“Okay… done,” I said as I pulled the now ruined coat off him. “Now… what about those healing abilities? Are those a myth too? Because you could definitely use them right now.”
Eric let out a long sigh and closed his eyes.
“So you know?” he asked, his head falling back until he looked at the ceiling.
“That you’re a vampire?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. I know.”
I mean, I hadn’t known for sure until he’d turned up at my doorstep and didn’t argue against me calling him one, but yeah. The cat was totally out of the bag now.
“Okay.” He nodded, then looked at me again. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”
I snorted. “Yeah. Not gonna lie, I’m not sure I’d have believed you.”
I might’ve just run screaming. I mean, that was what I’d done anyway. Minus the screaming part.
Fuck.
This was so messy.
“Soo… what about those healing abilities? You’re being purposefully evasive.”
Eric’s face brightened for a moment, the hint of a smile ghosting over his lips. But the next moment, his face was all serious again. Back to business.
“I…” he started, but stopped again to give me a pointed look. “I don’t want to scare you.”
“I’m not scared.”
Oddly enough, I really wasn’t.
Eric gave me another pointed look, but I just shrugged.
“Look. I hate to tell you this, but right now you’re neither scary nor imposing, or whatever. You look like a fucking lobster. Or aBritish dude who spent way too much time on a Spanish beach. Soo…”
He sighed.
“My healing abilities are good. Like if someone stabbed me, that wouldn’t be a problem. Even a gunshot wound wouldn’t. But sunlight is different.”
“Why?”
“Okay, maybe it’s not different. It’s the prolonged exposure. If I held my hand in the sunlight for like a second, then pulled it back, it’d heal just fine. But I ran here. Through the sun. So…”
“Your healing abilities are drained because your body kept trying to repair the damage while you kept adding more?”
“Basically.”
This stupid fucking idiot.
“Okay. So we need to replenish your energy for you to be able to start healing again, right?”
Eric gave a short nod.
“And that means…”
Eric cringed. “Blood.”
