She was straddling a latent dragon with nothing but a toothpick to defend herself! The quiet of the library was so absolute and dreadful that it disturbed nature herself. The want of birdsong stirring outside was as discordant as the shriek of fright that froze in Emma's pipes and palsied every nerve. Markus beheld her with a fixed and terrible stare such as could freeze hell itself.

"Do you weep for me," he asked at last, "or for yourself?" The sound of his voice, detached and cold-blooded, instantly shattered the prodigious silence that had held her in catalepsy.

Though she could breathe again, she could not tear away her gaping eyes, for they were snared by his. Her horror was multiform, the greatest of which was for herself and the guilty hand interposed between them. Why had he not struck her yet or seized hold of the weapon? And why could she do naught but gawp stupidly at him?

"It behooves you to act with great dispatch if you wish to kill me." Notwithstanding his dilating nostrils, he made no move against her, nor undertook to extricate himself from her reach. "Come, Emma, you are wasting my patience. Make a choice or I will make it for you." The latter was said in deadly tones.

It was warning enough to spark her limbs into frenzied action. She scrambled backward, sick with fright and disgust, her movements careless. Her escape was, however, foiled by the abrupt entanglement of the blanket around her legs, coiling about her like a snake. The unexpected cumber tore her screams from their bridles as she fell, flailing hopelessly. The ground came fast to meet her and with it a blow so stunning that she felt her chest sunder with a sickening knell. The pain was piercing and instant! The shock of impalement more so. It choked the breath from her so that she could neither breathe nor scream.

"Emma!" Iron fingers suddenly clamped her arm—a fact which she was only barely aware of— and turned her over onto her back.

She shut her eyes against the fell look upon Markus's face, her mouth agape in silent screams, her pain omnipotent. Whatever he said thereafter was suffocated by the peel of thunder in her ears as the blood pummeled her drums.

At the sudden vice grip on her shoulder, however, her lids sprung apart, and the agony endured heretofore was nothing to the throes suffered as he wrenched the stake from the sheath it had found betwixt her ribs. It was with renewed terror that she watched the blackness flood his eyes, his wings rampant overhead like some diabolical halo. But these were only fleeting minutiae in the face of greater danger—his head was descending swiftly, his face contorted, and his fangs bared for the strike; as it had done in the blood memory that had so tortured her. Over and over she had witnessed that scene!

Was this too only a cruel phantasmagoria or was this earthly moment the last of her life? Was she, like Cleopatra, to die beneath this angel of death—her lover from whose sanguinary kisses she would nevermore awaken? Were the wolfish sounds of his kisses to be the last sounds to touch her ears? These, the last thoughts of waning sentience, prefaced gentler reflections, the foremost of which were for her parents, her aunt and uncle, and for dear Milli most of all. Even as death loomed, she was most afeared for her beautiful sister.

But the violent cessation of his gorging swiftly tugged her back from the gathering darkness. The last thing on earth she had expected was for him to turn and purge all the lifeblood he had siphoned from her heart! An instant thereafter, his fangs were brutally employed in opening the veins in his wrist, which he promptly held to her slackening jaw. "Drink!"

Emma was too shocked to do more than swallow the hot spurting ichor. Although, had she been given a choice, she'd have done so readily, for, upon standing at the precipice of death, she'd found that she desperately wished to live! Not even for the sake of mankind could she have done away with herself and she certainly wasn't capable of slaying dragons.

Yet it mattered not what he was! She loved him not despite his darkness but because of it. She loved him exactly as he was, fangs and all.

His blood, all the while, was spreading and warming the flesh that had turned cold, checking some of the pain that still throbbed at her ravaged chest. A soporific haze began to cloud her eyes as the last drop slid down her tongue.

"Sleep," he commanded in a whisper at her ear. His voice was that of Hypnos himself—son of night and brother of death. She felt herself floating away, his arms cradling her, wrapped in the incense of memory, and blood, and the warmth of his empyrean male spice.

