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“I have a dome radar system that’s…” he sighed. “I need a promise you won’t tell Marco. This isn’t my secret to tell. I’ll share it with you, but not him.”
I was allowed to keep personal things from Marco, and I reasoned that the personal security around Ryan’s home was about as personal as it could get.
“You have my word, with the usual caveats.” Which meant if I could save the life of someone close to me by telling them, I would.
He shook his head. “Not even for the usual caveats with this one. Top secret military stuff I was able to get ahold of.”
“But the coterie isn’t likely to be able to access?”
He grinned. “Nope.”
“Well then, you have my word with no caveats, until your death or twenty-one years, whichever comes first, and it had better be the twenty-one years.” There was no sense telling anyone about this great technology that might keep us safe if there was no way for us to get it. Vampires aren’t in the habit of giving promises that last indefinitely, though. Forever is a long time when you live until someone kills you.
“It’s a dome that’s electrified. Anything or anyone who tries to come in will slide down the side, and will almost certainly be dead before they hit the ground outside the wall. A high-pitched noise keeps birds from flying into it. The animals inside will never get out and the animals outside aren’t getting in. I have a healthy ecosystem within these walls, but I occasionally need to add or subtract animals. Last year, I added two snakes and brought slayer trainees in to get rid of about a hundred squirrels. Five years ago, I caught a bunch of rabbits in humane cages and put them outside the wall.”
He’d told me on the plane that he wanted me to bite him and drink from him during our down time at his home. Had he been waiting until we were inside the copper ring of his property?
“The copper ring — is that why you’ve waited until we were here to talk about the possibility of me drinking from you?”
“No, not the circle. It’s more about the space. I just want it to be us and no one else. I want it to be private. Ours.”
“Then that’s what it’ll be.”
I’d brought a deer shifter and her human boyfriend. We’d dropped them off at the beach house before we’d come to Ryan’s home. If I needed to feed from someone besides Ryan, I’d have two people handy, a shifter and a human. They’d both be safe in Slayertown, because deer never hurt humans and in fact often need to be rescued from them. The slayers’ instincts would be to protect them as one of the weakest.
A few weeks earlier, Brooke in Birmingham had invited Marco, Cora, Ryan, me, Blade, Augustus, and Mitchell to her home for two nights, and it’d been the ideal way for us to get to know one another, and for the New Orleans threesome to give us pointers on how things worked with them. Mitchell and Cora had time during the day while we were down to talk about wolf-things, while Augustus, Marco, and I had the early morning hours to ourselves, once the daywalkers went to sleep. I’m pretty sure Blade and Ryan had already shared everything they intended to share with each other.
Privately, Augustus told me he has the control over Mitchell he should have, but he’s never forced the issue to try to prove he can make Blade do as he wants, because he’s pretty sure he can’t. He doesn’t believe she can force him to do her will, either, but he hopes she never tries, because if she were to succeed, his inner vampire would likely try to kill her.
“Have you told her this?” I asked him.
“That I’ll try to kill her if she forces me to her will? I’m pretty sure she knows that without me having to say the words, since she’ll likely feel she has to kill me if I can take over her will. She’ll never, ever be okay with that.” He sighed. “A vampire managed it, once. She escaped him and took four months to work out a plan to get to him and kill him true, and she managed it on her first attempt.”
If Ryan and I shared blood, would I be able to take him over? Vampires usually can, once they’ve drunk from the short-lived, but Ryan was long-lived. He felt like the short-lived, though. It seemed like I’d have control over him once I had his blood coursing through my veins, but was that part of what kept the slayers alive? Our belief we could take them over if we could only get close enough to them to drink from them? Our lore told us to never get close enough to try, no matter how tempting it seemed.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Ryan would strike out if I turned him into a puppet, but I would never try, so I would never know for certain.
And if he could turn me into his puppet?
Then he wouldn’t live to take another breath. I’d been forced into the role of puppet for too many centuries to allow a lover to ever do so.
On the plane, we’d had a telepathic conversation about what might happen once we were bound together by blood. It was a huge unknown, but we both wanted to take the step. I trusted my inner vampire, and I trusted Ryan’s inner slayer. We had to do this, but more, I wanted to do this. I wanted Ryan’s essence inside me. I wanted to feel him in ways I couldn’t without tasting his blood.
“You have to know I see this a little like a marriage ceremony,” Ryan told me when we were still ten feet from the bottom step of his front porch. “I want to carry you into my house, over the threshold, symbolically claiming you as mine before we merge ourselves into one being.”
“We don’t know that will happen,” I protested, but I knew it probably would. Our souls wanted to merge, to become one. Ingesting his blood into me was all it was going to take to make it happen in ways I was smart enough to know I didn’t understand, and wouldn’t — couldn’t — until we experienced it. “Okay, so yeah. We do. Is there something that will happen when we step onto the porch? When we cross the threshold?”
“Physically? The home security system will view me holding your hand when we step onto the porch, so it will register you as friend and not foe. Metaphysically, I don’t expect anything to happen.”
“Will it understand you carrying me into the house? Surely that isn’t in the program.”
He smiled. “It wasn’t a few days ago. It is now.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine, I’ll indulge you in this.”
It turns out, the romance of the moment hit me, when I hadn’t expected it to. I’d truly thought I was indulging him and it would mean nothing, but it felt as if he was taking me home, which made no sense because my only true home should be in Marco’s territory.
I’d been surprised to learn I didn’t need to check in with the Vampire Master over New Hampshire, to visit Slayertown. If I stepped outside the county I’d have to jump through all kinds of political hoops, but I didn’t plan to do so.
