But once he told her what he really was, he would no longer have any control over the situation. He would be entirely at the mercy of her reaction, and there was no predicting what that reaction might be. Then there was the inherent danger in it.
There had certainly been humans turned by vampires over the centuries (of course there had, or else how would he himself have been changed?), a small minority of the humans who mostly counted themselves lucky after their transformation. But to do what he was thinking, to reveal his nature without changing her into one of his kind, that sort of thing was unheard of.
Vampires didn’t live by the same kind of laws as humans. Why would they? They weren’t subject to any of the same laws of nature, so why would they choose to be subjected to the same laws? There was a council, and that council ruled. It ruled with absolute authority and didn’t bother with things like courts of law or juries of peers. Not that Reagan would have been particularly interested in having a jury of his peers. Vampires weren’t exactly the most forgiving group. They weren’t known for their empathy, that much was for sure.
When the council passed a ruling, they did so with ruthlessness and something that seemed a lot like enjoyment at the pain or anger of the ones they passed judgement on. It was beyond dangerous, for him and for Ella for him to do the thing he was thinking of. There was no way it was a good idea. So, of course, he had gone right ahead and done it anyway.
“You’ll be careful, Ella. Tell me that you’ll be careful.”
“Me?” She laughed, her face flushed in a way that would have made him salivate with hunger if he had been younger, or if she had been somebody else. “I’m pretty much always careful.”
“Do you think so?”
“Sure. I’m pretty sure that if you asked my friends, they would tell you careful is one of my most defining characteristics.”
“I’m sure they would. But then again, do they know about me?”
“Um, I guess so. They know something about you. One of them saw me talking to you in that bar.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. They thought you were hot. They told me I was lucky, pretty much. I think they were surprised that you would be interested in me. Out of the four of us, I’m the least likely to be approached by a hot guy.”
“Well then, the men you’ve been in contact with are idiots.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” her blush deepened, made her look like a little doll of painted porcelain, “I wasn’t fishing for compliments or anything like that. I was just explaining. They know about you. They know that I was...with you.”
“I’m sure they do,” Reagan answered patiently, “but they don’t know everything, do they? They don’t know what I am.”
Ella looked up with him with startled eyes, then looked back down again quickly. Her hands were twisting compulsively, a gesture he had a feeling was pretty common for her. He felt his heart, whatever heart he truly had left, ache as he watched her. The last thing he wanted to do was to cause her any pain, but this was important.
Now that he had done this reckless thing, he needed her to understand how serious it was. It was imperative that she look after herself, and to do that she would have to understand that care and discretion were important for her now. If she wanted him, that was the price she would have to pay. At least one of the prices. He hoped it would be the only one, but he couldn’t be sure. He had made her life unpredictable, had thrown everything into question for both of them.
“Ella?”
“It doesn’t matter! Do you understand me? It doesn’t matter at all. At least not to me.”
He was surprised by her sudden fierceness. Her face was still flushed in that pretty pink, but it was a different kind of flush now. Her eyes were blazing, her chest rising and falling quickly with her accelerated breath. Her hands, hands that only moments ago given her away as meek and afraid, were balled up into little fists down on each side of her.
Reagan almost laughed out loud, he was so surprised by her sudden transformation, but fortunately kept himself in check. There was no way she would be OK with being laughed at now. Whatever she was trying to say, she was deadly serious about it.
“But Ella, how can it not matter? It’s sort of a big deal. For almost everyone, or anyone who was even willing to entertain the idea of this being true, this would be about the biggest deal breaker there was. So, tell me how it doesn’t matter.”
He reached out to take one of her furiously fisted hands, but she jerked it away from him, breathing hard and trying to ignore the tears swimming in her eyes. Reagan had spent so little time around humans in the years piled on top of years during which he had been the monster known as vampire. The time with Ella in the last few days had been more than the last hundred years, and he found it shocking.
Ella’s moods switched at the drop of a hat, moving with a kind of violence from one extreme to the other. It was stunning, intoxicating, but also more than a little bit difficult to keep up with. He could see now that all of the joking levity had gone out of her. She was very, very upset, and it was because of him.
“What is it, Ella? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Oh you don’t, do you? Then forget it. Nothing’s the matter. Everything is just great.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” he replied cautiously, aware now that anything he said could just as easily make things worse as make them better, “I can see that I’ve made you unhappy. You won’t even let me touch you. I’m just not sure why.”
“Jesus, are you SERIOUS?!”
