Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter
Thirty-Five
Lara and I had our February date the week before Valentine’s Day.
Which was Thomas’s birthday.
We were sitting in a fine restaurant where the menu was all in French on the Near North Side, opening after months of having no power.
My French, a relic of my time in the public educational system, is comme ci, comme ca, at my very best. I was wearing a casual grey suit with a midnight blue shirt and no tie, because I had decided I wasn’t going to bring the garrote to my own assassination, if that’s how the evening decided to go.
Lara was stunning in a white skirt suit with a midnight blue shirt that matched mine.
The place was empty except for us and minimal staff. Lara had called it a soft open.
“Boeuf means beef, right?” I asked, peering at the menu. “Is that a steak?”
Lara was watching me with amused pale blue eyes. “Would you mind very much if I ordered for you?”
I narrowed my eyes. “It’s not going to be snails, is it?”
Her mouth quirked at the corner. “Don’t you enjoy trying new things?”
“As a trend, no,” I said. “New things have been a little rough on me, ever since”—I paused, musing—“since my old place burned down, really.”
“As I understand it,” Lara said, “that’s around when you got involved with Mab.”
“Probably the least destructive option I had at the time,” I said. “And it’s also when you arranged for that ship to come by after Chichén Itzá. Saved Molly’s life.”
She inclined her head slightly. “Wine?”
“Water, for me, but feel free.”
“Mmm,” she said, her eyes crinkling. “Perhaps I should keep a clear head.”
“Hah,” I replied. I drew in a breath and considered her. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s see what happens. I would like it if you ordered for me.”
“Excellent,” she said. She raised a hand, summoning the waiter instantly, and spoke to him in liquid, native-level French. He replied in the same language, and she said something that made him laugh before he departed.
“Your eyes are paler than usual,” I noted.
Lara focused her eyes on me for a moment, with an intensity that I could all but feel on my skin. Then she cleared her throat, looked aside, and picked up her glass of water. “I’ve not fed since New Year’s Eve.”
Meaning that she hadn’t fed in over a month. Which probably meant something. But I didn’t know enough about specifics to understand what, exactly.
“Um,” I said. “How does that work, exactly? I mean, is that a long time? Not much time? I’ve got no idea what the logistics are like.”
She took a sip of water and set it aside.
“It varies from individual to individual, based mainly on how much discipline and restraint one has developed. For me, absent other factors such as major metropolitan battles, I tend to feed once or twice a week. My sisters on most days. My father”—her face twisted—“would do so as a ritual once a year or so.”
I studied her face. “That bothers you,” I said. “Why?”
“Waiting so long between feedings essentially guaranteed the subject would die or be rendered a vegetable,” Lara said. “Even in his restraint, he is a flawlessly selfish machine.”
“Huh,” I said. “So, feeding every day is less destructive to the, ah, subject.”
“Daily instinctive feedings are smaller bites, if you want to think of it that way,” she said. “Though there are few humans who could withstand that over time without considerable mental damage.”
I thought of Halloween and had to work not to squirm. “Do they heal from it?”
“Over time, yes,” Lara said. “Some faster than others. The youthful more quickly than otherwise. The healthy more swiftly than the sickly.”
“And you get hungry again based on how much supernatural vampire stuff you do. Right?”
“Like anything else, when a Hunger is exercised, it requires more sustenance,” Lara said.
“I find it difficult to…maintain a healthy diet, feeding on a daily basis. I am discriminatory in who I will feed upon—they should be physically and mentally healthy. By spreading out my feedings, I am able to remain discriminatory with less risk to a more exclusive pool of subjects.”
“But you haven’t fed in five weeks,” I said. “And your eyes are still blue.”
Lara looked down at her glass of water, and her cheeks turned the faintest shade of pink. “Ah. Yes. The…energy intake from the spell was…” She shook her head a little, searching for words.
“Filling?” I suggested.
“Vital,” she said. “In the original sense. The sense of being filled with life. Like food so rich, you feel stuffed for days…” Her voice trailed off and she bit her lip, then covered up the small moment of vulnerability by sipping from her glass of water.
Magic was, in many ways, the raw energy of life, of creation.
Wizards had particularly vital life forces as a result of constantly working with such energies.
Maybe there was less difference between them than I’d always heard.
The White Court fed upon vital life energy.
