Chapter 2. Reive

The smell. A subtle and heady one. Oh, it’s such a long time since I had a woman... A terribly long time... he thought.

The man bent over the trembling girl and breathed in the scent of the hot air around her ear. The girl seemed to tremble even more.

A sweet smell mingled with fear... Her hand is burning... I can feel her pulse throbbing beneath my fingers...

Reive paused. He decided not to do what he had first intended. As he felt the fresh air, the flow of his thoughts changed direction. As if something different, along with the dust and ashes, was disappearing within him. Something old and clawed, cruel and very embittered. As soon as he inhaled the scent, felt the throbbing of her pulse, and the shivering and closeness of a woman’s body, something vehement flared up inside him. His cruelty accrued over years of torture under the heavy gravestones of the curse, began to abate. Yet it did not completely vanish.

The man moved aside and looked into his victim’s eyes. They were light-green, almost a herbal color.

He had seen nothing but darkness for so many years.

Hunger was flaming in his temples. Desire as well. Blood beginning to energize was circulating in his veins, and it brought a familiar energy back to his body. It maddened the man.

I’m eager to lay her out on the ground, take her cruelly and suck her dry!

He was engulfed by wild, brutal desires, of which he was not even aware. What was he like now? A hungry beast having been startled out of its dream.

The magic... his stream of thought became calmer as he moved closer to the girl, again this strange foretaste of magic. As if someone had wrapped vanilla buns in a sealed tin, but the hot, nostril-tickling smell had seeped out of the slits. I just have to grip her throat more tightly. Until it crisps. Drink all the blood. The first time, it’ll be enough for me to fill my empty fountain... Oh, Dark, how sweet her fear is...!

Instead of killing the girl, as an inner sense told him to, he took a deep breath and pressed his hips into hers. He flattened himself against the girl and bent down closer, almost touching her neck with his lips. He felt the small, quickly throbbing blood vessel. It was so warm, so...

“Hey, stop nuzzling me!” gasped the girl all of a sudden, turning her head back. “This is the first time I’ve seen such a wound-up guy. Oh, my God! Get off, you’re all covered in dirt.”

Reive looked at her with a puzzled frown, gave a start of surprise and released his prey. But he did not move farther away. He became curious.

He thought, This is such a new feeling. I haven’t experienced this for a hundred years.

His head was bowed, he was examining the girl. She had long light-brown hair coiled up in a braid. It seemed to be ordinary fair hair, but if you had a closer look, the girl’s hair appeared to be the color of red-hot steel.

“I’d already mistaken you for the Undead King,” she snorted, shaking off the soil. “And you’ve turned out to be just a dirty guy in rags.”

The man raised his eyebrows in astonishment. What a hit! I swear by the Black Death….

“What’re you talking about?” he muttered. His voice refused to obey him. As if it was an old rusted. He spoke hoarsely and brokenly.

“Come on, you’re alive?” the girl shrug her shoulders imperturbably. “That means you can’t be the Undead King. He’s already been dead for about seven centuries.”

“For how long?” the man breathed out, rolling his eyes. He couldn’t believe his ears.

Seven centuries... She’s like killed me for a second time, he thought in shock. I haven’t existed for over half a millennium. But how can I understand this girl’s speech? The great-grandsons of this damn Ulfricus must already be dead. Shabby ass! And he’s somehow managed to seal me up as he promised...

The man grinned, remembering the very last day in his and Ulfricus’ lives. He recalled the monk with piercing green-blue eyes reciting a horrific incantation that the earth had not known before. And he, Reive, was laughing at the monk’s actions, thinking that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off. However, in the nick of time, he put out his hand, tore out his ex-friend’s heart and looking into his blazing eyes full of rare gold magic he squeezed out his still pulsing life force.

Then, Darkness came.

Reive chuckled. His lips twisted, he tasted an unpleasant bitter flavor in his mouth.

“What’re you laughing at?” the girl sharply interrupted his memories.

The man looked at her, screwing up his eyes, and said nothing. He put his hand into the pocket of his ragged clothes, which had formerly been a black frock coat trimmed with velvet, and took out a corrugated ball of dirt. He ground it between his fingers and watched the frail ashes fall onto the ground.

“What’s that dirt?” the girl wrinkled up her nose and turned her head away in disgust.   

“A heart,” Reive answered pensively.

“What heart? What’re you talking about?” the girl snorted, again attracting his attention her incredible insolence. “How come you turned up from out of the ground? Are you a nature mage?”

The man eyed her up and down.

She had graceful shoulders, a nose that turned up a little, large bright eyes, in which something secret, something that elusive, something that concealed from other people’s sight, hid under her pretentious cockiness.

She’s young. Looks like a child, he thought.

“How old are you?” he said almost scornfully, not removing his gaze from her long, aristocratic neck.

“I turned twenty three yesterday. Just before graduating from the Academy,” she said proudly, as if she had been not unexperienced, but a skilled practitioner.

The man, however, looked down at the appealing breast outlined under a grey-blue dress, which looked like a tramp’s coat. He contemptuously raised his eyebrows.

Why does she wear such stuff? Or, maybe, she doesn’t have the money to buy a normal dress? the idea shot across his mind. But then, he saw her flush a little. 

  In all her embarrassment, she was so lovely. Her long, slightly curved lashes trembled, her eyes lowered, and lips that she either bit or licked, had a too sensual gloss.

 Under showy insolence, there was definitely something very different, something alluring, something that one would like to experience.

Reive caught his breath. He looked at her soft mesmerizing lips as if enchanted by them, and couldn’t take his eyes off. He came closer, musingly, his mind tossed by only one thought: to know their taste. To pull the girl to himself, to pass into her mouth with his tongue. To find out whether the girl was as fiery as she seemed to be.  

He raised his hand fascinated, to touch the girl. To touch her little lips with his thumb...

Suddenly, the girl moved, and in the next moment, her small palm slapped his hand aside, preventing him from reaching the object of his desires.

To say that Reive was just stunned was an understatement.

“You’re crazy!” she exclaimed, trying to crawl out. However, due to the considerable disparity between their weights, she didn’t manage it. “It’s all your fault, I’m covered with soil all over my body!”

He didn’t expect such a demonstration of insolence from a kid. It began to irritate him.

“It seems to me that our conversation’s taking too long,” he said roughly, frowning.

He drew back as if giving the girl more space.

“Yes, it is,” the girl chuckled a little nervously, trying to add more self-confidence to her voice. She began to ostentatiously shake the dirt off her clothes, looking at the man under her brows. “And please, try not to come at me anymore. Of course, I understand you like me and all that jazz...”

But Reive didn’t intend to tolerate such behavior any longer.

Am I a necromancer or what? he thought, clenching his teeth.

With his fingers, he made a short pass, entwining into a magical symbol the remains of the Dark still accessible to him.

For a moment, the air condensed, as it should.

He thought, I haven’t felt the Dark flowing through my veins for a long time.

The invocation worked  just as the insolent girl lifted her unsuspecting green eyes. Reive once again became mesmerized by their peculiar hue, which resembled that of carrageen moss or of fern on a summer night.

 But the next moment her eyelids closed. The twilight web had woven her into sleep.