“I’m Carl.” He bowed, showing me the crown of his platinum head. I laughed at the awkward, yet gallant gesture. I was beginning to think Julian really had dropped me off at an institution. Everyone seemed way too serene and happy to be there — probably over-medicated.
I narrowed my eyes as I took Carl’s hand. The gentle pad of his heartbeat in my palm confirmed he wasn’t an Undead. His skin was warm and dry, and his pulse jumped when we made contact, making my mouth water. I didn’t mean to, but like a pair of second eyelids, my aura-vision came online. A soft green light surrounded Carl, offsetting his light blue eyes. With his almost white hair, it made him seem about as threatening as the Easter Bunny.
“Sorry.” I dropped his hand and blinked until I was seeing normally. At least sensing auras didn’t bring the voices.
“That’s all right.” Carl smiled. “I understand you being curious about my intentions.”
“You…I mean, how did you know what I was doing?”
“I’ve been around psychics for most of my life.” Carl eased back into the room.
I nodded and set my things down on one of the chairs. “You’ve met others like me?”
“Well, no.” He barely covered his excited smile. “Not like you. Never an Undead that was also—”
“Right.” I held up a hand to stop him before he ruined the good impression he’d made. I gestured back to the cushions on the floor. “Would you like to sit down?”
Carl followed my cue as I settled down on a peach-colored silk pillow across from him. It felt a little weird, hosting someone in a room that wasn’t mine, but I went with it. I repressed the urge to offer him something to drink, since I had no idea how to go about obtaining said beverages. And besides, this didn’t feel like a social call. I had a feeling someone had been instructed to keep me monitored while Julian was gone. I couldn’t blame him.
Carl’s blue eyes were wide and inquisitive when I met them again. He smiled brighter. He could have been in a Colgate commercial. He was actually pretty cute, with his glitter of golden lashes. But more than anything, I could sense his keen curiosity about me. Heat rushed to my cheeks as if I were under bright stage lights. It felt almost that way, with Carl beaming at me.
“So…” I raised my brows in question.
“You want to know why I’m here.”
I lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Actually, I was going to ask where here was.”
“Oh!” He laughed, a sound that was both deep and light at the same time. “Right. This is Monique’s half-way house.”
“A half-way house?” I furrowed my brows.
Carl nodded and grinned.
“For the terminally Undead?”
He laughed again. I never knew I was so funny. But it made me smile to be having a somewhat normal conversation with someone.
“It’s a safe haven for orphans and runaways who have certain knowledge or abilities that make them…not fit in the human world. Though, she doesn’t go around advertising the last part.”
Orphans and runaways? So Julian had dumped me here? Ignoring the pinch in my throat, I nodded. “Which one are you? Knowledge or ability?”
He shrugged. “I have some telepathic senses. Nothing like what you probably have, but enough to get me in a bit of trouble as a kid. Mostly now, I think I know too much for my own good.”
Good to know.
He smiled again, unconcerned. “And I like it here.”
“Oh, yeah.” I glanced around the harem-inspired room. “It’s nice.” It was cozy. Especially if you had nowhere else. Sounded like exactly where I belonged.
“It’s home.”
Was it my home now? Was Julian coming back? If not, would I stay here? Could I stay here? “Who’s Monique?”
“She’s a friend of Julian’s,” Carl said.
I shook the surprised scowl off my face and wiped my hair back. Julian knowing someone that harbored others like me had come out of left field. He’d told me that psychics were enemies of the Undead. How many other things had he not bothered to clue me in on? “Is she a psychic?”
“You’ll see when you meet her,” was all that Carl said. “But now, we’re back to where we started. Why I’m here.”
I gave him an indulgent smile. “Okay, sure. Why are you here?”
He grinned. “I’m your breakfast.”
If it were possible for my eyes to pop out of the sockets, they would have. After an awkward moment of choking on my own spit, I finally gasped, “I’m sorry, what?”
“We don’t keep a stock of blood on hand here,” Carl explained, patting my back, “and Julian said you would need some.”