“I’m afraid that I am. You’ll have to bear with me, if you can. Try to remember, it’s been a very long time since I’ve tried to understand human emotion and even longer since I was actually a human myself. I can see that I’m saying the wrong things, that much is quite clear. I’m just not sure what it is I’m doing wrong.”
“Wow, you really don’t get it, do you?”
Ella’s fists began to relax some, hanging limply at her sides. For just a second, Reagan thought that she had calmed herself down just as quickly as she had worked herself up, but then her hands moved to her face, covering most of it as she shook her head slowly. Reagan resisted the urge to pull them away so that he could see her expression. He knew there was a good chance she would only shrug him off again.
The only real thing for him to do was wait. He hated to wait.
“Look,” she finally spoke in a tired, quiet voice, “if you’re starting to feel like this was a mistake, I get it. But you can just tell me that, OK? There’s no need for all of this...this production. If that’s how you feel, just tell me and we can both be on our way.”
“Wait. What?”
“That’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s fine, really. This is just a weekend trip for me anyway, you know? I’ll be gone soon and then it’ll be like I wasn’t here. You didn’t have to make such a fuss just to get rid of me. I would have gone without it.”
“No. Don’t say that, Ella, don’t.”
“Which part?”
Reagan felt a foreign kind of panic rising in his chest. He wasn’t an idiot. He knew that she was from Austin, and that there was a chance she would return there shortly. He knew that, had known it from the beginning, but hearing her say it out loud made it feel different. He grabbed her by the shoulders, only remembering at the last moment to be careful with her, not to use all of his considerable strength.
“Any of it. You’ve misunderstood me entirely.”
“Well then, what are you trying to say?”
“Exactly what I did. There is no hidden meaning behind my words, Ella. Not a one. I warned you to be careful because I want you to be safe. I warned you because I need you to be safe. I can’t imagine what I would do if something were to happen to you. I-I don’t think it would be good, for me or for anyone around me.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am.”
She looked like she was going to start crying again, leaving Reagan feeling comple
tely baffled. Was there nothing he could say that would make things right with this girl he craved? This beautiful, delicate, exceedingly complicated girl? He was on the verge of asking her a question along those lines (something that would undoubtedly have made her angry, or at the very least annoyed) when he saw her face light up with the most radiant of smiles. So, then they weren’t tears of sorrow, after all. She wasn’t angry with him anymore, or at least he didn’t think so. Not unless it was some kind of a trick.
“Are you...alright?”’
“Alright? I’m more than alright, Reagan. I’m happy. I’m so, so happy to hear you say that.”
Then she was all but launching herself into his arms, burying her face in the crook of his neck so that he could feel her hot tears on his skin. He paused for a moment, then wrapped his arms around her tightly, resting his chin on the top of her head. He hadn’t realized how much stress she’d been under.
He supposed he had allowed himself to believe that it was only him who was suffering. Now he was sure that fears and doubts had plagued her just as they had plagued him; possibly even more. It shouldn’t have made him feel better, but it did. It made him feel more secure about his position with her, about the idea that they would continue this thing they had begun.
When she finally pulled back from him, he felt so much better that he almost couldn’t remember why he had brought up the whole mess about her being careful to begin with. He was being overly cautious. It was one of the things that had always pissed Melania off about him. She had told him hundreds of times, thousands, that his reserved nature was nothing but a boring thorn in her side.
He had always just shrugged her off, but now that he could see what he had almost done to his still fresh and new relationship with Ella, he thought there might really be something to it. He needed to worry a little less and live a little more. Especially now that he finally had something to live for again, after all of the lonely, wasted years.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Hm?”
“You, mister. What are you thinking about? You went somewhere else just now, somewhere far away.”
“I apologize, my love. I was just thinking about how lucky I am to have found you. How sorry I am to have to let you go, even for an evening.”
“You could always come in with me, you know,” Ella replied coyly with a devious little smile.
Reagan laughed, feeling deliciously light and almost boyish. He kissed Ella on the tip of her nose, on her forehead, then finally on her full, supple mouth. Then, with no small amount of regret, he released her. It was true, he hated to leave her, even for a short amount of time.
In no time flat, she had become his supreme addiction. Leaving her felt forced, unnatural, and he didn’t want to do it. She must have seen it on his face, too, because her impish smile grew wider and she cocked her head with a come-hither gesture that looked achingly good on her.
“Oh no you don’t,” he managed to get out in a voice that sounded surprisingly similar to a croak.
“Oh no I don’t what? I’m not doing a thing.”
