“She looked more beautiful than she’d ever been. But it wasn’t the beauty of a thousand smiles, nor of the mother of my child, nor of the light of my life. No. Hers was a dark beauty now. Those lips that had once breathed life into mine? Now red as murder. That face shaped like heartbreak? Not milk-white and soft, but marbled and hard. I saw no rise and fall of breath in her breast, no pulse at her throat, still marked by the press of his teeth and the leavings of his feast. And I reared back, almost breaking at the final, awful horror of it. Because she wasn’t dead. She was Dead.
Astrid was turned
