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“I’ll teach you.”
Carver couldn’t resist any longer. Lifting his head, he peered up at Dante, shocked to see that the older vampire was smiling down at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you smiling?” Carver challenged.
“Because I like looking at you? I think you are adorable.”
“And a complete loser.” What was he going to tell Owen and Kenny.
“Because you couldn’t stab me in the heart with your little knife?”
“It’s not that little!” And it was sharp as fuck! Kenny had made sure. They’d practiced stabbing fruit and even a giant frozen ham to make sure the blade didn’t break off. Stabbing food was easier than a person or vampire, that was for damn sure.
“It’s a very cute dagger,” Dante told him. He kissed the top of Carver’s head, then nuzzled him.
Carver squirmed closer. ‘Keep talking and I might just get up the nerve to stab you after all.”
“Shh, you don’t want to stab me.”
He really didn’t. But why was Dante taking this so well? Tucking his chin to his chest, Carver had to ask. “Why aren’t you mad?”
There was amusement in Dante’s tone as he answered. “You wouldn’t have been able to kill me, baby. I’m over six hundred years old. I’m the clan leader. There is also a bond between us that has been growing since I first decided that you were mine. I was safe.”
That wasn’t fair at all! “What bond?”
Dante cupped his face, forcing Carver to look up at him again. “It’s like the bond that forms when I accept someone into my clan. I can start the process and once they take their place with us, the connection is complete. It is how I watch over my people.”
And he just what, decided Carver would be part of his clan? “You didn’t ask me.”
“I didn’t have to,” Dante said. “The bond doesn’t force anything. If you didn’t want to belong to me, then it wouldn’t form.”
“So we’re bonded? You’re claiming me as part of your clan?”
Dante chuckled. “No, little one. I’ve claimed you as so much more than a member of my clan. I claimed you as my own.”
This was not supposed to make Carver happy. He definitely needed to push those feelings down. “This complicates things.”
“Does it though?” Dante asked. “All you have to do is trust me, confide in me, and I’ll help you figure everything out. Didn’t I promise to teach you our ways?”
“What if I don’t want to learn your ways?” Anger bubbled up inside him. “What if I don’t want to be like this! Maybe I…maybe I hate this life and don’t want to do it anymore!”
Carver was shocked to hear the words he was screaming. He hadn’t said those words out loud to anyone. Not even Owen or Kenny. Or himself. He’d had a plan beyond the one that he’d worked up with Owen and Kenny.
As soon as Carver and his best friends rid the world of the monsters, Carver had planned in joining them in hell.
9
Dante
Finally they were getting somewhere.
Lifting Carver up, Dante placed his precious little one in his lap. “Then you’ll let me help you through these feelings. I have experience with them, after all. It might have been a long time ago, but I know being turned in hard. Especially being turned against your will. I have worked through the feelings myself and helped members of the clan do the same. I told you that you weren’t alone and I meant it.”
Carver sniffed. “How do you know I was turned against my will?”
“It wasn’t hard to figure out. I expected an angry sire to show up the first night, demanding that I turn you over to them. When that didn’t happen, I started to suspect that you might not have a sire and that is why I found you starving and on the verge of collapse.”
