Page 128 of Blood & Claw

Five men sat around it. None of them looked older than thirty winters. Their leathers and tribal tattoos marked them as locals; Circines, most likely.

None of them moved.

One leaned back in his chair, head lolling. A dark slash gaped across his throat. Another slumped forward, chin on his chest.

Darach had stopped beside the nearest of the corpses and bent over it, taking a closer look. Ailsa moved forward. These men had indeed been hunters: their longbows were still propped up by the door.

“What happened to them?” she asked.

“They’re husks.” Darach’s voice held a tight edge as he straightened up and met her eye. “Something sucked the blood right out of them like a leech.” He paused then, glancing at the dead men once more. “I’ve only heard of bavaan doing that.”

Ailsa’s heart kicked. Bavaan?

She moved closer, drawn as if by an invisible thread. Stopping next to Darach, she stared down at where the grey light filtering through the open doorway illuminated the hunter’s ravaged throat.

A cold sweat beaded on her brow.

No blade had made those cuts. They were claw marks. Talons had sliced open these men’s throats.

The hunter that Darach had stopped before sat slumped in his chair, head tilted back. A cup lay on its side. Ale had dried in a sticky pool on the wood. Blood smeared his ashen skin. His dead eyes stared up at Ailsa, faintly accusing.

It was a cold evening, with a deep chill that would settle into the bones after dark, but sweat beaded on her skin, all the same.

“Fools,” Darach murmured, shaking his head. “They let themselves be seduced.”

Ailsa’s stomach lurched.

For a heartbeat, she wasn’t looking at the dead hunters.

Instead, she was back beside the fire with Darach’s pulse hammering beneath her fingertips, consumed by the frantic need to taste his blood.

She remembered the stories of the vampiric faeries who preyed on lonely men. Beautiful women with cloven hooves and icy breaths, who seduced their victims before tearing open their throats and draining them dry.

Feeling sick, she looked down at her hands. She stretched her fingers out, marking the way the murky light caught on the pointed tips of her nails. She’d meant to file them the night before, yet hadn’t.

And now they looked just like …

She glanced up to find Darach staring down at her hands.

And the look on his face made her breathing seize.

Slowly, he raised his chin, and their gazes met. “Have you been manipulating me all this time?”

His voice was quiet, yet Ailsa flinched.

She hadn’t seen that question coming.

She might have expected, ‘What are you?’, but he’d just accused her of playing him—of seducing him. Did he think she planned to kill him after this job was done … to slash his throat and drink him dry?

Her heart started to pound. She couldn’t answer. Her mouth wouldn’t move.

No, she hadn’t been manipulating him. The thought sickened her.

But had she known what she was?

Maybe, deep down. She hadn’t faced it, however, for the truth was too terrible to face. Or to name.

And as heartbeats slid by, a curtain fell between them.