You're So Vein

by Christine Warren

  She said nothing. Obviously. When she’d realized he was a vampire, she had assumed—not unreasonably, she assured herself—that he’d been the one to attack her. His words unaccountably made her rethink. This monster might be just as evil as the one who had tried to kill her earlier, but at least he looked clean. He didn’t smell anything like the other one. No way could Ava ever forget that scent. But if the giant wasn’t her attacker, who was? And more important, where was he? Because Ava intended to prosecute him to the fullest extent of the new human protection laws.

  “You look like you remember something, but I’m guessing you’re fuzzy on the details.” He waited for her to nod. He could wait a goddamn lifetime as far as she was concerned. She had no plans to do this jerk any favors. “You were attacked as you were walking past an alley. Do you usually go for strolls through the city alone? In the middle of the night?”

  As if it was any of his business what she did. Ava continued to glare at him silently and search for a knot.

  “I would encourage you to take up a new hobby. You were completely vulnerable to the attack. A rogue vampire came up behind you and dragged you into the alley, out of sight. Polite, but probably unnecessary. I doubt anyone else would have passed at that hour. He had already killed another woman. You would have been second if I hadn’t found you.”

  Well, yipdee—frickin’—doo. You’re my hero. I’ll try to leave your corpse some dignity, she thought, but this time she tried to keep her thoughts to herself. He might not like that particular plan.

  “I picked you up and brought you back here. You needed some … medical attention. I patched you back up and decided to let you sleep.”

  “Knphah mnaph zphnst—” She broke off to glare at him.

  He watched her for a long minute before he so much as blinked. “Only if you promise not to scream. If you do, I’ll knock you unconscious again, and this time I’ll gag you before you wake up.”

  If he hit her, he’d have to kill her before she woke up, Ava thought, mental shields firmly in place, because she would eviscerate the man who laid a hand on her that way. She didn’t care how securely she was tied. She would get free eventually, and she had a very long memory. Still, she nodded. If he kept his hand clamped over her mouth and jaw any longer, she’d have bruises no amount of three-hundred-dollar foundation would hide.

  Ava nodded once.

  Satisfied, he let his hand slide away, moving slowly, as if ready to slam back into place if she should draw too deep a breath. Somehow the feathery brush of his callused fingers over her skin sent a wave of heat rushing through her. Disgusted with herself, Ava made very sure to stuff that away where no one would find it. What kind of sicko got turned on by a touch from a vampire who’d tied her to a bed?

  Okay, Regina, maybe, but that was beside the point.

  “I said, why didn’t you just call an ambulance and let the paramedics give me whatever medical attention you thought I needed?” Her voice came out low and hoarse, as if she’d spent the evening before screaming her way through a rock concert. Frowning, she tried clearing her throat, but it didn’t help. “Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

  “Much.” Again with the lack of irony. “But from what I hear, the emergency responders in this city have been having a hard time adjusting to the treatment of unusual patients.”

  Unusual. That was one of the new “polite” words for The Others, but Ava saw no point in prettying up her language. A monster was a monster in her book.

  “Yeah, well, it wouldn’t have mattered. They could have treated me just fine. I’m human.”

  The giant shook his head. “Not anymore.”

  A hollow buzzing noise exploded in Ava’s head. Her chest tightened as if someone had strapped a belt around her lungs and cinched. She felt the jittery buzz of a caffeine overdose with none of the creamy, latté accompaniment. She shook her head to clear it, but it didn’t help. “Excuse me?”

  “Your attacker was a vampire. You’ve been changed.”

  The feeling she now recognized as panic bled down her throat, burning like ice-cold whisky and jolting her heart into overdrive. She could practically see the adrenaline needle sticking out of her chest.

  “That’s not possible,” she rasped out. “I’m human, and I’m not stupid. I know what it takes for a person to cross over to vampire. You have to exchange blood. No way on earth am I dumb enough to do something like that. You couldn’t pay me enough to drink blood, let alone drink blood from a vampire.”

