Cain had mistakenly believed that the worst pain he'd ever experienced in his life had been when the blessed blood in his body had been reawakened by Brinn's ritual and started to purify his blood. It turned out that this was, in fact, a mere shadow of the agony one felt when a blessed soul bond sought to latch onto a soul that no longer existed. The bond kept burrowing deeper and deeper into what had to have been the place where his human soul had once resided, but now housed only the darkness of the vampire's curse. As the bond did not find what it sought, it refused to relent, and instead continued to pierce deeper and deeper into the center of his chest, into a place so deep and so dark that it felt like all the sinews that held his body together were pulled taut, there at the center of his very self, his core. It felt like it was on the verge of fracturing, and he was terrified.
What happened to a vampire who bonded a werewolf? He hadn't thought this through at all, hadn't considered whether it would have a similar effect to the foolish attempts of vampires to break the bond with their sire. Would he go mad? Would his blood-hunger once more vanish? Would he lose his sight, or would his physical form simply crumble to dust as it was destroyed by divinity from the inside? He was nothing but a hollow, empty shell of what used to be human, was it any wonder that a soul bond would wreak such havoc within?
The burrowing felt like tiny claws, scrabbling and tearing deeper and deeper into the very center of himself, and he couldn't do anything to stop it, only scream as the agony grew more and more intense. Vaguely, he sensed Damien, panicking, grabbing his shoulders, drawing him up and holding him, as if he thought the physical contact might make a difference. Cain was a bit surprised by the response, in the small part of him that still had rational thought, since he'd expected the werewolf to gloat about the misery, not comfort him through the worst of it.
At the moment where he sensed the very innermost part of himself was at risk of being destroyed, though, something very odd happened. The bond… latched.
It bit down on something, hard, gripping tight and refusing to let go. Then with a twist, and a snapping pop, it felt as if something had been tugged up, out of him, away from the black curse at his center, and walled off from all that made him vampire. The pain released at the same time, and he choked for breath in the sudden absence of agony. Heat pulsed through him, emanating from that strange, walled-off part of himself. As a vampire, he had no natural body heat, and the sensation was incredibly strange, almost nostalgic.
"Cain? Cain!" Damien was shaking his shoulder, tears in his voice – in his eyes, too, Cain realized as he forced his head up to look at the werewolf. That was odd. He was fairly certain the werewolf hated him. He hadn't expected anyone to shed tears for him, least of all a victim of his cruelty.
He couldn't find the strength to respond to Damien's urgent demands for him to answer, though, so he closed his eyes, and allowed himself to drift into a cool blackness that might have been sleep, but might be something more permanent. At the moment, he didn't particularly care.
* * *
"Come on, wake up, please wake up," a voice said, accompanied by gentle fingers carding through his hair, tucking it behind his ear. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had touched him with such kindness. That was in part due to his own stubbornness, but he hadn't realized how badly he missed the contact until it was freely given.
It took him a long moment to recall what was happening, and even longer to make his mouth form words. "Ugh," was what he said, which to be perfectly honest was not, in fact, a word, but rather a grunt of pain.
Damien gasped, bracing Cain's face between his hands and staring deep into his eyes, looking for all the world like he had actually been worried about him. "Are you feeling better?" he asked. "I don't know what happened."
Cain chuffed out a breath at that, somewhere between a rueful chuckle and a scoff. "Your damn bond is what happened," he said, surprised at how steady his voice sounded after screaming for so long. He'd expected his voice to be hoarse, but it sounded almost normal.
"I'm sorry," Damien said immediately, pulling away from Cain, and releasing his face. He felt strangely bereaved by the reduced contact. "I didn't know it would do that," the werewolf explained, gesturing vaguely between his chest and Cain's. "It didn't… my side of the bond didn't even hurt, so I couldn't tell immediately that it was causing you pain–"
"Wait," Cain said, lifting a hand, noting how difficult it was to move with a bit of concern. He wasn't completely unscathed by the event, it seemed. "What do you mean by that?"
"By what?" Damien asked, rocking back slightly, looking confused.
"Your side of the bond," Cain said. "Why would it have hurt?"
