𝙳𝚊𝚜 𝙷𝚎𝚛𝚣: 𝙱𝚞𝚌𝚑 𝙴𝚒𝚗𝚜

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟑

Lorelei stands at the bar of the tavern Inn, uncorking a dusty bottle. Picking up a glass from the drying rack, she eyes it over, finding a spot of dirt. Moving her tongue, she spits into the glass, wiping it out with the cuff of her oversized white shirt. Eyeing it again, she is satisfied and begins to pour herself a drink.

Hearing the creaks of wood, she listens to whomever is coming up the steps of the tavern. Passing a glance over her shoulder at the sound of the door opening, she spies Eber and grows a smirk looking back to the booze. Lifting her glass, she turns. "Join me in a drink?" Watching him, her smile holds until she focuses more on his eyes, her hand lowering the glass. His onyx spheres stare at her with a slow growing life to them. It is a life of something that wishes to take hers. Lorelei stiffens, beginning to sense it is not Eber she looks upon in the moment, but his hunger.

At once, Eber moves forward. "Eber." She tries reminding the mindless. His quick steps bring him ever closer to her. "Eber." Lorelei steps back, the soldier's presence forcing an instinctive response from her as he reaches her, her back hitting the edge of the bar as she dips her head back from his, coming towards her. His snarl, his lifting lips slowly begin to lower back over his fangs, his dark eyes staring into hers starting to regain the mind behind them. Gradually, his eyes lower, finding her hand on Romhild. Her worried gaze follows his, seeing her fingers wrapped around the sword at his side. Looking back up to him, she begins to see the changes on his face

as other times her touch has brushed across the blade. Steadily, the usual calm Eber returns.

"I am not healing like before." Raising his hand, he stretches the burnt skin over his palm as she looks at it, seeing the marks of God's renouncing of the soldier in the wounds to the bone.

Watching him change, Lorelei recognizes the manner of a man from long ago, responding with a gentleness from a woman long ago, "I am sure you were hungry after you underwent rigor mortis, now that you endured holy ground, you are starving," a pity sounding in her deep voice of velvet. Feeling the truth of her words burn his throat, the pain of his body becomes second thought, drifting behind the sound of blood moving under the woman's skin. The smell of her skin, the smell of that blood, it shows him the minds of a wulf, of a mountain cat, how they do not smell the deer; they smell the meat on its bones, they do not smell the blood; they taste the life of the prey as it drains away.

Pausing, that pity surveys him, then sets her glass of liquor to the bar with a sigh. Bringing her hand back between them, she turns her wrist up to him, growing a smile. "Join me in a drink?" She wonders at his thoughts as he carefully examines the soft meat she holds up for him to taste. "What is the matter, Soldier?... Do you not like the idea of biting me?" she plays. The lift of his eyes to hers lowers her curled lips. Among the aches in his body, the familiar one in his chest grows the longer his eyes linger in hers. Wanting things to be simpler, wanting thoughts of the past to stay there, she lifts another smile, regaining her play. "How do you know I would not like it?" She archs a brow.

Gradually, the corner of Eber's mouth curls when he turns her wrist over, setting her hand back to Romhild's hilt. His hands grip onto her sides, his fingers tipped by short claws tugging and poking through her wrinkles of fabric. He glides to her hips, guiding her to the nearby table, the back of her legs hitting the wood, his body pinning her there. Under her skin, her blood warms as it rushes through her body, blood which he can smell, making his lips part over his fangs.

Yanking at her layers of skirt, Eber's hold changes and he roughly hoists her to the surface by her thighs. He leans to her, his mouth latching onto her neck, forcing her head to one side, her long wavy coal hair bunching on her shoulder, his body pushing her down to the table as he comes over her.