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He was right. “Stop knowing me so well.”
“No.” He outstretched his hand for mine. I wiggled my spare hand out from under the blanket and gave it to him. He at once inhaled the scent at my wrist before kissing the top of my hand, and I wondered if my scent ever tempted him enough to try to drink—even once. In fact, I’d never seen him feed at all. How did he do it? I mean, I knew how. But…how? Did he stalk them? Did he just pick random people?
I didn’t want to think of him like that.
“Ask what you wish to ask?” He nodded for me to go on.
“Never mind—” I tried to pull my hand back, but he held on tighter. Not so much that it hurt but enough that there was no way I could break his grip, at least not without magic.
“Do you know something else about us both?”
“What?”
He flipped over my hand to my palm and traced the lines in them. “We are both a bit cowardly.”
“What?” I gaped. “We are—”
“We are so happy to be in this moment,” he replied, placing his palm over mine. “These moments when it is just you and me, man and woman, that we would do anything to stay here. Including avoiding topics of conversations that might anger or remind us that we are not simply man and woman.”
I stirred the soup in front of me slowly because he was right. I noticed that often he’d want to say something or start a conversation and then abruptly change the topic. And I did it, too.
“I’m happy here.”
“As am I. However…”
“We can only talk about art, or your past, or my work at the museum for so long,” I finished or him. I held his hand and took a deep breath. “Well, since we’ve exposed this, I will just let rip and say what I wanted to say.”
“Go on.”
“When do you eat or drink? Have you been tempted to drink from me, ever? Do you kill the people you drink from? And…”
“Breathe,” he instructed, and I nodded as I did so. “Good. And you have been holding that in for a while, I see.”
“Hmm.” I shrugged and drank more soup.
“It is too dangerous to hunt in your coven’s lands, so I have a refrigerator full of blood bags that is restocked every other day by the one who cleans. I merely make sure to drink right before you arrive and right after you leave.”
“Wait, your maid provides you blood bags? From where? The hospital would notice something like that, right?” I mean, I wasn’t sure how much he drank but still.
“It is because of thoughts like that that it is easy to fool mortals. Why would we bother trying to steal from the hospital when there are humans who willingly give us blood?” I must have been staring so long that all he could do was chuckle. “We live for eternity. The older you are and the better your family is, the more likely you are to have a network of knowing humans who are willing to exchange blood and secrecy for a little wealth.”
“Blood drug dealers. Well, there are no drugs, so blood dealers? Really?” That was insane or ingenious. Leave it to money to make a mortal ignore their natural instinct of fear. “So, while the witches are fighting to protect mankind from vampires, mankind is feeding them?”
“It has been this way all my life and even the lives before me,” he replied. “Very few humans can handle the truth. But a very few of more than seven billion is still quite a lot. So long as they keep their lives and make a profit, they do not care.”
I shook my head. It made sense. With all the vampires I’d come across, and with all the vampires I knew that were st
ill out there, if they were going around drinking cities dry, it would be all over the papers. The whole world would know about vampires.
“Often, when you hear of vampire attacks, it is Lesser Bloods who cannot control themselves. Other times, should it be a Noble, it is done with a cause—anger, revenge, to strike fear, send a message, create chaos for some other means, or they have won a battle. It is not just hunger. Unlike what your coven has told you, the vast majority of us are not mindless, bloodthirsty monsters wanting to suck the world dry and destroy all witches.”
“Is that what you’ve been too cowardly to say?” I asked gently. “You’re thoughts on my coven?”
He didn’t say anything, which was like saying everything. And I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Pulling my hand back, I lifted my bowl and finished the soup to get it over with.
“Baby steps,” he said when I put the bowl down, trying not to cringe at the taste.
“Baby steps?”
