Crave

  Her voice broke off, as if the thought made her ill. “He was in the stable with the goats, and he had drunk the father dry. He’d killed the man,” Gabriel finished for her.

  Shay met his gaze, tears in her eyes. “It made you sick. You threw up in the dirt while Sam pulled Ernst off the man.”

  Sick. It was exactly how he’d felt that day.

  “Ernst is the one who taught me not to kill. I’ve never killed a Giver,” Gabriel said quietly. “But he was mad with grief and rage. The humans had …” He couldn’t go there, couldn’t relive that night. “They had reduced us to that state.”

  “Not the farm family. Other humans,” Shay whispered. “I felt a memory of terror, humans with torches.”

  “Yeah. The typical ignorant torch-bearing mob,” Gabriel said angrily. “They think we’re monsters. Only humans are deserving of life.”

  She backed away from him and sank down on the edge of the bed. “You were mad with grief, too. I felt that much. I still feel it. What happened?”

  Gabriel turned his face away. He wasn’t going to give in to this. Maybe she did see visions of his past—clearly she did. But that didn’t mean he had to tell her more.

  “Sorry.” She got to her feet. “I didn’t mean to pry. I got used to seeing pieces of your life and trying to fit them together like a puzzle.”

  “I’m not a puzzle.”

  “I know.” Shay reached out to him, but stopped short of touching him. “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t answer. He would give anything to be able to walk away right now, but he was weak. Powerless. “I think I’ll go take a shower,” she said. “We could both use some time alone.”

  Gabriel nodded. He would definitely like some time without her around. Not that it would actually change anything. She was in control whether he liked it or not.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  BY THE TIME SHE APPEARED AGAIN, Gabriel had managed to pull himself up into a sitting position. And he’d made his plans. Much as he wanted to push it, get up and get moving as soon as he could, that would be a bad idea. He was still far from his family’s compound in Tennessee, and at any moment Shay’s stepfather could come after them. If that happened, Gabriel would need enough strength to fight. Shay might not realize just how dangerous that man was, but Gabriel did. He’d experienced the intensity of Martin’s ambition firsthand. These days, people threw around words like sociopath or obsession. A century ago, the word would have been monster.

  It takes one to know one, Gabriel thought wryly. Maybe Martin hadn’t killed anyone, but he was as much of a bloodsucker as Gabriel was.

  The whole family would deal with him, together. It was their way—share the vengeance and the responsibility for the act of vengeance. Even though none of them could feel his fury—his rage at being kept chained, impotent, and used as a lab rat—Ernst and the others would still be angry enough to want revenge.

  For now, though, he would give in to his weakness and allow Shay to nurse him back to health. He wouldn’t try to move until he was truly strong enough. He would push down his resentment and play along. This girl wasn’t the one who’d imprisoned him. He would focus on her and not on the memories of her stepfather.

  Shay had put her clothes back on, but her dark hair was wet and her skin glistened. She sat down next to him and smiled a little shyly.

  “So.”

  “So,” Gabriel repeated.

  She seemed to realize how close to him she was sitting, and she shifted away slightly. “So, you’re a vampire.”

  He laughed. The way she said it, so casually—even though he could hear a little strain under the casualness—he never thought he’d hear a human make that statement in that tone. “Yep, I’m a vampire,” he answered, channeling Ellen DeGeneres. Then he realized that Shay was too young to remember Ellen’s Time magazine cover with the line “Yep, I’m gay” on it. She was too young to remember how big a deal Nirvana was at the beginning, or how shocking the OJ Simpson trial was. To him, her entire lifetime was nothing more than the blink of an eye. Shay hadn’t even been born during the Watergate scandal or the Cold War or Vietnam.

  She was so very young, too young to know much of anything, and yet she had experienced parts of his life that had happened hundreds of years ago.

  “Okay, crosses: true or false?” Shay asked.

  “You’re not trying to figure out how to kill me, are you?” Gabriel said.