It was much later when she awoke from a nebulous dream, struggling weakly out of a thick bog that sucked her down again and again with interminable strength. Her first cogent thought was that the world appeared saturated in a black and crimson blur. An indeterminate length of time elapsed before the shapes and colors revealed themselves to be a bed—not just any resting place but the dragon's colossal nest of red damask aglow in muted candlelight. The drapes at the window, and those that hung from the bed, were all parted to admit the starless night.

It was not surprising that she did not at first notice the silent figure seated beside the bed, for he was cloaked in penumbral gloom, but, presently, the hairs on her arm rose the alarm and directed her eyes to whence the farouche gaze was concentrated.

She acknowledged his presence with a gasp and a series of rapid blinking, the latter of which she hoped would better delineate his profile in the darkness. And of all the many words in the English lexicon she could think of not a single one with which to begin except his name. It fell from her lips in a breathy whisper. He, however, seemed disinclined to answer.

"How...how long have I been asleep?" she asked, hoping a direct question would draw him out.

"One and twenty hours," was the quiet reply.

She glanced down at her bandaged chest, amazed to be counted amongst the living considering the grave wound she'd sustained. Whatever the weapon's history and composition it was certainly no earthly weapon. It had glided through her flesh with as little effort as molten steel through hoar frost! She lifted her eyes from the stained bandage and regarded him solemnly. "Thank you."

Again, he made no reply.

"Did you"—there was an awkward pause as she briefly averted her gaze—"did you rest at all or have you been keeping watch all this time?"

He gave a sharp snort, lifted himself out of his Tudor chair, and then prowled toward the foot of the bed. There the stuttering candlelight better described his towering frame and the hard angles of his face. He was all pale marble, his wings billowing like a demonic mantle behind him—wholly without his guise of humanity tonight. "Rest?" This was punctuated with another derisive snort. "If I was of a mind to rest—which I do but rarely—it would be a certain fool who would drop his guard to rest beside you."

She flinched and pulled the counterpane up to cover her nakedness. "Let us speak plainly, Markus—"

"I rather thought I was," he interposed with a black look.

She shook her head. "Why did you save my life?"

But he appeared in no mood to humor her. "Why did you seek to end mine?"

"I sought no such thing! If I had, the stake would have found its way into your heart instead of mine!"

"Was it cowardice that stayed your hand? Or, dare I hope, some nobler sentiment perhaps?"

She folded her arms stiffly over her bandaged breasts. "I haven't the heart for murder."

"Ah, but you do. If I were now to lunge at your neck I rather think you'd warm swiftly to murder."

She searched his face, descrying in it a fleeting glimpse of unguarded pain. "But you will not." She bit her lip, suddenly recalling afresh what she'd witnessed tonight in his blood memories; perhaps straying to the brink of the Underworld had allowed her to look deeper and clearer into the realm of gods, for she had returned with a much altered perception of him.

"No," he agreed, weary. "But I haven't yet decided what to do with you."

"Yes, you have. It is not in your nature to extemporize, so let us not pretend it is otherwise. Once and for all, tell me why you saved my life!" She met his glare with a lift of her chin. "Please. Why did you save my life?"

"Because I love you!" The confession hit with the full force of a thunderbolt yet was uttered low and barely above a whisper. "And for the first time in millennia, I know not how to proceed!"

"But—no!" Her mind unraveled and tangled in the aftermath of such a confession. When she saw that he was retreating back into the shadows, his brows knit in confusion, she forestalled him with a plea and threw up her hand to him. "Wait! You are not playing games? You are in earnest?" Fat tears were already coating her lashes and confounding her vision.

He turned from her and moved toward the window with terse strides. "What would you have me say now? A pretty avowal? A ballad? You have doubted me at every turn and I am no maudlin jongleur to kneel before you with bombast and beg your trust."

"Am I so mistook? You will forgive my doubt, seeing as you yourself nourished it. You have jeered at love and eschewed it in no uncertain terms!"

"I have no faith in it, of course I foreswear it!"

"So you love me against your will?"

He turned to glare over his shoulder. "Believe what you will, you obstinate woman. Of the two occupants numbered in this room, I am not the one who undertook to kill the other."

