“You will die. First, you’ll go into a sort of hibernation. Then you will waste away.”
“Wonderful.” I tapped my canine tooth, noting that it felt just as nubby and round as usual. No peculiar sharpness. I briefly considered that maybe Lucian was mistaken. After all, I was going to go out on a limb and assume I would be the first lab grown vampire he’d ever encountered. What if that meant the rules were different for me? Or what if I just needed to wait a little bit until the little black specks in my blood went dormant and died?
My stomach gurgled like the traitor it was.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked.
Lucian looked around the room discreetly.
“We find you someone to feed on. A woman. I don’t want your mouth on another man’s neck.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You fed on two women in front of me. Aren’t we being a little hypocritical?”
“No,” he said. “Maybe. But I get to make the rules, because you need me to wipe their memory, so I am picking the mark.”
I rolled my eyes but couldn’t help smiling. “How do you know I couldn’t use my freshly made vampire powers to wipe their memories?”
He grinned. “That’s something I’ll need to teach you. For now, you need me.”
I gave him a goofy smile, then hugged his arm. “That’s not all I need from you.”
Lucian chuckled, then lowered his voice, leaning closer. “What else do you need from me?”
“Various things,” I said, feeling my embarrassment rise.
“Such as?”
“More of what we did in the back seat of that car. More of you. A lot more.” I laughed a little to myself. “Maybe I’m supposed to be coy, but I don’t want to. I just want to tell you how much you mean to me every chance I get.”
Lucian’s gaze was deadly serious. He put his hands on my arms, thumbs running idle circles that gave me goosebumps while he stared into my eyes. “You’re sure you want this?”
I met his eyes, nodding. “I’ve never been more sure of anything. I love you. I don’t care if that’s a death sentence or if you don’t think I should. It’s how I feel, and I’m not going to—”
“I love you too. Even though I wish I didn’t.”
I gave his shoulder a little punch. “Well, you better learn to accept it, because you’re stuck with me.” I poked my canines again, making sure they hadn’t gone all pointy on me. “Maybe for eternity if Bennigan doesn’t manage to off us.”
“I could imagine worse ways to spend eternity.” Lucian looked down, then his face grew serious. “It’s time I told you exactly what we’re really up against.”
“You mean I’m in the vampire club now and get to know all the secrets?”
“As much as we have time to discuss before I need to get food in you.”
“Okay…”
“Dominic isn’t just any vampire. For hundreds of years, he was the reason The Order was able to enforce The Pact. Nobody could oppose him.”
“Why?”
“Some believed he was the original vampire. The first and the oldest. The most powerful by far. But just a few years after turning me, he vanished. Before long, there was a list of those who claimed to have been the ones to kill him, including Bennigan. I thought it was ridiculous, but decades and then centuries passed and he never returned. The Order managed to enforce The Pact without him, but just barely.”
“Wait,” I said. “I thought Alaric and Seraphina were your sort of vampire family, right? If you’re older than them and Dominic disappeared right after he turned you—”
“I turned them. But that’s a story for another day.”
“So if you turned me, does that mean in the vampire world… you’re like my dad and we just fanged in the back of a car?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not that sort of family. It’s more like a clan, and vampires within clans date and marry often. Also, I technically wasn’t the one who turned you. I bonded you, but you are unique. You turned yourself. Somehow.”
“That’s a relief. I definitely wasn’t going to start calling you daddy.”
Lucian grinned. “A shame.”
I smiled back, then frowned while I thought over what he’d said so far. “So the original vampire was the one who turned you? Why did he do it?”
“Do you recall when I said there was another way to turn a vampire? A ritual?”
I nodded. “Vaguely.”
“I was supposed to be a sacrifice to him. He would feed on my life force and make himself grow stronger. These things were unfortunately commonplace in the past. But the process involves turning the sacrifice briefly before the execution, and he didn’t anticipate how strong my ability to heal would be. Imagine his surprise when I walked away from the sacrificial stone the following morning.”
Lucian’s grin was wicked, but there was a twinge of sadness there, too.