Dae
Killian's house sat on a tree-lined block in the Quarter, a two-story Creole mansion painted soft pink with a wrought-iron balcony stretching across the entire front.
I ran past the front steps to the side gate at full vampire speed, dodging the last stragglers of the late-night crowd.
To them, I was nothing but a breeze that came out of nowhere.
Something they thought they saw out of the corner of their eyes.
I paused for a moment before I went in the back door, catching my breath. My lungs didn't need the air, but my body still heaved with the effort of outrunning what I'd left behind on that porch. Alice's taste on my tongue. Her legs around my waist. The sound she made when I —
Groaning aloud, I forced myself to focus.
The door was unlocked, and the second I pushed through it, the smell of Elias's blood hit me like a wall.
Like the others, I noticed it more than usual these days, ever since he'd come back as…
whatever the hell he was now. His scent did weird things to my senses, hovering somewhere between human and not-human, sweet in a way that made my fangs ache uncomfortably.
But also different. Wrong. Like fruit rotting from the inside, the sweetness curdling into something that made my stomach clench and my instincts scream "danger. "
But he was still my friend. My brother. And nothing would ever change that for me.
"In here," Killian called from the sitting room.
I cut through the kitchen, following Killian's voice to the sitting room beyond.
A single lamp threw long shadows across the dark gray furniture, and the burgundy curtains were drawn against the night. But I didn't need light to see, and I found them easily.
Elias was propped up on the couch, his back against the armrest and one long leg stretched out in front of him, the other foot on the floor. Talin was kneeling on the floor beside him with her hand wrapped around his, their fingers intertwined so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
I found Killian by the fireplace with his arms crossed casually across his chest, however I knew that stance.
I'd seen that pretend nonchalance many times over the years.
That was the stance of a Master vampire who'd exhausted every idea he had to fix things and was now just holding his ground because leaving one of his own wasn't an option.
Lizzy sat in the armchair closest to him, and Wiggles was on the couch with Elias, his little, old, black body pressed against his leg, chin on his thigh.
He probably didn't understand what was going on, but he understood Elias needed him.
"What happened?" I asked.
"He collapsed at the bar." Killian rubbed the back of his neck. "A few minutes after ye left. One second he was polishing a glass, the next he was on the floor."
I moved closer, and the smell intensified. Sour and sweet and off. My gums burned, not the same way they did with Alice, but I still had to press my tongue against my teeth to suppress it. Whatever was happening to Elias's blood, my body didn't know whether to be attracted to it or repulsed by it.
"I'm fine," Elias said.
His voice was steady. Precise. Controlled.
Just like usual. But his face was pale and gray, which was really weird.
Elias had actually gotten more color since losing the vampire, warmth returning to his olive skin now that he could stand in the sun.
But that warmth was draining out of him now.
His cheeks were ashen, his lips bloodless, and the dark circles under his eyes looked bruised.
"You're not fine," Talin said. Her voice was tight, and I could tell she was trying hard to keep the worry out of her tone. "Your heartbeat dropped. I felt it. It went from normal to — to nothing, and then you —"
"It came back. It was just a skip."
"After thirty seconds, Elias. Your heart stopped for thirty seconds." Her free hand pressed against his chest, and her breath hitched. "And you're freezing. You're ice cold."
My brother was delusional if he thought he could hide anything from his mate. He might be able to fool us, but never her. Not that any of us were going to believe him either. Not when we could take one look at him and see he was full of shit.
I crossed the room to stand beside her and wrapped my hand around Elias's forearm in greeting. The contact jolted me. Talin was right. His skin was like ice against my palm. My fingers tightened on instinct, and I pressed the back of my hand to his forehead. Same thing. Cold as stone.
"Stop it," he told me, turning his head away. "I'm fucking fine."
That wasn't right. Vampires ran warm, not human-warm, but far from the cold-skinned corpses of Hollywood bullshit.
We generated heat. It was part of the gift, part of what made us move and think and exist as something more than dead tissue.
And Elias, before tonight, had been warm.
Warmer than us, actually, running on his new human-like furnace.
"Have ye eaten today?" Killian asked.
"Of course I've eaten. I eat constantly now. That's all I do. Eat and sleep and —" Elias broke off and closed his eyes, and for a fraction of a second, the mask slipped. The terror underneath was bone deep.