“Oh.” He did? That was thoughtful of him. Forgive me for not being thrilled with the idea of sucking on a total stranger. Or anyone. I crawled away from Carl’s reassuring petting and stood up, gaining back some of my composure. “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”
He slumped back to the floor and looked up at me with an angelic smile, both amused and patient. “I was trying to break the ice.”
“Oh, it’s broken.” I laughed and shook my head. I was torn between shock, embarrassment, and outrage. Behind that hovered a nagging thought that Carl’s blood would probably be sweet, just like him. An intense pang of thirst that made me a little woozy.
I heard when Carl’s heartbeat increased, could almost feel it in my head. He gazed up at me, completely trusting. The lamb before the slaughter.
I shuddered. No way. I just couldn’t do it.
You’ll weaken and die — very painfully, and very slowly. Julian’s voice echoed in my head and I closed my eyes. Was he coming back? I could go for a while without blood, couldn’t I? When I opened my eyes, nothing had changed. I was still standing there wringing my hands together. Carl was still sitting in front of me, far too trusting.
I frowned. “Did Julian really tell you to come here and…?”
Offer yourself up as sacrifice?
Carl nodded, his manly voice that didn’t match his young face took on a somber note. “Yes, he did.”
“But why would you do it?” I lowered myself to the floor so that he didn’t have to keep craning his neck to look up at me.
“I don’t mind.” Carl smiled again, brilliant as the first day of spring, and his cheeks flushed a vivid pink. No coincidence it made me think of budding flowers. No, what surprised me were my other thoughts that followed on the heels of that one — thoughts of tasting him. Not just his blood, but his rosy lips, and his fresh, supple skin. His untainted desire…
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
I shook my head and willed it to clear. As if an inhuman thirst for blood weren’t enough, I also had to be cursed with uncanny senses that told me the very young man before me was still a virgin. Julian had sent me a virgin sacrifice.
What a jerk.
“Carl, I think you should go.” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, my stomach wrenching into tight knots. I could barely squeeze the words out, because a part of me didn’t want him to go at all. That part of me wanted to grab a hold of him and pull him close, to wrap my body around his, and to drink. I was so thirsty, and he was within arm’s reach, and willing. But I wouldn’t do it.
Then he was right next to me, the fresh scent of mint coming off of him in waves, coiling through my head. He took both my hands in his and pulled them away from my face. I squeezed my eyes shut tight. The heat of his body soaked into me like the sun’s rays, easing my muscles, melting my self-control.
“Alex,” he whispered from inches away. I shook my head, still refusing to look at him. “Alex.”
Just listening to him, all of his apparent youth seeped away. It wasn’t only the deepness of his voice, but the knowledge that laced it. Carl may have been a virgin, but he was no innocent. I know too much for my own good, he’d said. Did he really know what he was offering? What he was asking?
“Better than you do,” he said.
My eyes shot open in surprise. He could hear m
y thoughts?
“Sorry.” He smiled bitterly. “Bad habit.”
I swallowed, willing my shoulders to un-bunch. “I don’t know how to do this.”
How could Julian send me a living blood donor and expect me to just figure it out? What if I killed him? What if I turned him?
Carl’s golden lashes fell to shade his sky-blue eyes. He licked his lips. I was entranced by the subtle motion, riveted, like a cat fixed on its quarry. I felt a familiar prickle in my gums, and a tingle of anticipation zipped through me. I sighed, and even to me, it sounded wistful. Lustful.
“Don’t worry — I trust you. Just let your instincts take over.” He knelt on one of the pillows at our feet and looked up with a confidence that seemed oddly fitting on his handsome, unfinished features.
His words were echoed again by Julian’s voice in my head. Your instincts will take over. And just remembering Julian’s voice, something inside me snapped. It was enough to crumble the fragile hold I had on my moral objections. The drive was too overpowering.
I leaned in and kissed Carl full on the mouth.
It wasn’t tender or soft. It was ravenous.
