Chapter 13 #2
“Probably. There’s a whole shelf at Harbor Books that agrees with you.
I read three books online this morning at six because I couldn’t sleep, and one of them spent eighty pages on documented attacks, one spent considerably more time than necessary on blood rituals, and the third had an entire chapter on vampire seduction that I am choosing not to discuss with you. ”
“Wise.”
“I didn’t say I skipped it.”
His eyes close briefly, and I grin again.
“Penny.”
“I’m gathering information.”
“You are enjoying yourself.”
“I can do both things.”
His gaze rests on me for a moment, and some of the tension in his shoulders finally loosens.
“The blood. In there.” I nod at the door. “Where does that come from? Because I’ve watched you at six dinner parties and you have never once bitten anyone, and I would have noticed.”
Now he really looks at me, and I understand I’ve stumbled onto the thing that matters.
“That is the part the books get most wrong,” he says.
“They want the biting. It sells.” He glances at the walk-in door and then back at me.
“I don’t feed from people. Not as a rule.
There is a supply, a discreet one, arranged the way anything is arranged when you have money and centuries to build the right acquaintances.
It’s clean. It’s regular. It costs no one anything they’ll miss.
” He turns his hands over on the table, an old and courtly gesture.
“I decided a very long time ago that I would not build a life on frightening people to stay alive. It’s the one decision I’ve never regretted. ”
“You buy blood bank blood.”
“Effectively.”
“Like a very upsetting Blue Apron.”
He blinks. An actual laugh, low and startled out of him, and I think it may be the first completely unguarded sound I’ve ever heard the man make.
“Yes,” he says, recovering. “Like a very upsetting Blue Apron.”
“So you can feed from people. You just don’t.”
“I can.” The dryness comes back over his face, but there’s something more careful underneath it now, and I’ve learned to watch for the careful. “When I must. When I’m injured, or when it’s been too long. It’s not something I do at dinner parties. It’s not something I do lightly at all.”
“Does it hurt?” The question is out before I’ve cleared it with any responsible part of my brain. “When you… Being bitten. Does it hurt the person?”
He goes still in a new way. It’s the way he went still the night of the storm, when I looked at his mouth and he noticed me looking.
“No,” he says quietly. “Not the way you’re imagining. It’s not painful. It’s the opposite of painful, if it’s done with any care at all. Which is precisely why I’m careful about when I do it.”
“The opposite of painful.”
“Penny.”
“I’m just gathering information.”
“You are gathering a very specific kind of information.” The red comes up in his eyes, just slightly. “And you’re doing it in my kitchen, at night, wearing that.”
I look down at myself. I’m wearing jeans and one of my good soft sweaters, the deep green one, and I chose it this morning at six a.m. with a copy of a vampire book open on my lap, so I’m going to have to be honest with myself about my own motives at some point. Just not right now.
“So the opposite of painful,” I say, “is something you could describe in more detail.”
“It is something I am choosing not to describe in more detail,” he says, “because I have spent four hundred years learning restraint, and I have learned in the last few weeks that all of it was practice for you.”
My heart skips a beat, and I remember exactly who’s listening.
“Can I see them?”
He knows immediately what I mean.
“Penny.”
“The teeth. Fangs. Whatever the preferred terminology is.”
“Fangs will do.”
“Can I?”
“You do not need to.”
“I know. I want to.”
He watches me for several seconds, and then he opens his mouth and they come down.
That’s the only honest way to put it. No dramatic transformation, no snarl, no flash of lightning conveniently striking Blackthorn House.
His upper canines simply lengthen, sliding down until they’re unmistakable—thin and white and slightly curved, closer to a cat’s than anything on the covers at Harbor Books.
But that isn’t the strange part. The strange part is that his face doesn’t change. He is still Julian. Calm and composed, patiently watching me stare at his mouth. It’s a courteous man’s face with a predator’s hardware in it, being reasonable at me.
I make a small noise, and he closes his mouth.
“Okay,” I say.
“Penny.”
“I keep waiting to feel differently about you.”
He says nothing.
“And I keep not doing it.” I rub my hands over my face.
“That is honestly the most confusing part of this entire situation. You’re sitting there telling me you’re a four-hundred-year-old vampire, and all I can think is that this explains why you never eat anything and why your hands are cold and why you know entirely too much about shipbuilding. ”
“Approximately four hundred.”
“That is not the important part of that sentence.”
“It seemed important to you earlier.”
I drop my hands.
“You’re making jokes.”
“I have always made jokes.”