by Nora Ash
“Thanks. Can’t wait to make that blood sausage,” I said loudly, snatching the bottles from him two at a time to put into my basket.
The mom only gave me a pinched frown before she walked away, child in tow, and the old lady by the deli-counter didn’t look convinced, either.
Great.
I was so gonna bitch Dennis out for making us wear black clothes to work.
* * *
I drove home in my ancient Ford Fiesta, shoved the bottles into the fridge, and began Project Oh-Shit-I-Didn’t-Clean-Over-The-Weekend-Like-I-Meant-To with only about an hour left until sundown. In my usual, well-organized fashion, I was only just done with the impressive pile of dishes on my kitchen counter when my door buzzer went off.
I looked up, noticed it was pitch-black outside, and muttered a curse. I’d decluttered most of the living room and dining room—and by “decluttered,” I mean I’d shoved everything into my bedroom—and managed to run a brush through my hair and change out of my goth work ensemble, but the space certainly didn’t represent anything from a Better Living magazine.
Or an immaculately kept vampire mansion, for that matter.
I pushed aside the sudden rush of insecurity over the difference between my home and Warin’s. If we could be friends cross-species, a class difference really shouldn’t be the dealbreaker.
Wiping my hands on my butt—like a lady—I walked over to my door phone and picked it up. “Yeah?”
“It’s Warin. We have an appointment.”
I couldn’t hold back a grin at his formal tone. “Sure do. Hang on, I’ll buzz ya in.”
I pressed the buzzer and heard the street door opened and shut, followed by a knock on my front door less than two seconds later.
I pulled it open, and my face split into an automatic smile at the sight of him. “Hey! So glad you could make it.”
“Hello, Liv,” he said politely. He looked so proper as he stood at my doorstep, gray woolen coat buttoned up and both hands folded in front of him, it made a nervous giggle bubble out of my chest.
I mentally facepalmed myself and waved him in as I turned to get the blood out. “I’ve been looking forward to this—it’s rare I get to do live model drawings. “
Warin didn’t answer, and when I turned back toward him halfway to the fridge, he was still standing in the door opening.
“I cannot enter without a spoken invitation,” he said softly.
“Oh. Oh!” I blinked, entirely taken aback by the unexpectedness of his request. “Uh, come on in, Warin.”
“Thank you.” His voice was still soft as he stepped over the threshold and closed the door.
I bit the inside of my cheek as I watched him shrug out of his coat and hang it on the coat hanger I’d put up next to the door. Something not remotely connected to his magnetic blue eyes made a shiver travel up the length of my spine at the realization that I’d invited an undead creature into my home. Not that I hadn’t known what he was when I asked him to come by, but… there was just something deeply unsettling about that very real reminder that he was something other than human.
“You are fearful,” he said as he turned toward me. His face was blank, but his eyes seemed… saddened.
“What? No.” I waved him off and resumed my previous smile. “It’s just kind of odd, ya know?”
“I can detect fear quite easily,” he said, touching his nose with a finger. “There is no need to lie, Liv. I can leave if you are uncomfortable.”
He could smell me? Well, that was just all sorts of disconcerting. I sighed. “All right, it’s kind of… a tiny bit terrifying that you have to be invited into my home, like in one of those awful scary stories. But I’m not scared of you—you could have eaten me like, a million times by now, if that was your grand plan. And!” I skipped to the fridge and swung it open. “You seriously can’t leave now—do you have any idea how awkward it is to buy blood at a butcher’s? I don’t think anyone but the butcher himself bought that I was gonna make blood sausage. Pretty sure everyone else thought I had some sort of Satanic ritual planned.”
I pulled out one of the pint bottles of pigs’ blood and held it out toward him as a peace offering.
He stared at it for a long moment before he lifted his gaze to mine. “It was very kind of you to go out of your way for me. You needn’t have gone through embarrassment for my sake.”
My shoulders slumped. “Don’t tell me you ate already. I have four pints of this stuff.” His cheeks did look slightly flushed.
