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“Well, that was foolish.” He snickered.
“I was a kid!” I cried out, and I elbowed him a bit, causing him to grin.
“You were a Wiccan child; of course, nothing in nature would make you ill. You were part nature whether you realized it or not. When I was a boy, I re
member fever had broken out through my village. It claimed my elder brother, Demetrius, and within two days, my younger sister, Thalia. She was a newborn, and within hours, she was gone.”
He spoke of his past so freely, so openly, that I instantly felt whatever little guard I held up come down. “But you were fine?”
“Yes.” He nodded, holding my gaze. “Because I shared the same mother, not father as my sister and brother. And though my mother had magic in her blood, it was not enough to carry to her children. Her family magic ended with her. I received my witch’s blood from my biological father, a random, unknown fisherman, who I never met or knew.”
I thought of it a bit more. “If it was your older brother and younger sister…”
“Yes, my mother had an affair, which her husband suspected, but once his children had died, it was all but confirmed, and people knew more of the ways of witches then. He sought to have her and me stoned, but we escaped by boat the night before.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know.” His face bunched as he tried to think. “I believe I was at least nine or ten. I was born around the summer of 841, in Athens, Greece. In history, there was a great storm in Thessaloniki, around 851. We had escaped there by the time of that. I remained in Thessaloniki until I was reborn there in 872.”
Wow. I couldn’t see it, and before I got myself sucked further down that rabbit hole, I pulled myself back to this century, the present.
“So, the vampires all the books are written about—the ones that can’t come out at day— with fangs, and who have to be invited in?”
“Those are the stories of Lesser Bloods.” He nodded but saw the confusion on my face. “Vampires who were once humans with no magic in their blood, though they don’t sleep in coffins, either. They never sleep. Most of them in the wild avoid us. Those that are trained enough to remain around among us are treated as…well lesser.”
“So that is it!” I gasped, grabbing his arm. “I swear, I thought other vampires were avoiding me while I hunted, and Mrs. Ming would always mutter something like ‘annoying Nobles’ or ‘my lady’ whenever she was irritated with me. But I never understood why. I just thought it was something common when she was human.”
Though in America, there weren’t really Nobles or titles like my lady, it still made more sense at the time.
“Yes, many of them believe we are stuck up because we do not suffer the things they do.”
“Are we stuck up?”
He grinned, nodded, and teased, “Horribly so. But can you blame us? Have you seen what they suffer? A little sunshine and they look like the undead.”
It was a bad joke. I tried hard; I really did, but I grinned, too, luckily, not laughing. “Just earlier, you were looking down your nose at the humans for being bigots, and here you are looking down at other vampires.”
“Because humans are ridiculous. They judge one another based on things that have no bearing on their humanity. What does skin tone have to do with whether or not you are the same? In our case, there is a very big difference between a Noble and Lesser Blood. We are close but not similar. Lesser Bloods are a liability and often unstable.”
“Prejudice is prejudice,” I reminded him. “If I were a Lesser Blood, would you still try to mate me?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation; his eyes shined with no doubt. “Though I am sure our society would gossip, none would dare to in my presence, but mercifully, we do not have to be a vampire Romeo and Juliet. I quite hate the play.”
“I happen to like that play.”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course, you would. Your romantic heart bleeds for such tales.”
“I should remind you that just because I’m being nice and hospitable does not mean I have agreed to mate you.”
“Yes, I have noticed.”
That felt too simple. “But?”
“But, we are destined, Druella.” He sounded more like the bleeding-heart romantic now.
“And how do you know that?”
“I told you, I came to this land—or in 1920 I thought of coming to this land—because of you.” His voice got softer. Reaching up, he brushed a piece of hair from my face.
