He hadn’t heard her move, but suddenly she was crouched beside him. “It’s the animal blood. You can’t have it. It isn’t compatible.”
He coughed, choked, spit. “Oh, God—Ow!—No kidding.”
Gently she pried the chicken from his fist and, holding one wing between her thumb and forefinger, deposited it in a muck bucket next to the horse stall.
He worked up the nerve to glance her way and was relieved to see she wasn’t laughing at him. “You couldn’t have told me about this animal thing?”
“You didn’t ask.”
Still on his hands and knees, he laughed sardonically. “Guess there are a lot of things I didn’t ask.”
She knelt next to him and dabbed the chicken blood from his lips with the hem of her T-shirt. “There’s still time to make up for that. But first you need to feed.”
She sat with her back against the wall and pulled him to her. He was too weak to resist. The barn spun around him like a gyroscope.
She lifted her T-shirt, but he brushed her hand away from her breast. “Wait, wait. One thing I have to ask first.”
She frowned down at him. “What?”
“Is it normal for me to get totally turned on when I drink your blood?”
“Very normal. Although you’ll learn you do have the ability to control it, if you want to.”
He thought about that a moment. “Like if I decide to take a nip from a ninety-year-old crone with the face of a weevil?”
“That would be a good time, yes.” He could tell she tried to suppress her smile, but it broke through.
He was still contemplative, though. “Is it…as good…for you, too?”
She brushed her hand through his hair. “Not as good as for you, at this point. But when you’re stronger, we’ll exchange blood, and then it will be.”
He nodded, feeling queer about contemplating a future with her. A future had never been in his plan. He was going to kill Garth, and then himself and Sue Ellen so that they could rest in peace. Wasn’t he?
He thought it would be simple. He would become a vampire, and he’d have super strength and use it to kill Garth.
Unfortunately things hadn’t worked out quite that way. He’d become a vampire, all right, but he was about as strong as a newborn lamb, and Garth was the big, bad wolf.
Obviously, he had some recalculating to do. Not tonight, though. Tonight, he needed to feed. He needed blood to quench the fire that threatened to consume him. He needed Déadre.
He rested his head on her shoulder and she beamed such a beatific smile down at him that this time, he extended a thumbnail and opened the wound on her breast himself.
The scent of fresh blood was like the smell of the ocean to a sailor. It cleansed him. Stirred him. His skin tingled and a low throb pulsed in his sex.
Lying next to her, he turned to his side and hooked one leg over her, rubbing with his calf, pressing himself into her hip. He smoothed his palm down the soft planes of her belly and under her waistband to the nest of curls between her legs.
She drew his head down with her hands, offering nourishment, offering her blood, but tonight he wouldn’t just take. He would give as good as he got.
As good and better.
“HOW long until I don’t have to feed so often?” Daniel asked.
Hand in hand, they walked on a footpath through the woods behind the farmhouse. Nocturnal eyes peeked at them from branches and scrub brush, then scurried away.
Déadre couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so at peace. When she’d still been mortal, maybe.
“It’s different for everyone,” she said. “But most of us are able to sustain ourselves for at least a day or two after the first couple of months.”
His face twisted. “Months?”
“In vampire years, a month is hardly the blink of an eye.”
“Vampire years. Is that kind of like doggie years?”
“Yeah, except a lot longer.”
“Hmmphh.”
The path ended at a pond polka-dotted by floating lilies.
Daniel skimmed a stone across the moonlit surface. “How often do you need blood?”
“Every few weeks or so. But it’s been a little longer this time.”
He had raised a rock for another throw, but he paused. “Am I hurting you by taking your blood when you haven’t fed?”
She shrugged, hoping he wouldn’t see the weariness in the gesture. “I’m a little weak, that’s all. I’ll feel better once we’re back in the city.”
In truth, she wished she never had to go back to the city. To face the Enforcer.
“Once you take a mortal’s blood,” he said, the words tinged with revulsion.
“I don’t kill my donors. I only take enough to sustain myself without harming them.”
“How do you do it?” He lifted his head. His green eyes looked black, bleak, under the quarter moon. “I tried. I was so desperate for blood, I wanted to go into that farmhouse, drink from whoever lived there, but I couldn’t. It made me sick to think about it.”
He sat down in the grass, pulled his knees up and hooked his arms around them.
She lowered herself next to him, mimicking his position, and grazed her fingertips over the nape of his neck, down his spine. “Eventually you’ll have to take blood from someone besides me.”
He stared out over the water for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to respond. That he wasn’t ready to face that reality. But finally he said quietly, “What if there was another way? Could you give up mortal blood? Would you?”
“What other way? Snapping the heads off chickens?”
He winced. “No, no animal blood. That’s a lesson I won’t forget.”
“Then there is no other way.” Daniel sighed, and got such a faraway look on his face that Déadre wondered where his thoughts had taken him. “Daniel?”
He stood and brushed himself off, then offered a hand to help her up. “We’d better get back. It’ll be dawn soon.”
Déadre’s own thoughts did some wandering on the way back to the farmhouse to collect the jacket she’d left in the barn. “Let’s don’t go back, Daniel. Back to Atlanta, I mean. We can sleep today in the storm shelter, then head out tomorrow night for wherever we want to go.”
She’d never thought about leaving her home city before. Vampires congregated in clans and to be separated from the clan was risky. They supported each other, watched each others’ backs. Clans tended to be wary of strangers, especially strange vampires. The clan in a new city wasn’t likely to welcome them with open arms.
More likely they would brand them as rogues, cut off their heads and bury them facedown.
She’d rather take her chances with a strange clan than with the Enforcer, though. She couldn’t go back to Atlanta and face the High Matron and her thug. She couldn’t take Daniel there.
Her excitement grew with every step. “California, maybe. I’ve always wanted to see the coast.”
“I can’t.”
“Or the mountains. What do you think about the mountains?”
At the back of the farmhouse, he stepped in front of her, stopped her with firm hands on her shoulders. “Déadre, I can’t. I have to go back to Atlanta.”
She jerked away. The goats in the pen against the barn bleated. The mommas ran back and forth across their corral, their babies at their heels. The cattle next to them joined the ruckus, mooing and snorting.
“Because some man stole your house and your car and your work,” she said bitterly, remembering his words from the rave club. “And you have to kill him.”
“Because he killed someone I care about. My…” His voice broke. “My fiancée.”
“Your what?”
“He’s not a man, Déadre. He’s a vampire. And he…he made her one, too.”
She shook her head, not believing any of this. “So you used me to make you a vampire so you could win her back?”
“I used you to make me a vampire so I could set her free. She is—was—sweet and gentle. She wouldn’t want to live like that. She wouldn’t want me to leave her a—”
“A what?” She raised her hands out to the sides. “A monster, like me?”
He didn’t answer her question. He straightened his back and looked her straight in the eye. “He’s a vampire. As a mortal I had no chance against him. He’s too strong. Too fast.”