“I would never turn down your kind gesture,” he said, offering me a faint smile. “Thank you. I will have a glass.”
I beamed, relieved I hadn’t committed some form of vampire faux pas. “Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right over,” I told him, gesturing to the sofa.
I turned to my small kitchen and busied myself pouring the blood into a glass. It smelled pretty horrid, and it took everything I had not to gag. I was going to pour myself a glass of wine, but after getting the stench of pigs’ blood in my nostrils, I couldn’t face drinking any sort of red liquid. Instead, I got myself a drink of Mountain Dew, grabbed both glasses, and turned toward the sofa.
But Warin wasn’t sitting down. Instead, he was standing in front one of my paintings of a sunrise, seemingly absorbed.
“I did that one this summer, shortly after coming to Chicago,” I said as I put the glasses down. It was odd, having someone look so intensely at my art. It made me feel a bit shy—I rarely had people over, so it wasn’t a common occurrence. My paintings had always been just for me, since I was a kid needing somewhere beautiful to escape to.
“You have a lot of talent,” he said, not taking his eyes off the sunset. “Do you exhibit?”
“Ha, I wish,” I snorted, flopping down of the couch. With a finger, I pushed Warin’s glass of blood farther toward the other end of the coffee table. “I doubt anyone would offer up their gallery for an amateur. But thank you for the praise.”
“I would,” he said, finally turning away from the painting. “Do you have other pieces?”
“Yeah, tons.” I smiled, flattered by his obvious enjoyment of my art. As much as my inner critic claimed he was just being polite, I could see the sincerity in his eyes. “Most are in boxes in my bedroom, though.”
“I would like to see them sometime. If you don’t mind?” He walked across to the sofa and finally sat down, eying the glass of blood.
“Of course.” I reached for my drawing pad and pencil I’d strategically laid out on the coffee table in preparation for his arrival. Or hadn’t tidied up in my frantic rush to make my apartment look somewhat inhabitable, more like, but whatever.
“But it’ll have to wait. I’ve been so looking forward to this. You have really beautiful features.”
“Thank you,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, giving me a glance out the corner of his eye, and it wasn’t until then that I realized I’d called him beautiful. The young man on my couch whom I’d had more than one perverted dream about. Of course he would think I was flirting.
“Uh, I mean—you’ve got the face of any artist’s dream. Your cheekbones and jawline are very… structured,” I finished lamely, realizing I wasn’t making things any better. Judging from Warin’s arrow-straight posture and lack of eye contact, I’d managed to make him feel about as awkward as I did.
Great. Just great.
“Uh, so just relax and have a drink, and I’ll get started. I need to find your lines, so I don’t need you to sit super still just yet,” I said, thankful he at least couldn’t see my mortified blush while refusing to look at me.
I began drawing in the angles of his high cheekbones, and Warin reached for his glass and sank a bit further back into the couch. He looked like he was trying to appear relaxed, but his back was still obviously tensed.
“You don’t spend a lot of time around humans, do you?” I guessed. He looked completely out of place in my small home, and not only because of his immaculately pressed charcoal pants and s
oft cashmere sweater.
“Not socially,” he admitted, the corner of his mouth quirking up in just a ghost of a smile as he finally looked toward me.
“More for food, huh?” I asked as I quickly captured the small tilt of his lips. “I guess that’s not what most people would call a social affair, even if it involves dinner.”
He was polite enough to smile at my terrible joke.
“I only spend time with humans for business affairs. I haven’t fed from a human in… years. Apart from you.” His gaze brushed over my collarbone, and I subconsciously brought a hand to where he’d licked my blood off all those months ago.
“Huh. Then what do you eat?” I asked, forcing the echo of his tongue lapping against my skin firmly from my mind. “Animal blood?”
“Sometimes. Mostly donor blood.” He finally reached for his glass, as if the topic had reminded him of its existence.
