Page 4 of Awakened Light

Deep blue and filled with such passion and intensity it took my breath away each time I looked into them.

And now they stared back at me filled with mirth.

“Don’t let me stop you. You can keep checking out the goods.” His crooked smile deepened his dimples as he waggled his eyebrows.

Heat flooded my cheeks as I quickly looked away. “I wasn’t ‘checking out the goods.’ I was just looking for your most vulnerable spot so I can kill you with a well-placed fireball.”

One eyebrow climbed. “Is that so?”

“Yes. That’s so.” I looked back at him, and his growing smile coaxed another out of me.

“Literally the worst liar in history. You’re so busted.” He laughed and I gave up my fight, covered my face and joined him.

“Don’t feel bad. I’ve checked out your goods too. I dig all the tattoos.”

“Oh, do you?” I asked, looking down at the tribal tattoos on my arms.

“I do. You’re kind of a badass, Catrain. It’s not often I’m intimidated.” He propped up on his elbows. “Actually, I’m never intimidated. But when I first saw you standing on the beach with your spear and your tattoos, and all that face paint...” He blew out a whistle. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“I did?” I smiled wider.

A quick puff of breath accompanied his nodding head. “Oh yeah. You looked like you could kick even my arse.”

Pursing my lips, I raised my eyebrows. “Good. I glad I scared you.”

“I’m. I am,” he corrected.

I nodded in acknowledgment and repeated it. “I’m glad I scared you.”

Part of our evenings involved Thorne helping me with my English. We’d been taught English since childhood from the few Picts who’d been allowed out into the world. They thought it was important we could all speak the language in the event our island was ever discovered. After years of speaking it, my English was fairly good, but Thorne had been teaching me how to make it sound a bit more natural. Though my native accent remained strong, I had quickly learned some of the more casual and correct ways of speaking the language.

“Perfect. You’re a very quick learner, Cat.”

“Thank you,” I said while I watched him lower himself all the way back down again. I followed suit and mimicked his position and lay my head back on my folded arms and stared up at the darkening sky.

“I know you’ve been begging me to go, but I actually do have to leave tonight,” he said quietly.

The words sucked the air from my lungs. I should have been celebrating the fact my family’s greatest enemy was leaving my life, but instead, a pang of regret tightened up inside my stomach.

“Oh,” I whispered.

“I can only survive on the hog’s blood I’ve been feeding on for so long. I can feel my strength slipping away. We require human blood to survive, so unless you’re willing to offer me a blood meal, I need to get back to the mainland to feed.”

I crinkled my face in disgust. “I will not be letting you drink my blood. Disgusting.”

“It’s no more disgusting than you eating animal flesh. Unless you’re a vegetarian, you don’t have much of a leg to stand on.”

“It’s very different,” I argued. “You drink people.”

He shrugged. “I do. But unlike the animals you kill for food, the people I drink remain very much alive. And most say the experience of being my lunch is euphoric. We could argue, in fact, that the real monster here is you.”

I rolled my head over to face him, and when he turned his head, we locked eyes once again. My stomach tightened up and started those infuriating flip-flops that happened every time I looked at him.

“You really don’t kill everyone you feed on? I’ve spent my whole life hearing of the horrors and brutality of vampires. That you slaughter innocents and kill at will.”

Thorne gently shook his head. “I suppose when we first turned, we didn’t have control of it like we do now. We did kill most of the humans we fed on because we didn’t know another way. But we quickly learned to feed on them, erase their memory of it, and leave them alive. It’s rare for a vampire to kill a human, and Lothaire, the leader of our clan and all the vampires, enacted a law that forbids it. Any vampire caught killing a human for pleasure is put on trial, and the crime is punishable by death. It’s much easier to keep our existence a secret if we don’t leave a trail of bodies in our wake, so the law was put into place centuries ago. Feed, erase, release. That’s the way we function. And most of us have blood donors now or drink from a blood bag.”

“Like Emilia?” I asked, my curiosity about his life deepening. “You said she started as Aiden’s blood donor before they fell in love?”