Called By Blood

Chapter 8

At twilight Alex poked his head into the living room. "Would you mind if I used your bathtub?"

His voice brought back the dream she'd been attempting to repress all day. That kinky, disturbing dream that still had her wet.

Helena nodded and gestured that he should go up to the master bedroom. He walked carefully into the living room, like a thief, like he shouldn't be there. In his hand he carried a black overnight bag. One of the things Mikhail had retrieved from the hotel.

The voice might be the same, but this was not the dream Alex. Emphatically not. As usual, he wore nothing but her sleeping bag. His skin had faded from red to a dead, clay white and was covered with a network of dry, painful-looking cracks. He headed up without a word, the tail of the bag dragging behind him, and she let her thanks for breakfast die unspoken.

An hour passed. She heard the bathtub draining, and filling again. What was he doing up there? She watched TV, taking in nothing, thinking about her parents a lot. If she didn't think about them, she thought about the dream. Both lines of thought were torture. She'd started in on a book when she heard the stairs creak, and looked up to see him pausing on the steps to look back at her. He'd transformed.

Giving her a hint of a smile, he continued down the stairs. Instead of wearing the sleeping bag, he carried it. He wore an expensive-looking white shirt and a pair of nice black pants. His feet were bare and his sleeves rolled up. Some of his hair had grown back, she realized. Maybe a quarter inch of black stubble covered his skull.

More striking, though, was his face. As he came closer, she saw that somehow he'd shed his damaged skin. His newborn skin was as pink and tender as the flesh you'd find under a blister, and here and there he had a scab where the healing wasn't finished. Still, it was an amazing improvement.

He'd lost weight. And the short hair made his cheekbones sharper, his eyes bigger and darker than ever. She found his frailty compelling. And familiar. They both needed comfort that night. In a perfect world they could snuggle together on the couch under a big blanket.

But the world wasn't perfect. He was a vampire. So she kept her distance. "You look better."

He shrugged, a little sheepish. "Elk."

"Did you really eat an elk last night?"

Like quicksilver his expression changed, becoming abstracted. "I drained one." He sounded like he didn't quite believe it himself.

"But what happened to your skin?"

His abstracted look faded and his dark eyes searched her face intently. "The dead skin fell off. When I drank the elk dry, I absorbed its life force, and that accelerated my healing."

"I thought you never killed when you ate."

"I'm not supposed to. I never have before. There's no rules about animals, but any vamp who kills a human or another vamp by draining them dry is anathema. It's a death sentence. Only the Knyaz exsanguinate their enemies."

"You mean Mikhail exsanguinates…" Helena wished she didn't know what that word meant. "Maybe I don't want to know more about that."

Alex smiled a little. "It's okay. The point is that it's all too natural to kill while eating. It makes you strong, but it's addictive, and it messes with the mind. I found that out last night. I don't know how Mikhail deals with it."

He shook his head, dispelling whatever he was thinking about. "Anyway, if we didn't follow our discipline, I don't know what would have happened to our kind. Or yours."

He tilted his head to one side. "I'm giving you too much information again. I know. But I was wrong in not giving you enough information when we met. And I'm not lying to you anymore. Or sugar coating. If you have any questions, I want to answer them."

"You're leaving tonight?"

"Isn't that what we agreed?"

Helena noted the careful choice of words. It was up to her. She figured it couldn't hurt to be polite for a few minutes. They'd been through a lot together. And she was still curious about him. About all this. "Would you like a glass of wine for the road?"

They walked into the kitchen. He picked up the wine bottle and she handed him the corkscrew as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to be hanging out in the kitchen together.

"I wanted to thank you for breakfast this morning. That was sweet. I wouldn't think you'd be interested in cooking. I mean, I didn't think vampires ate food. But I suppose that's another one of those myths."

Alex laughed. "No, actually, you're right. I don't know any other vamp that cooks. It's pretty pointless."

"Then why do you do it?"

"Because I've always liked humans." He popped the cork. "Liked the human world. Wished I were human, often enough."

Maybe that was why his mother matched him to a human.

She took the bottle from him and gave him back a glass of Pinot Noir. "Why's that?"

"Why? I don't know. I guess I'm just curious about what goes on in the daytime. I want to know what it's like to swim in a clear blue Caribbean sea. I want to see the Grand Canyon in real life. I want to watch bees work. And then there's the food thing. We can't eat solid food, and I've always been curious about the different tastes and textures you humans get to enjoy."

"Does all blood taste the same?"

