Things had changed since then. In the previous months, I’d been banned from leaving the mansion because aside from the two human omegas who lived there - Benji and Caleb - I was the only human who knew the truth: that a coven of vampires lived right in the heart of the city. When they realized I wasn’t going to spill their secret so easily, the vampires - the Tenebrae brothers - let me leave, and even opened a new medical clinic for me to apologize for all the trouble.
It was the nicest gesture anyone had ever done for me.
It shouldn’t have been possible for vampires to be so kind. After all, they were creatures that fed off the life essence of other living things. I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that they fed on blood. All three of us humans averted our eyes, so to speak. Or at least, they did until their half-vampire babies demanded blood while still in the womb. In fact, I was the one who gave the orders to drink blood, for the health of both the omega bearing the child, and the dhampir baby inside.
Maybe I should have been grossed out. Maybe a normal person would’ve been. But I wasn’t.
I wondered what that said about me.
A sudden burst of cold wind made me shiver and I pulled my jacket tighter. A stray thought wormed its way into mind - that, if I was a vampire, I would never get cold.
But that wasn’t going to happen. The Tenebrae brothers had made it very clear that they never intended to turn anybody. The process was simply too painful, and they refused to subject anyone to that, especially not their human omega mates.
But I’m not anyone’s mate,I thought.Where does that leave me?
I filed the curious thought away and continued walking. After a long day of working, I knew I should have been letting my brain rest instead of fantasizing about vampires.
As I came up to the alley shortcut, I paused, remembering how Margaret had stolen me away here. This was where it all started. The alley seemed like a tunnel to another world, one most humans would never get to see. The world of vampires.
Enough about vampires,I told myself.
I passed the threshold and stepped into the alley. Just as I began to wonder how the family of raccoons was doing, the sharp slice of wind caught my ear. But it wasn’t a windy night - it was completely calm. Dread crept up my spine. My heart began to beat faster. All I thought about was the night Margaret had abducted me. How she leapt down from the building and snuck up behind me. Kidnapped me.
But that wasn’t possible. She was dead now.
I spun around, looking for the source of the noise.
“Hello?” I called.
“Hi!”
I let out an embarrassing shriek, nearly leaping out of my skin at the voice behind me. It took a second to register who it belonged to, but it didn’t stop my heart from racing.
“Theo!” I cried.
In front of me, Theo grinned. Out of all the Tenebrae vampire brothers, he was the most unusual. He was an unusually small alpha, roughly the same height as me, and despite being obviously attractive, he didn’t exude the raw power of his other brothers, Pierce and Adriel. Maybe it was his young appearance. I knew he was changed less than two decades ago at the age of twenty, making him the youngest vampire in the Tenebrae coven. Well, the youngest pure vampire anyway, not counting the two half-vampire dhamphir girls, Lark and Luna.
“Did I scare you?” Theo asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh.” His face fell. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
“Where did you even come from?” I asked, baffled.
He pointed up towards the roof of the building. “I jumped down from there.”
I stared at him. “And you don’t think jumping down from a building constitutes sneaking up on someone?” I asked dryly.
“I guess so.” He put a finger to his lip in thought. His nails were normal now, not like the sharpened claws vampires acquired when they were fully enraged or otherwise emotional. “I sometimes still forget how fast I move.” He glanced behind my shoulder, down the alley, before meeting my eyes again. “Anyways, aren’t you glad to see me?”
He grinned wide, innocently baring his sharp fangs. He made no attempt to hide them from me. A mind-altering fog allowed the vampires to manipulate humans’ reality into perceiving what they wanted them to perceive, so a person who wasn’t aware of the existence of vampires would just think he had normal canine teeth. But Theo and the other vampires didn’t try to hide anything from me, not anymore. That ship had sailed when I was abducted and stuck in the coven’s mansion.
“I am,” I admitted, my lips twitching into a small smile of my own. “It’s been weird lately. Not seeing you guys all the time, I mean.”
Theo beamed at this. “Really?”
“Yeah, I mean, I spent months living at your mansion. I saw you and your family every day.” My smile fell a bit. “And now I only see you once in a while, except for check ups with the girls. Life’s just different now, I guess.”
