11. Tavia
Chapter 11
Tavia
I barely saw Cyan over the next couple of weeks, despite the two of us remaining roommates. He seemed to be keeping his distance, even avoiding me, since the night we drilled together. I only caught glimpses of him in the corridor, hanging out in someone else’s apartment, or across the great room.
The last of my winemaking supplies appeared at my bedroom door two nights after we’d drilled. But no sign of Cyan. Not even a note.
His distance confused me, and it bothered me more than I liked to admit. It seemed like such an overblown reaction to my having an elevated heart rate after moving nonstop for over an hour. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the real issue or if it was something else.
I wished we could talk it out. I thought we were becoming friends, after all. And at the same time, I would never beg for attention from someone who yelled at me over what I couldn’t control.
So I threw myself into my favorite hobby for the next three weeks, making some homemade wine. I hung out with Bea, became acquainted with the other vampires of Blood 'til Dawn, and worked on becoming active at night.
Switching to a nocturnal schedule proved to be one hell of a pain in the ass. After some time, it seemed the best I could do was wake up between noon to one in the afternoon and go to bed around four in the morning.
My “mornings” were the quietest part of the day. Since the sun was at its highest, Bea and all the vampires were dead asleep. That was when I tinkered with my winemaking experiments.
Fortunately the human market had a good selection of fruit in their produce section, so I had plenty to play with. Grapes were the obvious choice for wine, but I also loved experimenting with citrus, berries, and other fruits. One of my biggest hits back at the compound had been a blackberry wine aged in an oak barrel for eighteen months.
I had thought about adding a barrel to my original supplies list for Cyan, but it wasn’t so much a need as a nice-to-have and I didn’t want to be too greedy. He’d been too generous to get me all the essentials anyway.
That morning, which was actually early afternoon, I paused to stare at his closed bedroom door like I always did. I hoped he pulled his head out of his ass and talked to me soon. I still needed a phone, and to find out when he’d take me back to Sapien to see Amy.
And as much as I hated to admit it, I kind of missed him.
I didn’t dare let those feelings linger. Amy was my priority, not Cyan.
Despite having complete faith in Robin, I was worried about Amy. Robin couldn’t be glued to her side all the time, and I wondered if the bullying had gotten worse without my being there to shield her. I needed to know if she was okay. Once we had phones, it would be so much easier to check on her.
It was jarring to find out that all the vampires in Blood 'til Dawn had phones. Almost all of the other humans and brusang I saw at the market had them too. While growing up, Amy and I had been told that personal phones were a luxury. No one in Sapien had one because we couldn’t afford them. Not when we had to buy rice, lumber, fabric, work boots, fencing wire, animal feed, and everything else needed for survival.
I dragged myself away from staring at Cyan’s door like a weirdo and headed for the great room.
Most of the cabinets in the huge kitchen were empty, considering vampires didn’t need to store a bunch of food. Bea, as the only brusang residing here, claimed two cabinets and one shelf in the refrigerator for her cooking supplies and few eating needs. I stored most of my stuff in Cyan’s place, and used the rest of the cabinet space for my winemaking experiments, most of which were in 1-gallon glass jars.
After helping myself to a cup of coffee from Bea’s machine, which she always encouraged me to do, I set to checking on my creations.
The first one I checked, a standard red grape wine, I knew I had screwed up somewhere.
“Oh boy.” I took a gravity reading and winced at the number. “I sure overpitched you, didn’t I?” The batch would need more sugar and a secondary fermentation, otherwise it would taste entirely too dry.
My two other batches thankfully had normal readings, which meant they were ready to bottle and taste. I was dying to try them and see if I still had my touch, but first, I wanted to buy fresh grapes for the first batch.
I looked at the door heading out to the garage, feeling hesitant. It was two in the afternoon, which meant the vast majority of Sanguine was asleep. The market was open twenty-four hours to accommodate humans on all schedules, but I had never gone there myself before.
Come to think of it, I had never stepped foot outside of this compound without Bea at my side.
Come on, I pep-talked myself. They’ve made it clear you’re not a prisoner. It’s a short walk and all you need are some grapes. Sanguine was still a foreign territory to me, but the walk to the market was an easy, straight shot. There was no way I’d get lost.
Fighting the nervous flutters in my stomach, I put shoes on and headed outside. The moment I stepped into the sun, I had to stand and just let my skin soak up the golden light like bathwater.
It was so warm and felt heavenly on my face. I’d never been much of a sunshine addict like some people, but after three weeks of barely seeing it, I’d forgotten how much I missed those warm rays.
I started on my walk, feeling a little glum about my new life. Unless they took that drug, draitrium, vampires would never feel this energizing warmth. The sun was lethal to them, and I found that sad. I could definitely understand the temptation to try a drug to feel the sun for the first time. Or in the case of a brusang, the first time after years of darkness.