"No." The very idea seemed to surprise him. "Not at all. No more than all wine tastes the same. It's all blood, but each person's is unique. And each person's flavor changes depending on all sorts of things. Age. Diet. Stress. A woman tastes different in different parts of her cycle."

Oh really. "So you've had a lot of people. Some that you know well."

He put down his wine glass and looked her in the eye. "I can't count how many people I've fed from in my life, but since I've been an adult most of them have been women, and most of those have been my lovers. I prefer to feed while making love."

Helena did some quick math. One meal a day, he'd said that first night. Three hundred and sixty five days in a year. He couldn't feed off of a single lover very often without making them anemic. How frequently could you give blood? No more than once a week, she figured. He'd had hundreds of lovers. Her expression must have been appalled, because he added, "My chemistry is radically different than yours. I can't pick up human diseases or pass them on. I can't get humans pregnant either."

As if that made it okay to be a huge man slut. She folded her arms. "You must have had some pretty open-minded girlfriends over the years."

"I've never been in a monogamous relationship." He widened his eyes at her in frustration. "Don't look at me like that. I'm not a complete dog. Some of my donors are one night stands, yes, but many are friends."

"Friends you suck on."

"Friends I've sucked on for years."

"But you never offered one of them a commitment, never tried to take it to the next level?"

"Never wanted to. I was waiting."

"For…?"

Leaning against the counter, he gave the wine in his glass a thoughtful swirl.

"Not everyone gets a dream. Some of us, I guess, are meant to go through this life without a destined mate. Mikhail doesn't have his yet, for instance. Maybe he never will. But ever since I was a kid I knew my bride was out there, somewhere, waiting for me. Maybe she was vamp, maybe human. Maybe she lived in Nepal, maybe down the block. Every woman I met, I asked myself, is she the one? The answer was always no. And I've never been one to settle."

Helena rubbed the gooseflesh off her arms. He sure could draw reactions from her, but they were always confused. She didn't know if that reasoning was noble and romantic or just some advanced form of commitment phobia. "When you came to my door…?"

"I knew. Even if Ma hadn't given me your name. I'd have known. Like I would know if a freight train ran me over."

"Why didn't I know?"

"Didn't you?"

"I don't know. It was more like you hypnotized me or something."

"I didn't. I haven't ever. Not with you." As he spoke, a dark flush crept across his cheekbones. "Not that I haven't been tempted."

"But you came here looking for love? How would you know it when you found it? Oh Alex. Love isn't a bolt from the blue. It takes practice, commitment, work. And when all is said and done, it's not worth it."

"You don't mean that."

"I do."

Helena's face was as set and grim as a hanging judge. Alex wanted to rip out Jeff's lungs. He tossed back the last of his wine, hiding his snarl in the glass as a tumult of Helena's bad memories washed over him.

It was time to stop talking about relationship stuff. He didn't think it was anything that needed lots of talk anyway. She was his. Sooner or later she'd realize it. That was the only way he could think and stay sane.

He cast around for some way to distract her. Maybe even make her smile. He loved her smile. Her real smile. She had a fake smile, but the real one wrinkled the bridge of her nose and made her eyes dance.

"You have a vampire kitchen, you know."

She blinked in surprise. "You mean I don't cook." Instead of smiling, she frowned suspiciously. "You think I should cook?"

Careful, Faustin. Here be dragons. He was going to tease her about her diet, but that was obviously a very bad idea. Fucking Jeff. It had something to do with him.

"No. But I think I should cook for you. I'd like to make dinner for you tonight before I leave, if you don't have plans, that is."

A very gratifying blush bloomed on her cheeks. His heart began to beat double time. It was saying hope, hope, hope. He knew she wanted him. She'd walked into his dream last night, or maybe it was the other way around, but whichever, it had been spectacular. It was the source of the tension that danced between them. But lust wasn't love. It wasn't even like. He knew that better than anyone.

"That's nice—but you don't have to."

"It would be fun. It's not something I ever get to do."

"You don't cook for your lovers?"

You are the only lover I've ever wanted to feed. But he couldn't say that without scaring her, or sounding like a jerk. Should he have fed his donors? He'd didn't know anyone who fed their donors. He gave them drinks at least, coffee in the morning. Sometimes. Christ, I am a jerk.

What he did say was true. "I never knew I could cook solid food before this morning." He laughed. "My luck may not hold, either. I'm not saying this is going to be great."

Still she looked suspicious. Talking with her was like negotiating a damn minefield.

"I'm staying in a hotel tonight, not matter what. Just so we're clear."

He watched her relax, and even though her smile was not big enough to wrinkle her nose, it was genuine. "Then let's have dinner."