“He knew a vampire skilled enough to turn me, but Seth told me if I turned, I would be a danger to others. The vampire who could turn me wouldn’t be able to help me control my new...urges.” I shook my head, remembering the way Seth swirled the olive in his dry martini. Decked in a fitted striped suit with his slick hair, looking completely out of place in the dive called The Hairy Harbinger, I couldn’t tell if he was an angel or the devil.
Turned out it was the latter.
“But Seth said he could help me with that. If I did what he said, he’d make sure I didn’t hurt anyone.”
This time, Miranda swiped a hand over her face as she groaned.
“Yeah, I know,’ I said, flexing my shoulders. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Yadda yadda.”
What was done was done. There was no use going on about what a gullible dumbass I was. There were only consequences to deal with now.
“He told you to bite him and drink his blood after you turned,” she filled in the rest.
I didn’t mind skipping over the awkward part of the story where I met up with Seth and the vampire in a room at the Menaggio. Idiot that I was, I didn’t even realize that it was Seth’s hotel and he was a god.
Yet the whole thing felt eerie, wrong. Still, I had committed to my plan. I knew what I wanted, and I was going to get it. I knew it’d be painful, but I wasn’t prepared.
The vampire got a taste of my blood and instantly went berserk.
He tore my throat out with zero control while Seth looked on from his seat, legs crossed, watching like some kind of cuck.
As my neck was ravaged, no ability to scream, my blood gushing out from my jugular, I realized I’d only stupidly served myself up to be a quick meal for a vampire and this was the end.
Then I woke. Naked in silk sheets of a bed I didn’t know. Panic spiked through me with hard disorientation, though nothing beat under my chest.
More severe than that was a new, all-consuming thirst that threatened to consume me from the inside out.
Seth swept into the room in an open red paisley robe with black trim that billowed behind him. He only wore a pair of black boxers. For a man who appeared to be in his sixties, he still kept fit and groomed.
Him floating in the room, looking deliberately like a snack for a hungry vampire, was yet another red flag. But I couldn't process anything other than the thirst, burning me alive from the inside out. He cradled my head to his neck, cooing and encouraging me to drink. He’d take care of me, and in turn, I’d be his golden boy. His lucky charm.
The moment my fangs sank into a god, I was eternally clasped to him as a decorative item.
“Yeah, I did.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. “I drank his blood.”
Miranda sighed, leaning back on the couch. “I know we dealt with Seth before you were clued in on the supernatural shit, but Aaron, a blood-bond? You knew what that was. Why the hell would you agree to that?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t think it through.” Seth came to me when I was vulnerable, offering everything I wanted.
Even now, I wondered if I’d known Seth was a god at the first, would I have accepted his help? I’d like to think not. But I’d been so desperate to make myself better for Timothy, I might have made all the same dumb mistakes and ended up exactly where I was.
Immortal and bound to the wrong man.
“When Seth said he could help keep me from hurting others, it didn’t occur to me that he planned on doing it through a blood-bond where he could control me. I was a starving fledgling. Honestly, I think I would have tried to take a bite out of anyone who’d been nearby.” I ran a hand through my hair, the thought souring on my tongue as soon as I said it.
Miranda huffed again then pinched the bridge of her nose. “At least this is something we can easily fix.” She stood, her shoulders squared with resolve.
My eyebrows raised of their own accord. “Oh?”
She shot me a look like I was an idiot. “Yes. If you bite Timothy, a blood-bond with him would break the one you have with Seth.”
She was right. Now that she said it, I remembered something in the weird unwritten rule book of vampires that this was a thing.
If I drank the blood of another god, I would be bound to them instead.
As soon as the solution was presented, it dissolved, and I went flat. “That’s not an option.”
"The hell it isn't," Miranda said with force. “Cut the shit, Aaron. You missed Timothy, and you thought if you became immortal, he’d stop keeping you at arm’s length. That the two of you would have a real shot.”
