Maris will feel the effect of the pills but she’ll also feel my bite. Both will have the same effect of putting her under. It’s a dance I played with patients when I found a particular human with better than average blood. My blood heals wounds, vampirebites included. There won’t be a sign of me tasting her when I’m done and if she remembers me feeding it’ll all just come off as a dream.
“Okay,” Maris whispers. Her eyes shift past me to look up at the seashell above her. “Sometimes I wonder what she would think of me.”
“Who? Isla?”
She nods. “Yes. I don’t think she would be very impressed by the current state of affairs.”
That makes me crack a wry smile. “And what affairs would those be?”
Her eyes come to me. “My life. The newspaper. It’s dying. This house.” Maris’ voice is getting sleepier, her words coming slower. I can hear her start to drift off the longer she speaks, “I feel like I keep trying to repair things but it’s no use. It all keeps falling apart. A-and I-I’m not a good person, Julian,” she ends on a yawn.
She’s right. She’s not.
“Being good is boring,” I tell her.
She gives me a sleepy smile. “Yeah…that’s true. Boring people suck. I never…thought I would still be here.”
I reach out and stroke the side of her face. I catch a lock of her dark hair and twirl it around my finger. “Be where, Maris?”
“This…town. I was going to…move away. I was going to…see the world.”
“And be famous?” I ask. It’s the same story I’ve heard from any small town would-be debutantes, because it’s easy to see that Maris is as high class in Vesper Point as anyone could hope to be, minus her murderous hermit ways, that never met her potential. The ones too scared to actually be uncomfortable. It surprises me that Maris is one of them.
“No…famous people are idiots.” She makes a face and turns her face into my touch. “I was going…to see…see…the world. Die somewhere new.”
Once again, Maris has completely and utterly captivated me with her answer. “How the fuck do you keep doing this?” I whisper to her but Maris doesn’t answer me. She’s asleep. I scrub a hand over my face and let out a deep, resigned sigh. Even if Maris was awake to answer me she wouldn’t be able to. She doesn’t know what she’s doing to me any more than I fucking understand why it’s working.
I move closer to Maris and look her over. She’s pretty when she’s asleep. She’s beautiful when she’s awake, but now it’s softer. Pretty. Like all humans do, Maris looks younger when she’s asleep. Her eyelashes flutter. They’re so long that they fan out across her pale skin and brush the top of her cheeks. Maris’ lips part and she sighs, that soft sound of breath has me leaning in close to her. I slide her hair back from her neck, one hand at the back of her head and pause to take her in. She’s lovely, the veins under her skin singing to me. I can see them, an intricate roadmap of lines beneath Maris’ skin that beg me to taste them, to possess them. Each one is a beautiful path for me to follow. I shift Maris in my arms and the pliant woman turns in her sleep to nestle closer.
She wants this.
It’s a line that all vampires trot out when they have a human they truly desire. One they haven’t made a Thrall because the pleasure of their company is more intoxicating than mindless obedience could ever hope to be. I rolled my eyes when I heard the vampires insist on it even though I could tell their human was just in it for the chance of becoming a vampire. Delusional. That’s what I called them. I’d never want a human, I’d never take one and swear they belonged to me, or find my pleasure and entertainment in their existence.
But here I am, holding Maris like she’s the most precious, delicate being on the face of this fucking planet while I drop fang and wax poetic about her fucking veins. I lean closer, fingers stroking the side of her neck where I feel her pulse the strongest.
Ba-dump. Ba-dump.
It’s music to my ears, a fucking symphony. I might have just fed on the padre but while he was fucking surprisingly delicious, the feed was driven by pettiness, a definite moment of me acting out at being forced into this small town because my maker fucked me over…again. Call me old-fashioned but betrayal from a maker brings my idiot teen to the surface. Maris is different.
Maris is because I want her. The blood is just a benefit. At first I only planned to give her mine to speed up the healing. She’ll wake up tomorrow fresh as a daisy because of my blood. It’s a trick I used on patients that needed more care, the ones that were about to keel over and were decent enough. Even though I’m a soulless demon, there’s a line to how much suffering I’ll watch before I decide to intervene.
Maris has been mine since she stumbled into the confessional booth last night.
I lift Maris and move into her ridiculous seashell bed with her and ease her into my lap. Maris is out cold. The sleeping pills are effective but I’m sure she’s also just that exhausted. Murder is tough work, I should know. A quick slip of my fang along my wrist is all it takes before I open Maris’ mouth and offer her my blood. I hold it over her mouth and squeeze my fist to force my sluggish veins to work faster. Like all vampires, my heart beats at a glacier pace and it takes some coaxing to get my blood moving. A drop hits her tongue and she sucks in a sharp breath. For a moment I think she’s going to open her eyes.
“Fuck.”
I freeze and watch her, waiting for her to move or open her eyes. I’ll have to glamour her then. I wait another secondbut thankfully she doesn’t open her eyes. Instead, Maris moves closer to me, she turns her body into me and curls close like she knows I’m there. I have to nudge her onto her back to make sure I don’t get any blood anywhere other than inside of her. One drop at a time I feed her until I’m sure she’s swallowed enough. By the time I lick my wrist to close the wound, Maris' wounds are healing. They’re not entirely healed but her black eye has all but vanished and her split lip is gone.
She’s prettier when her face isn’t beat to shit.
I look her over for another second. With my blood in her system she won’t wake up. Vampire blood relaxes humans, it’s an aphrodisiac to some, but mostly it makes them feel drunk. She’ll sleep well.
I lift Maris in my arms and when she scoots in closer to me, I let her. She nuzzles her face against my chest and lets out a contented sigh when I pull her closer. See, my idiot vampire brain tells me—she wants this, even in her sleep. She wants you.
“She’s just touch-starved, that’s all,” I whisper but still no human has reached for me like this. She’s like a moth to a flame. I stroke her hair for a moment and lean in to lick the side of her neck. Fuck. The second I feel her heat, feel the beat of her pulse against my lips, I almost bite down. I don’t though. I’ll rip her throat out with how keyed up I am.
“Do not kill her,” I order myself, like I did when I was young. “Under no conditions.”