  “No!” Shay exclaimed. “God. I saved your life twice. And I could run out the door right now, crossless. You’re not exactly in tip-top shape. It’s just the first thing that came into my head. Vampires—crosses.”

  He’d offended her. He hadn’t meant to. He’d actually been joking—because, like she said, she’d saved his life twice. “Crosses don’t hurt my family. Or holy water. But I’ve heard that there are some vampires who can be burned by either of them.”

  “I don’t get it,” Shay said.

  Gabriel shrugged. “The mind is a powerful thing.”

  “So it burns because they expect it to burn?”

  “As far as I know, all vampires are physiologically the same; so that’s my theory,” Gabriel replied. “If you truly believe you’re an evil, God-forsaken creature, then a religious artifact burns.”

  “And you know you aren’t an evil, God-forsaken creature, so it doesn’t hurt you,” she said. “So why does the hawthorn work?”

  “I think it’s just poisonous to us,” Gabriel said, still reeling from her casual assertion that he wasn’t evil. He’d practically choked her, he’d kidnapped her and used her as a human shield, and yet she didn’t think of him as evil.

  “Can I ask something else?” she said. “Actually, can I ask many, many questions?”

  He smiled, despite himself. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. What’s the deal with Sam?” she began. “In one of the visions I saw, it was your last day in the sun, and Sam was completely awesome. But then I saw the night when Sam stole you from the orphanage, and that was terrifying. I mean, he didn’t take Elena, because he knew how badly you wanted her to stay hidden. But he took you, and you were just a little boy. So what’s his deal? Is he good or bad?”

  Gabriel gaped at her. He hadn’t been expecting something so personal. He’d figured she would ask about vampire slayers or if he could turn into fog.

  Shay noticed his expression. “Sorry. I guess it’s weird that I even know about Elena,” she said. “I’m probably freaking you out.”

  Gabriel hadn’t expected a human to try to see things from his perspective. Had being inside him, as she described it, actually made her willing to see him as a being with emotions equal to her own?

  “It is weird. But it’s not like you intentionally set out to pry,” Gabriel said. He thought for a moment. “I’m so used to the way my family is formed, that it doesn’t seem horrifying or even strange to me anymore. It’s been almost four hundred years since the vampires came to the orphanage.”

  Now she gaped at him.

  “I’m older than I look,” he pointed out. “I haven’t thought about that night in ages, literally. I guess it was terrifying. Looking back, though, I see it as the night I found a home, a real home.”

  He thought she’d begin to argue immediately, insisting he couldn’t possibly feel the way he felt. Instead, she waited for him to continue. “I didn’t have a family before that night. I almost had a sister, in Elena, but I didn’t remember my parents. I don’t know if I even have—had—any biological brothers and sisters. It’s hard for me to imagine what my life would have been like if I hadn’t been taken that night. I used to wish Elena had been taken too. But Sam knew I believed I was saving her, and he let me have that.”

  “Why did he take you?” Shay asked. “And the others?”

  “We can’t reproduce like humans. For us, having children means taking them.” Gabriel sighed. “That sounds bad. In my family, we took only orphans. They had no family, so we would give them one. The child is rais
ed with us, as if we are their parents, older siblings, what have you. When they’re older, they serve as our eyes and ears during daylight hours. And when they’re grown, they join us through the blood ritual. They become vampires.”

  “That’s why they only wanted the youngest children,” Shay murmured. “So they don’t remember.”

  “Yes. For kids even a little older than I was, becoming a part of the family is almost impossible. The memories of human life are too strong. Mine had almost faded before I made the choice to give up the sun,” Gabriel answered.

  “Was it really a choice? I mean, I get that the timing was a choice. But could you really have kept your humanity, if you’d wanted to?” Her eyes were intent.

