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I retracted my fangs, though a pang of loss made me shudder. I loved being inside my Blood when I took them. Locking my mouth tight on the punctures, I sucked a swallow of blood into my mouth and held it on my tongue. Tasting.
Male. Powerful. Extremely old.
Midnight velvet skies sprinkled with millions of stars. Eerie green and blue flares of comets streaking to the horizon. Blazing sun, baking the earth until it cracked open. Howling, hot winds and stinging sands. Torrential rains pounding the earth, swelling the river until it overflowed its banks and poured around my feet.
His feet. This endless guardian, standing watch since the beginning of time. Or so it seemed. Always awake. Always guarding.
The sphinx never slept.
I swallowed his blood, shivering as flares of energy sparked through my veins. Oh yeah. He carried quite a kick.
His mind stretched toward me from an impossible distance, crossing thousands of years to find me. :Your Majesty, we rise in answer to your Call.:
I sucked another long swallow of his blood, drinking him like a cold, foamy draught straight from the tap. :We? There are more than just you?:
:If you can hold us.:
Pressing my palms to his chest, I groaned when I found only stone instead of the luxurious fur of his lion. :How many?:
An image filled my mind of a long, dark avenue lined with shadows. The sun peeked over the horizon, slowly illuminating the line of sentinels. Sphinxes lined the cobblestoned road. Pair after pair after pair into the distance as far as I could see. Stunned, I blinked, and another image filled my head. Columns of a palace, flickering from its grandeur thousands of years ago, to the ruin it was now. Broken obelisks, worn carvings, hieroglyphs wiped away by the endless passage of time. Blowing sands swallowing the city. Hiding the crumbled, chipped remains of sphinxes.
Still guarding.
Statues deep in the Nile, lost to floods centuries ago. Buried in mud, tangled in reeds.
Still awake. Always watching.
Waiting.
:Thousands,: he replied. :Take me, Your Majesty, and call as many of your army as you can before the sun sets in your world. Though I must warn you. The more you drink of me, the more of them you claim, and consequently, the harder I am to hold. Lose me and lose your legion.:
Thousands? Goddess above, why did She send me an entire army? Surely I wouldn’t need a legion of sphinxes to bring justice to the Dauphine.
I hesitated for a moment, not willing to take a dozen new Blood at once, let alone thousands.
:They’re your army, not your Blood. You bring me alone into your circle.: A deep cough vibrated through his chest. A lion’s laughter. :Besides, not even the Great One’s daughter can hold three thousand sphinxes to her will.:
I bit back a knee-jerk response, “Watch me.” Had I learned nothing from taking on the sunfires? They’d nearly burned me out trying to hold them all.
But my ego insisted I could do it. Sphinxes were in my lineage. They were monsters.
While the sun sank lower in the sky.
:We’ve got him, my queen.: Rik sent me an image of him gripping one of the curled ram horns in his mighty biceps, twisting the sphinx’s head into an armlock, while the dragon rode his back. :Suck him fucking dry.:
14
SHARA
How much blood could I physically hold?
I had a moment to laugh at myself, remembering how concerned I was when I’d first tasted Daire and Rik’s blood. Terrified my fresh hunger would injure them. They’d told me my stomach couldn’t hold enough to actually incapacitate a fully-grown Aima warrior, but they were wrong.
I could hold a fucking lot. So much it’d taken help from the Aztec sun god—who knew all things regarding blood—to help me understand how I managed to drink so deeply and not be in physical pain.
How sweetly dangerous would it be to simply feast—without fear of yet another mighty Blood dropping unconscious at my feet?
Surrendering to the thirst, I pulled hard on my punctures, wallowing in the bottomless pit inside the sphinx. So much blood. The cheese grater stopped flaying my tender nerves, easing the nagging, burning pain growing exponentially over the past few days. Until I couldn’t smell or look at my Blood without wanting to tear them apart.
