Groping a blind hand up and behind my shoulder, I grabbed the offending device.
“Breakfast?” wheezed through the line before I could growl my displeasure.
“William.” I sighed. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Breakfast,” he said in a confident answer. I hung up. Then, pulled the phone back off its cradle and left it lying on the nightstand.
I’d earned a few more hours at least, a bone-deep weariness pulling me back into sleep.
What seemed like moments later, there was a loud, insistent knocking on the door.
“Go away.”
But the knocking persisted, louder and more insistent than before, like a stampede of armored elephants thundered across a cement field. I transported myself from my coffin to the door in less than a human blink, flinging the door wide and glaring down at the fangling with his silver service tray.
“Breakfast.”
I put an arm out, blocking his entry. “Before you come in here with your infernal breakfast, you must prove you can say at minimum three other words.”
He squinted at me, wan face wrinkling in thought. He held up a few fingers, ticking the count silently before flashing me a fanged grin. “I brought toast, too.”
William pushed past me, feet hovering just above the ground as he set the tray on the coffee table. He whipped the cover off with a flourish, revealing a strange array beneath.
There was a tea service, complete with identical cubes of sugar, thick cream, and thin steam slipping from the pot’s spout. He’d also brought toast, as promised, a slab of butter slipping in a greasy pool down the front, and there, in the middle, was a promising soup bowl filled nearly to the brim with blood.
I sat with a tired groan on the sofa, picking up the bowl and bringing it to my lips, all too aware of William staring. It was still warm, and I closed my eyes in contentment, anticipating that first, revitalizing sip.
Instead, a taste like sewer filth seeped over my tongue and down my throat. I sputtered and coughed, spewing the toxic mess across the table and over William’s work uniform. “Whatis this?” My voice was more animal than human, my very core vibrating with rage.
“Rat,” William said with glee, shoulders straight, chest puffed. “Caught them myself.”
Well, at least we were up to a full fourdifferentwords every time now.
“When I requested my meals from a live supply, I did not mean fromrodents.” My stomach threatened to empty, twisting on itself in painful clenches.
“What, then?” Confusion pulled his proud grin down at the corners.
“Human, you . . . ” I let the insult sizzle on my tongue, swallowing it before it could find its target. “Human. Human is preferred.”
“Billy said—”
“Billy isn’t here. I am here.”
“We have hospital bags . . . ?” William’s unsaid question dangled between us.
I waved him away with an exhausted gesture. “Alright then. Bring me that.” As the fangling turned to go, a sudden thought had me stopping him again. “Tell the others our first lesson will begin early. Meet me in the lobby at eleven.”
It was time to teach the nest how to properly hunt.
As if the fates themselves were conspiring against me this evening, my cell rang as soon as William clicked the door closed.
“What,” I hissed in answer.
“Good evening to you, too, friend.” Billy’s cheery voice lilted through the phone. He’d been turned in Ashbourne some two hundred years ago and chose to maintain his accent. My mind flashed briefly to the punishing boots in my ribs that night in Boston, angry, stilted American voices telling me to go back to my own country, not knowing I’d helped to found what they claimed as theirs. They thought I was just another Italian trying to steal their life from under them, not stopping to consider the oppression we all suffered before the invention of labor unions.
Not for the first time, I wondered what my long life could’ve been had I come from a colonizing country.
“Pat?” Billy asked again, dragging me back to the present.
