“I’m not a vampire now, am I?” she blurted, desperation in her eyes.
Desperation and horror—because I was horrifying to her. As I should be, I decided. I was horrifying to myself.
She was far from ready to accept all that she was now, as herself or to me. So I answered her question in the most direct fashion. “Vampires are born, not made. You are something else. No longer fully human, but not a vampire, either.”
Revulsion was now naked on her face, and she looked at her hand again. “Why bite people at all, then, if it means they’ll usually die?”
Why kill? Better that she should ask, why live? “Because I die, if I do not. And it is not an easy death or a swift one.” I had vowed to be patient with her, to be gentle. The first few weeks with a cognate were the most fragile, and much damage could be done through carelessness, through lack of self-control.
To us both.
I opened the bedside table and found the syringe within, where I had expected it. Where the protocols had stated that it would be. I looked up to find her eyes even wider as she stared fixedly at the object in my hand. “For the catheter,” I explained. “You want it out, don’t you?”
She blushed—I was fiercely glad to see that blush, the stain of her healthy blood in her cheeks—and she nodded.
“So you’re not actually...you know, undead,” she blurted, still grappling with the idea that I was a vampire and that she had been cured by one.
I retrieved the length of tubing that ran from her catheter to the collection bag, putting the syringe to the port on the side to remove the bubble of air the held the catheter in place.
“No, not undead,” I said evenly, though I was certain that she sensed the truth of that already, even if she wouldn’t let herself acknowledge it. “I am as alive and sensible, in the old meaning of the word, as any human.”
I set the syringe on the nightstand. “And you can remove the catheter now,” I added. “Unless you require assistance.”
“No,” she said quickly, rummaging under her blankets as her blushed deepened. “Not at all.”
As soon as she was done with her adjustments, she lifted her chin and met my gaze squarely. Her blush had not receded, but she appeared to be doing her best to ignore it. “So why don’t you just drink animal blood? A really rare steak? Do people just taste better?”
As if we had not asked those questions ourselves. I snorted. “Animal blood does no more for us than it does for you.”
“Blood donations?” she pushed.
Suddenly, I felt every year, every minute of my age, the weight of it so immense that even I couldn’t know how great it was. She was so young, so quick and full of the first rush of life. I could not remember ever feeling like that—hell, for that matter, I couldn’t even remember remembering it. She kept looking for an escape with the optimism of her youth even though we agnates had been looking for a way out countless generations before her ancestors had even crossed to this continent. Even though her fate had already been sealed.
“Cora, we have tried,” I said heavily. “Over years, centuries, millennia, we have tried. If I could drink blood removed from its host or take the life of a mouse or cow instead of a human, I would. Many of us would.” Many among the Adelphoi, at least. “But it is the interaction between a living, human host and the vampiric enzymes that produces a change in the cells themselves that we need to live.”
“So you eat people.” Cora said the words flatly, almost scoffing.
“Not like food,” I said, amused by the simplicity of her statement. “More like a vitamin, without which we develop something like scurvy or rickets. I don’t sit down to dine on living victims every night. Not every week or even every month.”
“That’s really no different from...from buying organs stolen from living donors on the black market,” she said with a shudder.
She was still viewing me as if I were like her—a variation on humanity rather than something else entirely. “There is a difference, Cora. When a human kills a human, it is murder, and there is no consent asked or given. When a human kills a creature that is not human, or vice versa....” I trailed off as I leaned forward, letting her draw the conclusion.
“We aren’t animals.” She breathed the words, caught like a mouse in the gaze of a cobra.
The darkness in me roared up at her fearful fascination. “You aren’t,” I agreed softly, leaning closer. I touched her soft cheek with one fingertip, and she made a tiny, needy sound and instantly angled her face toward mine. “But what if we are? Animals made to need you. It is what I am, not what I choose.”
I could have told myself that I wanted to make a point, to cut through her sanctimonious condemnations. But it was a lie. In truth, I was fascinated by the way her reaction to my touch rippled through her body—and back into mine, where I felt a tingling heat building at the base of my spine. I wanted to make her breath come short as it was now, her lips parted even as mine still hovered a hairsbreadth away.
“And I never take anything that is not offered to me,” I told her softly, almost cruelly. She leaned in to close the distance between us, and I pulled back.
Her eyes flew open, her pupils almost swallowing the outer irises in their blackness as she swayed with her desire—for me, for everything that was between us. She pushed from the bed in agitation, and I sat back against my chair. She twitched the thin fabric of the nightgown to fall to her calves, but her nipples defied her attempt at modest, their hard peaks visible beneath it.
“You can’t do that,” she protested in spite of the evidence. “It’s not right. Who could refuse you?”
No human who wasn’t under the thrall or the consort of another agnate. And that was exactly it. It wasn’t as simple as my pulling strings that she had to obey. It was that she wanted to. She was made to want to, just as I was made to need her.
“Cora, I am telling you how things are, not how I would like things to be,” I told her, shifting to face her more squarely as she folded her arms across her chest. “I want to put an end to all this death.”
I didn’t fully share Alys’ dream, but that part…yes, that part was mine. That was the piece of it that had kept me going for decades after I should have descended into the senility of the ancient and unbonded.
Cora frowned. “So the screening….”
I realized that she had suspected that the test was some kind of pretense, some excuse for drawing her in. “It was very real. I have poured millions of dollars into my research, attempting to lower the casualties, to identify those who will live. You are the first success.” The first success among hundreds of carefully cataloged failures.
Her expression was torn between disbelief and outrage. “How could you possibly know that I would be the one in one hundred, then? How could you quote me statistics if you really had no clue?” She all but spat the word.
She was beginning to tire me. It was one thing to indulge her questions for a while, to be gentle and careful in my introduction to her new world. But she was my cognate, and her incessant challenges were something I had no intentions of living with.
But I shoved down my impulse to silence her—with my mind, with a kiss, or with something more. And instead, I schooled myself again to patience. All things in time. She would learn her place. They all did, eventually.
And so I explained. “It was an estimate based on the conversion rate of the general population and the number that we could exclude from consideration. We knew for certain that all those we exclude have no chance of survival. Simple mathematics dictates the likelihood among those that remain.”
“You accepted me on a guess,” she all but sputtered. “And what were the other requirements, other than that I had to be terminally ill and pass the blood test?”
I narrowed my gaze at her. She was ready for this much of the truth—and fully deserved it, in every sense of the word. “That you be female. And an adult young enough to withstand the conversion.”