I wouldn’t take sunlight for granted anymore. Now that I lived among vampires, these midday walks would probably become few and far between. I’d savor them when I could.
While enjoying each sunlit step, I made it to the market and bought my grapes without incident. On a whim, I also bought a few avocados that weren’t quite ripe yet. I’d been craving guacamole for a while, which was also a luxury I rarely indulged in back in Sapien. But here, money seemed to be no object for the ruling vampire clan.
My mind was on the wine I’d be bottling soon, and the guacamole I’d be eating in a few days, when I left the market and turned the corner, nearly running straight into a man who came out of nowhere.
I shrieked and nearly dropped my shopping bag, which drew his attention from the sky toward me. The sight of his face sent my heart hammering and I backed up a step, thinking I should run back inside.
His eyes and skin had a sickly yellow appearance. There looked to be tear tracks down his cheeks but instead of water, it was a thicker, gooier substance. His skin and lips were also incredibly dry and blistered like he’d been sunburned. The man’s mouth hung open and I saw the tips of fangs.
A vampire out in broad daylight could only mean one thing. This man was high out of his mind on drae.
He looked truly out of it, and so much worse than the guy trying to push on me and Bea at the restaurant. That vampire barely had a yellow tinge in his eyes compared to this man. He had control of speech and seemed cognizant of his surroundings. This poor vampire looked extremely sick and I couldn’t begin to imagine what his state of mind was like.
I took another step back, trying to gauge him from a safer distance.
“Are you okay, sir?” I asked, against my better judgment.
His head cocked at the sound of my voice. He was already facing my direction, but his eyes couldn’t seem to focus on me.
“Beautiful sunny day,” he mumbled, more to himself than me. “So beautiful, the sun.”
I began side-stepping, making a wide circle around him. He followed the sound slowly, looking extremely unsteady on his feet. If it came to it, I could maybe outrun him.
“Blood,” he said, his voice a dry rasp as he wiped the gunky tears from his face. “When did I last have any blood?”
He lifted his nose to the air and sniffed, and I walked faster in my attempt to get around him, my heart hammering.
“Can I have some blood?” He seemed to forget about me, talking to someone he couldn’t see. “I need blood and…and drae. I’ll pay you back, I swear.”
His mutterings faded to nothing as I speedwalked back to the Blood ‘til Dawn compound, constantly checking over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t following me. I didn’t relax until I crossed the garage full of motorcycles, entered the great room and shut the door behind me.
I leaned against the door for a moment, catching my breath with my eyes closed. When I opened them, my heart sped up again for an entirely different reason.
Cyan sat on the central island, shirtless and in sweatpants, his bare feet swinging slightly as he sipped from a coffee mug.
“What are you doing up?”
“What happened to you?”
Our questions burst out at the same time, but he was quicker to act. Hopping down from the counter with feline grace, he strode over to me, took the shopping bag from my shoulder, and gently pulled me to a barstool with a hand wrapped around my arm.
“Are you hurt? You look like you saw a ghost.” His nostrils flared, probably scenting me for a bleeding wound, as his fingertips ran from my shoulders to my wrists.
The closeness of him, and the circumstances of how we last spoke, made me painfully aware of my pulse thrumming through every blood vessel. Damn him for making me self-conscious of physical responses I had no control over.
“I’m okay,” I said, forcing deep breaths to make my heartbeat slow down. “I saw another addict. Someone in really bad shape and it spooked me.”
Cyan pulled away, crossed the kitchen to grab an empty glass, which he filled with water and set in front of me.
“Thank you.” Damn him for being thoughtful. If even sweet.
“Tell me what happened. Where did you go?” Cyan crossed his arms over his bare chest, his tone leaving no room for argument.
“I needed more grapes for one of my wines, so I went to the market. On my way back there was this guy, a vampire out in the middle of the street in broad daylight.”
Cyan’s face fell. “Fuck. How did he look?”
I described the state I saw him in and Cyan looked more exhausted with each passing second. “That’s the draitrium, right? The drug that other guy was trying to push.”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Cyan blew out a long breath and scrubbed a hand down his face. “I know exactly who you’re talking about, and I’m sorry you had to see that. His name is Pyke. The clan has tried to get him cleaned up multiple times. He’s harmless as far as we can tell. Just gets stoned out of his mind and spends hours looking at the sky. We usually find him right after dusk, bawling his eyes out because the beautiful sun is gone.”
“Oh, that’s awful. That poor man.”
Cyan shrugged and shook his head in a what can you do? motion. “We’ve done all we can for him. He’s refused to tell us who he buys from but he’s not violent, nor has he tried to sell to anyone else, so we just leave him be. It’s sad, honestly.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It must be hard to watch people destroy themselves, knowing you’ve already tried everything to help.”
