by Evie Byrne
“That doesn’t make sense. What with the hours and the taped-up windows and the…eating. I mean, it must be awkward to keep a mixed household. I don’t understand how it’s done.”
His distant, formal tone continued. “That’s not a problem, because it usually doesn’t remain a ‘mixed household’ for long.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. When it did, her stomach twisted. “Oh jeez. Oh crap. You wouldn’t.”
“Only when you asked. We’d have to if we wanted children.”
Helena leaned back against the cold, cement wall. “You can really do that? Oh my God.” She could be like them? As much as she tried to repress it, she remembered Alex tearing into her like an animal. Felt it.
Never. She’d never do it.
“You should sit.”
“I don’t want to!” She pushed off the wall and began to pace the narrow, low-ceilinged room. It smelled bad down there. A combination of damp concrete and sick, unwashed vampire.
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
She’d expected him to say two-hundred and fifty or something. The shock made her stop pacing. “But you’re just a baby.”
“Why, how old are you?”
“Thirty-one. Thirty-two, I mean.”
“So? That’s no big deal.”
“That’s a significant difference.” She’d always dated men at least five years older than her. “Why would someone your age even want to get married?”
“I’ve always wanted to be married. My brothers used to laugh at me about it. Then Gregor got married and decided it wasn’t so bad after all. And Mikhail, well, he just stopped laughing altogether.”
Helena stopped pacing and sat on her heels about ten feet away from him. That was about as close as was comfortable. He confused her. He really did. She rubbed her face and tried to think clearly—without success.
“What is it with Mikhail anyway?”
Alex cricked his neck in her direction. “What do you mean?”
“You’re brothers but you don’t look much alike.”
“He takes after my father. Me and Gregor look like Ma.”
“No, I mean, he looks more vampire-y than you—than you used to.”
“That’s a long story. Mikhail is Knyaz. Our leader. Pop was, but he stepped down last year and Mikhail is first born. Being Knyaz makes him more…more like what you see, but Mikhail has always been like that in some ways. He’s been preparing for this all his life.”
“He’s the head of your family, you mean?”
“Pop is still head of our family, but Misha has taken over what I guess you’d call the family business.”
Helena looked at him expectantly. He was dancing around something, so she just waited until he spit it out.
“Mikhail oversees our people and protects our territory.” He took a deep, rattling breath. “Our feeding grounds. From other vamps.”
Helena puzzled that one out, and didn’t like what she came up with. “Like ranchers protecting your stock?”
He didn’t seem to pick up on the distaste in her voice. Instead he considered the question. “Sort of. No one feeds on our territory without our permission. All feeding has to be on the down low. It’s how we go unnoticed. Mikhail enforces these rules.”
“And if someone breaks your rules?”
Alex glanced up at her. “Do you really want to know all this right now?”
“No.” The less she knew the better. Less fodder for nightmares. “I really wish you would have told me first. What you were. Before we slept together.”
He nodded. “You should not have found out this way. I don’t know how to make it better.”
His eyes were still Alex’s. That was the worst of it.
“It’s just that I’ve only known you for one day, really. And I don’t understand what all this means. My reality is not the same as it used to be, and I really want the old one back.” Her voice wavered as she spoke, but she managed not to cry.
Alex was silent a long while, then he said, “I feel better tonight. It’s time I returned your basement to you. Mikhail can’t feed me forever. So I’ll go back home where it’s easier for me to…um, find something to eat. I can’t…it’s harder in a strange town.”
Helena squirmed as much as him while he spoke, wondering what gory details he was skipping over when he spoke of eating. “You’re leaving?”
A little whistling sound escaped him. A ghost of a snort. “You want me to stay?”
Not really, no. She couldn’t say that aloud because she felt sorry for him, so she said nothing.
He bent what was left of his face into a crooked smile, showing way too many teeth. “You need time to absorb this. I need time to heal.”
Despite herself, she let him see her shoulders sag in relief.
