I’d drank the blood of a vampire, and now I was pretending he was my boyfriend. Oh, and some sort of magnetic magic black dots were now flooding my blood and drawing me toward him like he was a drug.
Wonderful.
9
Lucian
I knew I needed to get back to Alaric and Seraphina soon. They’d be worried.
Yet I found myself trailing after Cara as she gave a group of people some sort of “haunted tour” through the city of Savannah, which had grown considerably since I’d last seen it. In fact, I’d come to the city when it was little more than a town and I’d known many of the vampires who were prominent in the area at the time. I’d also been present for many of the events she described, like the mass burials when the yellow fever came or the hanging of Alice Riley in the town square.
I watched Cara as she went through the motions of the tour. She was a peculiar human, even by the standards I was coming to understand of these modern women. Cara dressed somewhat randomly. The night I’d seen her she had been clad in black and aggressive clothes that were at odds with her slender, feminine frame. Today she had worn a simple, pastel pink skirt and a white blouse that completely changed her look. She’d seemed like a woman who would speak her mind and never dream of apologizing the night before, and today she looked more delicate—as if the sharper edges were subtle things that would only be discovered upon closer inspection.
She was fascinating.
She wore her black hair just down to her jawline, where it swooped forward into two little points. A solid line of bangs hung just above her eyebrows, making her hair like a frame for the simple, clean features on her face. But the most arresting thing about her might have been her mouth, which seemed to telegraph her feelings as openly as a book, whether she wanted it to or not.
She pressed her full lips together when I was irritating her. When she was aroused, she breathed through her mouth, showing just the hint of two flat, slightly oversized front teeth. When she was amused, she always bit her lip before she smiled, as if she was trying to stop the expression from coming by force and failing all the same. My favorite might have been when she was angry, which seemed to set her lips into a silent, shifting state where she was half forming the words she was about to hurl my way.
The woman was a constant surprise and yet somehow comfortably predictable. She was full of life and energy in a way that made me feel more alive than I had in decades, too.
She was currently making up some nonsense about how the bumpy sidewalk outside one of Savannah’s many graveyards was actually caused by unmarked graves buried beneath our feet. I grinned, watching the members of her tour look down at their feet in horror.
I added a new expression of her wicked mouth to my list. When she was lying for fun, she held part of her lower lip between her teeth on one side.
The tour ended at the Mercer House, which woke a strange kind of bitterness in me. I didn’t enjoy thinking about the wasted years we had spent sealed in there or the oddness of knowing people like this were touring the house all these years.
It was hard to think of much beyond the blinding throbs of need I felt toward Cara. I’d been bonded before, but it had never felt this difficult to resist. Maybe it was my long slumber or maybe it was how Cara had been on the brink of death when I’d brought her back. All the blood she’d lost meant there was more room for mine, perhaps.
It could also have had something to do with the fact that I pushed my will on her that first night we escaped from the room at the Mercer House. I’d heard stories of extremely powerful vampires bonding humans with nothing more than a suggestion. I supposed being dormant didn’t stop me from becoming more powerful while I was trapped, and maybe I’d jumpstarted the bond before I even realized as much.
Whatever the cause, it was taking every ounce of my control to stop from kissing her. Touching her. Taking her.
Cara felt like a precious thing. Watching her walk around unclaimed was as hard as passing by a diamond ring lying on a busy sidewalk. Surely at any moment, another hand would snatch out to grab her if I didn’t first.
But I knew what would happen if I gave in to my impulses. I’d be damning her to the existence I lived. To an eternity of watching the world grow to dust around her, where her only companions would be others like me. The deadly, the deranged, and the ones who hadn’t quite lost their minds yet.