He rubbed a hand over his head and heaved out a sigh. “You’ve got that right, Tavi.”
I finished off my water, my brain scrambling to fill in the awkward silence. Should I just make an excuse to go? This was the most conversation we’d had in weeks, and Cyan definitely didn’t intend to end up in the same room as me. He probably dreaded having to talk to me at all, especially since my distracting heart rate had been elevated when I walked in.
“I’ll just um?—”
“I owe you an apology.”
We spoke at the same time, and then stared at each other.
“What?” I said.
Cyan sighed out a long breath, idly scratching the side of his chest where he’d made his vow to me. The scars were completely healed but still looked fresher than the right side.
“I shouldn’t have yelled at you the other night when we were training.” His hand dropped to his side. “I was frustrated, but not at you. My frustration was…misplaced, and I took it out on you, which was wrong. I’m sorry for how I acted, Octavia.”
His use of my full first name was jarring. It felt wrong to not be Tavi to him.
“What were you so frustrated about, then?”
Cyan, also known as Cyanide, the smooth-talking negotiator of the ruling vampire clan, looked absolutely flustered.
“I…ah, huh.” He smiled sheepishly, one fang poking his bottom lip. “You really don’t know?”
I stared blankly. “No. You said it had nothing to do with me, so why would I?”
“Right, right.” He rubbed his jaw, which was starting to grow a layer of stubble. “I—don’t worry about it. It was just clan stuff that Thorne talked to me about.”
“Oh. Okay.” I didn’t know what to make of that. Clan stuff was most likely none of my business.
“Anyway.” Cyan turned his palms up. “I apologize and accept full responsibility for my actions. I’d love for you to accept my apology, but I understand if you don’t.”
I crossed my arms, thinking it over. “It wasn’t even the yelling that bothered me. But you avoiding me for weeks was really confusing. I thought I had done something wrong. You were like, shunning me and that…that hurt, Cyan.”
He winced. “I’m so sorry, Tavi. I’m not good at—” He stopped, swallowed, and tried again. “What I mean to say is I’m kind of, um…” He trailed off again and let out a wry laugh as he looked down at his lap. “I’m not a very good friend sometimes. I fuck up. I let people down.” He glanced up at me, his gaze cold despite the warm red tone. “So if you don’t want to be friends with me, I would understand.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You’re friends with everybody in the clan. Everyone I know likes you.”
“Rhain doesn’t like me.”
I snorted. “Rhain doesn’t seem to like anybody.”
Cyan smirked. “True enough.” He set his coffee mug in his lap and stared at it for a few seconds. “I really am sorry, Tavi. I won’t raise my voice at you again. And I’ll do my best to not give you the cold shoulder, but I…I have some stuff to work out. Vampire-specific stuff that I can’t really get into with a human. So if you ever feel like I’m avoiding you, just know that it’s me, not you.”
He looked and sounded genuine. I wanted to know more about this stuff he needed to work out, but some things needed to be kept private. If the yelling was a one-off, and he tried his best not to be distant, what was the harm in forgiveness? I truly did miss talking to him.
“Apology tentatively accepted,” I said. “But I’d appreciate it if you gave me a heads-up before avoiding me for three weeks again.”
He gave a small bob of his head and said, “I’ll try, Tavi.”
With that, I felt ready to bury the hatchet.
“So, is that Bea’s coffee?” I gestured toward the mug he’d been drinking out of.
He grinned, actually humored this time. “I like coffee every once in a while. I know you humans drink it to wake up but it actually has a relaxing effect on me.”
“How funny. What about alcohol?”
“Same effect as humans.” He laughed. “We can actually get a buzz from drinking the blood of an intoxicated person. Doesn’t happen often, since they can’t really consent to that. But fun if you arrange it beforehand. On that note,” he turned toward the cabinets where my fermenters were stashed, “how are your wine projects going?”
“Um.” I played with a strand of my hair while figuring out how to answer. People were curious about my winemaking up until the point I started getting technical, which was when their eyes glazed over with boredom.
The process was methodical, full of measurements, and the intricacies required a basic understanding of chemistry. I geeked out about it, but the details were not interesting to most people. They just didn’t know that until they asked me about it.
“Pretty good,” was what I settled on. “One of them needs to sit for a couple more weeks, but the other two can be racked. I mean, they’re ready to be siphoned out and bottled for drinking.”
“That’s great. Can I help?”
I gave him a long look. “You really want to?”
“Yeah, if I won’t be in the way.” His fang grazed his lower lip. “Consider my labor an active part of my apology.”
“Okay.” My breath hitched for some reason. “Sure.”