“You’ll grow used to it. If we can’t find a way to undo this,” he added quickly.
He took out a cloth and cleaned my chin delicately, then used it to clean up the wound on the woman’s neck from my bite. Next, he gave instructions to the dazed woman on how she could find her way back home safely.
When she was gone, Lucian focused on me again, concern clouding his expression. “You will probably crave human food next. Do you feel hungry?”
“A little, yeah.”
“We’ll go back to my house and call delivery. It will be safer there.”
I started walking beside him, mind racing with all the questions I wasn’t allowed answers to before now. There were so many more things I probably should’ve wanted to know about the danger we were in, but I found myself asking the least important question first. “Werewolves,” I said. “Are they real?”
Lucian sighed. “Yes. And I’ve never met one who isn’t a complete asshole.”
40
Lucian
The vague yellow glow of streetlights filtered through the hazy windows of my home in Savannah. Cara sat on the couch with a box of pizza in her lap and a nervous look on her face while she ate ravenously.
“You’re sure it’s normal to be this hungry?”
I nodded. “Your body is changing. It needs fuel.”
Vlad poured himself some bourbon, took a mouthful, then spit it on the floor with a grimace. He was wearing a pink bathrobe today that he mostly had tied around his sizable waist. His bare belly and chest along with glimpses of his legs were still unfortunately included in the outfit. “I still remember when I first got turned.” Vlad leaned against the wall, folding his arms. “Feels like it was only a thousand years ago.”
“You told me you forgot all about it,” I said.
“Yes, well, you’re a fucker and I like to lie to you. This one,” he said, pointing to Cara. “I like her. She has some spunk. So I’ll tell her the story. Anyway, I was a young beautiful prostitute in my city. Royalty from across the world came to have just one night with me. I was gorgeous, elegant, absolutely deadly with my tongue—”
I shook my head. “We stop aging after we’re turned. You don’t need to describe the way you look as if it was any different.”
“Underneath this padded exterior lies the body of a lithe panther,” he said. “And that was when I met her. Ana Black. The original vampire. Hundreds of years old even then. Smoking hot. Absolute pair of tits that—”
“Vlad,” I said, cutting him off. “That would make her older than Dominic.”
“And?”
“And the rumor has always been that he’s the oldest of us.”
“Rumors are shit. Rumors say I never met a pussy I didn’t like. That rumor is absurdly false. There was once a pussy in the canals of—” Vlad interrupted himself, frowning as he used his hands to try to gauge the size of this supposed pussy.
I ignored him, turning to look at Cara, who was watching with interest. “How do you kill a vampire, exactly?” she asked.
Vlad stopped talking, then pursed his lips. “Not so hard, really. A little sunlight. Or you could always cut off their head and bury it in sacred ground. Personally, I never understood the point of going to all that trouble. I say you just tie them up and let the sun come. Much less messy and you don’t even need to find a shovel.”
Cara set down the pizza she’d been about to bite as if she was having second thoughts. “So that’s what we need to do to Bennigan? Expose him to sunlight?”
Vlad rubbed his hands together excitedly, then gave me a wide-eyed look. “See? This is why I like her. The girl is vicious.”
“He’s not going to stop until we’re dead, right?” Cara asked. “It sounds like it’s us or him.”
“That’s probably true,” I agreed. “But he has dozens of allies under his spell. We couldn’t hope to outnumber him and hold him in place until the sun came. Our best chance would be to find where he rests and surprise him.”
“How do you find that out?”
“A vampire’s resting place is his most carefully guarded secret,” Vlad said, taking another sip of bourbon and spitting it. “Good luck.”
Cara frowned. “But I found your coffin really easy. Shouldn’t it be better hidden if it’s such a big secret?”
“You found what Vlad let you find,” he said. “Besides, I sleep with one tooth sharpened. Let my enemies come. They’ll be the ones regretting it.”
“They will regret the smells you omit while you sleep,” I muttered.
“Hey!” Vlad said, throwing his hands up. “That was one time. And I swear, that human had gotten into something foul before I fed on him.” He clutched his stomach at the memory. “The world should thank me for what I did to him the next day.”