For a moment, he froze, shocked, or overwhelmed — I didn’t care. Then his arms wrapped around me and crushed us together. I heard a sound like a battering of wings in my head, and we fell back to the floor, a tangle of limbs and tongues and teeth.
The first tang of blood hit me in a crimson wave of earth-shattering desire. Carl gasped when my fang cut him, then moaned as I swirled my tongue in his mouth, coating mine with the gift.
His beautiful gift. The force of his life, for mine. In the heady rush of blood and Undead pheromones engulfing me, I loved him just a little bit. Loved him, even though I didn’t know him. It would have seemed strange, if I had still been myself. But I wasn’t. The person I had been was lost. Carl’s offering, his blood, was the only thing that made sense to me.
I whispered something to him, something meaningless, and he answered by pulling away and baring his throbbing neck.
I paused. A tiny voice that used to be my conscience screamed to the surface, but was quickly silenced by survival instincts I had no control over. I stared at the bounty before me, my fangs almost aching. They pulsed matching the beat under Carl’s skin. His blood clung to my palette and blossomed into a mouth-watering bouquet, mingled with the sweetness of his sweat and the scent of male arousal tingeing the air.
“Alex.” He sighed, squeezing me to his chest. “Please.”
His words made me dizzy. It was exactly what I wanted to hear, and yet I hesitated. I couldn’t make a victim out of someone else. “Are you sure?”
Of its own accord, my tongue snaked out to trail along his straining muscles.
“Yes,” he hissed, rolling me on top of him.
I bit him, too swept away to be gentle. I only knew what I wanted lay behind a layer of skin and flesh in my way. Carl cried out, but I bit down harder, claiming the piece of him that was mine. He had given it to me, and it was mine. My senses drowned in the initial onslaught, like the first storm after a long drought. I wanted to bathe in it, to open my arms and let it rain down on me.
My instincts did take over. My throat worked, my lips creating a tight suction, not wasting a drop. My arms locked around his shoulders, but he didn’t fight. As I drank, Carl lifted his hips to press against me, moaning, and not from pain. I bore my weight down on him, claiming his body as I claimed his blood, wanting both with a razor sharp hunger. All my life I had chased this feeling, and now, when I was dead, I found it. It was like the night I had been bitten by Cody, only now I wasn’t numb, but hyper-aware. As I drank down Carl’s hot, crisp essence, I knew what it felt like to be truly at peace.
And then the voices came.
Only a faint whisper in the back of my head at first. Barely noticeable. It grew to a clash of dark, sultry words brushing against my mind like a storm of feathers.
“Alex?” Carl whispered. His heart beat faster, pumping more blood than I could swallow into my mouth until it seeped out the sides. My lips lost their purchase on his slick skin.
He cried out in pain, digging his fingers into my back.
Use the power his blood gives you.
I couldn’t tell if they were my thoughts or not, and that scared me, but I couldn’t withdraw. The voices grew louder. The black wave built inside of me.
No! I released my hold on Carl’s neck, and he clung to me as I screamed, wild and terrified, like a trapped animal. I had no escape. The hunter was inside of me, already a part of me.
Use your powers.
“No!” I yelled, shaking my head. I opened my eyes to see Carl aglow with a blinding white light. His fear rose up like something tangible, tying itself to mine to create a panic that ground down all logic.
Use them. Make us stop. Force us out. Use your powers.
Though he tried to hold on, I scrambled away from Carl, slipping on the pool of blood gathering underneath us.
“No, no, no.” I kept my face averted from the light of his aura as I tore my arms from his grip. The voices raged on in my head, pulling me down into the black abyss. “Please, no!”
“Alex!” Julian’s voice rang crystal clear through the chaos of terror, the bell-toll of a sanctuary through a flutter of birds. Suddenly, he was there, standing over me. Thankful beyond words and too stunned to get up, I crawled towards him. He knelt on the floor and caught me in his arms.
