Forged by Desire Read Free

it for a while now. “Please, stop…”
    The dream shattered.
    ***
    Garrett sucked in a huge breath and bolted upright, breathing hard. His fingers clenched in the blankets as they fell into his naked lap.
    The world was dark and silent, the steel shutters drawn across his window to keep the sunlight out so he could sleep. Yet everything in the room was clearly visible, his blue-blood senses so superior he could make out each piece of furniture and article of clothing. Holding his head in his hands, he rocked back and forth, trying to fight the raging desire that burned through him.
    Perry. At the opera.
    The dream struck him every time he closed his eyes, though events had not played out that way in life. Perry had stopped him before he took her blood, slamming him back against the wall with her own eyes bleeding to black and their breath mingling. They were so close to kissing that if the screams hadn’t started echoing down the hallways outside, he didn’t know what would have happened.
    “Bloody hell.” Swallowing hard, he brought his shaking hands down from his face. The dream always ended that way. The hunger overwhelming him until all he cared for was her blood. Sometimes he woke before the end. Those were the better nightmares.
    Sometimes he had to witness the whole damned thing.
    A month since that incident at the opera, and he couldn’t forget it. He’d never thought of Perry as a woman, as a beautiful woman, until that night. Now the thought haunted him.
    His hands were still shaking. Garrett sucked in a steady breath and lowered them. Movement fractured off the small mirror attached to the vanity. Himself, still in shades of gray instead of color, his eyes as black as the demon inside him. The hunger.
    Shoving the blankets aside, Garrett made his way to the vanity and stared at himself in the mirror, taking slow, steady breaths until he could see the blackness washing out of his eyes. Come on . The muscle in his jaw tightened. He could control this. He would .
    But it was growing harder and harder each day. No matter how much blood he drank, the hunger kept growing until it was a gnawing pit within him, eating away at bits of his soul until he was afraid one day he wouldn’t wake up from the dream. One day, the dream would be real.
    “Damn it,” he muttered, grinding the heels of his palms against his eyes. Anything to force it down.
    The intensity was ebbing slowly, his heart returning to its normal rhythm. Garrett slowly lowered his hands, staring at the blue of his eyes in the mirror. Almost normal. Only a shadow existed, a warning that the demon of his hunger haunted him still.
    Pouring water into his shaving jug, he splashed it across his face. The heavy brass spectrometer in the corner caught his eye. There was no point avoiding it. Ignoring the truth didn’t make it go away.
    Taking up his razor, he slashed a small cut across his finger and squeezed it to make blood well. It oozed slowly through the cut, the dark bluish-red that gave blue bloods their name. Slowly the drop quivered on the tip of his finger, then fell into the glass vial at the end of the spectrometer. Garrett squeezed another two drops out, but the cut was almost healed. With a grimace, he turned the dials on the spectrometer to start the acidic reaction.
    The device spat out a small roll of paper with several numbers printed on it. He ignored the first three and went straight to the craving virus percentage.
    Sixty-eight .
    Garrett stared at the piece of paper for a long time, then scrunched it up in his fist. The numbers were still burned across his retinas. They’d increased since his last reading, which had been yesterday morning.
    Suddenly it wasn’t enough to clench the paper in his fist. He tore it into fine shreds, discarding them among the ashes in his cold hearth. He had a duty to report this. Any blue blood that reached CV levels of nearly seventy percent was staring the Fade in the eye. It was something every blue