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

by S.T. Gibson

ven loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.

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?

You turned a strong-minded girl into a pulsing wound of need.

Vienna made you irritable as much as it made me blossom. 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.

I was happy to spend countless lifetimes chasing the warmth coming off you, even though the haze was clouding my vision.

Yet, that night, I would have given anything to be a mortal girl once again, flesh dying around me just as quickly as my beauty had come into bloom. An infinitesimal life seemed preferable to an endless one trailing after you like a dog.

Or at crushing despair, the same despair that drove you towards frenzied research, that overtook Magdalena in a dark cloud, that drove me weeping into the arms of a God I wasn’t sure I still believed in. None of us were immune to it. It was simply a byproduct of our unnatural lives. People aren’t meant to live for ever. I know that now.

here was no huge argument that predicated my decision to betray you, no ultimate act of tyranny. I simply broke under the weight of a thousand tense nights, a thousand thoughtless, soul-stripping words.