9. Leo
Leo
Keep him talking, my brain shrieked, so loud I could barely hear his voice over it.
It was the only thing I could do. Keep him talking, and maybe he wouldn’t notice that I was deeply uncomfortable with . . . well, best not to even think about that, wasn’t it?
Thank fuck I’d moved the crushed basket into my lap, and maybe, just maybe, vampires didn’t have senses as good as wolves.
Not that I had any idea about that, obviously.
For all I knew, vampires were everything or nothing like every book and story I’d ever heard of.
Heck, when we’d gotten a motel room just outside San Francisco, Evie had found a television show with vampires.
Those vampires had been immune to the sun, though, so I doubted that held much truth.
Altair’s exposed shins were healing right before my eyes, but not ten minutes earlier, I’d watched them smoke and burn and flake.
He was decidedly not immune to the sun. Plus he’d implied even his terrifying-sounding sire hadn’t been immune, talking about the logistics of vampiric ocean travel in the nineteenth century.
Briefly, I wondered how Altair himself had succeeded, but something told me he wouldn’t want to explain that. It was a safe secret for him. A way he had used to escape, and talking to a near-stranger about that would be too much, far too fast.
He was like a skittish raccoon. He wanted what I had.
Wanted the food source, and maybe even the company.
Definitely the protection from the witches that I could represent.
But he’d asked for food and company and shelter before, and gotten hurt by the people he’d tried to trust, so now, he knew that running was always the safest course of action.
One wrong move, and he’d go skittering into the undergrowth, and I would never see him again.
Maybe we had only just met, but something deep and instinctual inside me knew that I couldn’t let that happen.
I had to keep him here, keep him talking, give him what he needed to survive, and more than that, slowly show him that I was safe.
I would help him. I would definitely never lock him in a cage and use him for .
. . heck, I didn’t even know what those awful witches might have done to him.
I knew some of what they’d done to Aleks, and my brother, while he was one of the strongest people I knew, had been indelibly marked by that experience.
An experience that had lasted years, not decades. Not close to two centuries.
“—and I know there’s a desert somewhere near here,” Altair was saying, his voice gone low and steady. I wondered if he was talking just to talk. If he thought he needed to soothe the savage beast, because I was a danger.
I was dangerous, that much was true. I wouldn’t try to convince him otherwise, because that would be a lie.
Not that I was afraid of lying. I was actually pretty good at lying, especially for a werewolf.
Again, I simply didn’t know what Altair’s vampiric abilities might be, and I didn’t want a poorly planned lie to make him think he couldn’t trust me.
Or the erection I was still trying to fight down.
“There is a desert,” I agreed. “Actually a lot of it. I’m not sure how you got through, like, Montana or Wyoming back in the day. There aren’t a lot of trees to hide under there.”
“There was a covered wagon,” he said, quietly, sedate and eyes distant, like he was back in that wagon.
“A kind family who were going west, who offered to help me. I”—his eyes ducked far away from me, and he wrapped his arms over his chest—“they thought I got sick while traveling, and offered to let me ride in their wagon.”
There was some shame in him for that situation, and I wondered if the family had ended up dead.
Well, of course they had, one way or another. It had happened so long ago that even if the family had survived, their great-grandchildren were dead by now.
Even if they’d died, though, I suspected that had been more the fault of the witches, not Altair.
After all, he’d been riding in their wagon.
Even if he’d been near-starving—which presumably he wasn’t, given that he’d been free at the time—killing the people who could actually move the wagon during the day would have been a terrible idea that probably would have resulted in his death.
And maybe letting people live out of self-preservation wasn’t honorable, or admirable, but it also wasn’t evil.
Besides, he was a vampire. Was it even possible for a vampire to have never killed anyone at all?
I was a wolf, so maybe I of all people had the proper point of view to understand that.
Sure, killing was never good, but people killed animals all the time to ensure their own survival.
I didn’t doubt they regularly killed each other for the same reason.
Morals weren’t gray, exactly, but they were .
. . less obvious than some people seemed to think. Less black and white and absolute.
