“I’m not a vampire,” I said, but Ray wasn’t listening.
“There’s his master, poking around, telling him what’s what and that he better toe the line. There’s the senior vamps in the family, checking out the new talent, just in case they want to recruit him for one of their cliques later on. There’s the slightly older babies, trying to dig up some dirt to make sure he stays on the bottom of the heap, and so on. And they never shut up. Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak. It drove me crazy for years.”
“Is that what happened?”
“But I got used to it. So will you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to get used to it,” I muttered, examining a box that promised to vibrate. I thought that was my job. I put it back.
“Oh, you want it, all right,” Ray said. “The two of you practically melt the walls every time you get within three feet of—”
“That’s not the same thing,” I told him irritably. It wasn’t the sex that worried me. I’d had sex; I’d never had a relationship with a vampire unless you counted Mircea, and look how well that had turned out. If I couldn’t even manage the usual father-daughter stuff, how was I supposed to handle something much more complex with someone I didn’t know half as well?
Relationships weren’t my best thing. They never had been. Even the easy ones. And nothing about Louis-Cesare was easy.
“It is when you’re dating a master. You gotta take the whole package, you know?” Ray said. And then he stopped, and turned to look at me. “Hey, that’s it, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“You never dated a master before.”
“I’ve been with vampires.”
“Yeah, sure. Any regular old vamp—I can see that. I mean, you’re stronger than him; you’re the one calling the shots; you’re the one who says when you’ve had enough and it’s time to head out.”
“Shut up and pick something.”
“But it’s not the same with a senior master, is it? Somebody who might be stronger than you. Somebody who might want to take the lead sometimes, too. Somebody you can’t just dump whenever you—”
I tipped the whole display into the basket he’d picked up by the door. He blinked. “Well, that oughta do it.”
I grabbed the basket o’ co
ndoms and went to wait in line, ignoring the looks from a couple people ahead of me, who were apparently not used to seeing someone buying twenty boxes at once. Ray went to lean on the counter, supposedly enthralled by an awesome display of toenail clippers, but in fact snacking on the salesclerk.
And, predictably, my stomach curled into a knot.
It was one of the things—one of the very, very many things—about dating a master that wasn’t going to work. Ray made it sound so easy, like this was just some kind of tug-of-war, some weird power play, that I needed to get past and I’d be fine. Like all the other humans who eagerly lined up to attach themselves to the great houses. Mircea probably turned away fifty a month, and those were just the ones arrogant enough to try. Louis-Cesare, as the longtime darling of the European Senate, could hardly have attracted any fewer.
Ray probably thought I should feel honored to have caught his eye. That I should feel grateful. That I should feel…whatever those other humans felt.
He forgot one thing.
I wasn’t human.
There had always been a love/hate—okay, mostly hate—thing going on with me and the vampire community. I’d tried to stay away; I’d spent years trying. Like Claire said, there were other things to hunt and most of them were much less likely to hunt me back. But there was nothing that made my blood sing, my senses reel, my heart pound quite like chasing my natural prey.
Except maybe fucking it.
It was crude, but it was the truth. Vampires weren’t just prey to me; they never had been. There was this weird kind of yearning underneath it all, and resentment and jealousy and a bone-deep ache that I didn’t understand. Not completely. I just knew that, every once in a while, the craving got too deep and it was either fight or fuck, and mostly it was the former but sometimes…sometimes it had been the latter. Just long enough to get it out of my system, to keep myself from going crazier than I already was.
And then, yeah, I moved on. Why the hell wouldn’t I? If I stayed around, it always ended the same way, and crazy or not, I didn’t particularly like the idea of staking a former lover. No matter how much a few of them had deserved it.
But this wasn’t a one-night stand. This was…well, I didn’t really know what this was, since I’d been avoiding discussing it. Talking about it meant facing the fact that this weird little interlude or experiment or whatever the hell I thought I’d been doing had run its course. Because how could you care about someone when his very means of existence made your stomach hurt?
Not that Louis-Cesare needed to snack on random clerks when he probably had a whole stable lined up and eager to be used. I knew that. But still. It was what he was.
And I killed what he was.