Мишель Роуэн - Bitten & Smitten

“Do I have to?”

“No.”

I looked back down at the diluted blood. “But if I don’t, I’ll get the headache from hell again, right?”

He paused before answering. “That is correct.”

“Well, then, down the hatch.” I gulped a bit of the drink. Damn if it didn’t taste fantastic. I was so grossing myself out, but hey, at least it beat sucking on fingers.

After a moment I placed the empty glass back down on the table and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Good?” Thierry asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t want to drink blood.”

“Didn’t look like you had much of a problem just now.”

I glared at him. “You do what you have to do.”

“Agreed.” His lips twitched, almost smiling.

Nice to know he was finding me amusing.

“So, I’m really a vampire?” I said. “For real?”

“Yes.”

“But I still have a reflection.” I ran my tongue along my teeth. “And I don’t have any fangs.”

He shook his head. “Of course not. You are still young—barely a fledgling. These things will take time to develop.”

I frowned. “So, if this is all actually happening to me, that means everything last night was real, too. Gordon really got killed.”

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry for your loss.”

My bottom lip trembled a bit at the memory. “He was a jerk. But he didn’t deserve to die.” I touched my neck; the bite had faded to nearly nothing. “Why did he bite me?”

“He shouldn’t have. Not if he didn’t discuss it with you first.”

“If he’d discussed it with me, I would have said no. For that matter, I would have said no to anything else he had in mind last night, too. Definitely not a love match.” I felt a shiver go down my spine at the memory of what happened. “But that still shouldn’t have happened to him. Poor Gordon.”

“The hunters are very dangerous.”

I tensed. “Who are these hunter guys, anyhow? Do they think they’re a bunch of Buffy the Vampire Slayers? What gives them the right to go around killing people?”

He brought his drink to his lips and took a sip before answering me. “The hunters think they are doing a service to the world by ridding it of a perceived evil.” He smiled then, a genuine smile, but not a pleasant one. “They will never be convinced we are unworthy of their attentions. That we are not the monsters they think we are.”

“How do we stop them?”

He met my gaze again, and I was suddenly floored by how intense it was, especially now, talking about the hunters.

“We don’t. We simply avoid them as best we can during the hunting season.”

“Hunting season?”

“Yes, the main group of hunters migrate to different parts of the world where vampires have formed communities. Like here in Toronto. There will always be stragglers that stay behind, but the main group moves every few months to another location. Right now it is our turn, and we must be even more careful than normal.”

“But there has to be a way of talking to them, telling them that what they’re doing is wrong—”

“No,” he interrupted me. “There isn’t. All we can do is stay away from them and not be careless.”

“Or they’ll stab us in the heart with their wooden stakes. And we’ll turn into a big puddle of goo, just like Gordon?”

Thierry blinked at me. “Puddle of goo?”

“When the hunters killed Gordon, he disintegrated into a big puddle of goo. I always thought vampires turned into dust, but I guess that’s just on TV. Pretty gross, though.”

“How we die is determined by how long we have lived. If you are careless enough to be slain by a hunter, you will not disintegrate into goo.” He grimaced at the word choice.

“You will simply die. Your sire must have been very old. Only then will one decompose upon their vampire death, much like they would have in their natural human grave.”

“Yuck.” I shuddered. “The hunters sure went to work on Gordon, though. It was horrible. He must have been very hard to kill.”

Thierry shook his head. “All that is required is a deathblow to the heart with a wooden or silver object. Anything else the hunters do is for their own perverse pleasure.”

I went silent for a moment, thinking about everything I’d just heard. Being a vampire sounded incredibly dangerous. With very few perks. But I just had to look on the positive side. Other than the hunters, being a vampire might not be so bad. There was the whole non-aging thing. I liked the sound of that. Everyone in the crowded, smoky club looked fairly happy to me. They were just like regular people, only they’d be young and pretty forever.

Thierry watched me in silence for a few moments. “I feel it would be best if you took a job here, at Midnight Eclipse.”

I shook my head. “I’m not waiting tables.”

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. There’s plenty to occupy you otherwise. Perhaps as a hostess?”

“Why are you doing this? Offering me a job?”

He took another drink and made me wait. “You are currently unemployed, is that not so?”

“Yes, but who says I don’t have fifty people banging on my door wanting me to come work for them?”

“What is it that you did at your last job?”

This time I was the one to pause. “Well, it’s not going to sound all that glamorous, but I was a senior executive assistant.”

Thierry stared at me. “You are correct; that does not sound very glamorous.”

I chewed on my bottom lip. “Look, maybe I made a mistake coming here, after all.”

When I stood up to leave, Thierry reached across the table and grabbed my wrist. “You must stay here. Sit down.”

Something about the way he said it, as if it were a direct order from the “master” himself, pissed me off. I tried to pull away, but his grip was too strong.

“I must do nothing. Let go of me.”

He held on for another second, then released me so quickly that I almost fell backward into the booth. “I am only concerned for your safety.”

“What do you care about my safety?” I suddenly felt very annoyed. “You don’t even know me. Just because I interrupted your little suicide attempt last night—”

His eyes flashed, the expression on his face cutting me off from saying anything else.

“You will not speak of that again.”

It was surprising how quickly his handsome face shifted into something scary-looking. This was not a man I wanted to be mad at me.

I swallowed hard and sat back down at the table.

“Look, I’m sorry. Whatever you want to do with your life is none of my business. All I’m looking for…” I paused and decided to rephrase that. “All I’m asking for is a little guidance.”

He stared at me for a moment and I could see his anger fade away. “I thought you already knew it all from your friend Anne Rice. And this Buffy person.”

“That was before I started using my boss’s finger as a chew toy.”

He drummed his fingertips on the tablecloth. “And what can I expect in return?”

I leaned back and presented him with my best smile. “My friendship.”

He took me by surprise by throwing his head back and laughing long and hard. “Your

friendship? Now why would you think I’d want, or need, something like that from you?”

I shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

“Your hunch is wrong.”

I wasn’t about to be discouraged. “Okay, then, how about this? Those hunters were going

to kill me last night. You saved my life. Therefore, you’re responsible for me whether you like it or not.”

That sobered him up a bit. He looked me over then, slowly, from my freshly washed, shoulder-length brown hair tucked neatly behind my ears, down my makeup-free face, along the line of my neck, and finally to my Diva T-shirt. The sparkles must have made him snap out of his sudden daze. His eyes flicked back to my face.