Page 12 of Nightshade

What was that old saying?

Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought it back.

That was me, the smug cat who wanted to know everything.

“My sire was . . . like you. Russian. He killed me, and then kept me around for years, because . . . he said he gave me this life, so he owned it.” His eyes went distant as he said that, and it would have been impossible to ignore the very real pain in his eyes as he spoke. Sure, maybe it was designed to make me sympathize with him, but . . . well, I did that anyway. “I don’t know what you know about vampires⁠—”

He broke off and stared at me, so I gave him a half-hearted shrug. I wasn’t going to tell him that I hadn’t even been sure vampires were real until I’d seen him writhing and screaming in the dappled sunlight. Nope. Again, I’d learned from Viktor that ignorance should be kept to myself, lest someone take advantage of it.

He sighed, glancing away, and took a moment to decide how to continue. “A vampire’s sire can give them orders, and we . . . we can’t deny them. He could tell me to stab myself, and I would do it.”

It was good. Oh, not that bit of horror about being someone’s slave, but him telling me. It cost him only pride, because it wasn’t like I was a vampire sire, to be able to take advantage of it, and also, it made me sympathize even more.

In fact, it made me sympathize more than he could know, since I’d lived most of my life in packs where we’d been forced to do the alpha’s bidding without question, and both of those alphas had been awful people. The first Aleks’s grandfather, a sharp-edged man who had no soft emotions but lots of hard rules, and the second his uncle, who had been a selfish bastard who’d only ever thought of himself. Still odd, how Aleks hadn’t turned out anything like either of them.

I tried to thank Mama for that every day. She was the angel who had made all of our lives livable, both under those horrible alphas, and by raising one who was better than any other. I had also spent most of my life trying to be more like her, because clearly, she was the best person ever born.

There couldn’t be a better role model.

I reached out and picked up the crushed basket, not looking at Altair as I tried to coax it back into shape. “I’m sorry. We had a terrible alpha who used to tell us to do bad things.”

“You said . . . The one who dealt with the witches, yes?”

“Yeah.” I glanced up at Altair, and his eyes . . . well, they were was intense. I didn’t know a damned thing about vampires, but in that moment, I’d have believed it if someone told me their eyes had hypnotic powers. Or maybe it was just that he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

He reminded me a little of a fae I’d met once in Russia, features so sharp and fine that they seemed like they should be a painting instead of attached to a human face. Ethereal. Not an angel like Mama, though. Maybe one of those devils human religion liked so much.

He swallowed hard and nodded to me, then glanced away. I wondered if that meant the next thing he said would be a lie. “I escaped him, barely. Ran to the new world, because vampires then didn’t like to cross the ocean. Months on a ship are dangerous.”

Ahh, not a lie so much as a . . . what was the word? Skip? Ignoring things that happened. Glossing over them. Maybe they were so traumatic he didn’t want to think about them, or maybe he’d done bad things and didn’t want to tell me. Couldn’t really blame him either way. It wasn’t like I was telling him about killing Barry as we sat there in the woods, only just having met and still taking the measure of each other.

I nodded at that, because frankly, I couldn’t imagine it. The notion of sunlight being dangerous was impossible to take in properly. It was like if water were made of acid, or breathing air was toxic. Sunlight wasn’t something I’d ever considered avoiding. It was everywhere.

“I came west because people were going west,” he added with a little shrug, then winced. He glanced up at the sky, which was blocked off where he was, but given the deep orange light on the forest floor, and the slant the light was starting to take, it was clear that the sun would be gone soon.

I probably should have been nervous about it. Soon, I would be alone in the woods with a predator who was no longer held back by the danger that had stopped him before.

But I couldn’t be scared.

He was so miserable, so sad, as he sat there staring down at his legs. His legs, which were flaking with dead skin that had been burned in the ten or so seconds he’d spent in full daylight. He wasn’t scary at all. He was half-starved and miserable, and he’d spent almost two hundred years in captivity.

“So, um,” I said, pausing to try to find the least awkward way to say the very unintelligent thing I was about to say. “You’re probably pretty hungry, if you tried to attack a werewolf who’s a lot bigger than you.”

He just sat there and blinked at me, clearly not sure how to answer that. I couldn’t blame him, since well . . . how was he supposed to respond to that? It was obvious that he was hungry, but also, I imagined that admitting that one wanted to eat the person they were sitting with wasn’t exactly great manners.

“I’m not trying to—it’s just, I thought—I’m a werewolf, you know?” I had to keep from groaning at myself at that. Gee, did he know I was a werewolf? No freaking kidding. “I’m just, I’m trying to say, uh, I could maybe spare a little. If you . . . if you’re hungry, and you’re, like, willing to try to not kill me.”

CHAPTER 8

Altair

To try not to kill him.

That was the promise he wanted to extract from me. He wasn’t demanding that I keep from hurting him. He was even allowing for mistakes.

All I had to do was try.

My lips curled upward. This werewolf was an absolute darling. I’d gone west chasing people hunting for gold, but I was the one who’d found a gold mine, sitting there chewing the left side of his bottom lip, looking for all the world like he was the anxious one, the one trying not to put me out.