  The vampire’s expression remained impassive, not a shred of sympathy in evidence. Then again, he showed no shred of deception, either. She didn’t plan to trust him, but some unfamiliar thing that squirmed in her gut told her she didn’t have to take his word for it. Not when she already knew. Deep inside.

  A knot formed in Ava’s stomach, pulled tight. She struggled for denial. “I wouldn’t do that,” she repeated.

  The man blinked. “You know he bit you. He nearly tore a chunk out of the side of your neck. You remember that, don’t you?”

  Her hand went instinctively to the spot, felt a small amount of scabbing, a little dried blood. Nothing like the injury that should have been there. “Sure, but one bite wouldn’t do it. He could drink me dry and I wouldn’t turn unless I’d drunk from him, too. Which I definitely. Did. Not. Do.”

  He inclined his head just a fraction. “Not intentionally, I’m certain. I believe you would not have planned to do so.”

  “I wouldn’t have done so at all. I didn’t do so.”

  “You fought back.” When he paused, as if waiting for a response, Ava nodded. “You kicked, elbowed, stomped, hit, clawed.”

  Another nod.

  “Bit.”

  The knot in her stomach unraveled, along with every nerve and muscle in her body. Despite her prone position on the bed, dizziness overwhelmed her. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and watched the beams overhead dance the tarantella. The entire room was moving around her, and her heart threatened to race the contents of her stomach to see which made it out of her throat first. She fought for breath like a winded marathoner and nearly gagged at the sharp memory of copper heat flooding her mouth.

  Santa María, what have I done?

  “It wasn’t supposed to matter.” Her voice was a murmur, weak with disbelief, grief, shame, fear. She wrapped her fingers around the ropes over her head and held on as if afraid she might fall. “He was going to kill me. I know he was going to kill me. It shouldn’t have mattered that his blood got into my mouth, because I was never going to make it out of that alley.”

  He looked at her. “You made it out.”

  Shaking, Ava stared at the ceiling and unclenched her fists from the ropes, all of the fight draining out of her body. “That’s it, then. I’m going to turn into a vampire. I’m going to be one of the monsters.” She tore her gaze from the ceiling and turned it on her captor. “Tell me how long I have.”

  He frowned. She could tell because his brows drew together all of half a millimeter. “What do you mean?”

  “How long do I have before I transform?” she demanded, thinking that he might be compelling, but he seemed to be dumber than a catfish in a frying pan. “Before I go all fangy. How long do I have?”

  The frown did not ease. If anything, it got even deeper, almost recognizable. “I’m not certain I understand—”

  “It’s very simple, Sherlock,” she snapped, a little of herself coming back to her. If only for a moment. “I want you to tell me how much longer I have before I’m officially one of the liquid diet crowd. I’ve been around this scene for long enough to know that the last thing I want to do is live the rest of my life as a bloodsucking monster. I’ll kill myself first, and damn the Church.”

  For an instant, Ava thought she saw something almost like sympathy in those arctic eyes, but it passed so quickly she couldn’t be sure. When he spoke, he sounded as cold and disinterested as ever.

  “You have no time,” he said. “This is not a matter
of waiting for your membership card to arrive. He drank, you drank, the end. You are vampire. It is done.”

  The finality of his words accomplished what the fear and dread and panic inside her had not. It froze the last living spark of her hope, leaving her as cold and desolate as those wintery eyes.

  Monster, she called herself, and fought the wave of nausea that accompanied the thought. Then something even worse occurred to her. All this time she’d spent resenting her friends and hating their husbands, and now she had become just as bad as they were. She had become the thing she hated most in the world.

  The thing she feared.

  The thing on which she had been able to focus all of her rage at the father who had abandoned her and her mother, the mother who had loved and hated her husband so much that she had no emotion left for her only child, the industry that had stolen her childhood, chewed her up, and only failed to spit her out because she had left before they got the chance.