“Do people often guess what you are? Like, do your business associates know they’re dealing with a vampire?” I asked as I began sketching in his eyebrows. The shadows of his refined Cupid’s bow and the angle of his jaw were begging for a charcoal drawing, but I always liked to start out in pencil until I was familiar with the subject. Especially with a live model.
“Not often, no. And when they do, it’s easy to Compel them to forget.” His fingers tightened around the stem of the glass for a moment before he brought it to his lips.
I opened my mouth to ask what on Earth he meant by “Compel them to forget,” but before I could, Warin’s features contorted in revulsion and he harked and spat the deep red liquid back into the glass.
“Jesus fuck, are you all right?” I tossed my paper and pencil aside and rushed to his side to slap his back as he heaved.
The vampire made a groaning sort of noise in response. His coughing fit lasted for nearly a minute before it finally seemed to ease. Whatever blood remained in his mouth he wiped on his arm, seemingly not caring about the expensive cashmere sweater.
“What was that? Do you need some water?” I asked, already halfway up to get him a glass of water before he stopped me.
“No.” He muttered something that sounded an awful lot like a curse. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” I said. It was true—he looked if possible even paler than normal, with a slightly green tinge. “What the hell happened?”
Warin touched the glass with a single finger, pushing it farther away. “It’s dead blood.”
“Uh…” I frowned, looking at the glass. “Isn’t all blood…?”
“We cannot drink corpse blood. If the blood is drained after the last heartbeat, it is poisonous to vampires.”
“Oh, my goddess! I am so, so sorry!” I slapped a hand up to cover my mouth, feeling about as horrible as one should when nearly poisoning their unsuspecting guest. Martha Stewart would certainly never give me any sorts of rewards, that’s for certain. “I had no idea.”
“Where did you get this blood from?” he asked, a speculative frown on his still slightly ill-looking face.
“The local supermarket’s butcher. Why, is it uncommon for it to be, uh, from a dead animal?”
“Yes.” He rubbed his face with his blood-free hand. “Butchers always sell fresh blood.”
My eyes widened. “You think… you think someone deliberately swapped it with dead blood? To target vampires? Who would even know to do that?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for months. There have been… concerning events. I was close to unraveling their network this summer, but they have been laying low since August.” He gave the glass another disgusted look. “They could certainly be organized enough to target blood distribution, and the victims would rarely be high ranking enough for anyone to notice.”
“Oh, wow, I forgot you said you were in vampire law enforcement.” I stared at him with renewed appreciation. Then something he’d said dawned on me, and my stomach dropped: since August.
“Is that why you were in that basement? Did I ruin some undercover mission, or something like that?”
The first smile since what I’d undoubtedly be referring to as “the blood incident” for years to come touched his lips. “Something like that.”
“Oh, fuck. I’m sorry.”
He snorted. “You’re sorry you got kidnapped and offered as food for me? You are an odd one.”
“Yeah, well,” I huffed, not entirely sure how to take his continued insistence that I was a weird human. “I’m gonna help you get to the bottom of the blood thing. It’s the least I can do for nearly poisoning you.”
The wry smile on his face disappeared in the blink of an eye. “You will do no such thing.”
“Beg your pardon?”
He frowned at me. “I believe I’ve made it perfectly clear that I do not wish for you to get in between vampires and those who seek to harm us.”
I rolled my eyes. “And you always get your way, do you? Whoever they are, they thought it was perfectly acceptable to feed me to a vampire, remember? I think I have a right to get as involved as I want. Which isn’t much, by the way. But I could just go to the butcher’s during daytime and ask casually about the blood. Probably less suspicious than if a ghostly guy shows up and starts chatting to them about their suppliers, eh?”
Warin’s frown deepened. “Liv, I am serious. You are not to get involved. Do you understand?”
Well, wasn’t he Mr. Domineering? Get a little corpse blood in him and the polite young man I’d let into my home earlier in the evening turned all patronizing. I rolled my eyes and grabbed my drawing kit again.
“Right, whatever. So what does it mean to Compel someone?”