Mikhail stepped in between them, materializing out of the shadows of the basement. She stifled a squeak of surprise.
Wincing, Alex craned his neck backward to look his brother in the face. Helena glanced between them, perceiving but not understanding a hint of threat in the air. Mikhail said, very soft, “You’re not going anywhere, Alexander Ivanovitch.”
He turned to her, cold and courtly as usual. “We must beg your hospitality a little longer.”
Chapter Six
“Will you excuse us, Helena?” Alex fought to keep his voice steady. Helena wasted no time in taking herself upstairs. As soon as he heard the door close, he said to his brother, “Like hell I’m staying.”
Mikhail spun on his heel and began to stuff the few things he’d brought with him into his bag. “It’s time I left. But you’ve tasted her. For you, there’s no going back.”
Alex stared at him in disbelief. He couldn’t be serious. “You’re leaving me here. Alone. Like this.”
“Little brother, I’m leaving you and I’m forbidding Vamp Air to take you as passenger without my permission.”
Vamp Air was what they called the private charter service that a handful of vamp families shared, but in which the Faustin family held a controlling interest. Regular commercial air travel made their kind nervous, what with the every present threat of layovers and delays. Vamp Air planes came with special fittings on the windows and sympathetic, highly paid human crews.
To escape this godforsaken state, Alex would break open his piggy bank and charter his own plane and pray to hell the pilot was trustworthy. But he was so weak he couldn’t afford the slightest bit of exposure. And he looked like Freddy Kruger.
“You asshole.”
“I know you had no choice, but still, you drank from her. You will taste nothing but dust and ashes until you make her yours. You know this.”
Mikhail didn’t know half of it. Helena was not going to accept this. Alex wanted to hug himself and rock against the horror of it.
“Misha, I can’t stay here. It’s breaking her. Can’t you see that? She can’t even look at me without twitching. All she does is scrub the floors. She’s not sleeping, either. Her dreams are a mess.”
Mikhail squatted in front of Alex so he could fix him with a hard look. “Why are you hearing her dreams? You’ve listened to her blood? You’ve started the bonding?” Mikhail’s hands shot out as if he intended to throttle him, but he stopped himself just in time.
“You perfect idiot.” He lowered his hands. “You tasted her even before you were burnt. Knowing the story of Roland. Knowing what happened to Gregor. I can’t even feel sorry for you now.”
Out of pride alone, Alex kept hold of Mikhail’s gaze. Yes, he was an idiot. That was obvious or he wouldn’t be sitting on a mildew-afflicted sleeping bag in a suburban basement shedding skin while his bride was upstairs having a nervous breakdown.
Mikhail wasn’t mated so it was easy for him to stand in judgment. He didn’t know what it was like to hold his destined wife in his arms. He didn’t know how funny and sweet Helena was, how she’d yielded under his hands from the first moment, how perfectly their bodies fit together. It had b
een easy enough that ecstatic first night to believe they would be together forever. Easy enough to take her blood as an act of faith.
He’d screwed up. Helena was freaking out for good reason. And that was precisely why he had to get the hell away and give her some space.
Mikhail cocked his head at Alex, his eyes narrowing to pale slits. “You think you’ll make yourself pretty again and return to court her as if nothing has happened?” He gave a short bark of laughter. “We are monsters, Alex. You and Gregor pretend we are not, but your little human sees the truth.”
“And that truth is too much for her! Goddamn it. This is not all about me.” Alex pushed to his feet. Tears for Helena welled in his eyes and spilled like acid over his raw skin. The pain of it brought even more tears to his eyes. “Fuck!”
Blind, Alex spun around in pain and frustration, striking out at the air, each of his wild gestures tearing tissue-thin skin. “Fuck!”
Too weak to pull off a respectable tantrum, he fell to his knees exhausted after a few seconds. When Alex’s breathing slowed, Mikhail continued speaking as if nothing had happened. “You can’t fool her or seduce her. You must make her love the monster you are. That is your only hope.”