Maybe, given the situation Lara had been in, her Hunger had fed on raw magical power.
Or maybe it was about me—the whole starborn thing was still a wild card.
Maybe it was my magic, specifically, that the Outsider had been in tune with enough to feed upon.
Lara cleared her throat, inhaled, and composed herself. “Speaking of which, what have you found about helping Thomas?”
I frowned at her for a long moment, then focused my eyes on nothing in particular, thinking. She tilted her head after a moment, and I held up a couple of fingers, asking for time. She folded her hands and focused on me, waiting.
“If what I did for you pacified the Hunger,” I said slowly, “it should do the same for Thomas, shouldn’t it?”
She blinked. “Was that not the plan?”
“It’s trying to kill him,” I said. “The plan was to cut it out of him.”
Her pale blue eyes widened. “That would…He’d…”
“Be just a guy,” I said quietly.
Lara took a slow breath through her mouth. “Never to feel Hunger again,” she said quietly. She shook her head. “How would…I can’t even imagine how much his life would change. Empty night.”
“Change good? Change bad?”
“I suppose that would depend a great deal on one’s attitude,” she said. Her eyes went distant. “Inari and her husband seem happy. She’s had three children.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked, finding myself smiling. Man, that case had been a long time ago. “Good for them.”
“But she lives a world away,” Lara said. “Honestly. I’m not sure you could appreciate it.”
“It’s like she left the Mafia,” I said. “I got kicked out of a gang recently myself.”
She blinked at me and gave me a rueful smile. “I suppose you did. You’re perceptive for someone so…”
“Manly?” I suggested. “Tall? Scarred?”
She laughed. “Young,” she said. “From what I’ve seen, it takes a lifetime to learn to see some things.” Her voice went dry. “For some people, more.”
“I’ve had to learn a lot the last few years.” I frowned. “Is it possible to, I don’t know, force-feed his Hunger?”
Lara considered the question grimly. “It wouldn’t be like dealing with mine was.
His Hunger is not in the same state of restraint and balance as mine.
It is berserk with need and blind to any food but Thomas’s life force.
” She frowned. “And his Hunger is larger and stronger than mine. By a considerable margin.”
“How much bigger and stronger are we talking?” I asked.
Lara spread her hands helplessly. “There is no system of weights and measures that applies. If he’d not been with Justine all this time, feeding more or less freely from her, and instead had been forced to develop more discipline and restraint, he’d likely be one of the most powerful of our kind.
” She sighed. “But he seemed so happy. I couldn’t bring myself to do what Father would have done. ”
“Get rid of Justine,” I said.
“Mmmm.”
“So we’ve got no way to know if I can get his Hunger pacified,” I said. “I am sure I can cut it out. If I’m not exhausted from trying to feed the thing instead.”
“A difficult question of balance,” Lara said, nodding. She frowned, looking down. “And…there is an additional concern.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“It could be,” she began slowly, “that this kind of…um.” She paused, her expression faintly annoyed. “I’m sorry. I find it’s very awkward to be discussing these kinds of particulars with someone who isn’t in the Court. I haven’t felt this way since I was quite young.”
“It’s been centuries since you felt awkward?” I asked.
She lifted her brows and spread her pale hands.
Her nails were silver. “When you…fed me, it was intense. As if…what I felt before when feeding had been coming through a filter. Or as if I’d been sipping through a tiny straw.
And suddenly there were no restraints and…
” She stared at the table for a moment, her eyes flickering brighter.
“It was a formidable experience. I am not sure in his condition that such a thing would be good for him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“This process, the transfer of energy, is more complicated than providing someone with food, at the end of the day. If it was a simple transference, I would have been able to help him on the boat on the way to the island.”
“Explain it to me,” I said quietly. Lara as a cool and remote icon was attractive to a distracting degree. Lara feeling awkward and struggling to communicate made her…
Much, much more…dangerous.
I should always bear that in mind.
I folded my hands to keep them from doing anything inadvisable.
Lara thought about it for a moment, then said, “Imagine the prisoners from concentration camps in the Second World War. Emaciated. Starving. Dying. Barely living skeletons. You couldn’t just drop a five-course meal in front of them after so much time with so little food.
The shock to their system could kill them.
That’s the situation Thomas and his Hunger are in.
Even if you could feed them, it might do tremendous harm to Thomas. Or to the Hunger.”