Free The Dark Rising by Lacey Weatherford Page A

of his jaw towards his temple.  One red streak ran from his temples to the outer corner of each eye.
    I glanced over his brow, which was slightly furrowed above the bridge of his nose, and two small bumps, I assumed must be horns, bulged beneath his hairline at the top of his forehead.  Horns might have been stretching the term a little bit.  They were more like nubs, of what appeared to be, bone and tissue.
    His teeth, well, I had a hard time with those.  The edges of every one sharpened into fang-like points, which were still easy to see despite the fact they were covered in Babs’s blood.
    I didn’t know what to do about any of this. 
    Vance was feasibly the most powerful person on the planet now.  He’d already been a magical prodigy to begin with.  Then he had assimilated his father’s powers, along with all of the magic his dad had stolen from other witches and warlocks prior to that.  He’d been dangerous then, and that had been before he received the Awakening. 
    I remembered back to Scotland, when he had been fighting Douglas for his life.  He’d drunk Douglas’s blood.  The realization hit me then.  I must not have ever truly stopped his demon conversion.  I’d only slowed it down.
    It all made sense now.  He had been able to perform the demon kiss on his father.  His withdrawals had quit after that.  Those powers must have fed the cravings, stopping the reactions he’d been having.
    Douglas and Fiona had been feeding him blood through the champagne on our honeymoon.  Then Douglas had drunk Vance’s blood at the ritual, right before Vance attacked and drank his.
     The blood exchange had been made, and the process started all over.  The Awakening must have helped to regenerate the conversion right along with the cellular repair.
    I refused to lose him again.  Not this way.  To know he was alive, but that he was evil?  I couldn’t bear it. 
    He was immortal, the demon conversion fixed into his cell structure.  There would be no way to cure him.
    The tears began to well in my eyes.
     I sat there, in still silence, while I watched the ice shard I had shoved through him began to work its way backward, out of his body the same direction it had gone in.  Soon it fell out onto the floor with a clunk, and the hole in his chest started to rapidly close.
    I wasn’t scared of him.  After all, I was immortal too, though not nearly as powerful.  But I was afraid for him, for us, for our future and what this would mean.
    His eyes registered consciousness then, and I heard him suck in a breath of air.  He lay there for a moment before he made a move to sit up.
    Once he was sitting, he slid away from me, until he was able to lean up against the wall opposite me.
    I stared into his demon transformed face while he looked at me, realizing even now, he was still the most handsome man I had ever seen.  I loved him, in spite of everything.
    I shuffled through his mind and I could tell he was temporarily weakened from blood loss.
    “When did you first know?” I asked him point blank.
    He stared at me with his glowing eyes for a moment before he answered me.
    “I was sure when your grandma pricked her finger,” he spoke, in a slightly raspy voice.
    “What do you mean, sure?”
    “I noticed something stirring earlier, the first time I kissed your neck, though I didn’t know at the time what it was.”
    I remembered now, him sucking so hard on me I knew it would leave a mark, and it had.  That had been before I had given him the memories.
    “Why didn’t you say something?” I asked, feeling angry with him.
    “I thought I could control it,” he said with a shrug, “Once I had seen the things in your memory.  He … I’d controlled it before.  I figured this must be the same thing.”
    I couldn’t fault him with that.  He wouldn’t have experienced the prior feelings and cravings he’d had.  He only witnessed them from my point of view.  There was no way he could have told the