"I would not have killed you!"

"So you say." He left the window and approached the bed again. "Would you have me trust you absolutely without the benefit of having the favor returned?"

She dropped her gaze and wiped the tears from her cheeks. "You are right." From the first, she had allowed the opinions of others to overmaster what was in her heart. It was one thing to heed the wise counsel of trusted friends (which neither Anna or Victoria were)—to weigh it against rationale—but quite another to ignore the dictates of her heart altogether. "I am bewildered and overwhelmed at every turn; beset by your enemies and past lovers; ambuscaded by the depth of feelings awakened for you—such as I never knew was even possible, and I am adrift amidst the broken debris of my former life. Worst of all I am consumed with fear—fear for Milli and fear for my everlasting soul!"

"Because you believe your association with me has cost you your precious soul?" Swiftly, he turned away before she could read his expression. "How you must hate me then."

"I don't know what to believe, Markus! You must see that what Victoria and Anna—"

"Victoria's tongue," he said with a growl, "wags for no other purpose than to breed mischief." He stalked toward the escritoire, snatched up whatever was lying atop it, and then brought it to the bed, whereupon he dropped it within reach of her hand. It was the wooden blade that had so nearly ended her life. "It is no ordinary blade she gave you. There are but few weapons in humanity's arsenal with which to slay a vampyre, but the Horeb Blade is one among them. It is charred with age and tempered—or blessed, if you prefer—by the flame of God."

Emma's thumb glided along the petrified length that appeared less like indurated wood and more like obsidian. "Why has it not been destroyed?"

"Memento mori—a reminder that even we antediluvian beasts are not immortal." He watched her thumb as it travelled up and down the blade. "But the better question is: why, do you think Victoria poisoned the tip, hmm?"

Emma's eyes shot up to meet his. "But you are impervious to poison." Or so she'd assumed.

"For the most part." He looked down at himself, reduced to his base and beast-like appearance. "But the bane I sucked from your wound was enough to render me weak for the time being."

"You saved my life," she said, nodding her head slowly, "like you tried to save Cleopatra's."

"Yes. I dared to love her, and in so doing I tried to save her—tried to draw the blood out. In the end, all I attained was my own downfall, and the curse of drinking blood for all eternity."

Emma could see, even now, how he'd roared and wept over the cradled body of his beloved queen; how he'd brought his fists down upon the bowl of poison she'd consumed, splintering it as completely as his wrecked heart; how his tears had left bloody streaks down his nacreous flesh. "Yes," she said, "I see that now."

"The irony seems a little too contrived, wouldn't you say?"

"Do you mean Victoria meant to poison me?"

"And, accordingly, to punish me. Yes, I believe that was her motive exactly."

"But she could not have known I'd fall on my own weapon." And then it occurred to her, as her eyes widened over the blade, that she'd failed to consider Victoria's second choice. "Oh! I was to turn the blade on myself if not on you."

"Ay, and even a cowardly nick—for you'd have ventured that at least—would have sufficed to kill you, only slowly; you see, your death was assured." Markus tucked a finger beneath her chin and lifted her face to his. "Moreover, had I not suspected your fever last night, and found the blade hidden in the armchair, I'd not have discovered the deadly nightshade. And you'd have died regardless of my blood."

"You tested me then?" Guilt and ire instantly warmed her chest.

"I had to know, Emma."

She wrenched her head away from his hand. "Are we always to question and test one another? Must we always doubt?"

"Doubt is far safer than hope," he replied, his tone like gravel. "I dare not hope..."

"You dare not hope for my love in return? Is that what you fear?"

"I am who I am. You might have loved Kassiel, but can you love the creature he became?"

"I do not know Kassiel!" Emma drew herself up to her knees and reached up to guide his beloved face down, touching her brow to his. "I love only Markus Winterly." She gave him no chance to doubt her, for she fixed tight arms behind his neck and pressed her lips hungrily to his. With tender kisses, she proceeded to show him just how much she loved his darkness.