As her laughter faded, a sudden shiver travelled down her spine and her gaze slid over to Greyvian of its own volition as if dragged towards him like two magnets to metal. The shiver turned to a thrill of pleasure as her eyes locked onto his, the connection between them immediate and intense. She stared at him for a long moment, drinking him in before she had to look away. Her mother had raised her not to stare. Why had her mother raised her not to stare? She really just wanted to sit and gaze at him all evening; to catalogue all of his features over and over until the sight of him was burnt into her brain for all time.
Could she force herself to go against the ingrained habit?
Trying and failing, she instead gave herself a legitimate reason to look at him by asking, “Any other magical abilities I need to know about?”
Again, Greyvian said nothing, continuing, instead, to look at her as if he were about to tackle her to the floor and drain her dry. She would have been frightened if she hadn’t been so turned on by it.
God, she had issues.
“Well,” Knox said when it was clear that Greyvian wasn’t going to, “I don’t know if I’d call it magical, but we don’t get sick. No colds, no flu, no cancer. Okay, that does sound a bit magical, doesn’t it?”
Sienna nodded in agreement, and then—because her mind was still on Greyvian—asked, “No diseases either?”
Knox smiled, sending a sly glance Greyvian’s way, and said, “No diseases—sexual, or otherwise.”
Good to know.
“But the most magical ability of all,” Knox continued, “is the fact that we’re pretty much invisible to the human race.”
Sienna immediately snorted a laugh, figuring he was joking.
“I’m serious,” Knox said, his expression reflecting the statement.
Looking from Knox to Lucas to Greyvian and then back to Knox, she realised that he really did mean it. “You’re not joking?”
“Nope.”
“But, I see you fine.”
He nodded his head slowly, a deep frown lining his brow. “I noticed, and a part of me is grateful for it—but you shouldn’t.”
“Invisible?” she ventured. “Really?”
“Well, we’re not ‘invisible’ per-se,” he acknowledged, air-quoting the word invisible. “We call it Awareness—with a capital A. Humans can still see us—in a way—they’re just not really consciously Aware of it. It means we can walk around no problem without having humans bumping into us all the time.”
“Because how irritating would that be?” Lucas chimed in dryly.
Sienna stared at Knox for a long moment, still suspecting that he was joking, but his serious expression never wavered for a second.
“Invisible?” she asked Greyvian, pretty sure that he wouldn’t keep to the joke, as he didn’t seem the jovial type.
“He’s not joking,” Greyvian confirmed, voice inflectionless.
“But why would you want to be invisible?” she asked Knox. “Aside from all the mischief you can get up to, of course.”
The blonde laughed and said, “Aside from that, it’s not necessarily something we want. It’s just there. From the moment of transition until the day we die we become invisible to the human race. We can lower it for a time, but it takes effort and can only be sustained in short bursts.”
“Invisible?” she asked again, finding it really hard to believe.
Knox rolled his eyes at her scepticism and then grinned when there was a knock at the door.
“I’ll show you,” he said, getting up and heading over.
Pulling the door open, he looked back at her to make sure that she was watching and then proceeded to stand slightly to the side without saying anything. The delivery boy, a young brunette who couldn’t have been more than fourteen but who was almost as tall as Knox, stood there silently in return, a slightly confused look on his face as his brain struggled to comprehend what his eyes were telling him without success—that there was a man/male standing right in front of him. As the vampire-awareness-tampering did its thing, his eyes darted to Knox and then away and then back to Knox and then away again, his gaze sliding off of the male as if repelled by some unseen force until, as luck would have it, his gaze made its way into the apartment and landed on her.
His confused expression immediately disappeared and it was suddenly business as usual.
“Hi,” he said, polite enough, or not interested enough, that he didn’t gawk around at her living space as he raised the bag of food and added, “I have a delivery here for Sienna.”
“That’s me,” she said, marvelling at the fact that Knox was now standing an inch away from the kid—who didn’t seem to notice that Knox’s nose was practically in his ear.
“Cool,” the delivery boy said, going for nonchalance, even though he was starting to look a little uncomfortable—as if he subconsciously knew that Knox was flicking his tongue near his ear. “That’ll be thirty-three fifty.”
Trying her hardest not to laugh at Knox’s antics, she nodded and got to her feet. “Of course. Sorry.”
As she passed Greyvian on her way to the door, she wasn’t quite astonished enough by the evidence of vampire ‘invisibility’ not to notice that Greyvian tensed and seemed to hold his breath as she walked past him. Her new sadistic streak crowing in delight, she was more than aware that he was watching her every move and may have sashayed her way over to the door with a little more hip sway than was usual.
Arriving next to the door, she tried to act natural—and not as if she knew that Greyvian was watching her—as she dug around in her bag and found her purse.
“Keep the change,” she told the boy, only half noticing that the kid looked really on-edge now, his gaze darting around the apartment like he knew the others were there and not being able to really see them was freaking him out. Having Knox breathing down his neck couldn’t have helped his mental state either.
“Thanks.”
He might have opened his mouth to say more, but Knox was already closing the door on him.
“See?” the blonde said, a tad smugly.
