“No, it’s a special blend I keep at home. It’s Russian.”
“Russian?” I felt my forehead wrinkle. “I thought you were Hungarian.”
“I am, but my boyfriend is Russian. I keep the coffee for him.” Her gaze flickered toward the front door, and I almost fell off the chair as understanding crashed over me like a bucket of cold water.
No wonder Aleksei had gone to her instead of Gabriel. Sometimes I am so stupid!
“But—you’re human!” I blurted out as if this might be news to her.
“Well . . . so are you.” Her eyebrows pulled together just enough to make her look worried.
“Yeah but, but . . . Aleksei . . . he’s a—”
“Vampire, I know.” Dropping her voice to a whisper, she leaned toward me. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, Rowan, but so is your boyfriend.” The worried look vanished as a smile twitched at the corner of her mouth. She was teasing me, only I wasn’t sure how to respond. “Rowan, I know this is difficult for you. This is why Aleksei came to me. He thought I could help, but first you must tell me what is problem.”
Excuse me? I wondered in how many other homes, around other kitchen tables, a similar conversation was being conducted. I was willing to bet it was a big, fat zero. We were talking about vampires, for God’s sake, and Anasztaizia couldn’t see what I was having a problem with? I sucked in a breath and forced myself to remain calm. She was only here to help, I reminded myself, and she was from another country, a different culture, so maybe she really didn’t understand where I was coming from.
“Sorry, but I’m having difficulty getting my head around the fact that they kill people,” I said tersely. “And don’t try telling me they don’t—I know, I saw it.”
“Yes,” she agreed matter-of-factly, “what you say is true. Sometimes they do kill people, but I promise you they kill only very bad people.”
Oh wow, well that was a relief, except who decided what was bad enough to get your throat ripped out?
“And they drink blood,” I continued, “human people blood!”
I was starting to babble, and I saw Anasztaizia’s expression turn slightly alarmed.
“They are vampires, so they do have to drink blood,” she agreed warily, “this you know. Of course human blood is better, but they can survive on animal blood if no other is available.” The doorknob diamond flashed as it moved across the table and came to a rest on the back of my hand. “Think of it like . . . um . . . a diabetic needing insulin,” she finished brightly.
“Diabetics don’t kill people to get what they need,” I snapped coldly.
“Well . . . neither do vampires.”
One of us was very confused, or in a state of serious denial. Apparently Anasztaizia’s relationship with the big guy outside my front door didn’t include seeing him eat. At least not the essential part of his diet. She couldn’t have, or else she would never have just said what she did. I knew what I’d seen. God knows I was never going to forget Gabriel puncturing that woman’s neck with his fangs. I was about to contest her statement when it suddenly hit me that, in all honesty, I couldn’t. While I had watched Gabriel inflict the wound, I hadn’t actually seen him drink her blood.
The stain on his mouth and chest had occurred from the initial severing of the artery and the resulting subsequent struggle. In all truth, I’d not seen Gabriel put his mouth on her again. Anasztaizia curled her fingers around my hand, making it look for a moment as if I was the one wearing the enormous diamond.
“Rowan, vampires never feed from those they kill,” she said in a soothing singsong, “and they don’t kill those from whom they feed.” The grip on my hand tightened imperceptibly as she slowly pushed aside the collar of her blouse with the other hand. My eyes were drawn to the creamy column of her neck, and I saw two small puncture marks centered inside the faint shadow of a bruise. “Aleksei fed from me earlier tonight. The mark will be gone by morning.”
Yanking my hand free, I jumped up and knocked over my chair. It was enough to make me forget the pain thumping in my head. “You let him do that to you?” I asked in a horrified gasp. “For God’s sake . . . why?”
A brief flash of irritability crossed her face as she smoothed her collar back into place. “Why would I want him to use someone else?”
