Chapter 29 Kit #3
“You need blood,” Shaun said. He turned to Rake when he came back out into the hallway. “Go get a couple of people and bring them back. Maybe make it a few. We’ll need to feed.”
Rake’s eyebrows raised at the order, but he didn’t deny it.
Shaun stuck his wrist out to Kit. “Here.”
Kit blinked. “You’d let me feed from you?”
“Your flesh is melting. Of course you can feed from me.”
DJ knelt at Kit’s side. “You can suck on me, too.”
Kit rolled his head around to look at him. “You phrased it like that deliberately, didn’t you?”
“Obviously. It made you smile.”
Kit ran his tongue over his fangs, which had been peeking out from under his lip as he, true to DJ’s claim, smiled. Shaun waggled his fingers. “Feed,” he urged.
Kit took hold of Shaun’s arm and pulled his wrist to his mouth. He’d rarely fed from other vampires, and it didn’t compare to drinking from humans. No thudding pulse, for one thing. You had to pull the blood from the veins with force, and it was cooler than the warm blood of a mortal being.
Kit’s skin tingled as he drank. He hoped that meant the blood was working.
“Don’t drain them,” Rake warned, as he strode past fully dressed, then disappeared out the front door.
Shaun pulled his wrist back. Kit wiped a stray drop of blood with a finger and then put it into his mouth, before pulling it free with a pop. “Not bad.”
DJ scoffed. “Just wait till you get a bite of me. I’m mad tasty.”
Kit took the proffered wrist. DJ wasn’t wrong.
His blood was thicker than Shaun’s, with deeper undertones.
Nothing came close to Quin’s blood, however.
Even as Kit drank from DJ, his eyes were on the bedroom.
They needed to get back to the witches as soon as possible and ensure Lawrence was banished for good.
Kit wasn’t sure either of them would survive another possession.
“Your skin is looking better already,” Shaun said.
Kit let DJ go and inspected his arms. He’d skipped a couple of healing stages, most of it now looking like a surface-level burn of the sort that pasty Scottish people got whilst on holiday in Spain. “Thank you,” Kit mumbled.
“Any time,” Shaun said, shooting him a soft smile that made Kit’s insides mushy.
“Group hug?” DJ asked.
Kit’s instinct was to refuse, but he couldn’t muster a retort. “If you must,” he said primly.
DJ chuckled. “It’s for you, you dolt.”
DJ pulled him into a bear hug, careful of Kit’s arms. Shaun joined in from the other side, and whilst Kit would never voice it out loud, the comfort and care from the two of them at that moment was something he never recalled before.
It was different than to how he felt with Quin, but important all the same.
The sound of the door had them breaking apart. They turned as one to watch as Rake came in, trailed by three white guys in their twenties, all wearing some variation of tracksuit. They looked like they’d coordinated.
“Sampling some of the local cuisine, are we?” Shaun said.
Rake nodded curtly. “Dig in. I compelled them into thinking I invited them here for a party.”
“A dinner party,” DJ said with a grin. “They just didn’t expect to be on the menu.”
The men wore matching glazed expressions, no idea that a group of immortal vampires were making jokes at their expense. None of them had any significant appeal to Kit, but he pointed at the one who smelled the best. “I want that one.”
Shaun and DJ started a game of rock, paper, scissors over who would get the first pick of the other two men.
Kit left them to it, and made quick work of feeding, his underlying hunger driving him more than any genuine desire to taste the man.
It was a chore compared to the pleasure of feeding from Quin, but Kit needed the blood to stimulate his healing.
Once he was full, Rake nodded at him. “Go lie down,” he said. “I’ll deal with them.”
Kit shot him a grateful smile and went into the bedroom. He sat down on the end of the bed, parked next to Quin’s feet. Kit took care with unlacing Quin’s shoes and slipping them off, then began to shimmy his damp jeans off.
One of Quin’s pockets bulged as Kit pulled the trousers down. Thinking that it was Quin’s phone, Kit didn’t question removing it. That was, until he pulled out a tiny velvet-covered box. In his haste, Kit almost dropped it.
“Oh, shit,” he gasped.
Shaun was at the doorway in a second. “Everything all…what’s that?” he asked, gaze homing in on the box.
Kit shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“I mean, in a box like that, there’s usually only one thing.”
“Uh-huh.”
Shaun was silent for a few seconds. “Are you going to open it?”
“No! What if it’s not for me?”
Shaun rolled his eyes. “Who else is it going to be for?”
“What if it’s not what we think it is?”
“What else is it gonna be?”
“What if—”
“Kit, I swear to god, open that box or I’ll do it for you.”
Kit held the box to his chest. “Don’t you dare.”
Shaun smirked. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Kit sat and stared at the box in his hands, unable to think beyond his fear of what it might hold, and what that might mean.
If it was what he thought it was, it wasn’t an option he’d ever considered for himself.
It hadn’t even been legal to be gay in Scotland until he was a teenager.
It was something to be hidden, a dirty secret, a shameful thing.
Kit’s desires had been illegal, and then his existence had been snuffed out. As a vampire, it was an impossibility. And yet, he held the box in his hands. His throat went tight and hot as he flipped the lid open.
The ring was perfect. A silver, slim band with a tiny purple-blue stone in the centre. It appeared delicate, but when he took it out, it felt sturdier than it looked.
It probably wasn’t the done thing to just slip it onto your finger, but Kit didn’t care. He put it on—it was perhaps a size too big—and stared at it for an unknowable length of time.
He whispered one word into the silence of the room.
“Yes.”