---
He felt warm and alive and devastatingly real under her lips, and the first contact alone nearly made some humiliating sound leave her before she had even bitten him. She felt the pulse jump once beneath her mouth, and something deep in her new bloodline answered that pulse like a starving prayer.
Her vampire fangs descended.
The sensation shocked her. Not because it hurt. Because it felt too natural.
Then she bit him.
Sekhmet's body tightened. Only once.
A sharp intake of breath, it was almost controlled before it fully formed, but not hidden from those watching closely enough. Lily felt it. Felt what she had done to him in that instant. The puncture was clean. Her new fangs entered better than any human teeth could have, with a vampire's cruel precision and a Cruoraphim's strange grace.
Then blood reached her mouth. And at that moment the world changed for her.
Lily had thought the first time she drank his blood from the glass had been overwhelming.