  All those things that had gnawed at her, that had fueled the silent, agonized scream deep inside her belly … For the past five years she had been able to ignore them all by concentrating not on them but on the anger and loathing they made her feel. For five years, she had been able to cope with it all by hating the monsters—the Lupines and Felines and demons and witches and changelings and Faeries.

  And vampires.

  And now she was one of them.

  Fate, she decided miserably, had a sick, vicious sense of humor.

  Chapter Seven

  Shock could have accounted for Ava’s silence, but she’d been shocked more than a few times in her life and she’d never before found herself at a loss for words. But there was a difference, she supposed, between being shocked when a younger girl with a big nose and no breasts got the cover of Vogue instead of her, and finding out that she had just gone over to the Dark Side of the Force without so much as catching a glimpse of a

  YOU ARE HERE sign to warn her of the possibility.

  Either way, something kept her quiet and malleable while the man looming over her untied first her feet and then her hands from where they had been bound to the frame of a very large iron bed. When he finished, she rubbed absently at the raw, scabby rings of red skin around her wrists where the rope had bitten into them. Lifting herself into a sitting position, she looked down at the marks and frowned.

  “You had to tie the rope that tight? I’m surprised my hands didn’t turn blue and fall off,” she bitched, just because it gave her something else to focus on. Something other than the truth.

  “I used the softest rope I had, and it wasn’t very tight.” His eyes weren’t on her but on the rope in his hands as he coiled it into a neat bundle. “I left it as loose as I could, but it was on for almost twenty-four hours. You fought hard.”

  The idea offered Ava little comfort, and neither did the note of admiration she heard in his voice. “I fought? What did I fight? What did you try to do to me while I was out?”

  One tawny eyebrow arched. “Relax. I have no taste for forcing myself on women who remain unaware of my presence. I tried to keep you from harming yourself. That is all.”

  She kept her eyes on him, still suspicious, and slid toward the side of the bed to stand. Her skirt rode up her thighs with the motion. Absently she reached down to pull it back into place and froze. Her gaze shot down to her legs and back to the blond giant’s face.

  “That’s all?” she demanded, her raspy voice bordering on a screech. “That’s all? If that’s all, then why the hell aren’t I wearing my stockings?”

  He looked up, blinked, shrugged. Then he pointed at the foot of the bed. “I ran out of rope.”

  “You— … I— … What— …”

  The fury swamped her, cutting off her power of speech and leaving her gaping up at him like a landed carp. That was okay, though. She’s rather have the fury than the fear. Any day.

  Energized, she leapt to her feet and …

  … folded like a house of cards on the small bedside rug.

  “… body still needs time to recover,” she heard him say through the tinny buzzing in her ears. “You will need to rest and take care for a few more days.”

  He had scooped her up from where she’d fallen, which was good, because Ava didn’t think she had the strength to do more than a bad impression of a sea cucumber. But when he bent down to place her back on the bed, she stiffened. He paused.

  “You have been in bed for quite a while,” he said, turning toward the bedroom door. “You might feel better if you sat up in the other room. Besides, you should have something more to eat. It will help to build up your strength.”

  Ava didn’t bother to protest as he carried her through a nearly empty apartment decorated in early modern bachelor-cum-charity shop. All except for the computer equipment, which figured. Men and their toys.

  Of course she thought about struggling, but after weighing the possibility for all of a second and a half, she discarded it. The man was built like an overly tall gymnast, at least three inches over six feet, with a deceptive leanness that distracted from the mind-bogglingly well-developed musculature padding his long frame. He had lifted her as easily as a scrap of paper and looked like carrying her through the apartment was causing him about as much strain as flossing his teeth. Struggling, especially when she could barely stand on her own, wouldn’t do her any good. Better to save her strength for more important things.

  For making plans, and carrying them out.

