MEDINA POV
The first sip was a mistake.
I knew it before I even swallowed, knew it from the second the warm metal edge of the mug touched my bottom lip and that scent rose stronger, richer, alive in a way bottled blood had no right to be, knew it when the taste hit my tongue and my whole body went still around it, every nerve, every instinct, every dark and ugly little part of me lifting its head at once like a pack of starving things catching blood in the wind.
Oh.
Oh, no.
It was perfect.
That was my first coherent thought, sharp and immediate and horrifying in its clarity, because blood was blood to most of my kind after enough years, after enough feeding and enough practice and enough exhaustion with survival to stop pretending there was poetry in it, but this—this was not just go
