DPOV
Isabella did as well as could be expected as I led her down to the lowest levels of the palace. It wasn't until we got to the very bottom of the stairs that she clammed up and her muscles clenched. I stopped to grab a torch off the wall, reaching into my inner jacket pocket for my zippo. Before I lit it, she gulped loud.
"I thought fire was dangerous for vampires."
I nodded as I flicked the top, igniting the flint and held the flame to the tip of the torch. "Deadly in fact. However, any vampire worth a damn can put themselves out as long as they are capable of moving." Then I flashed her a dark grin. "I hear tale that it is extremely painful and torturous to be lit on fire and then be put out. Our bodies can compensate for a lot, but once we lose skin, we can never get it back. Can you just imagine what it would be like to live for eternity with burnt and singed flesh, knowing that the exposed nerves and muscles will never again be covered and hidden from the elements and attack?"
She covered her mouth, a whimpered and choked 'Oh, God' slipping past her lips. I just grinned wider and pushed open the door that separated us from her death.
"God can't help you here. We're too close to Hell." I held the fire lit torch into the pitch black hall. "After you, Gatáki."
She licked her lips and looked into the darkness before her. She hesitated for a moment before taking that first tentative step into the hall. She paused and looked up at me for a moment, her eyes speaking volumes and words she wouldn't say. She didn't want to go, she was petrified. I just cocked a brow at her, nodding my head to the side indicating for her to go ahead.
Nothing was going to happen to her, not while I was right here. There was no one anywhere near us, everyone too afraid to get within two floors of a male about to bite his mate. She could stall all she wanted. It was going to happen no matter how long she took to reach our destination.
Progress was slow, something that was certainly understandable. There are not too many living vampires that had prior knowledge about was going to happen to them in their final human moments. I didn't. My change was a blind side, a sneak attack by my sire over two thousand years ago. I couldn't imagine knowing what was occurring until it was too late to do anything. Then again, not like a human stood a snowball's chance in hell of stopping a vampire that got it in their head that the human was going to die, either by being that night's dinner, coven member or mate.
If you found yourself in a vampire's sight, you were fucked.
It took ten minutes to make it twenty feet. I actually expected either some kind of fight or a longer time frame. However, when you know your fate has come to claim you, when you have reached the end of your path in life and destiny is staring you in the face, even the youngest of humans know that resistance is futile. She knew months ago that this was just as possible of a place for her life to end as anywhere else in the world. It was her own choice to go against the laws she willing bound herself to by involving herself in our world. It was time to pay the piper, to face the consequences of her choices.
And she wouldn't remember a single one of them. I would be seeing to that personally.
She stopped and looked up at me when I cleared my throat. I just looked at her a moment before I set my hand on the door to her deathbed. When I pushed it open, she nodded to me, stepping inside the completely dark room. There were no lights, no windows. Only the torch in my hand, that gave off very little light, lit the entryway. I reclosed the door behind us and looked at her when she made a noise in the back of her throat.
Snorting slightly, I leapt up to the ceiling of the room, grabbing a protruding rock to keep myself there. I looked back down to the floor, seeing her looking up at me, her bottom lip between her teeth and curiosity in her eyes.
"Can I ask you something?"
I hummed in my throat as I set the lit end of the torch into a groove in the rocks around the top of the room, lighting the fuel that was inside. I followed the tail of fire as it ran the perimeter of the room, making sure it went all the way around before I nodded to her question. "You can ask whatever you want." Then I dropped to the ground, tossing the torch into a puddle of water against a wall where it fizzled out. "But the answer isn't going to matter in three days."
Her brow drew down and she blinked once. "That's the second time you said something like that. What do you mean?"
I stepped around her and shrugged out of my jacket, folding it into a square and setting it on one end of the concrete pry in the center of the room. Turning back and leaning against the edge, I crossed my arms and ankles. "It means that when you wake up in three days, whatever I say now, you're not even going to remember. So the Q and A is a little pointless."
She grunted lightly. "But, I thought that vampires retained something of their human lives if they thought about them."
I clicked my tongue and nodded once. "True. For once the Cullens told you the truth. However," I pushed myself to stand and slowly walked over to her. "While that can happen on occasion, that isn't going to be the case with you. You will barely even remember you WERE human."
She looked up at me with eyes full of confusion. "How do you know?"
As I came to stand right in front of her, I grinned and chuckled. "Call it vampire intuition. When next your eyes open, you will only remember two things." I slid around and stood behind her, whispering in one ear, "The first is my name is Demetri." Grabbing her hair and moving it out of the way of her neck, I whispered in the other, "The other is you belong to me."
With that, I sank my teeth into her neck, lodging whatever response she might have said in her throat.
