Page 50 of Vampire's Choice
A nod. No smile.
Okay. She thought about moving to the bottom row of the audience seating and encouraging him to join her, but if she sat down, she wasn’t getting back up. Best to avoid temptation.
“You taunted me at the lake,” he said. “Challenged me.”
She wasn’t expecting him to go there, thinking tonight’s drama would have made the argument water under the bridge. “You were being pushy. And mean.”
He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “You said I couldn’t arouse a woman without my incubus…powers. But it isn’t separate from me. It’s who I am, and yet it’s what makes me dangerous, out of control.”
The red in his irises glinted, thanks to the yellow safety lights mounted in the rafters. “Do you consider your bloodlust part of who you are? How would you feel, having something that’s so much a part of you, that you ache to let it loose, be the thing you have to contain? All the time. Otherwise, you incur a death sentence for the crime of being who you are.”
The words struck a chord, targeting her heart, her sense of herself.
"I can tell you understand. But there’s a difference. If I set my desires free, I kill indiscriminately. I take pleasure in it. I relish feeling their life force slipping away. When the drug was in my system, I felt that rise up, what I am required to hold down. All the fucking time.”
The surge of black rage in his gaze almost had her stepping back, but she resisted the urge. She suspected he saw that struggle. But he also saw her contain it.
“When I looked at you,” he continued, his voice soft with menace, “Feeling that way, about you, made me very angry. What kind of cruel god makes a creature like that? Like me?”
Another question she’d asked about herself, though perhaps with less, “I’d burn down the universe if I could” emotion than she heard in his voice. She answered carefully, but with sincere curiosity.
“Is it that you feel pleasure in their life force slipping away, or you feel pleasure in the feeding, the fulfillment of it, that sacrifice? The giving to you of everything, taking in who they are, a way of connecting. In that moment, you are together. It’s not separate.”
He studied her a long moment. “Except I’m taking their life.”
“Vampires have an annual kill. You’re aware?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“The purity of the blood, the spiritual component is important, because vampires already walk too closely to darkness. It’s required to be a good person, not an evil one. We have to make our peace with that.”
Even now, after having done it so many times, it wasn’t the easiest thing to talk about, but it answered his frustration with something meaningful, not pointless platitudes. She would look at it without flinching.
“The first couple times I had to do it, my father was with me. He told me we have to survive, and if something made us this way, made it impossible to survive without it, then our obligation is to be humane about it, even while taking what we need to live.”
She took a breath. “I try to give pleasure during it, to provide an anesthetic so the human never sees it coming. Never feel it, except maybe at that very last moment. A blink of fear and pain before it’s over. And there’s a moment where…I try to connect with them. So they don’t feel alone.”
Her mother had sat with her after her first one. “Say a prayer for his soul, and ask forgiveness. Because though the annual kill is necessary for you to live, his desire to live was no different from yours. You took his life, which connects you to him forever. You will meet again, because that’s the way of it.”
“It’s different for me. For the incubus part of my blood,” Merc said. “What I see in their eyes, in the end, yes, they are experiencing physical pleasure, but deep inside, a part of them is screaming. That excites me, too. In a way that makes me want to do it again. Sooner than is necessary. Tonight…reopened that craving to an unacceptable level.”
She understood the drive of bloodlust, but what he was talking about…it was different. He was like an alcoholic who’d fallen off the wagon. All the effort to live a sober life was suddenly in jeopardy.
She swallowed as his gaze got flatter. “Have you ever fed on a vampire?” she asked. “An immortal being? Does it have to be human?”
"I haven’t considered it.”
Not until recently.
She read that from his unsettling gaze, but she wasn’t going to cut and run. "We still have to have a human annual kill, but vampires can exist day-to-day on other blood, as long as it's from a humanlike species. My brother feeds exclusively on Catriona. Since she’s part human, everyone pretends that’s why she can meet his needs, but that’s because Queen Rhoswen gets very prickly about vampires nourishing themselves on Fae blood.”
“You’re inferior to them.” Merc shrugged.
She refused to be goaded, though she did roll her eyes before she made her point. “Maybe we should try it sometime. Feed on me, the way it’s obvious you want to do. Not just a taste, like earlier. All the way."
She made the offer with a casualness she didn’t feel, especially when his expression went from flat to full-on, in-her-face, hungry predator. Her knees quivered.
He hadn’t moved, but he felt a lot closer. Still, his response was unequivocal. "No."