Nox went perfectly still.
Understanding flashed across his pale blue eyes, and in a moment, the realization must have come all at once; this wasn’t at all a dream. He started, launching himself away from her.
“You’re not Blaise,” he said, horror draining the little color left in his pallid face.
“Fates be praised for that,” the parasite said, allowing a sly grin to slice across Blaise’s plain features.
Nox swallowed, and the parasite couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy as disgust wrinkled his nose. He retched, gagging on the blood still coating his tongue, as if it had somehow soured in his mouth with the realization of who had been in control of the body he’d just been feasting on.
Nox began to shake.
“I thought it was a dream,” he said, pacing now as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
The parasite attempted to shift into Cinderella, sure Nox would become less appalled with himself when he realized the girl whose blood he’d shared was breathtaking, far out of his league. But Nox’s venom still coursed through the parasite’s blood, and when she attempted to shift, it was as if she hit a wall of adamant laced with sludge too slippery to climb.
Nox stopped, his lanky form stiff as he turned toward her. “What were you going to let me do?”
His voice was shaking with rage, and the parasite could not say that she understood. He enjoyed the blood sharing as much as she had. And if she’d let him have his way with Blaise’s body, he would have enjoyed that, too.
“A great many things, if only we had more time,” the parasite said, but it did not have the effect she intended, because then Nox was upon her, pinning her by the throat.
All this felt delightfully familiar. Evander had pinned her by the throat once, and she hadn’t minded the experience.
“This is her body. Blaise’s body. Not yours. And you would have had me…” His tongue groped for words but found none.
At the same moment, he seemed to realize it was also Blaise’s throat he was crushing, because he retracted his hand with equal speed as he’d appeared next to her.
“I’m going to kill you. Do you understand that?” Nox seethed, his fangs still jutting from his gums. The parasite wondered what they would feel like scraping against her neck. Pleasant, she figured, if they had felt so delightful against her wrist. “I’m going to find a way to sever you from Blaise’s body, and then I’m going to destroy you.”
“You won’t destroy me,” the parasite said, and as soon as the words left her lips, something solid seemed to clamp onto the air between them.
Nox must have felt it too, because his cheeks went slack with horror.
“What did you do?” he whispered, and the parasite found her thoughts wandering to how his breath would feel against her ear.
“It’s not as much what I did as what we did,” the parasite said, feeling more alert now as the venom faded from her system. “You offered me your blood freely and then partook of mine. You must have met no one else of your kind, otherwise you would have been more careful about who you shared your blood with.”
“Others?” The word seemed suspended in the air between them.
“You can’t have believed you were the only one to find yourself afflicted by this condition?”
Nox blinked, the rage returning after its slight hiatus in the face of shock. “What happened when I offered you my blood?”
The parasite settled into her place on the table. “When one of your kind exchanges blood with a mortal, it is similar to entering a fae bargain. Except the conditions are not so rigid.”
Nox’s already pale face went white. “What did I agree to do?”
The parasite curled her lips. “Anything I ask.”
Nox was quick, but not quick enough. He’d made it to the door and had his hand on the handle before the parasite commanded him to stop.
He obeyed.
When she told him to come, he did.
“You won’t remember any of this in the morning. You’re going to think you dreamed of feeding on Blaise, but that is all you will think of it—a dream. Do you understand?”
Nox’s jaw clenched, his throat tightened. “You’re filth.”
The parasite bristled and determined she would change his mind about that. “Tell me you understand.”
“I understand,” he said, and he looked as though he’d betrayed his oldest of friends when he said it.
“Come closer,” she said, and a thrill rattled her ribcage when he obeyed.
When she whispered to him what she wished for him to do, he shuddered.
She told him to forget this conversation, but not what he was supposed to do. Then she repeated herself one more time just to make sure.
Knowing her time for pleasure was drawing nigh, that surely the moon would be close to its apex by now, she whispered in his ear, “Now kiss me.”
Revulsion soiled his handsome features, but he did as she said, grazing her lips with a peck.
The parasite couldn’t help the cruel smile. She would have to be careful with this one.
“Now kiss me like you want to kiss Blaise.”
Nox was not so gentle this time.
