A Dark Heart Read Online Free PDF

brave – or incredibly stupid – to
bait him now, to even be here at all. The last person who'd disturbed his
slumber had not lived to tell about it. Granted, the intruder had been a
murderer he'd been hunting for months, who'd made the mistake of trying to hunt him . But Elijah hadn't discovered the man's identity until after he'd thrown the bloodless corpse across the room.
    Percy's eyes widened slightly as Elijah stood up and stalked in her direction,
her hand pointlessly reaching inside her waistcoat for one of the dozen or so
blades she kept hidden on her person. He glared at her and passed her by, his
sights set on the cabinet behind her – though she'd no idea how hard it
was for him to resist the call of her blood as he brushed her shoulder. For
some reason, her blood had always smelled particularly delicious to him –
not like Lady Christiana’s, of course, or even Aline Romanov’s before her
Bonding – but it was special all the same, and it took the last of his
willpower to resist.
    It hurt not to drink Percy dry.
    When he reached the cabinet, he pulled the familiar tin box from its
hiding place behind a false panel and began fumbling with its contents: a
half-empty vial of liquid morphine, needle, and tourniquet. He hurriedly
prepared his morning breakfast, his hands already beginning to shake from both
his withdrawal from the drug and his raging thirst for blood.
    He cinched the India-rubber tourniquet tight and stabbed the needle in
his arm in a lightning-quick move, injecting the rest of the vial into his
bloodstream before his inhuman body could reject the needle. He could feel the
sweet, deliciously warm opiate slowly spread throughout his veins, gelding the
beast inside of him. At least for the moment.
    His metallic fangs receded, his hypersensitive vision returned to normal,
and when he looked at Percy now, he didn't want to rip her throat out.
    Well, he did . But he didn't ache like a giant streetcar was
crushing his body when he resisted the animal urge to do so. Now the bloodlust
was just an itch. An annoying, unscratchable itch, granted, but one that paled
in comparison to the blessed numbness of the morphine. Thank God .
    Percy's elegant little nose wrinkled in disgust as she stared at the
tourniquet that remained around his scarred arm. "Is that really
necessary?"
    "Would you rather I drank you dry, Percy?" he growled, ripping
off the tourniquet and tossing it back into the tin box. He pocketed the empty
vial. He'd have to replenish his supply soon. He'd run out even more quickly
than usual. It was taking more and more of the drug to quell his thirst, to
send him into oblivion. A sure sign that his time was running out.
    "You need some real ... food. And soon. That poison is killing
you," Percy insisted, looking at his arms pointedly.
    Elijah was surprised at the genuine concern he heard in Percy's voice. He
glanced down at his bare arms and had to admit they looked fairly gruesome.
Black and blue and crusted in scabs, his arms were a rotting mess. The sites
where he injected the morphine were the only things – besides the scar on
his cheek – that never healed. He'd shot himself through the head,
stabbed himself through the heart, and, on one memorable occasion, jumped out
of an airship a thousand feet in the air. He'd survived all of these
excruciatingly painful attempts to end his life without a scratch. But
something about the morphine – most likely the same property that
diminished his bloodlust – overruled his unnatural ability to heal. It was killing him.
    He shrugged. "Good," he said gruffly.
    Over the nine years since his turning, he'd learned that there were at
least three ways to kill his kind. Beheading. Incineration – though this
had to be quite thorough, as he'd learned the hard way when trying to kill a
leech who'd been particularly tenacious of life. And starvation. But not
ordinary starvation. It was one unique to his kind, which happened only when
deprived of a maker's