The Blood Gospel

She shifted at the word widow. “I have been bearing up—” She leaned forward. “Nonsense. We have known each other too long and too well to be untruthful now. Ferenc’s death has been both a great burden and a freedom to me.”

A freedom?

He dared not ask. He raised his head.

“You look as if you have been ill,” she said. “So tell me the truth. How have the past months served you?”

He fell into her silver eyes, reflecting orange from the firelight. How could he be apart from her? She alone of all he knew he had trusted with memories of his mortal life, only keeping secret his unnatural state of being.

A ghost of a smile played on her soft lips. Her hand brushed water from her bare shoulder, then fell coyly to her soft throat. He stared at her fingers, and what they covered.

She stood and took his hand between hers. “Always so cold.”

The heat of her hand exploded under his skin. He must move away, but instead he stood and put his other hand over hers, drawing more of her warmth into his chilled body. Just that. A simple moment of connection. He asked for nothing more.

Her heartbeat traveled from her hands through his arms and up to where his heart had once beat. Now his blood moved to the rhythm of hers. Scarlet stained the edges of his vision.

Her eyelids fell closed, and she tipped her face up toward his.

He took her flushed cheeks in his marble-white hands. He had never touched a woman before, not like this. He caressed her face, her smooth white throat.

Her heart sped under his palms. Fear? Or did something else drive it?

Tears coursed down her cheeks.

“Rhun,” she whispered, “I’ve waited so long for you.”

He traced the impossibly soft redness of her lips with one fingertip. She shivered under his touch.

He longed to press his lips against hers, to feel the warmth of her mouth. To taste her. But it was forbidden. He was a priest. Chaste. He must stop this at once. He drew his hands a finger’s width away from her and toward the silver cross that lay over his cassock.

She cast her eyes on the cross and let out a quiet moan of disappointment.

Rhun froze, fighting the warmth of her skin, the scent of snowmelt in her hair, the pulse of her heart in her lips, the salt smell of her tears. He had never been so terrified in his mortal and immortal life.

She leaned forward and kissed him, her lips light as the touch of a butterfly.

And Rhun was lost.

She tasted of grief and blood and passion. He was no longer a priest or a monster. He was simply a man. A man as he had never been before.