There was a moment of numbness where I wasn’t aware of anything but Julian, and then a woman’s voice, high-pitched and frenzied, cut through my shock. I turned in Julian’s embrace and looked over my shoulder to see her and someone else bent over Carl. He had passed out. All the beauty and vigor had drained away from him. It was spread across the floor in a red smear, and my shirt was soaked in it. I nearly puked.
“Oh, God, Carl!” What did I do?
Julian shushed me and wrapped me tighter, but I had to watch.
“I killed him.” I was too horror-stricken to put any strength behind the words.
The slender black-haired woman stood up as two more men entered the room and lifted Carl between them. She finally turned her irate gaze on me.
I blinked back at her in awe. She was exotically beautiful, with smooth, eloquent features and surrounded by a cloud of charcoal grey static that whipped like a hurricane. One of her eyes was a vivid green, the other a soft lilac. Both burned with a hatred I hadn’t had time to earn, even given the circumstances. Monique. I knew it without words, and she knew I knew. She looked over my head at Julian, and her expression instantly softened.
“You said I had nothing to worry about.” Her smoky voice carried a heavy French accent.
“I didn’t think you would,” Julian responded. I startled at the sound of his voice, then relaxed back against him.
“It is not the first time you were wrong.” Monique narrowed her eyes at me. “I should have known better. You cannot predict what will happen with one like her.”
I frowned at being talked about as if I weren’t there, but didn’t say anything. Something unspoken passed between them. Monique sighed before looking at me again.
“He will live,” she said. I could almost hear “no thanks to you” echoing after. “I will have a clean room across the hall made up for you.” She paused, giving Julian a weighted look, then glided out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Chapter Nine
Julian held me, not speaking a word, until I stopped shivering. Finally he leaned away and looked down at me. I gazed back, my face rigidly fixed in wide-eyed shock.
He sighed, squeezing my shoulders. “I’m sorry. I should have been here.”
“Why weren’t you?” I asked, cold, distant.
Julian’s chocolate eyes looked pained, and his jaw clenched. “You remember what I told you about our instincts. Being so young, you won’t have good control of your sexual impulses. I thought you would want some privacy.”
Seriously? He hadn’t
wanted to embarrass me by being a voyeur? I wasn’t sure if I should be flattered he had my sense of propriety at heart, or pissed that he was okay with me having sex with some random stranger.
He brought one hand up to rest on my shoulder, then his fingers traced lightly over my neck, and my healed bite mark. I closed my eyes, cursing my body’s instant reaction to such a simple touch from him. “The first time you take blood from a live donor is always intense. It gets easier.”
“I could have killed him. I could have turned him!” I worried at my lower lip as my vision clouded with tears.
Julian shook his head. “Your body hasn’t started making the chemicals yet. It usually takes about a month. I wouldn’t have let anything bad happen, Alex.” There was a sympathetic inflection in his voice, the same gentle understanding that made me so comfortable with him at the beginning of our short and volatile relationship. It still had the same calming effect.
“You didn’t tell me it would feel like that.” He hadn’t told me I would turn into a ravaging sex fiend while tearing through flesh like a beast. My stomach heaved.
Julian gave me a bitter smile as he slid off his bloodied coat. “I hadn’t thought there would be a need. I told Carl what to do in case I was gone too long. He jumped the gun. I’m sorry, Alex. I didn’t prepare you because we’re not supposed to take human blood from the vein anymore. The Code forbids it.”
“You mean the Cloak forbids it.” Not that either of us were in the habit of following their rules anymore. I frowned from my splayed position on the floor as he crossed the small room to the sink.
He didn’t answer me, just removed a washcloth from the cupboard and wet it down with sharp, jerky movements.
“I thought you were an enforcer for them, upholding the Code and all that.”
“I am,” he bit off, then turned and peeled off his black T-shirt. “I was.”
“What are you doing?” I swallowed the lump that formed in my throat at the sight of so much of Julian’s naked skin. My instincts were still going haywire, sending jolts of excitement through my belly.
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