Any number of reasons sprang to mind as revulsion and fascination flowed through me, each fighting for the upper hand. My head was now swimming with a lot more than the effects of too much bourbon. A hole had been punched in the fabric of my understanding, one that was big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through. It was a hole I doubted could ever be patched.
Staring at the table, I saw the diamond winking at me from Anasztaizia’s hand. The significance of the finger she was wearing it on hadn’t occurred to me until now. Aleksei was a lot more than just a boyfriend. He was her fiancé. Jeez—was she actually going to marry him?
Rising from her seat, Anasztaizia started toward me, but I held up my hands, warding her off. “Please,” I begged, feeling the hard edge of the sink up against my butt, “stay where you are. I don’t know if I can take any more.”
It really wasn’t her fault. She was only trying to help me get a handle on the reality that had been forced on me. But the image of Aleksei, and those fangs, puncturing the creamy skin of Anasztaizia’s neck was too much for me to take in. My brain was threatening to shut down completely.
Not wanting her to see how close I really was to losing it, I did an abrupt one-eighty and covered my face with my hands. As I pulled in a few shuddering breaths, I felt her hand making soothing circles on my back.
“I’m so sorry, Rowan,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. Neither of us did. I forgot how difficult it must be to accept what I am telling you, what you have seen. It must be like a very bad movie. In my culture, stories of vampires are told in the nursery and so are very commonplace. It takes great trust to accept that what I am saying to you is true, but”—she gave my upper arms a light squeeze—“I swear to you, it is the truth.”
Something in her voice penetrated the chaos in my head, and I turned back around to face her. “How did you and . . .” I doubted she had met Aleksei through E-Harmony.
“As a young girl I ran away from home and ended up in Budapest with no money, no friends, and nowhere to stay. This is one of many mistakes I have made with my life.” She gave me a rueful smile and shook her head. “I was befriended by a girl named Marta, who said she could help me.”
“Anasztaizia, it’s all right, you don’t have to go on.” I didn’t want to make her relive something she’d rather forget.
“No, it’s okay. It was long time ago.”
Not that long, I thought to myself. If she wasn’t my age, she only had me beat by a year or two.
“The first thing Marta did,” Anasztaizia continued, “was to give me to her boyfriend, who raped me. He raped all the new girls. It was how he broke them in.”
I gasped. Even though I had assumed whatever she told me was probably going to be bad, I hadn’t expected that. “H-how old were you?”
“Fourteen.” She sat back down at the table, her hands in her lap. As she continued speaking, I noticed she played with the diamond ring on her finger, as if reminding herself she now lived a different life. “I had been prostitute for six months when I was saved.”
“Saved?” Somehow I didn’t think she was talking about the biblical sense.
“The man I was with decided I hadn’t been good enough, and he wanted his money back. I refused, so he hit me.” She gave me a different type of smile this time. “He only got to hit me once.”
“Aleksei?”
“Yes . . . Aleksei.”
“Did you know he was a vampire?”
Opening her mouth, she tapped a tooth. “Oh yes . . . I knew.” “And you weren’t afraid?” I asked incredulously.
Her fingers stilled, and she gave me a look that I couldn’t read. “Marta’s boyfriend had already made sure I sto
pped being afraid. Of anything.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t imagine being forced into a life of prostitution at any age, much less fourteen. “So what happened next?”
“Aleksei took me home.”
“Home?” She’d been with him since she was fourteen? Apparently my expression told her what I was thinking.
“He took me back to my family, and made me promise to finish school.”
“But you saw him again, right?”
“Not in the way you are thinking.” Propping her elbow on the table, she cupped her chin in her hand. “When he came to see me, he was more like annoying big brother. He was not boyfriend. I was in love with him from first time I saw him, but Aleksei wanted me to know boys my own age . . . and my own kind. It took me some time to persuade him he was only male for me.” She gave me a wonderful, sunny smile. “He wouldn’t even kiss me without my father’s permission !”
“Really?” I was filled with an odd admiration at Aleksei’s restraint. As lovely as Anasztaizia was now, I could only imagine how tempting she must have been when she was on the cusp of womanhood.
