Dead After Dark (Companion #6.5)(78)

He felt the convulsion of a sob shake her. He stroked her hair. “Don’t cry. I won’t importune you. You could never love a man like me.” He tried a laugh. “And I told you I’d make a damnable husband.”

“I do love you, you stupid man,” she choked.

“You . . . you what?”

“I love you.” She jerked her head up, apparently angry. “I love you past all sense.”

“My God.” His heart swelled. He frowned. “Then why won’t you marry me? That is the customary thing when two people love each other.”

She sat up, her lovely breasts hanging above him. She set her lips. “I am going to tell you what I am sworn not to tell anyone, so that you may know why I cannot marry you.” She took a breath and let it out. “I am vampire.” She watched for his reaction.

He swallowed carefully. He’d guessed. But to have it confirmed was . . . horrifying. He hoped it didn’t show on his face. He had to get past the word itself to Freya. He needed to buy time. “So you did drink my blood that first night.”

She nodded.

“Tell me about it. Being vampire, I mean.”

She looked wary. “Well. I have a parasite in my blood. We call it our Companion. It gives us certain . . . qualities.”

“The sensitivity to sunlight.” He could start there. That wasn’t so bad.

“Strength. Heightened senses.”

He could deal with that. “Red eyes?”

She chewed her lips. “This thing in our blood has power we can use. The red eyes happen when we call the power.”

“And what does the power do?”

She gave a tiny shrug. “I can . . . influence minds.” Her voice was small.

And he had though she was a proponent of “animal magnetism,” like Dr. Mesmer.

“And if I draw enough power, the field collapses in on itself in a whirl of darkness and I pop out into another place.”

“I . . . guess I . . . saw that once.”

She nodded. “And if I die, the parasite dies with me. It has a keen urge to life. So it rebuilds its host. Forever.”

Drew closed his mouth to prevent his jaw from dropping. “Immortal?” he managed.

“Unless I am decapitated.” She looked down at her hands. “I am very old.”

“How old?”

“Nine hundred years, or thereabouts. So you see why I couldn’t marry you.”

“I’d get old. And you wouldn’t.” He shook his head. “You must think me a baby, na?ve, uninteresting.”

She reached out for his hands. “No, no. You make me see that I have not been living at all. You . . . you showed me how to make love.”

“I showed you? You’re the most skilled practitioner of the art of love I can imagine.”

She straightened her shoulders. “That’s because sex was my job. It wasn’t love.” She must have seen his shocked expression. “The Companion gives us a heightened sexuality. By using our sexuality, increasing it, we can increase our power as well. My job was to use Tantric teachings to train selected men of our kind to increase their power. They became Harriers, the weapons my father sent against those who threatened our kind by making other vampires.” She looked down at her hands. “He used them against those who threatened his power, too.”

He had to go slowly here. There was so much. “Your father made you have sex with these apprentices?”

“I wanted to serve our kind. It was a kind of sexual torture in some ways, this training. But I did it to them, for the greater good. But then he sent my sister and me to kill one we had made. I came to understand that what we were doing was wrong.” She stared out the open window directly across from the bed into the night. “I realize now that she had gone a little insane with the power we had over the Aspirants. She liked the torture. It was dangerous, the training. And when I wouldn’t help her with it, it killed her.”

“So it wasn’t your fault she died.”

“Oh yes it was. I knew it could happen. But she had to be stopped. I carry the guilt of stopping her.” She turned back to him. “So never think I knew love. I didn’t even know tenderness and sex could exist together until I met you.”

She hadn’t known love in more ways than one. What father could do that to his daughter?

“But,” she said, making her tone light. “You see why marrying me would be a bad idea. One can’t marry a vampire who lives forever.”

A little thought darted through his brain. He pushed it down. He sat up and put his arms across his knees. “What about the blood?”

She looked down. “I need about a cup every fortnight or so. That must seem horrible to you. But I don’t kill anyone. And I can erase their memory, or supplant it with some better one; that they had wonderful sex, for instance, or that they are handsome.”

So far, so good. He could live with that. “And do they become vampires?” If they did, he might already be one.

She gave a weary chuckle. “Of course not, else the world would be littered with vampires. No, our kind survives in a delicate balance with humans. It is strictly forbidden to make a human vampire.”

“And how does one do that?” He made his voice as neutral as he could.

“Well, you have to get some of my blood in your system somehow—an open wound, for instance.” She tried on a smile. It came out lopsided. “I’ve been very careful, though. You’re not infected. You’d know because you get sick immediately, and you’d die without infusions of a vampire’s blood for the first three days, to give you immunity to the effects of the parasite on the human system.”