Daughter of the Blood

gardens. Unbuttoning his shirt, he smiled with pleasure as the breeze caressed his bare skin. He pulled a thin black cigarette from its gold case, lit it, and sighed as the smoke drifted slowly out of his mouth and nostrils, burning away Maris's stench.
    The light in Maris's bedroom went out.
    Stupid bitch. She didn't understand the game she played. No—she didn't understand the game he played. He was 1,700 years old and just coming into his prime. He'd worn a Ring of Obedience controlled by Dorothea SaDiablo, Hayll's High Priestess, for as long as he could remember. He had been raised in her court as her cousin's bastard son, had been educated and trained to serve Hayll's Black Widows. That is, taught enough of the Craft to serve those witch-bitches as they wanted to be served. He'd been whoring in courts long turned to dust while Maris's people were just beginning to build cities. He'd destroyed better witches than her, and he could destroy her, too. He'd brought down courts, laid waste to cities, brought about minor wars as vengeance for bedroom games.
    Dorothea punished him, hurt him, sold him into service in court after court, but in the end, Maris and her kind were expendable. He was not. It had cost Dorothea and Hayll's other Black Widows dearly to create him, and whatever they had done, they couldn't do again.
    Hayll's Blood was failing. In his generation, there were very few who wore the darker Jewels—not surprising since Dorothea had been so thorough about purging the stronger witches who might have challenged her rule after she became High Priestess, leaving her followers within Hayll's Hundred Families, lighter-Jeweled witches who had no social standing, and Blood females who had little power as the only ones capable of mating with a Blood male and producing healthy Blood children.
    Now she needed a dark bloodline to mate with her Black Widow Sisters. So while she gladly humiliated and tortured him, she wouldn't destroy him because, if there was any possibility at all, she wanted his willing seed in her Sisters' bodies, and she would use fools like Maris to wear him down until he was ready to submit. He would never submit.
    Seven hundred years ago, Tersa had told him the living myth was coming. Seven hundred years of waiting, watching, searching, hoping. Seven hundred heartbreaking, exhausting years. He refused to give up, refused to wonder if she'd been mistaken, refused because his heart yearned too much for that strange, wonderful, terrifying creature called Witch.
    In his soul, he knew her. In his dreams, he saw her. He never envisioned a face. It always blurred if he tried to focus on it. But he could see her dressed in a robe made of dark, transparent spidersilk, a robe that slid from her shoulders as she moved, a robe that opened and closed as she walked, revealing bare, night-cool skin. And there would be a scent in the room that was her, a scent he would wake to, burying his face in her pillow after she was up and attending her own concerns.
    It wasn't lust—the body's fire paled in comparison to the embrace of mind to mind—although physical pleasure was part of it. He wanted to touch her, feel the texture of her skin, taste the warmth of her. He wanted to caress her until they both burned. He wanted to weave his life into hers until there was no telling where one began and the other ended. He wanted to put his arms around her, strong and protecting, and find himself protected; possess her and be possessed; dominate her and be dominated. He wanted that Other, that shadow across his life, who made him ache with every breath while he stumbled among these feeble women who meant nothing to him and never could.
    Simply, he believed that he had been born to be her lover.
    Daemon lit another cigarette and flexed the ring finger of his right hand. The snake tooth slid smoothly out of its channel and rested on the underside of his long, black-tinted fingernail. He smiled. Maris wondered if he had claws? Well, this little darling would impress her. Not for very long, though, since the venom in the sac beneath his fingernail was extremely potent.
    He was lucky that he'd reached sexual maturity a little later than most Hayllians. The snake tooth had come along with the rest of the physical changes, a shocking surprise, for he'd thought it was impossible for a male to be a natural Black Widow. During that time, he'd been serving in a court where it was fashionable for men to wear their nails long and