“Aleksei is very old-fashioned,” she said with a soft laugh, “even for a vampire.”
“Your parents,” I said hesitantly, “they didn’t know, did they?”
“My mother, I think, did, although she did not say, and my father has suspected for some time. He wants me to be happy, and he knows Aleksei makes me happy.” That much was blatantly obvious.
I came and sat back down opposite her. “Does it hurt?” I blurted out.
“What?” The change of topic startled her.
I pointed at her neck. “Does it hurt when he . . .” I let my voice trail off, not certain I knew how to refer to such an intimate act.
Reaching across the table top, Anasztaizia took hold of my hands, gripping them lightly, her thumbs rubbing gently across my knuckles. “Are you sure this is what you want to know?” she asked gently.
No, I wasn’t sure at all, but something inside me had been woken up, and it was saying I needed to know. Not trusting myself to speak, I nodded.
“Very well,” she sighed and took a moment to gather her thoughts. “It only hurts first time,” she said quietly, “but I think that is because the mental struggle is hard to deal with. The physical part is much easier, but there is no way you can prepare for how you will feel.”
“What do you mean by mental struggle?”
“Before first time, Aleksei wanted me to know as much as I could about what was going to happen. Sometimes is better to know nothing. To just do and feel the experience, to, how you say . . . go with the flow?” Something she remembered made her lips curve upward in a private smile. “First time you will fight, but in the end that which is stronger will win.”
I couldn’t imagine any situation where I would ever be stronger than Gabriel. And then I wondered why it would matter, because I also couldn’t imagine him drinking my blood. Anasztaizia, guessing the path my mind was wandering on, set me straight.
“This is not about physical strength, Rowan. The fight will be inside your head.” She tapped her temple with her forefinger. “Blood is the life force of the body, it is not meant to be given to another. Not like this.”
“But people donate blood all the time,” I said, thinking about the latest Red Cross drive I’d seen advertised in the Sunday newspaper.
She laughed out loud. A wonderful sound that made everything she was saying easier to hear. “This is not quite the same thing.”
She was right. The difference between having a sterile needle put in my arm and Gabriel sinking his fangs into my neck were like night and day. The first felt like an almost philanthropic act, the other a violation.
“Never underestimate your own instinct for survival,” Anasztaizia continued. “You are being asked to go against your strongest urge, and to give freely what is most precious to you. Ignoring your own needs because your desire for another, and his needs, are stronger.” I swallowed and gently pulled my hands free of her grasp. It was a lot to take in. “How often do you . . . ?”
“Each vampire is different.” She made another graceful lift with her shoulders. “The older the vampire, the stronger he is, and the more control he has over the hunger.” She looked at me, her eyes frank with curiosity. “Gabriel has not yet tried to—”
“Oh my God—no!” My hand instinctively went to my throat. “Never!”
“Ah well . . . he is very strong.”
There was something in her tone, a sort of fatalistic inevitability that said this was going to happen to me, and the sooner I accepted it, the better. Either that or the amount of bourbon in my system was finally taking over and eighty-proof Tennessee whiskey was dulling my comprehensive reasoning.
A voice inside my head whispered that maybe things weren’t so bad after all. I might be involved with a vampire, but I was still alive and hadn’t given up as much as a single drop of blood. If Gabriel had wanted to feed from me, he could have done so at least a half dozen times by now. Perhaps Anasztaizia was right. It was just a matter of viewing it in the proper context. Blood was every bit as necessary to a vampire as insulin to a diabetic. It was the method of extraction that I was going to have to come to terms with.
“Do you think,” I paused, feeling my cheeks burn, “Gabriel will want to feed from me?”
Her gaze was unflinching. In all the times we’d met, I’d never noticed before that her eyes were the most gorgeous shade of turquoise.
“I don’t think,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “Gabriel wants to feed from anyone else.”
Oh . . . shit.
