were bent with age, their leaves not just dark and withered but black. No matter how much she squinted, everything in the forest was black. The age-spotted trunks, the rotting leaves, the mud-swathed ground…it was all just black.
Something inside her head clicked. “Lord Erou,” Zari gasped. “He didn’t die here.”
Erou straightened. “What do you mean?”
“In my vision…one of the last things he saw was green. The leaves above him, they were green. So he died in a forest, but not this forest.”