Mikhail was never just a brother. He was the prince of New York. Always perfect. Always exerting authority over lesser sorts. Alex wanted to drive a fist through his face. Once, just once, he’d love to see him lose it. See him on his knees.
Mikhail’s upper lip twitched, revealing a bit of fang. Alex flinched, realizing Mikhail might have caught the direction of his thoughts. He could, sometimes. But Mikhail resumed his usual impassive expression. “I’ll leave you now.”
“Don’t.” Alex crawled in front of him, naked, exhausted, pathetic. Past pride, he raised his hands in the gesture of formal supplication, something he’d never done before, but he’d seen plenty of times. “Knyaz, I beg your mercy.”
Mikhail studied him for a long, tightly drawn moment, during which Alex remained frozen, his hands out, his eyes pleading. Take me home, Misha. I need to be in my own place. I need my family. I need my donors. Please don’t leave me like this.
With a small shake of the head, an almost imperceptible negation, Mikhail made a sign of blessing. “God be with you, little brother.”
In a blink he was gone.
“How am I going to feed myself?” Alex shouted after him. “Just what the hell am I supposed to do?”
A little while later he knew what he had to do and made his way to the top of the stairs, shuffling like an old man. Helena would be wondering about the shouting, no doubt. Her office was just to the left of the basement door, but she wasn’t in it. Reluctant to enter her space without permission, he stopped at the top stair and knocked on the open door. Her dog trotted down to bark at him.
The noise made him wince. “Shh.”
Helena followed her dog down a few moments later. She was dressed in sweats and held a quart of chocolate ice cream in the crook of her arm. Her eyes were ringed with shadows. They flicked over him obliquely, taking in his relative position and condition before coming to rest on some point just behind him. She was good at not looking at him.
“Do you need something?”
“No. Yes.” Suddenly chilled, he pulled the bag more tightly around his shoulders and winced at the pain of it. He stood one stair down, making Helena the same height as him. So not only was he a walking piece of beef jerky wearing an orange sleeping bag, but he’d shrunk too. “Mikhail has gone home. He left me behind.”
Her eyes went round. “Why?”
“He wants me to—” Alex sighed, searching for words. “He wants me to be accountable for my own mistakes. But I told you I was leaving, and I will. I just have to ask you if you would mind if I stayed down here for two or three more days. I’m not strong enough to go out in the world yet.”
Her mouth tightened. Clearly she’d already fallen in love with the idea of him clearing out, and was trying to imagine how she’d live through this delay.
“But if that makes you uncomfortable, I’ll—” What the fuck would he do? Make do. Somehow. Find the seediest hotel on earth with a blind manager. Ordinarily he could disguise his appearance, but in his weakened state it was too hard to create even a simple illusion. What he needed was to spend a few days eating as much as he could. It was the only way to get back on his feet.
Reading his thoughts, Helena said, “How are you going to eat without Mikhail?”
Alex hesitated.
Helena took a step backward.
“Not you!” Alex cried, as horrified as her. Scully circled her feet protectively. Scully was pretty hefty for a little dog, he realized.
“Why are you looking at my dog like that?”
Alex swallowed. “I’m not going to eat you or your dog. Okay?” But maybe someone else’s dog.
“What else are you going to eat if you can’t leave the house?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t leave the house. I just can’t show myself to the world, you know? Airports. Rental car agencies. I can’t do that for a few days.”
Her voice thick with revulsion, Helena repeated, “What are you going to eat, Alex?”
“Anything I can.” He spat out the words. There it was, the truth, like Mikhail wanted. He was a monster. Monsters couldn’t call for take-out when they didn’t feel well. He was going to stagger out into the night, naked because he couldn’t drag clothes over his tattered flesh, and he was going to search this godforsaken affluent woodsy fucking neighborhood for anything with a heartbeat. Dogs, cats, raccoons, rats, mice, birds, whatever he could find. Humans too, if possible, but it would have to be by some odd chance encounter, because he was too weak to enthrall them or take them down by force.