  He deposited her on a worn-out sofa with surprising gentleness. Before she’d so much as smoothed her skirt, he had already walked away. She wasn’t used to people walking away from her, not even vampires who intimidated her and held her prisoner.

  Because she was so off balance, Ava frowned and searched for something to say to get his attention, to stop him from walking away. “I thought you said you were going to feed me.”

  “I am.”

  She watched as he opened the door to a small refrigerator and reached inside.

  “You’re giving me leftovers?” she demanded, infusing her voice with outrage. Outraged was how she would react to such a plan under other circumstances. Normal circumstances. “The least you could do is order out for Thai. I’ll have something spicy, with the really thin rice noodles. Shrimp, no pork.”

  He returned holding something, but the back of the sofa blocked her view of his hands. He detoured to neither the compact oven nor the built-in microwave above it. He didn’t even hold whatever it was over a hot plate.

  “I’m warning you, if you try to make me eat cold pizza straight out of the refrigerator, I will throw it up all over you. That kind of thing will just ruin your stomach.”

  “Not to mention my upholstery,” he retorted, rounding the end of the sofa and nudging her knees aside to perch on the edge next to her. “Don’t worry, it is not cold pizza. Nor is it Thai food, which, I would like to point out, would also not sit very well with you at the moment.”

  “What is it then?”

  He took her hand in his, turned it palm up, and placed something slick and cold against it. Confused, Ava glanced down and felt a new wave of dizziness threaten to overcome her. She jumped back, her spine hitting a particularly worn spot in the arm of the sofa. The bag of blood he’d given her bounced once off her knee before landing on the floor.

  “No.”

  He sighed, reached down, and retrieved the bag. “You need to drink it,” he said, his voice calm and level. She wanted to slap him. “Not only does your body need it to help you regain your strength, but since it’s the only thing you’ll be eating for the rest of your newly extended life, it would be better that you become used to it sooner than later.”

  Ava shook her head. “No. I’m not drinking that. I’m not drinking blood. I’ll find another way.”

  That blond brow arched again. “There is only one other way, and I doubt you would find it pleasant.”

  “What is it?”

  “You could kill yourself.”

&
nbsp; That flat, hard tone assured her he spoke the truth. His gaze never wavered from hers, and his expression did little to convince her that he cared about her decision either way.

  The question was, did Ava? No matter what she considered in the heat of the moment, did she actually want to die? Or more important, to be dead?

  Completely dead, as opposed to whatever degree of dead she might be at the moment.

  “You are a vampire now,” he continued, “and for a vampire, blood is life. Without blood, you cannot survive. If you will refuse to feed, you would be better served to end your life now. Not only will it spare you from suffering through the hunger; it will save me from having to kill you once you go mad and begin to attack humans indiscriminately. Is this what you would choose?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t like either of those choices.”

  “That is too bad, for they are the only ones you have.”

  “What about—”

  He sighed, a sound so put-upon, she wondered if he filled in for Sisyphus on bank holidays. “I will make you a deal,” he offered, his tone disturbingly pleasant. “If you agree to drink that bag, I will agree not to use force to ensure that you do so.”

  “Force?” Ava felt her spine straighten almost involuntarily. Her eyes she narrowed quite willingly. “Exactly what kind of force do you think you’re going to use on me, Goliath? Because I warn you, if you try to hold my nose and pour it down my throat, you’d better tie me up again first. And hide your kitchen knives before I castrate you. Maybe the spoons, too.”

  “That would not be necessary. I would not need to resort to such crude physical tactics.” He watched her, his eyes glinting with both challenge and confidence. Ava felt herself drawn into those eyes and clenched her jaw against the sudden urge to lean toward him. He saved her the trouble and shifted closer, running a callused fingertip over the curve of her jaw. “All I would need to do,” he purred, a new, decidedly unfrozen animation lighting his harsh features, “is ask. If I asked you, kralya, you would do anything for me. Wouldn’t you?”