"You share echoes of your bondmate's experiences," Damien said. "That's… basic level knowledge, I thought." He frowned. "I experienced it even before we were mated – at least, I think that's what happened – which is part of why I was so surprised when I didn't notice."
Cain was going to point out that you couldn't exactly expect a normal experience when this certainly wasn't a normal pairing, but he was finding that the answers he was getting from Damien only brought him even more questions. "You experienced my pain before we bonded?"
"I think that's what it was," Damien explained. "I don't know what happened, exactly. But I know I felt pain, and I knew it had to do with you, and the bond was pulling taut – like it was in danger of coming undone. Usually that's caused by death, but you're already mostly there, being undead, so…" Damien shrugged. "I just figured Brinn was up to something and tried to ignore it."
There was only moment in the recent past that Cain could think of where he'd been on the verge of death. "That… actually makes more sense than I expected," he said. "You remember when I was caught in a blood-purifying ritual?"
Damien blinked. "You almost died?"
"I told you I was dying!"
"But the pain stopped!" Damien protested. "So you weren't in immediate danger anymore!"
"Yes, but that's because I was granted mercy," Cain said. "It could have ended very differently."
Damien frowned, and he could see the mix of emotions flickering over his features. Some small part of him was relieved to hear that Cain had made it out of that situation relatively unscathed, but some other part of him probably thought he deserved all he'd suffered, and worse. Cain could sympathize, because he felt much the same way about it.
"I guess," the werewolf said slowly, "this was different because there was no risk of you dying."
That sounded fundamentally untrue to Cain, because it had felt far worse than the blood purification ritual and the thrice-blessed blood. But he couldn't ignore the fact that he had, indeed, survived whatever hell this bond had wreaked on him to complete the connection between himself and Damien. "Perhaps not," he conceded.
"It still looked like you were dying," Damien said, sounding a bit sheepish. "How, uh… how are you feeling, by the way? Do you need anything?" Blood, maybe? wasn't said, but it was implied with the nervous way the werewolf was holding himself.
As much as Cain wanted to deny his weakness, it was quite clear that he was not recovered from the incident. But he was also more than a little terrified to try the werewolf's blood. He'd only just managed to find a blood he was able to drink. What if this bond made that impossible again? Would he starve, shrivelling into a little husk of a vampire, unable to die but equally unable to live? "I need…" he sarted to answer, paused, and considered the werewolf. Damien hadn't actually offered his blood. He had to know that Cain was feeling weak, even if he hadn't felt his pain through the bond, because the exhaustion was almost debilitating. "…nothing."
Damien narrowed his eyes at Cain, one of his hands instinctively rising to the center of his chest, rubbing the space over his sternum. "Don't lie," he said. "You need blood, don't you?"
Cain closed his eyes. "I might."
Damien sighed loudly. "You're not making this easy," he muttered under his breath, shifting his weight.
Cain was about to ask what he meant by that, when he heart the soft shick of a knife being pulled from a sheath, and then the rich, savory scent of blood filled his nostrils, and his eyes sprang open.
Damien sat beside him, a small knife drawn, lightly stained with blood. He'd pressed the blade into the inner corner of his elbow, and a small trickle of blood was trailing down the side of his arm, dribbling into a small mug he was holding below the cut. "You could have just asked," he said. "It's the least I could do, after all this," he waved the knife vaguely, as if encompassing the events of the past few minutes. "I got the supplies while you were sleeping," he added, as if he'd anticipated Cain's question. "I figured you'd need something to help you recover. I made sure to get the stuff from the kitchens, so it should work fine. No silver or blessed steel or anything like that." He frowned then, looking back down at his arm and then the accumulated blood in the mug. "How much do you need?" he asked. "There's about a mouthful or so in there now."
Cain could have drained an entire body with how much he needed for recovery. But he'd long since learned restraint. "That's enough for now," he said. Damien had been tortured by Crowe up until very recently, he likely didn't have much blood to spare.
"Okay," Damien agreed, and picked up a bit of cloth, tying it tightly around the inside of his elbow before extending the mug in Cain's direction. "Drink up."
Cautiously, Cain accepted the mug, and drank.