Draven was going to have his teeth on me, and hislips!I had to admit that I was far more excited about his lips than I was about his teeth.
Draven grabbed my hand and lightly touched the veins on the top of my hand with his fingertips. “You don’t become a vampire with just a bite, Mia,” he murmured, focusing intently on my hands. “There’s a changing serum that I can secrete with my fangs, but I can also choose not to secrete it, and keep all your lovely blood human.”
Goosebumps broke out on my arms, and a hot-cold sensation started from the crown of my head and continued downward to the tips of my toes, melting like a molten river. It felt like pure relaxation. The relaxation you might feel if someone were to take every scrap of worry, fear, and pain away from you in one big swoop. It felt like I was floating. Like I was flying.
Draven looked into my eyes. His were a deep red, and I knew that he was giving me this feeling. I also knew, but in a very chill part of myself that wasn’t really concerned but knew I ought to be, that Draven’s eyes changing from brown to red meant he was about to feed. This fascinated me. His eyes hadn’t changed by the pool when he’d drank blood from a bottle, but they did now. My guess was that actually biting a person required his teeth to be in play, and required all of a vampire’s abilities to turn on, like the ability to calm prey so that it didn’t run from you. I felt no concern, though. I simply noted the depth of the crimson and the refracting firelight in his irises and waited.
And then I saw the pain in his eyes, and that woke me up like someone had jolted me with a taser while in the bathtub. I sat up straight, my languidness gone in an instant.
“Do you still want me to continue?”
I looked at him for what felt like a very long time. The grandfather clocked ticked, and the fire crackled. I tried to peer into his face, his eyes, hissoulif I could, because I wanted to discern the secrets behind those eyes. I wanted to discern the reasons behind that pain. What I was coming to realize I wanted, more than anything, was to be someone he turned to. Someone he could rely on. If that meant only as a friend, then I would deal.
Since discovering that I was an empath, I hadn’t really tried to tune into the ability much. I just used it in a passive state, never an active state. It felt like a live wire when I did, and I didn’t much like the feeling. But right then, I pushed myself to tune in deeply. I could feel a hum of power in my chest that felt like it was fisted tighter than a vault. It felt jagged and thorny and a lot like someone had shoved a molten lava-ball of glass inside my chest. It hurt to touch, and it hurt to use with intention, to twist around and latch onto people. But I didn’t care about that at the moment because someone I was starting to care about very much was hurting.
His red eyes were studying my face carefully, as if he were looking for acceptance and permission to continue to be written on the planes of my cheekbones and across the lines of my forehead.
The hum of power was getting louder, and the jagged edges of the molten ball were stabbing me as I tried to reach in with non-physical hands and pry the ball open.
I put my hand on Draven’s cheek and felt the stubble of recent growth there. It was soft, unlike what I’d imagined most guys’ facial hair to feel. I focused on the warmth of his skin and the soft tickle of hair as I tried to sense inside of him. My power was reluctant and stabby, but I unfurled one petal from the lava-ball, and something blossomed inside of me that felt like Draven’s past.
Images flitted through my mind rapidly and with crystal clarity and sound. I flinched at the violence in them, trying to slow them down so I could study them and see them better. But they refused to slow, flickering through my head like a high-speed slideshow: vampires slaughtering one another, a man with a crown on his head shouting to an army behind him, dark gray eyes that glinted with seething hatred, a naked woman with her throat ripped out, her eyes wide open. I felt my breathing stop as Draven covered her body with his, holding her to him, sobbing.
I didn’t realize that I was crying until the images abruptly stopped. My breathing was loud, shallow, and fast. So much so that I had to focus on not hyperventilating.
My life had been so…smallcompared to his.
I’d never in my life felt small next to someone.
Until right then.
It was like finding a dragon from a fairy tale, and listening to him tell you the stories from the thousand years he’d lived, and being stuck with the knowledge that you’re just this simple milkmaid from the tiny village down the hill. Poor. Easily exchanged for another milkmaid. The knowledge that your life has neither the length nor the breadth to befriend the dragon.
He’d loved the woman. Deeply. He was still mourning her, and I could sense that several hundred years had passed since her death.
I looked away from Draven and used my sleeve to dry my eyes, feeling foolish. I got up intending to get out of the study and head to my room, even though I knew I’d lie awake and miserable in my bed. But Draven, who hadn’t said a word to me, but must have felt what had just happened, grabbed my hand and tugged me back down.
I was still reeling, and I wanted nothing more than to disappear somewhere where I could hide and think. I was trembling, and I couldn’t account for why. Was it the influx of emotions that had come with the scenes? Was it because I felt cold after being separated from Draven’s—I didn’t know what to call it—his memories? His psyche?
I didn’t know what I had done just now. I’d been trying to connect with him empathically, and instead I’d sucked memories out of his head. Not. Cool. And if it felt like this every time, I was never doing it again.
I didn’t know how to tell him I’d just majorly violated his privacy, and I was feeling faintly nauseous, so I just sat on the couch, unable to talk, shaking like a leaf in a storm.
Draven drew me onto his lap and wrapped his arms and a blanket around me that had been warming by the fire. He made soothing sounds as he held me.
I felt like an idiot for being this shaken. I was definitely tougher than this, but I was trying to cut myself a little slack. I hadn’t known that this was going to happen. From my understanding, empaths could only feel what others felt. There’d been no mention of being able to see into someone’s past. I felt like there should be an owner’s manual for these things. One that they handed out when people discovered their gifts.Oh, you’re the new empath? Here! Take this owner’s manual. It should help a ton!
My ear was positioned over Draven’s chest, and I expected there to be silence because of his vampiness, but there wasn’t. There was aglub-glubsound as his heart pumped, and his chest rose and fell with each breath and release.
I closed my eyes and focused on that sound, trying to train my breathing to rise and fall with his, and then realized that he was syncing his breath with mine.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said.
“For what?”
The sound of his voice echoed in the cavern of his chest, and I could hear the depth of it from my close position pressed up against him. Draven was cuddling with me. Why couldn’t I enjoy the moment more? I tried, I really did, but I was still too shaken.
“For...whatever I just did. I’m still not sure, but it felt like a terrible invasion of privacy.”