  Gabriel’s instinct was just to say yes—to say that nothing was forced. “To be honest, I don’t know,” he admitted. He tried to imagine Ernst’s reaction if Gabriel had turned his back on the family. It was too painful to think about hurting the man who had become his father that way. “It never happened. No human is transformed until he or she reaches physical maturity. By that time—”

  “By that time there’s nothing to go back to. Like you couldn’t go find Elena fourteen years after you were taken,” Shay said. “She wouldn’t have known you.”

  “I like to think she’d remember me. I never forgot her. But Elena wouldn’t have been able to give me all that my family did. I loved them, and they loved me. That’s why none of us ever considered rejecting the chance to transform.”

  “I saw you once, waiting for an orphan girl to take. You and Ernst thought her mother was dying of influenza.”

  Gabriel shook his head. He didn’t recall that night.

  “Her father was already dead. But Ernst said he hoped you wouldn’t have to take her,” Shay explained. “You were outside, watching her house. Waiting.”

  The memory rushed back to Gabriel. How strange that she remembered such detail about a moment he’d all but forgotten. “Millie,” he said with a smile. “She was four, old enough to understand that her parents were gone. But the memory faded eventually. Ernst became her father after that. He’s a father to us all.”

  “That vision made me think about my own dad. I never knew him. He left my mother before I was even born,” Shay told him. “Ernst told you that your parents are in you, part of you, even if you never knew them.” Gabriel watched Shay lightly run her fingers over her face, then down toward a necklace that hung beneath her shirt. “I’m not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.”

  “I choose to think it’s good,” he answered. “Although I don’t know anything more about my parents than you do about your father.”

  Shay snorted. “I know he left.”

  That’s worse, Gabriel thought. It might be better to not know anything, like him.

  “You said you had many, many questions,” Gabriel reminded Shay, hoping to pull her out of the dark place she’d slipped into.

  “Right. Okay.” Shay thought for a moment. “So you study bats, is that right? Is that like an inside joke or what?”

  “Ernst has always been fascinated by science—he’s been there since its invention.” Gabriel smiled. “Also, working as researchers in a remote location gives us the privacy we need. We’ve been doing it for two hundred years now, in various places. It’s a good fit. As for why bats? I suppose there’s an appealing irony. But mostly it’s because they’re nocturnal and so are we, and we were able to get a grant to study them.”

  “Wow. That is so much less interesting than ‘We turn into bats at will, and so we surround ourselves with our bloodsucking brethren,’” Shay told him.

  “I know. Sorry,” Gabriel chuckled. “We are very comfortable in caves, for what it’s worth. We lived in them in Greece.”

  Shay shrugged. “That just sounds uncomfortable if you’re not a bat.”

  Gabriel didn’t want to think about their cavern in Greece. He pushed the memory away, as he always did when it appeared. “Maybe when we leave Tennessee, we’ll choose a new specialty. The children of the night, possibly.”

  “What?”

  “You aren’t up on your classic vampire lore. We’re supposed to have an affinity for wolves. Dracula calls them children of the night.” He put on his best bad Transylvanian accent, and she laughed.

  The sound startled him. This was wrong. He was feeling way too comfortable with her, perhaps because she was acting so comfortable with him. Did she truly believe she knew him after a handful of visions? Tiny pieces of a life that had spanned centuries?

  If she did know him, she wouldn’t be so comfortable. She’d be disgusted by what he had done. Maybe she would even have left him to die. Maybe he’d even have deserved it.

  “Where did vampires come from in the first place, though?” Shay asked. “If you can’t reproduce, then you need another vampire to make you.”

  “More than one. It’s a ritual involving the entire family.”

  “But how did the first vampire come into existence?” Shay pressed.

  Gabriel was suddenly tired of their question-and-answer game. He longed for the dark and oblivion of his daytime sleep. But it wasn’t time yet, and he couldn’t enter the state at will. Besides, he’d invited her curiosity.

  “Where did the first human come from?” Gabriel countered. “Adam and Eve? Evolution? In China there’s a story that says Pan-Gu, the first being, grew inside a big cosmic egg.”

  “Huh,” Shay said.

  “Yeah,” Gabriel answered.