I had killed Barry, after all. Hadn’t regretted it for a moment, or ever wished I hadn’t killed him. I was sad he’d made it necessary to choose that, that Grant had gathered his group and convinced them to die for him, but I wouldn’t take back what had happened to a single one of them.
Not that Aleks or Viktor ever talked to me about what had happened.
Even after killing Barry, they both seemed to think I was the very joke I’d made in my head that afternoon: little red riding hood, the innocent off trying to pick flowers in the woods, and I had indeed run across the big bad . . . vampire.
I couldn’t bring Altair back to the pack, I realized.
Even if I trusted him completely, which, well, I wasn’t that naive, my pack couldn’t be trusted to deal fairly with a vampire.
I suspected none of them knew any more about vampires than I did, and I’d learned the hard way in Russia that ignorance usually translated into fear, which was always followed by violence.
They didn’t understand vampires, so they would fear him, so they would hurt him.
Or he would hurt them trying to protect himself.
Altair was looking at me, his eyes narrowed, so I thought back a moment, trying to process what he’d been saying.
The family headed west. The fact that there was a desert nearby.
He’d been headed toward the gold rush, but I’d been to California, and it seemed like a bad idea for a vampire to go to such a beautiful, sunny place.
He needed somewhere with woods and rain and that sort of thing. Somewhere kind of like Idaho, honestly.
Sure, Alaska would give him close to six months of total darkness, but it would also give him six months of total light, which didn’t seem like a great trade. I wouldn’t want to be stuck completely inside half the year. Half the day seemed like a much better option.
I glanced over to the sunny section of the forest floor, which was almost entirely gone, and considered.
“There’s a cabin about half a mile off. One of our former alphas used to call it his hunting lodge.
Not that I think he ever hunted for the pack, but it was a place to go on his own, a little away from the pack. ”
Altair lifted a brow and . . . oh. Oh. He was .
. . he’d been beautiful before, but now, with a meal in him—don’t think about him biting your wrist—he was stunning.
His perfect unblemished skin was indeed a golden brown that felt warm even without sunlight.
His features were less sharp and hollow, filled out by . . . well, he looked perfect.
Like he belonged on the cover of a magazine, or in advertisements. I had literally never seen anyone so breathtaking in person before. And not half an hour earlier, he’d had his lips on my wrist. His teeth, burying themselves in—
No, bad Leo. Stop thinking about that.
I had to be the worst excuse for a werewolf ever born. What kind of wolf liked being bitten? That wasn’t normal at all. It was . . . it was sick. I was sick.
Altair was clearly considering me, head cocked to one side, and a queasy, slick feeling in my stomach said that he might leave. Might know that I was attracted to him and be disgusted and walk away.
Or he might stay and use me because of it.
Somehow, that seemed like a better option. If he stayed, even if it was just to use me for a convenient meal and to protect him from the witches, it meant he was still there. It meant I had time to show him I was more than a convenient meal.
It was the raccoon learning that I wasn’t just a source of food, but I would also offer him water, and sometimes, we could just sit together in the woods, and be . . . friends. Nap. Stare at the stars.
Evie still thought it was hilarious that I had a raccoon friend, and everyone else said it was wasteful and silly, but .
. . he was my friend. I called him Drew, because it was a name, and also, it sounded a little like the Russian word for friend, and when I saw him and called it, his little head always popped up and he came waddling toward me.
Altair was still staring at me, and I sighed.
I pushed up to my feet and held out a hand.
“I’ll take you there. We’ll see if it’s still livable.
If you need anything to stay there a while.
I can”—I reached out and braced against a tree when I got a little dizzy at standing up so quickly.
It might take me a minute to recover enough to feed him again.
I’d need to eat well for dinner, too. “It might be a bit, but I’ll see to it you’re fed. ”
He glanced around, frowning. “There are creatures in the woods.”
“No!” He jerked back at the insistence in my voice, and I paused and held up my hands, surrendering. “I have a . . . there’s a raccoon, Drew. I’d hate for him to end up a meal.”