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“No.”
“What did you eat in Eagleton?” Matthew wants to know. He raises an eyebrow, but I’m not sure if it’s because he’s judging the humans there for not having healthy diets or because there’s something else I don’t know.
I stop eating, and I put my hands in my lap.
“Please don’t tell me they ate vampires,” I whisper.
If he says yes, I’m definitely going to be sick.
He can’t
say yes.
He just can’t.
“Not as far as I know,” he answers, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
“Were you worried?” Eli asks thoughtfully, watching me.
“There’s just a lot I don’t know about Eagleton. I feel like I was tricked, sort of.” It sounds simplistic and a little dumb when I say it out loud, but it’s my reality. I should have questioned so many things that I just didn’t. I should have tugged at the strings around me and seen what unraveled.
“They definitely left you out of the loop a lot,” Benjamin says in a rare moment of understanding. He’s always so gruff and wild with me. I’m not sure whether I love it or hate it, but it’s something that’s going to take some getting used to.
“Well, if you didn’t eat vampires,” Eli winks. “What did you eat?”
“Vegetables. Fruit. Sometimes rabbits.”
They all frown.
“What?”
“They didn’t feed you much.”
“There wasn’t a lot of food to go around,” I shrug.
The men exchange looks, and I know that I’m going to hate whatever it is that they say next. I wish they’d just spit it out so I can know. Knowing would be better than this sense of growing dread.
“What is it?” I sigh, shaking my head. Whatever they want to say, they should just say it.
“Eagleton was a known food supplier. They’re the only human colony around, but they provided food to the elves, and to the dwarves who live in the forest.” Eli says the words, and they sink right into my belly like a damn weight.
“What?”
“That was part of what they did on their hunts. They killed vampires, yes, but they also brought what they could pilfer from the vamps and sold it. They would sell vampire goods to other communities in the forests.” Eli watches me. Is he looking at me to see if I’m going to be okay with this information?
Or is he wondering if I already knew this?
“That, along with the meat they gathered,” Benjamin says gruffly.
“But...but there was no meat,” I whisper.
“We found it in underground storage units,” Matthew tells me. “After we collected the humans from Eagleton, we did another sweep.”
That was when Benjamin was holding me in place, when Eli disappeared back into the town. They found underground storage units? Full of food? How could I have been so damn stupid?
“Did you know those existed?”
“I...”
