“Blood?”
“Blood.”
He turns his head away from me.
“Any blood? Or specific blood.”
“It used to be any blood, but I haven’t been able to feed properly for…” Linton flaps the arm which lies next to him on the floor from side to side. “I don’t remember.”
“You haven’t been eatingat all?”
“No.” He returns his gaze to mine. “I…can’t.”
“You have to, Linton, or you’ll die.”
“I like it when you say my name,” he says, with the hint of a smile.
“You like it when I say Linton?” I ask, brushing my hands down his face and onto his shoulders where one wing sits like a cloak.
It is so, so soft, like a fluffy cloud and absolutely not what I was expecting.
“I like it.” He sighs. “I like you touching my wings too. It makes my spicket happy.”
“Your…spicket?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he hums, but doesn’t expand on what he means.
Could it be that Linton is delirious from lack of food? That so much of his strange behaviour, some of which I thought was perhaps related to alcohol or another narcotic, is simply a result of the fact he simply hasn’t been…feeding?
“Linton?”
He looks at me from under half-lidded eyes.
“Yes, Kaitlyn,” he says with another wet smile.
“Do the…creatures you feed on have to die for you to eat?” The moment I ask the question, I know there’s no going back, but I don’t want him to die, not in the least because he seems to want to protect me from the other horrors in the Yeavering. “I mean, could you take my blood?”
His eyes open wide, then he shakes his head.
“Most don’t even know I’ve been feeding.” He runs his dark tongue over the sharp fangs in his mouth. “I have venom. It makes feeding pleasurable.”
I try to get the image out of my head of my close to seven foot tall, ripped mothman creeping into people’s houses and biting them like a low-rent vampire.
“But you do generally ask permission, don’t you?”
The way Linton looks at me tells me all I need to know. He has absolutely been a low-rent vampire in the past. But in his head, as it doesn’t hurt anyone, he thinks it’s all okay.
Linton logic.
“But why haven’t you been feeding?”
“I dunno,” he grumbles. “I can’t.”
“You have to. After all, you’ve said I belong to you and that Tam Lin wants me…”. I leave the thought hanging in the air for a beat or two. “You can have some of my blood, if you want.”
I offer it because he hasn’t asked for it. I offer it because of the way his face lost all the hard edges only moments ago. I offer it because of the way he said my name when he came to.
Linton has, despite all his strangeness, done nothing to me other than kill some Redcaps and bring me to this inn.