If he was suspicious of my quick capitulation, he didn’t show it. “It’s a hypnosis, of a sort.”
“And you use it to make people forget what you are?” I asked, arching my eyebrows at him. That sounded pretty fucking creepy. “What else can you do with it?”
His looked down, and I resumed my drawing to capture the way his dark eyelashes shadowed his cheekbones. “We can capture the mind of any human. Make them do whatever we ask. How long it lasts depends on the strength of the vampire and the will of the human.”
“That…” My pencil came to a halt as I stared at him. “I’m sorry, are you telling me you can… mindfuck people?”
“Yes. If humans truly understood what we were, what we can do, it wouldn’t be our physical strength you feared.” He looked up at me then, capturing my gaze with the magnetic pull of his. “Would it?”
“I…” I frowned, unable to ignore the icy tendril traveling up my spine when I remembered all the little things he’d told me about his kind. Things most humans didn’t know—shouldn’t know. “Are you going to Compel me to forget?”
“No.” He didn’t move his gaze from mine. “I can’t. You’re the only human who’s ever been able to resist my Compulsion.”
“Oh, that’s… Wait, you tried?” Mild outrage made me scowl at him.
“Of course I did. You know about our weakness for silver, you know the location of my home, benefits of ingesting vampire blood…”
“Pure safety procedure?” I asked, still feeling kinda miffed about his apparent attempt to mindfuck me without my consent.
“Yes. And that’s why you can never tell anyone what you know. Other vampires are unlikely to let you wander around with so much information and a free mind.” He finally released my gaze, settling back into the couch as if the matter was fully discussed.
But I only had more questions.
“But why? Why can’t you Compel me? I’m as ordinary as ordinary can be,” I said, frowning at the vampire.
“There is nothing ordinary about you, Liv,” he said softly, flicking those long eyelashes up to look at me once more with the most intense stare I’d ever received in my life. “I do not know why you can resist my Compulsion, but I know you are far from ordinary. I’ve known it since we first met.”
Predictably, the deepest blush of my lifetime
heated up my entire face, until I was pretty sure I was glowing like a lighthouse. Before I could think of a joking deflection, a sharp shrill cut through my living room.
I jolted, dropping my pencil in my lap.
Warin slid his hand into his pants’ pocket and withdrew his fancy smartphone. Faster than my eye could follow, he’d lifted it to his ear. “Yes? Yes. I’m on my way.” He hung up without another word.
“Running late?” I asked, glancing at my own phone. To my surprise, it had been four hours since he’d arrived. Huh.
“Yes. My apologies—I will have to leave now.” He got to his feet, but turned toward me before he’d gotten more than a few steps toward the door. “Would it be acceptable if I come back another night?”
I smiled—I’d been low-key worried he wouldn’t want to repeat the evening after the blood incident. “Yes, you have to. I’m nowhere near done with my drawings. I have time tomorrow night, if you do?”
He frowned, regret flickering across his pale features. “It would be hard to fit it in tomorrow night.”
I reached out my hand. “Give me your phone.”
He obeyed, eyebrows raised in question.
I quickly typed in my number and gave it back to him. “There. Give me a call when you have time, and we’ll figure something out.”
Warin nodded. “I will. Thank you for tonight, Liv.”
I grimaced and got up to see him out. “Yeah, sorry again about almost poisoning you. I promise, I’m done attempting to play Better Housekeeping hostess. You’ll have to bring your own dinner next time.”
I didn’t miss the look of brief relief on the vampire’s face as he turned to leave.
8
I drove back to the supermarket after work the next day.
The same old man who’d served me the previous day was minding the butcher’s counter again. He lit up in a smile of recognition when I stopped in front of him, shopping basket over one arm.
“Ah, how was the sausage-making, dear?”
“Not good, I’m afraid.” I leaned on the counter and gave a dramatic sigh. “It tasted off. I was wondering if there might have been something off with the blood? Grandma always made it with very fresh ingredients, and this was just not up to par.”