She mumbled into his shirt, “Stealing from people. Being a parasite.”
His hand stroked through her hair. “Then come to me when you are hungry, Jenny. I’ll feed you.”
She lifted her heavy head. “How will that work?”
“If I’ve fed recently enough, you’ll receive sustenance just like from any other.” He stroked a hand up and down her back. “I won’t mind.”
She protested, “It doesn’t solve the larger problem. What do others do?”
“You assume others have the same inhibitions,” he pointed out. “It’s something you get used to.”
“What if they don’t?” she said mulishly.
He grinned at her. “So impatient. We don’t have to eat the whole elephant at once. Be content with small bites. We will get there eventually. Ideally, your maker would teach you all this when you are turned, but I don’t think any of you young ones have had good teachers in anything.”
“No. Not at all. No one ever taught me,” she whispered. “They only hobbled me.”
Kendrick’s gaze darkened. His eyes flickered from her hand on his chest to her face, but to her relief, he did not ask. He simply said, “You know I would end your tormentor in a moment if you wished it.”
“We’re trying to start a new way for the Ossuary. As much as I would like to see Laurent dead, that wouldn’t be wise. He’s not the problem, really. It’s the blood bond that’s the problem.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How so?”
“Well, so many vampires are still chained by their blood bonds, like Elspeth. It still exists, for all that he isn’t ordering her around by it right now. He still could, and all his previous loathsome edicts stand. Is there a way to break it?”
“Time, or making a vampire yourself.”
“That’s all?” she mumbled, dropping her head to his shoulder again.
“All that I have heard.” His thumb rubbed down her arm comfortingly. “Sleep a bit, my dear heart. You’re not used to being awake.”
“I used to love the late afternoon,” she murmured, her gaze moving to the small ribbons of light that the curtains could not fully block. “The way the world looked with a patina of gold. I’d come home from school and do lessons at the table in my father’s study as he spoke to university students and grilled them on their vocabulary.” The days had been full of light and language, and the nights full of stories. Stories and love.
Her eyes fluttered closed.
“They only hobbled me.”
“I always hated it and hated having to do it.”
The words rang in Kendrick’s head long after Genevieve had subsided into a doze again, and he realized that what he saw as two separate things—her hatred of drinking blood, the only thing that could sustain them, and her traumatic and painful beginning as a vampire—were probably linked far more closely than he would have liked.
Whatever it was, her body remembered, and her mind did not. He recalled the way she had frozen when he had first confronted her outside his Ossuary rooms. An unexpected, unseen hold had sent her into a panic.
You’ve been entrusted with a treasure, he told himself.And now you must prove worthy of it. Don’t damage it at the first opportunity.
When the sunlight under the curtains dimmed and the sun had set nearly level with the horizon, Genevieve woke again, blinking eyes that flashed ruby.
“Hungry, love?” Kendrick asked, running a hand over her cheek.
She opened her mouth and then checked herself. “We need to complete the blood bond, don’t we?”
“That’s not what I asked. Are you hungry?”
She shot him a narrow look. “I suppose.”
“Do you always wake so grumpy, or are those the hunger pangs talking?”
Her mouth dropped open in wordless outrage, and so she did not react when he sat up in bed and pulled her along with him. “Drink from me,” he said.
