Page 70 of Just the Pool Boy at Vampire Mansion

I curled my fingers into my palm. But the food looked so good. My mouth watered at the sight of the delicious morsels. They were small, the fancy kind where you get one bite and a cloth napkin. Dark little tarts with something glistening pooled in the middle. Figs split open and dripping. Pastries glazed until they shone like they’d been polished. A tray of something with a warm and rich sweet smell, that had my stomach climbing up my throat to get to them.

The longer I looked, the worse the wanting got, like the food was leaning toward me the same as I leaned toward it.

“But I want to,” I almost whined.

Bentley narrowed his eyes. “Or go ahead and stuff your face. What do I care?”

Jeremy handed me a glass of wine.

He stared, and looked as though he might keep on staring if I didn’t drink the wine this instant.

I took a sip, and his stance eased, shoulders relaxing. “I suppose you’re here about the failed attempt to kidnap Theo Witherborne. An attempt I presume you personally foiled, Owen. As the Witherbornes are not capable of devising how and why I took the measures I did.”

Oh, alright, if Jeremy was going to dive right in with the facts, that saved me trying to wrangle some natural-sounding small talk out of my head to warm things up between us.

“Then you admit it,” I said, taking another sip. The wine was good. Real good. Bubbly and sweet and thirst quenching, although weirdly dry too. I needed more of it, immediately.

“Yes, of course. I’ve nothing to hide, and you’re no threat.”

“Excuse you, but I’m a threat,” Bentley said, raising his hand.

“Hardly.” Jeremy’s smile was sympathetic, almost pitying. “Vampires have been defanged since coming out. You’re all more worried about public perception than your standing in the supernatural tiers.”

“There are tiers?” I asked. “Like a top five?”

Jeremy smiled. “Boy, you have no idea the world you’ve stumbled into.”

That was true. I hadn’t cared about vampires much until getting the pool gig at the Witherbornes’, and now there were splintery things leaping from pools to kidnap vampire heirs, and the pool itself had some kind of vibe I could dial into. A man had died, a girl with no name had appeared, and somehow I’d ended up in the middle of it. But the wine was good, so none of that mattered. So good . . . I sipped more.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” I suggested. “Then we’ll all be on the same page.”

“A grand idea.” Jeremy took my empty wine glass and handed me another. A small, barely noticeable voice in the back of my mind warned me not to drink, right as I was lifting the glass to my lips.

Bentley side-eyed me, which should have been a red flag in itself. When an unhinged vampire side-eyes you, it probably means you’re doing something stupid, or are about to.

“Where should we start?” Jeremy said. “Hm, perhaps when the vampires, fae, sprites, and all other non-humans decided my people, my beloved family, should be banished, sent away like naughty children.” His face began to change. Shadows gathered in the hollows of his cheeks and under his eyes. I blinked, and the hollows vanished. “That was their mistake. If they hadn’t done that, we certainly wouldn’t have had the need to retaliate, which led to us putting down roots here in the human realm, and opened our eyes to all the possibilities in this world. We don’t need our own kind when this human world is ripe and exposed for the picking.”

I glanced at Bentley. He shrugged. Neither of us had any idea what Jeremy was referring to. But at least he was talking. Maybe if he aired all his grievances, he’d be more open to not trying to kidnap Theo or messing with his vampire neighbors in future.

I tried to think how my therapist might have approached this conversation. “Tell me more about how you saw an opportunity during what must have been a terrible time.” Good. Then I added my own little twist. “How does your banished family relate to Theo exactly?”

“Ah yes, the Witherborne heir.” Jeremy made a low, grumbling sound in his throat. “Vampires in general are diabolical creatures. They do not decay, they do not age, they are in fact anti-aging. The living dead, as it were. Unnatural. But Theo Witherborne is special. He is the heir to an ancient bloodline, and he has yet to transition, which means his blood is pure and very much alive and exceedingly potent.”

“I think you’ll find I’m far more potent than my brother,” Bentley said. “One hundred percent more potent, in fact, but if you want the family dud, you do you.”

Jeremy and I both ignored Bentley’s poorly disguised sibling jealousy.

“You see, the human fools don’t know the goldmine they sit on,” Jeremy continued. “This world is rich and teeming with life, ready to be extracted, like juice from a peach.”

Interesting analogy. How was Jeremy going to extract life, exactly? What was he? Did he extract life from living things, perhaps in the same way vampires took blood? But he wasn’t a vampire.

There it was again, the hollowing in Jeremy’s face.

I dropped my gaze to my half-empty wine glass, then looked back at Jeremy. No, I was definitely seeing this. His skin had thinned, turned grayish, and shrunk around his cheekbones. That should probably have been alarming, but for some reason that likely had a lot to do with the suspicious wine, I wasn’t feeling much alarm. Or much of anything. Just thirsty.

I set the glass down on the table and frowned at it. Bad wine.

Bentley arched an eyebrow at me, then both eyebrows went up, scolding me for not listening to him. He said a lot of useless things. How was I supposed to know he’d been right about the wine?