And I am so very, very alone.
I remember Robert, loving him, how in many ways his love allowed me to sleep in peace for the first time since my hellish rebirth. This thing I feel inside me now, for Eilidh, this warmth brightly blooming within my soul, is something I haven’t felt since consigning my love to his tomb from which he would never arise.
Not even Lucius knows all of that about me, even though he knows what an evil bastard my sire was and no doubt suspects what I might have endured at his hands.
Something about Eilidh makes me want to open up to her. It’s said that shifters know who their true mates are.
Perhaps this could be the case for me, as well. Could I be so lucky a second time in my un-life?
Maybe if I can keep from scaring her off, I’ll be able to find out.
“But you’ve killed people?” she asks.
“I have.”
“Recently?”
Of course, she wishes to know this. Despite my reluctance to speak about it, she deserves answers. “Not to sound pedantic, but define recently. To me, it feels like World War II was only a few years ago.”
“I mean, you don’t kill for sport? For fun?”
“No. I never have done that. I’ve killed in battle and in self-defense. I’ve released people from suffering, and I’ve been an executioner for those deserving death. Not once have I ever killed for sport. Although, I would be lying if I said I never took pleasure in it.”
“Like when?”
I really didn’t mean for our first deeply intimate conversation to take such a dark turn, but I suppose it is inevitable if I wish to earn her trust. “Murderers. Rapists. Child abusers.”
She doesn’t look horrified by that admission, so I suppose it’s a good thing. “How’d you know they were guilty?”
“Well, you are literally the first human I haven’t been able to charm, so…” I shrug. “I would simply ask them to tell me the truth. If they were innocent, I did my best to help bring the truth to light and the guilty to justice. Countless times, I’ve hunted down the truly guilty and forced them to publicly admit their sins to exonerate the innocent and then face their own punishment.”
I chuckle. “Once, I even rescued a woman who was falsely accused of murder through witchcraft. I put her younger sister in the cell in her place. She’d poisoned her brother-in-law because she was jealous of her older sister’s true love. I deposited the innocent with the local priest, told him I was an angel, and the facts of the story—which I’d already gotten from the true murderess, obviously, and then sat back to watch.”
“She was exonerated?”
“Yes. They hung the guilty woman the next day, just after sunset, as the ‘angel’ ordered. No way was I missingthatone. Before they hung her, she actually confessed to several murders that others had already been brought to justice for. She wanted to ‘cleanse her soul.’” I take another sip of blood. “In that case, as you can imagine, I did thoroughly relish that justice was truly served.”
“Oh. That’s…I probably would have done the same thing.” She takes another bite of her dinner. “Did you ever torture anyone? Like, I mean, the bad kind of torture.NotBDSM.”
“Only someone deserving. And perhaps a handful of times. I don’t have a stomach for that kind of sadism, ironically enough. It’s something my sire used to berate me for, that I didn’t have bloodlust within me beyond sating my basic hunger. Brutality for brutality’s sake. Merely to sweeten the blood. If it wasn’t enjoyable to the person I was feeding from, I certainly couldn’t enjoy partaking of it when I fed from them. Unless, of course, they were cruel, and I was their retribution.”
“Doesn’t exactly sound like a bad thing.”
“I’d like to think it’s not.” I smile and touch a finger to my lips. “Shh. Don’t tell anyone I’m a big softy.”
She giggles. The sound makes me happily sigh. As I take another drink of blood, I realize I have now become a willing pet vampire to a very unusual human.
I hope she’s ready to learn what it’s like to be the focus of loving obsession.
* * *
Once we finish eatingaround eleven, I help her clean up the dishes and carry everything downstairs to the small kitchen they have on-site. They only serve things like appetizers, bar snacks—nothing complicated.
Augustus had been hovering around the back hallway near the door to the stairs. She whispers in his ear and then flashes me another smile.
The club is busy. Now that we’re down here and I’m paying attention, I realizehowbusy it is. I’m about to suggest we return to the office where it’s quieter, private, and we don’t have to raise our voices to have what I hope will be an intimate conversation, when she darts away and onto the crowded dance floor.
Apparently, her actions take Augustus by surprise because he blurs after her. As if by magick, the crowd parts, and there’s my blue-haired goddess with a male vampire face down on the dance floor, his right arm wrenched what looks painfully high, her knee planted in the small of his back, and…