  Shay yawned. “You must be tired,” Gabriel said. “It’s late for you.” He wished she would fall asleep since he couldn’t.

  “I slept a lot during the day while you were unconscious,” she told him. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to wake up. But I remembered it’s hard for you to stay awake during the day.”

  “It’s called the death sleep. Some of the older vampires can fight against the impulse and stay awake during the daylight hours.”

  “Like Sam,” she murmured. It was surreal hearing Sam’s name on her lips.

  “I haven’t mastered that ability yet, although I’ve been trying to. Giving ourselves completely over to the death sleep makes us too vulnerable,” Gabriel explained.

  “So I shouldn’t be worried if you’re like that during the day tomorrow?”

  “You shouldn’t be worried.” How did he get to this place, where he was telling a human not to worry about him?

  “I’ve been up in the middle of the night a lot. In hospitals, they wake you up every few hours, for medication or to take readings or something,” Shay said. “Sometimes there’s a good old movie on. Wanna see?” She got up and grabbed the remote from the top of the television. “Although I guess there are no old movies for you.”

  “Not really,” he answered. “I saw one of the very first movies. I snuck in, even though I wasn’t supposed to have any contact with humans unless it was absolutely necessary.”

  “Unless you were drinking their blood,” Shay commented.

  Gabriel raised one eyebrow. “What part of necessary didn’t you understand?”

  “You sound so modern sometimes,” Shay said.

  “I am modern. I’ve just been around for a long time. If you aren’t able to adapt, you’ll die. It’s something we teach the children in our family. Now, do you want to hear this story or not?”

  “Yes. Pray continue. Please.”

  Was she actually mocking him? Teasing him? What kind of human was she?

  He returned to his anecdote. “Anyway, it was this short little piece of film. A gunslinger turned toward the camera—so, toward the audience—and shot. People dropped to the floor, trying to find cover.”

  “What did you do?” Shay asked.

  “You didn’t have a vision of that day, clearly.” One side of Gabriel’s mouth curled up in a half smile. “I didn’t do anything except think it was very cool.”

  Shay studied his face for a few seconds. “No, you screamed like a little girl in pigtails,” she guessed.


  “I might have made some sort of manly sound of surprise,” Gabriel replied.

  Shay laughed. Again, Gabriel was struck by how surreal it was to be sitting here with a human. Talking with her as if she really had known him for hundreds of years.

  Stay focused, he told himself. It’s true; she’s an innocent. And I’ll make sure she’s kept safe.

  But Shay’s mother and stepfather, they were another story. They deserved to suffer for what they’d done to Gabriel. He’d make them pay for every hour they had held him captive. Then he would kill them both.

  Shay reached out and ran one finger down Gabriel’s arm, taking in the sensation of smooth warm skin over firm muscle. He didn’t react. She hesitated, then swept his dark brown hair away from his forehead, letting her fingers tangle in the curls for a moment. She’d been wanting to feel the texture, and it felt the way she’d expected it to—soft and springy at the same time.

  Abruptly, she jerked her hand away. What was she doing? Gabriel was out of it, as out of it as if she’d slipped him a roofie. More than that. His whole system had slowed down—his heart rate, his breathing. It was almost like he was in a coma, alive, but unaware of his surroundings.

  Or was he aware, at some deep level, of everything he experienced during his daytime slumber state? Shay flushed at the thought of Gabriel feeling her light touch, knowing without being able to react, to push her hand away. That or capture her hand and hold it close.

  Shay jumped up from the bed, where she’d been sitting next to Gabriel. This is the guy who took me hostage, she reminded herself, appalled that she imagined him touching her and liked what she was imagining.

  Well, he was also the guy who’d kept her alive with his blood, who had completely changed her life, letting her experience strength and power and normalcy. He was the guy who had tried to protect his best friend, even at the age of five. Who loved Ernst even though he’d seen Ernst kill a man out of anger. He was sensitive. Powerfully connected to the people in his family.