Mackey could handle it. In control, saving lives with no desire to hunt them as prey. If he knew the truth about Tai… But he deserved to know. They all deserved to know.
“Hey, man, did I say something?” Mackey frowned.
Tai didn’t let himself look away, held Mackey’s frank gaze. “I’m a bloodfiend.”
The room pitched into absolute silence.
He looked around at all of them. Everyone gaped. Well, not everyone. Leslie looked surprised but mostly worried. Ryker’s eyebrows arched toward his hairline. Claire met Tai’s eyes and then turned a glare on the whole room as if daring them to judge him. As if their judgment would be wrong.
“I shouldn’t have accepted your hospitality without telling you.” Tai’s voice refused to rise above a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“Wait,” Nova said. “Isthisthe thing? The complicated story, the misunderstanding?”
Tai nodded. He’d flipped his plan on its head, told them before earning any trust at all. But the plan had been a sort of lie, taking advantage of their willingness to give him a chance. If honesty stole his chance, then…well, they weren’t to blame.
“Claire was opening a blood bar, and you’re a bloodfiend,” Logan said. “That’s why you backed out on her.”
Tai nodded again, all his words frozen.
“Whoa. When I tried to figure out what was wrong with you, treating her like that, I never once thoughtbloodfiend maybe.”
In Tai’s hand, the stem of his wine glass cracked, and then the crack ran upward, through the cup to the rim. Oddly, the last sip of his wine didn’t drip through, but he wouldn’t take the chance of staining the carpet, and anyway he couldn’t look at any of them now. He rose and took his glass to the kitchen, set it carefully in the sink. Meanwhile his girlfriend hissed at the whole room.
Or maybe just at Logan, who was now stammering. “Sorry, I just, I mean— Claire, stop, I said I was sorry.”
Claire joined Tai, watched him with eyes that still glittered bright purple. “Hey.”
Tai shook his head. “It’s fine. I’ll see you…um, later.”
“What?”
He looked up from his fixed stare at the cracked glass. “You don’t have to leave just because I do.”
Which he did, obviously.“No son of mine gets to keep a vile nature and still be my son.”
His father’s voice was an iron fist, squeezing his chest. He knew that voice lied, but in this moment, in this house with a whole lot of shocked, appalled,normalvampires, the voice sounded true. Tai darted to the front door, on a path straight toward his car and the drive home, but he nearly collided with multiple bodies that had darted with equal speed to block the door. Mackey stood there, Nova and Philippa, Ryker and Leslie. Then Logan joined them, and finally Claire crossed more slowly to stand at Tai’s side. She had let her friends make their point, knowing they would.
Tai shook his head. “I’m a bloodfiend.”
“We got that,” Logan said.
“So let me go.”
“Nah,” Mackey said.
“You don’t understand,” Tai said. “I’m not like you. I’m…” He latched a hand onto his neck.
Philippa stepped away from the group, away from the door. She set a hand on Tai’s shoulder, and just as he’d felt earlier, a wave of kindness crashed over him along with a sharp sense of being watched—no, being seen. He met her eyes and couldn’t look away, and somehow he knew she wasn’t lookingathim, butintohim.
“Have you ever slaked from a human, Tai?” she said quietly.
“No.”
Philippa nodded. Maybe for the benefit of the others, she said, “That’s the truth.”
Oh, of course. Only right they’d want to know he was safe before letting him leave. Tai took another step toward the door. “Now I’ll go.”
“Um, I think you missed something,” Logan said.
