A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood, #1)

by S.T. Gibson

There are no angels in this world to accompany the dying in their final moments, only pickpockets and carrion birds.

I knew then I would chase your tiny moments of weakness all the way into hell and back. What is more lovely, after all, than a monster undone with wanting?

think, my lord, that this is when you loved me best. When I was freshly made, and still as malleable as wet clay in your hands.

You were the air I breathed and the blood in my nursing cup; I knew nothing else except the strength of your arms and the scent of your hair and the lines of your long white fingers. I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn’t any room for tracking time. There wasn’t any room to examine the past or the future; there was only the eternal now.

You always hated it when I overreached the carefully drawn limits of my knowledge. Probably because you so enjoyed dangling the promise of revelation just out of my reach, the way sailors dangle kippers to make cats dance for their supper.

I wanted to dash myself against your rocks like a wave, obliterate my old self and see what rose shining and new from the sea foam. The only words I had to describe you in those early days were plunging cliffside or primordial sea, crystal-cold stars or black expanse of sky.

I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every word you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn’t care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until we two could no longer be told apart. You turned a strong-minded girl into a pulsing wound of need. I never knew the meaning of the word enthralled before you.

I wouldn’t realize until later that you were irritable precisely because I was in bloom, because there were suddenly so many sources of joy in my life apart from your presence.