“You are, and you’re doing it well. You’ve already told me you need to get to bed at a decent time, right?”
“Yes, but-”
“And that it was important? That it was important for you to do that?”
“Maybe.”
“You absolutely did. And do you remember why?”
“Nope, so it couldn’t have been too important, right?”
“Because,” Reagan smiled, pushing on despite Ella’s willful ignorance of what he was talking about, “your friends are expecting you tomorrow morning.”
“They aren’t all even my friends!”
“No, they aren’t, but Jen is. She’s the reason you came here, isn’t she? And you want to be a good friend to her. You feel that you haven’t done that as well as you could have. You’re torn, torn between what you want to do and what you know you should do.”
“Wait, are you in my head right now?”
“Perhaps.”
“Stop it! That is so unfair. It gives you a major advantage, and you already have one of those. You’re right, though.”
“Am I?”
“Yes,” she spoke with a dark look on her face and a lip poked out like a child, “you are. I can’t miss brunch tomorrow. She’ll be so pissed, and things are already weird between us. OK fine, I’ll go to sleep. But will I see you tomorrow?”
“You won’t be able to keep me away.”
Nodding to herself with satisfaction, Ella planted another quick kiss on Reagan’s expectant mouth and then hurried back into her room before she could change her mind. Reagan remained in place for some time after she had gone, without any cognizance of how long he stood there.
He stayed until the scent of her perfume faded and then disappeared entirely. Only then did he turn and make his way down the hall.
* * *
“Come here. You come here right the fuck now.”
“Jesus, Melania, don’t you ever greet a person with a simple hello?”
“Shut up, Reagan, just do it.”
“You really should try it, you know. It’s nice. Relaxing. I have a feeling people’s reception of you will improve mightily.”
“Fuck off, Reagan. Do what I say.”
Reagan rolled his eyes and bared his teeth at his bitchy sister, but he did as she told him. It was just easier that way. That was something he had learned over the years upon years with her. You could argue with her, or you could try, at least, but she wasn’t going to make things easy on you if you did. Besides, this time it was sort of his fault.
Not because he had done anything directly to her, but because he had made the choice to go back to the club after dropping Ella back off at her hotel room. The smart thing would have been for him to go home, to just go home and keep himself to himself until it was time to see her again.
But because he was apparently not in the habit of doing the smart thing, he had taken himself back to the dam, back down those stone steps and to the scene of his unveiling of himself. He had almost thought “back to the scene of the crime,” and he supposed that was sort of true as well.
It wasn’t exactly considered kosher for one of his kind to reveal himself the way he had, especially to do it in front of so many others. Some of them were probably still lingering in the club, whispering amongst themselves about what a terrible thing he had done. He should have gone home. Restless or not, he should have just gone home.
“Ok, hotshot, wanna tell me what you think you were doing?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Melania.”
“Seriously? You’re going to try and play that card with me?”
“I’m not playing a card, and I don’t want to fight. I just want to relax, OK? Can we just do that?
Can we just have a good time for once?”
“No, we can NOT just have a good time for once, and do you want to know why?”
“No.”
“Too bad, brother. We can’t just have a good time because you keep doing stupid shit. We can’t relax and have a good time and just lounge around like there isn’t a care in the world because you’re putting yourself in danger. And when you do THAT, you put me in danger as well.”
“How am I putting you in danger, Mel? I fail to see how you’re even really involved in what I do.”
“Because, I’m your family. Remember that? Did you happen to think of that?”
“But you aren’t my sister, are you? Not really. It’s not like we’re flesh and bone from before. It was all an accident, wasn’t it? It was an accident, and you know it as well as I do.”
Melania’s pretty, innocent looking eyes grew wide. At first Reagan thought that it was with anger. That was her most common emotion, after all, and it would have made sense for her to feel that way now. As he watched, however, he realized it was something else. Something else entirely.
Her face looked like it was about to crumble into a th
ousand little pieces, making her look twenty years older despite the fact that she would never actually age. Her eyes began to shine, something Reagan couldn’t remember having seen with her before, and after a moment he realized she was trying not to cry. He didn’t believe he had ever seen her cry before, not in over a hundred years, but she was about to do it now.
He felt instantly sorry, instantly terrible, but when he reached out to console her she slapped his arm away with a surprising amount of venom. Her fangs were showing and she was backing away from him slowly, apparently heedless of the fact that there was nothing behind her but a brick wall. There was essentially nowhere to go, something she realized very soon with a hiss of frustration.
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