8. Bite Me

(Maxine)

By midnight I'd stopped pretending I was going to win this.

The fever had a hand around my throat, and the magic under my skin had graduated from ache to something with angry opinions, dragging itself along every nerve I owned in search of a door that wasn't there. I'd curled up small on the bed, because small hurt less. Small is not a good look on me. I'd have been embarrassed about it if I'd had the spare capacity.

Ferren stood over me, frustration rolling off her in waves. She’s a witch who specializes in healing, and nothing she’s tried thus far had worked. Right now, she was weighing two bad doors and hating both of them.

"If she feeds from you again," she said to Morrison, because apparently I'd stopped counting as a participant in my own emergency, "the bond deepens. I can't tell you into what. Nobody's ever come back from where you two already are to write it down." She tugged the blanket over my shoulder as if that would do anything at all. "But if she doesn't, the magic keeps burning through her hunting for you, and somewhere in the next day it burns through something she can't live without. Those are the doors. I don't have a third."

"Then it isn't your decision," Morrison said.

He crossed to the bed and crouched so we were level, which not one person in his position had bothered to do all day. Up close, he'd given up on the locked-door face. He was wrecked and furious and something underneath both of those that I was too far gone to name.

"It's your decision," he said. "Only yours. I'm not going to let anyone pour me into you like medicine while you're too sick to say no. So I'm asking. Do you want this?"

I always have a line ready. What I had instead was the truth: I wanted it so badly it scared me, and wanting things this much had never once ended well for me.

"Yes," I said. "God, yes. Give me your wrist before I do something undignified to the furniture."

Ferren didn't stay to watch. She'd raised enough Marwicks to know when a room had stopped being hers. 

"I'll be right outside," she said, gathering her kit. "Call me the second it turns, and don't be brave about it." 

The door shut behind her, and then it was only the two of us and a very bad idea we'd both agreed to. 

***

He offered his wrist first, which was polite, and clinical, which was the plan.

I propped up on an elbow and took his forearm in both hands the way a sommelier handles something rare and expensive, and I told myself this was a medical procedure. In and out. Take what the magic needed. Keep my dignity. Keep my heart in the drawer where it lived.

Then I bit down, and the plan died on contact.

His blood hit my tongue and the resonance went off like it had spent all day waiting for permission. It wasn't pain this time. It was the exact opposite of pain, so far in that direction that I lost the shape of the room. His magic poured down my throat, recognized me, and lit up every nerve it had spent all day torturing, and the relief was so total and so obscene that I made a sound I'll deny to my grave.

Underneath the relief ran his side of it. That was the new part. In the private room on that cursed Council island he'd caught a taste of me by accident and flung me across the floor. Now the bond ran open both ways, and I got the exact moment his control let go: the hitch of his breath, his pulse jumping under my mouth and then giving up the pretense of steady altogether. 

His heart was doing something undignified, and whatever my mouth was doing to him rolled back through the bond into me and doubled, his pleasure stacked on mine until I couldn't sort out whose was whose.

He said my name. Not the polished version he used to put distance in a room. Wrecked. A warning and a plea tangled into one word.

I don't remember choosing to move. One second I had him by the wrist like a well-behaved patient, and the next I'd climbed into his lap, mouth still at his skin, knees on either side of his thighs, and his hands had found my hips like they belonged there. Neither of us pretended it was clinical after that. His grip went tight. So did mine. The relief kept spilling over into something greedier, and every place we touched opened another channel for the bond to pour through, until the feeding wasn't the point anymore. It was only the excuse.

I lifted my mouth off his wrist because I wanted his mouth instead, and he gave it to me like he'd been waiting for it all day. He kissed the taste of his own blood out of me. I rocked against him. He made a low, broken sound into my mouth, and somewhere in there his careful hands quit being careful.

I got his shirt open, buttons be damned, and dragged my mouth down his throat, over the pulse he could never quite hold steady. He pushed the strap of my slip off my shoulder and pressed his lips to the curve where it met my neck, careful even now, and I ground down against him until the only things left between us were two thin layers and a question neither of us had said out loud.

His hand slid up my thigh and stopped at the top of it. Waiting. Asking without asking, his palm warm and still on my skin, leaving me every inch of room to say yes or no or nothing at all.

I put my hand over his and held it there. Not to push it away. To hold us both right on the edge, because crossing it meant giving up the last of myself I hadn't already handed him, and some stubborn, frightened scrap of me needed to keep one thing back, even now, even shaking, even with his blood and his magic singing through everything I had.

So we stayed there. Right at the brink and not over it, breathing each other's air, the not-finishing turning into something almost crueler than finishing would have been, the bond winding tighter and tighter with nowhere to go, both of us shaking with it.

And then, right at the top of it, with so much of him in me and so much of me bleeding back into him that I honestly couldn't have told you my own name, the room went.