“I see,” she confirmed, glancing repeatedly at Greyvian on her way back to the table to make sure that he was still watching her. She needn’t have worried. His gaze never wavered and she could practically feel it on her like a physical thing.
“He seemed pretty edgy,” she said, feeling a bit that way herself as she set the bag down on the table. “Is that normal?”
Listening as intently as she could given that Greyvian was still watching her, Knox told her that some people were more Aware than others and, therefore, responded a bit differently, she gathered four plates from the cupboard and laid one down in front of Knox, Lucas and then Greyvian. She was tempted to stand right beside the latter as she did, so that perhaps she could have brushed against him accidentally-on-purpose, but restrained herself admirably, doling them out from the vacant space where she had been sitting instead. Once she had added cutlery to the mix, she returned to her seat beside Greyvian’s silent form and once again met his impassive stare for as long as she could comfortably hold before using the excuse of loading her plate to look away.
She wasn’t normally this flustered by men she found attractive, but for some reason her heart was racing and she felt giddy as a schoolgirl.
Maybe it was the fact that he kept staring at her? Watching her every move as if he were a lion lying in wait for its prey.
He can eat me any day, she thought, glancing in his direction once again.
Laughing at herself, she tried to get a grip as she ate her Chilli Jam Chicken and rice while Knox entertained them all, covering what would have been an awkward silence with the ease of someone used to single-handedly carrying a conversation.
She couldn’t have said what he talked about, as she wasn’t really listening, her attention focused on Greyvian more than anything else. What would it feel like to have his fangs in her neck? It wasn’t the first time she’d had the thought and it certainly wouldn’t be the l
ast—of that she was sure. Not until he appeased her curiosity by sinking them into her, his hot mouth on her skin, his warm tongue lapping at her blood...
Christ. Why was that such a turn-on?
“Why is a transition even necessary?” she asked, trying to distract herself from her inner daydreams. “Why aren’t you all just vampires from birth? Do you have to be human first so that you can age normally and then bam, you transition, become a vampire, and then never look a day over thirty for the rest of your lives?”
“Hey, a day over twenty-five, if you please,” Knox replied with an offended look that he ruined by grinning. “And yes, you have it almost right. We transition to become immortal. But we’re not all born human—that’s just the half-breeds. Why that is, I won’t get into. Full-bloods, like Greyvian over here, are born vampire. And yes, they need to drink blood right from the start.”
“Oh.” Vampire babies!
She looked at Greyvian for a long moment, trying to picture him as a vampire child drinking blood from a human, but couldn’t. Even though she knew exactly what Jacob had looked like, the two images just wouldn’t mesh in her mind.
“Is a full-blood transition the same as a half-breed’s?”
Whether it was her hopeful expression or some other reason, he actually answered her this time.
“Worse,” he said shortly, neutral expression at odds with the statement.
“Yikes. Becoming immortal doesn’t sound like much fun,” she noted, looking from one to the other. “Does anyone know exactly how it works? How you’re able to stay the same age?”
“Well, to understand that, you have to understand how aging works,” Lucas began when nobody else seemed inclined to explain. “As far as science can determine, the mortal body has to create new cells as others die. This is a good thing in the beginning, because it allows you to grow and mature, but it can also lead to damaged cells, mutations, and the like. Over the years, the mortal body doesn’t produce as many cells as it should to keep the body young, meaning it’s less resilient against disease, skin becomes less elastic and so on and so forth. Waste products also begin to build up in the more permanent cells, making the body work harder and, ultimately, leading to its demise. This—among other things, like free radicals and lifestyle—leads to aging.”
She wondered idly if Lucas was a scientist or just liked to read a lot as she nodded to show that she was following. As the male paused to collect his thoughts, her gaze drifted over to Greyvian of their own volition, blue eyes locking on to black. Butterflies erupted in her stomach.
God, he was sexy.
“Conversely,” Lucas continued, “as far as our science can tell, once a half-breed or full-blood transitions, the only cells that die inside of our bodies are the red blood cells.”
“Is that why you need to drink blood?” Sienna asked, beyond fascinated.
“No, that’s just part and parcel of being a vampire. See, our bodies don’t produce their own red blood cells the way a human’s does in the bone marrow. Our bodies produce the cells by combining with foreign cells and multiplying.”
Interesting. “What happens if you don’t drink blood? Do you wither and die?”
Knox turned his head and looked at Greyvian, as if the black-eyed male could better answer that question, and seemed alarmed by what he saw.
“Grey, you good, man? When’s the last time you fed?”
Sienna’s eyes locked on to Greyvian’s. Black. They were black when they should have been grey. She realised now that she’d noticed, but it hadn’t sunk in until now.
It seemed that things weren’t nearly as tranquil behind the dark pools as he portrayed on the surface. A shiver of delight swept up her spine. It was more thrilling than she’d care to admit that he was so affected by her.
Ignoring Knox’s concern, Greyvian looked into her eyes, the dark depths drawing her in and threatening to swallow her. When he replied, his voice was neutral, yet the words he spoke were, once again, at odds with the lack of emotion.