I closed my eyes and felt the room spin as my brain threw random images at me. Unfortunately, they all seemed to be from the same B horror movie. I was almost overcome by a collage of heaving bosoms, heavy eyeliner, and ridiculous lacey nightgowns. But in the middle of this grotesque nightmare, Anasztaizia threw me an unexpected lifeline.
“Rowan, surely you must know Gabriel will not force you. He will wait for you to give yourself to him.”
And what if that never happens? What then? How long can he last without blood?
Until he’s forced to use someone else.
A sudden panicky feeling began deep in my stomach. I looked around my kitchen, trying desperately to find something that would anchor me back to the mundane reality that had been my life a short while before. It felt like a dozen lifetimes had passed since then. Anasztaizia stared at me, her eyes filled with concern, and sensing, I’m sure, the turmoil in me.
Everything was the same, and everything was different. Yesterday morning I had no idea that the human race coexisted with supernatural creatures, and now the proof was irrefutable. Inanimate objects could not take me back to the life I’d once had because that life, and all that it comprised, no longer existed for me.
I think life likes to test us every now and then, just to see if our coping skills are in need of a few improvements. I got pushed into the deep end to see if I would sink or swim, and I had absolutely no intention of going under. Sharing a world with vampires was going to take a different set of coping skills, and the sooner I took advantage of the instruction being offered, the better. I gave Anasztaizia a wobbly smile.
“I think I’d better invite your boyfriend in.”
CHAPTER 6
Before opening the front door, I braced myself for the very real probability that my guest on the other side would not be in the best of moods. I didn’t know if Aleksei was the type to hold a grudge, but I couldn’t count on him not still being pissed at my refusal to let him in. I thought about asking Anasztaizia for tips on dealing with a ticked-off vampire, but I wasn’t sure how objective she would be. Squaring my shoulders, I told myself to ignore the fact that Aleksei was a vampire. I should treat him like any other guy with a chip on his shoulder—in his case, a really, really big shoulder.
The first thing he did was snarl at me. The second was drop his fangs. So much for trying
to ignore the vampire part. He apparently had no intention of letting me forget exactly what he was. I took a step back and began rethinking the wisdom of inviting him inside.
“Aleksei . . .”
The voice coming from behind me shifted his focus, and I was stunned at his transformation. Hostile attitude and fangs both disappeared at the slightly disapproving tone in Anasztaizia’s musical lilt, allowing me to see their relationship wasn’t at all one-sided. Completely smitten, Aleksei would do absolutely anything for this woman.
“It’s all right, Rowan,” Anasztaizia murmured from behind me as she placed her hand on my shoulder. “He’s just a little unsettled.”
Unsettled?
A dozen different adjectives to explain the big guy’s state of mind bounced around inside my head. Every one of them was normally used to describe an act of violence. Unsettled wasn’t one of them.
“Please,” the exotic blonde continued in a low voice, “you have to invite him in.”
Swallowing, I looked at the vampire standing on my cheery ho-ho-ho Christmas doormat and, taking a deep breath, asked, “Aleksei, won’t you please come in?”
He stepped over the threshold and brushed past me, almost flattening me against the wall. In a way I could understand his reaction. If vampires were as possessive as Anasztaizia had said, then being kept waiting on my porch must have been absolute torture for him. He was looking for reassurance that his girlfriend had not been harmed by walking into the proverbial lion’s den, alone and without his protection. The fact that she had done so of her own free will was completely irrelevant. My actions had made it a necessity. It was something I didn’t think he was going to forgive, or forget, anytime soon.
After closing the front door, I turned to see Anasztaizia being swallowed up inside the army greatcoat as Aleksei wrapped his arms around her. Low murmuring was interspersed with chaste kisses administered to her forehead, temples, and nose. And then a decidedly unchaste one was placed on her mouth. I could almost feel the raw heat as I quickly lowered my gaze. Was that what Gabriel and I looked like?
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