BPOV
He whispered in my ear. "The first is my name is Demetri." I felt my hair leave my neck on the other side before his icy breath caressed my skin as he whispered in the other. "The other is you belong to me."
I couldn't even form a response before it felt like little knives sliced into my neck. My eyes went wide and I gagged on my tongue, my knees buckling under the unexpected pain. The scream that wanted to escape was caught behind his teeth as he caught me around the waist to keep me on my feet.
I could feel Demetri swallow against my shoulder, my heart stalling with every new mouthful of blood he pulled from my body. I counted three before the world began to spin and tilt, dim to dull colors and fuzz around the edges. Still, he took more. I wasn't sure he was going to stop and I wasn't opposed to that happening. The more he took, the colder I began to feel. I could feel my heart slowing with so little blood left to push through my veins.
It was just when I thought that I was going to freeze to death, it seemed fire erupted in my veins. It wasn't a slow moving acid like it was last time. It was like every nerve I had was set alight at the same time. White noise thundered in my ears drowning out everything else. I don't even know if I screamed or not. It felt like I did, but I will never know if it made the escape past the teeth that were still in my neck.
It could have been seconds, it could have been hours. I didn't know. But finally I felt the ease of pressure on my neck leading me to assume I was finally released of his teeth. There was a low, quiet growl right next to my ear, barely breaking through the deafening buzz.
It wasn't the same dark and menacing one that I had come to know. It was more of a purr but one that would come from lion or tiger opposed to a house cat. I felt my knees bend and my feet leave the ground. The movement was agonizing but what was worse was when the only reprieve I had left, the coolness of his chest vanishing leaving me to feel the burn everywhere now.
I didn't know what he was doing, or how much time had passed, before I felt something cool and hard first against my butt and feet before it was expanded to my back and legs. When the back of my head was placed on something soft, I knew where I was. He put me on the concrete table that was in the room, allowing me to use his jacket as a pillow.
I will blame the pain for this, but when I felt the material under my head, my mind leapt at the opportunity to remind me what it looked like, and also, what he looked like in it. Fucking traitor. It was more of a cape with sleeves than it was a jacket. There was no way it was ever going to close in front of his chest. It was long, just like the blue one he wore before the altercation with the three vampires, but it was longer than that. When he wore it, the bottom of it drug the ground, trailing behind him a couple of inches. I would have said it was too big for him, but with the way it was perfectly tailored to his arms, I knew it wasn't.
It was pitch, jet black setting off his pale skin and making the red of his eyes stand out even more than they already did, to the point they nearly glowed. The lapels on the front each boasted a strange variation of the Volturi Crest in crimson red stitching. It also had a hood, but I am pretty sure that's standard issue. It looked like it was made of canvas, but it was softer and smoother to the touch than that.
It was nothing but a flash of a picture before my mind's eye, but the details stuck out enough to see the defined muscles of his arms through the sleeves. I hated that I noticed that, but come the fuck on. Vampires are hot, whether you want to them to be or not, and he was no exception.
The image was gone nearly as soon as it showed up, leaving me in complete darkness for a moment, or an hour, I don't know. But it was interrupted by the feeling of ice cool bliss setting on the side of my face. I forced my eyes to open to see what it was and came face to face with the little bastard himself.
His red eyes, a far deeper red than they were the last time I saw them since he just fed, were right in front of mine, different emotions that I wasn't able to name burning in the bloody depths. The coolness on my face turned out to be the backs of his fingers as they gently caressed my cheek. I saw his lips moving, his voice soft and soothing as it broke its way through the white noise again.
"Burn for your sins you will never atone for. Wade the fires of hell and earn your eternity." Then his eyes seemed to soften, taking on a look of real and true remorse. "This is going to hurt; horrifically. You have never known pain like this before. But, on my life, you will never know it again. The only way anyone will so much a touch you after this, is over my ashes."
Well, this certainly doesn't sound pleasant. I've been bitten before. I know how bad this shit hurts. Or, I thought I did. God damn this is so much worse than the last time. I wanted to know how long this was going to last, how much time had passed because it has to be at least half over by now. If there was a way to find out, a way to get the words out, I would never get the chance to test any theory I came up with.
It was instant, out of left fucking field. Between my eyes erupted the most god awful, stabbing, burning, agonizing pain to ever be bestowed on a human. If I was able to avoid screaming before this, that shit went out the window. I was willing to bet the Cullens heard the scream that ripped from the bottom of my darkening soul as my hands flew up to my forehead, the heals of my palms pushing into my eyes as my back arched off the table I was on. Seems the little bastard told the truth yet again.
I really had never felt pain like this before and I was even willing to open up to the idea of taking him up on his offer to keep it from happening again.