“When a vampire doesn’t drink blood, he does indeed wither. But he does not die. No matter how much he wishes he would.”
Without another word, Greyvian abruptly stood, his body surging upwards in a barely contained explosion of movement that stalled her breath in her throat as she half-expected him to launch himself at her. He didn’t. Instead, he turned and calmly walked towards the front door, opened it with control, and was gone.
Blinking, Sienna looked at Knox. “Was it something I said?”
The blonde smiled shortly but eyed the door with concern and a touch of puzzlement.
“Where’s he going?” she asked, although she already knew.
“With his eyes as black as they were—I assume he’s going to get someone to eat.”
Damn, why didn’t he just eat me?
“Is that a good idea? With Jacob so close to transition, that is?”
Knox looked at her with a raised eyebrow and a wry smile. “Would you prefer he drank your blood?”
YES!
“I’m just saying is all,” she replied nonchalantly.
The male nodded like he believed her—not. “He won’t go far. He knows how important timing is with a transition.”
She stared at the door longingly but then had a thought. Does he kill them?
“How often do you need to feed?” she asked instead, not sure she really wanted to know the answer to that other question. She didn’t want to ruin the fantasy with harsh reality just yet.
“Every two weeks, give or take a few days,” he said, absently running his tongue over his incisors as he eyed her neck.
“When was the last time you fed?” she asked pointedly.
He caught himself and grinned sheepishly, looking a little long in the tooth now. “Sorry. It’s just that you do smell really good.”
He seemed to distract himself by taking a sip of his drink. Glancing at Lucas, she noted that he also kept sipping at his drink.
Knox must have seen her concern, because he smiled again, and said, “Seriously, you have nothing to worry about. It’s more curiosity than a real thirst.”
“What about Greyvian? Do you think he reacted the way he did because of thirst?”
The vampire shrugged a shoulder. “It’s more than likely, but who can say with that male?”
She frowned, curious. “How long have you known him?”
“Over a century.”
“How well do you know him?”
Knox smiled slowly, as if pleased that she’d picked up on that. “Before today I would have said as well as anybody could, but now… Let’s just say that I know a lot about him, but I don’t really know him that well. He’s not exactly chatty if you hadn’t noticed.”
True, but talking could be highly over-rated. She’d learned a great deal about him since she’d walked into the apartment to find him standing there. For instance, she’d learned that he was a divine smelling vampire (that looked great in black leather) who was totally hot for her if the erection he’d been grinding into her was anything to go by. Sometimes it took days, weeks or even months to establish that kind of knowledge about someone.
She wondered how much of that would have been true if she hadn’t smelled so good. Was it only her scent that drove him wild, or was it something more? Did it really matter? Either way, it was lust, pure and simple—and who was she to argue with that?
4
Outward appearances portrayed Greyvian to be calm, cold even, and for the past hundred years, the inside of his mind had perfectly reflected that. He had been comfortable in that state. Being numb inside was often thought of as a bad thing from what he could gather of the human world, but he preferred it to the alternative. Emotions were messy, stressful things that could quickly cause someone to go out of control and do or say things they would come to regret.
Like telling those three back at the apartment that he would rather die than starve. As if he were some pity case they should all make sad eyes at and wax lyri
cal about how things had turned around for him, how he was no longer the pitiful starving child he had once been.
He was not accustomed to talking about himself and even less so without any prompting. He could not fathom why he had told her that. Why he added that last sentence. It had not been necessary. He should have just stopped at ‘they wither, but don’t die’.
Why had he uttered that last sentence?
It must be the thirst. The unrelenting desire to sink his fangs into her neck and drain her of her life’s blood. It was making him irrational. Damn her. Why did she have to smell so good? What was it about her that gave her that scent? She wasn’t a pre-trans—although if she were, she would have smelled bitter—and she wasn’t a vampire. It must have something to do with the fact that she was Aware without them making her so. Either way, he didn’t like it. Didn’t like feeling. Thirst. Desire. Unbridled lust. The last time he had succumbed to those feelings many humans had died.
Picking up his pace, he jogged the next lap around her apartment and futilely tried to escape the memories.
Stowing away in his family’s wagon would have been utterly impossible if it weren’t for his sister. He was much too weak to lift himself up in bed, let alone into the back of a wagon. To then cover himself with the heavy cloth kept in back to hide… Thankfully for Katarina, it was the work of a moment. Lifting him from his bed without effort, for he was stick thin and light as a feather, she headed for the stairs and then paused just long enough to check that nobody was at the bottom before heading down. She paused again when she reached the door to the yard and listened intently for any movement from the kitchen nearby. Dawn was at least an hour away however, so there was nobody around. With a nod of readiness, Katarina headed for the courtyard. Once again she paused at the door and they watched and listened for any sounds outside. Nothing. Everybody was still in bed.
Heart pounding from fear and exhilaration at what they were about to do, he felt only a twinge of self-pity for his frail state as his sister clutched him to her breast and ran easily for all she was worth to the wagon which sat only metres away. She practically threw him onto the bed in her haste and he rolled and bumped across the unyielding wood wincing and grunting, hoping nothing broke in the process.
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