‘I’m not going to lie,’ I say, ‘that’s kind of hot.’
‘You fuckin’ bet it is,’ he rasps, dragging a finger down my neck until it settles in the hollow between my collarbones.
‘Do you kill people?’ I ask, and he stills. It’s a moment or two before he moves again, and when he does, he backs off enough that he can see my face, looking at me carefully, earnestly.
‘No,’ he says, and I can’t say why, but it feels like the truth.
I swallow. ‘Do you bite people?’
‘I have done.’ His hand goes to his jaw, rubbing at the stubble there. ‘Not for a while.’
‘Are you going to bite me?’
He studies me for a beat before he answers.
‘Not unless you ask me to.’
I fix him with a look, and it makes his serious expression crack, one corner of his mouth lifting in a soft little smile.
‘I take consent very seriously.’
I pull in a deep breath before I ask my next question.
‘If you do, will I become a vampire too?’
He shakes his head, though the pillow catches most of the movement. ‘Only if you ingest my blood as well,’ he says. I feel his hand trail over the side of my neck, grazing my hairline. ‘It’s never an accident, the way it happens. It’s deliberate. People either ask for it, or they have it done to them on purpose, usually violently.’
A shiver slips down my spine at that, fear and concern coming together at once. ‘How did it happen for you?’
‘Elias,’ he says, a weight to it that deepens the crease between his eyebrows. ‘I asked him. Begged him, actually. He was dead set against it.’
I frown. ‘Why?’
And then he takes a breath so deep I feel it move the entire bed. ‘My mum,’ he says simply, and for a moment I think he’s going to leave it at that. But after a while, he takes another, sharper breath and starts to speak again.
‘It was just after we got the confirmation of her diagnosis.’ One finger twirls a strand of hair close to my temple. ‘I hadn’t long found out about Elias being a vampire, and I was still in the stage where I was asking amillion questions.’ A hint of a smile creeps into his eyes. ‘Like you.’
I smile back, turning my head so that I can kiss his hand, silently urging him to continue.
‘Anyway, we were talking about immortality, and I asked Elias if becoming a vampire could reverse an existing health condition.’
‘Like Alzheimer’s,’ I say, as the realisation dawns on me, and he nods slowly.
‘But Elias is as old as the hills, and he didn’t remember exactly how it worked, and I didn’t want to take any chances, you know. I mean, it’s my mum. And I’d already lost my dad…’
‘So…’
‘So he punched me in the face and then he turned me, and we both watched the bloody lip he gave me like a pair of idiot hawks to see if it healed up before our eyes.’
I raise an eyebrow, and he does at least have the decency to look a little sheepish.
‘I know, Luce. Iknowhow stupid that sounds, but you have to remember that I was young then, still grieving my dad, and then facing the loss of everything about my mum that made her my mum. I wasdesperate.’ His mouth twists into a regretful smile. ‘Also, drunk.’
My nose wrinkles. ‘That tracks.’
‘Elias said that we needed a control for it to be a fair test, and so after my change, he punched me with his other fist, and the cut from that healed in thirty seconds. So our hypothesis was that vampirism does not cover pre-existing conditions.’ Green eyes blink mournfully at me. ‘Based on that, I couldn’t take the chance that my mum would be stuck in Alzheimer’s hell for all eternity.’
My heart falls for him, a lead weight in my chest. I should have known that there would be a reason behind it all, but his sacrifice almost brings me to tears.