“You’re going to eat my neighbors.” Her teeth chattered as she spoke.
“Ah, Christ.” Too tired to stand any longer, Alex slid down the wall to sit on the top stair, just inside the shadows. “We don’t kill when we feed. Do you know that?”
The smaller creatures he’d kill, but she didn’t have to know about that. He didn’t even want to think about it. His jaw clenched with distaste as he imagined sucking on a rat.
She shook her head. “How should I know anything at all about this stuff?”
“So you thought Mikhail was on a killing streak? Was the local news reporting dead bodies all over the CU campus?”
Again she shook her head, but her chin lifted. “Your brother wouldn’t leave tracks. He’s not the type.”
Alex caught the emphasis. “Unlike me.”
With unexpected venom she said, “You leave tracks everywhere.”
It stung, but he didn’t know what to say. Instead he went back to his original point. “Me, my family, all decent vampires, feed in one of two ways. They either hunt, which means we draw a pint or two from an unsuspecting victim and let them go, or we turn to willing donors.”
“Willing? For pay?”
“For pleasure.”
Helena slid down the wall as he had, coming to rest across the hall from him. The light from her office bathed her face in white light. The hall walls were white, and the carpet too. Her sweats were white. She lived in an unstained world.
She leaned forward, her cheeks pale, her blue eyes as cold as Mikhail’s. “Did you suck my blood the first time we had sex?”
“Yes.”
“I knew it.” Her lips curled in disgust. “When I was coming, right?”
He nodded.
“In my most vulnerable, trusting moment you attacked me.”
“Feeding isn’t an attack. It’s sharing.”
“Seems like a funny one-sided kind of sharing to me.”
“At the time you didn’t mind it at all. I’d go so far as to guess that at the time, you were having the biggest orgasm of your life.”
“That’s not the point. The point is I didn’t give you permission to do any such thing.”
“Did I ask your permission to kiss you, to eat you out, to fuck you?”
“Beg your pardon, but I think drinking my life blood is a little different.”
“Well I don’t!” Alex felt like shit. Inside and out. He was born a blood drinker. He’d never tried to defend the practice. Never had to. But here in front of Helena, with her acting like goddamn martyred Joan of Arc, it seemed indefensible.
“I wanted you. All of you. I can’t take you by halves. And you wanted it, too. You were begging.”
“Oh, it’s my fault. I was asking for it.”
“I’m a predator. I respond to signals.”
“It must be convenient to be a predator among all of us stupid sheep. You can do whatever you want, take whatever you want.”
“It is what I am.” It was harder for him to say it than for her to hear it. Each word was a nail in his coffin.
“What you are is dangerous!” Helena jumped to her feet, looking like she was ready to come over and do a little more damage to his face.
“Helena MacAllister, I swear by all that I hold sacred that I would never hurt you by sharing your blood. I would never drain you dry, I would never pass you a disease, I would not make you a vampire, a slave, a mommy, whatever it is you’re thinking about.”
Trembling, her fists clenched, she restrained herself from hitting him—out of disgust more than mercy, he was sure. She addressed her next words to the carpet between them. “Oh, you swear? And tell me, just what does a vampire hold sacred?”
“Fuck you, Helena.”
The silence that followed was the silence that followed a bomb blast, the long pause before the sirens began to wail. It hadn’t been a casual fuck you. He hadn’t meant to make it a curse, but his fear and frustration wrapped the words with power. If it sounded like a curse to him, it sounded worse to her.
Could I possibly make myself any more repulsive?
He had to leave before he hurt her again. But before he could open his mouth she said, “Don’t you dare speak to me like that.”
“I’m sorry.” It was inadequate, but he was sorry. For everything.
Her eyes glittered fiercely. “I shouldn’t have said you held nothing sacred. I don’t know that. I don’t know you at all.” She swiped away her tears. “You can stay down here tonight and tomorrow night. That’s it. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to talk to you.”