As I stared at my friend, I shifted my vision, and Elias's aura bloomed into view around him. My chest tightened.
It had been a rainbow since the transformation, leaning toward Talin's threadwalker glow but denser, laced with an undercurrent nobody had been able to identify. Unusual, but stable. Consistent. Like his blood had found a new equilibrium.
Not anymore.
The colors were guttering. Flickering like a candle in a draft, contracting inward and then flaring out in uneven pulses that matched the irregular thud of his heartbeat.
The colors were wrong too, muddied, like someone had smeared ash through clean water.
And in the spaces where the aura thinned, where it pulled away from his body like smoke being sucked through a crack, my gut clenched.
Because there was nothing. No color. No light.
Just...absence. Gaps in his field where something used to be and wasn't anymore.
"His aura's destabilizing," I whispered.
Every head in the room turned to me.
"What does that mean?" Talin's voice was sharp. Scared.
"It means something is consuming it. Or...
no. Not consuming. Starving." I watched, studying the pattern.
The flickering wasn't random. It was rhythmic, cyclical.
It surged whenever Talin touched him and retreated when the contact broke.
Like it was reaching for something. "His aura reacts when you touch him, Talin. "
Talin looked down at their joined hands. "What do you mean, reacts? I…I can't see it. I don't have that ability, Dae—"
"It brightens," I explained quickly as the panic in her voice grew louder with every word she said. "Gets stronger. And then the second your skin isn't on his, it starts to fade again."
"So, what?" she asked. "Do I need to strip down and just lay on him or something? Because I will. I'll do it right now."
A possessive growl sounded from the couch and Elias's gave every male in the room a threatening stare. I stopped her before she could yank off her shirt, then I crouched down to Elias's level. His dark eyes were telling me to shut the fuck up, but I couldn't just ignore this. "You're eating."
"I already said that."
"Food. Yes. But what about blood?"
The room went very still.
Elias's jaw clenched. "I don't need her blood."
"When was the last time?"
"I said I don't —"
"The night of his transformation." Talin's voice was quiet. "He drank from me that night. Before everything happened. After that..." She looked at Elias. "You said you didn't need it anymore."
"I don't." His hand tightened around hers. "It was just a leftover craving, I told you. Like wanting a good whiskey. Not a need."
"Elias." I kept my voice steady. Factual. The language he understood. "I can see your aura. I can see it dying. And the only time it stabilizes is when she's touching you. That's not a craving."
His expression shifted, and I saw a shadow of recognition cross his features. The data no longer supported his hypothesis, and he was too precise a man to ignore data.
"But I'm not a vampire anymore," he said, each word ground out like gravel through a mortar.
"No. Not completely."
"I don't have fangs. I don't burn in the sun. I don't die during the day." His voice cracked on the last word. "I ate a fucking sandwich for lunch, Dae-Jung. I had mustard on it. Vampires don't eat mustard."
Any other night, I would've laughed. Would've pointed out that mustard was a bold choice for a man who'd been subsisting on blood for a hundred and sixty years and wasn't used to his new tastebuds yet. But something told me that joke wouldn't go over very well right now, so I refrained.
"You're right. You're not a vampire," I agreed. "We can all see that. But you're not completely human either. You're something in between, and whatever in between is, it needs her. Or, more specifically, her blood. At least that's what I think."
Elias turned his face away, refusing to look at either of us.
Killian shifted uneasily by the fireplace. Elias wasn't his creation anymore. The thread between maker and child had burned away with everything else, and I saw the helplessness settle across his shoulders. Lizzy reached for his hand, and he stared down at her for a long moment before taking it.
"Let me help you." Talin shifted closer, her free hand coming up to touch his face. "Elias. Please. Let me —"
"No." He caught her wrist. Gently, always gently with her, but firm. "I'm not doing that. I don't need to feed from you. I'm not a vampire anymore. I don't need it. You do."
"Elias, you heard what Dae said—"
"I heard him." His gaze found hers. "That doesn't mean he's right. I had a bad night. That's all. I don't need to do anything drastic over a bad night."
"A bad night? I'm telling you that your heart stopped." Her voice was thick with tears.