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If you choose to let your vampire guest feed from you, keep a heavy silver object handy. Also, remember to take vitamin and iron supplements.
—The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
I managed to get back to the house before collapsing completely. Cal propped me up on the couch, forcing as much orange juice into my system as possible and covering me with a soft blue fleece blanket. He tried to make me some toast but nearly set my kitchen on fire. So I settled for valerian tea and lemon drops.
I was going to need serious therapy and a new toaster.
As far as we could tell, whoever was running the grow operation had returned to the site and seen us rooting around in the shed. But their decision to eliminate the problem “naturally” by dosing Cal with pollen from the fangwort plants left us with even more questions. Did they know what we were looking for? Did they know that one of us was a vampire, or had they just assumed and hoped for the best? Did they know that they’d dosed Cal, specifically? I guessed that they probably didn’t. If so, I said, they probably would have stuck around to see the job finished.
Cal seemed to find that insulting.
I hadn’t quite processed the whole thing. I was tired and weak and really wanted the “mortal peril” business to stop. I had wanted Cal, wanted him desperately. But that sort of encounter was very different for me. It didn’t feel wrong, but the idea that I had that sort of passion in me, that sort of violence, scared me.
There was no reason for fangwort to have this effect on vampires. I couldn’t find any chemical or physiological reason for the plant to make Cal all bloodthirsty. I found that frustrating to the point of throwing one of Jane’s books across the room. Unfortunately, Cal was in the way at the time and took my books away for the rest of the night.
He also said, for the safety of his cranium, that I should just chalk the strange vampire reactions up to “general mystical forces” for now.
Another irritating mystery was Cal’s ability to pull back from bloodlust and settle for plain old lust. From what we’d read, the vampires affected by the poisonings were so overwhelmed by thirst that they tore their victims apart indiscriminately, even if those people were close friends or lovers. And if I tried to ask him about it, he found creative ways to leave the room.
It was doubly upsetting to Cal, knowing that a vampire of his age had lost control so quickly and that the substance was capable of affecting vampires in airborne form. He’d been lost, he said, to the call of my blood, even though he knew it was wrong and he didn’t want to hurt me. The possibility of it being used as some sort of aerosol weapon against vampires, and therefore the humans around them, seriously concerned him. But considering Cal’s ability to “pull himself out” of his bloodthirsty state, we assumed that the inhaled pollen was less potent than the ingested version. That made sense, as much as any of this made sense. A vampire’s digestive system was a bit more active than his respiratory system.
Once I’d convinced Cal that tearing through the Council offices like a wrecking ball, searching for the person who’d locked us in, wasn’t a good idea, he finally settled down enough to sit still and drink a bottle of clean donor blood. Cal had worked too hard to get the answers he needed to risk exposure through a bloody, destructive tantrum. Besides, if anyone was going to have the stakey hissy fit all over Mr. Evil Pollen, it was me. The courts were more lenient regarding human-on-vampire violence. I could get away with it.
I was afraid that Cal would distance himself from me, either because I was pushing him or because he was afraid he’d hurt me. But rather than shutting down and shutting me out, Cal seemed afraid to let me out of his sight. From the moment I walked through the door, Cal was with me. He helped Gigi cook before I arrived home, to make sure I would eat. When I got into the shower, he joined me and scrubbed my back.
It felt like home. It felt like having a family. It felt … a little claustrophobic.
OK, the shower thing I didn’t mind so much.
But when he tried getting up before sunset so he could “have dinner” with us, I blew up.
“What is going on with you? What if we didn’t happen to have the kitchen blinds closed? Is this because you’re trying to make up for the, uh—” I looked toward Gigi, who was applying herself to her last-minute math homework with too much earnestness to be genuine. “The incident? I told you, I’m fine. It’s no big deal.”
Cal put his reading aside and cast a sidelong glance at my sister. “Gigi, would you mind going into the office and getting a file marked ‘Blue Moon Financials’?” he asked.
“I know when I’m being sent out of the room, you know,” she said, frowning into her salad.
“Good, then you know I’m doing it to avoid being rude to you, which is a mark of respect,” he countered.
She growled and launched a grade-A flounce from the room. “I hate when logic works against me.”
“I told you, I’m fine, nothing a few iron supplements couldn’t take care of,” I whispered, knowing that Gigi was listening outside the door. “If you’re trying to prove to yourself that there aren’t any aftereffects of the pollen—”
“It’s not that,” he said, stroking the still-raw bite mark I’d hidden under a collared Beeline shirt. “I can feel something coming, Iris, something that’s going to resolve this mess. It’s a sort of tickle at the edge of my brain telling me I’m close to a solution. My time here is coming to a close.”
“Oh.” I slumped back against the couch. “Oh.”
I hadn’t thought of Cal’s leaving in days. He was enmeshed in our home now, our lives. I forgot that he only considered it a temporary situation, and an inconvenient one at that. Cheeks pink, I averted my eyes and wanted the floor to swallow me.
“I don’t want to waste what time I have left with you,” he said softly.
“Oh.”
Why couldn’t I stop saying “Oh”?
He smiled, affecting a cheerful tone of voice. “The good news is that I will be exacting bloody, anatomically detailed revenge on the person who nearly killed you—twice. And, of course, you’ll have your life back.”
My expression must have been hurt, because when Gigi walked back in with the file, she faltered a bit. I recovered, smiling. She frowned and handed Cal the file.
