Stupidly, her jealousy thrilled him. He pointed at her, hoping she would realize it was for her safety that he kept his hunger at bay. “I think it is time we tell Pedro about the conditions of his new life,” he said, hoping to distract her.
Pedro grimaced, struggling to pull away from Lucas. “Yes. I need to know the rules.”
Kos reached down to help pull him to his feet.
Andre pointed again, straight into Zoey’s room. “Not you, Hunter. I do not want any information getting back to your kind.”
“He can’t ever contact them again,” Bel said.
“Do you want him in on this, Pedro?”
Pedro didn’t spare Lucas a look. “I couldn’t care less.”
“Then you’re out. Back in Zoey’s room. Now.”
“Andre,” Zoey said his name in barely more than a whisper.
Before he thought better of it, he was at her side in a flash.
“Can I listen? Maybe I’m safer if I don’t know anything. But it seems I’m not safe from the Hunters regardless.”
Andre wanted nothing more than to hold her and protect her forever. The feeling was not chivalry. It was a need for her alone.
“Fair enough,” he replied, then wiped his hand over his forehead and down the back of his head, lingering over his knotted neck.
Lucas closed himself in Zoey’s room while the others went into Pedro’s. He headed to the window, where the afternoon sun dipped behind the hills and glared into the already bright room.
Something unique about Hunter blood? Didn’t that make all kinds of sense.
All the old stories came back to him. No wonder Hunters were absolutely forbidden to give their blood to a vampire. And no wonder he didn’t know vampires’ bites were better than blowjobs. Either that information had been suppressed by Hunters long ago and lost to the modern clan, or no one had told Lucas.
Maybe his father’s book was true. After showing it to Ethan, Stephen’s attempt to hide it from Lucas had been a failure. He had broken into his father’s desk and flipped through the ancient tome, astonished by images of vampires and Hunters living together in peace. Under a flat yellow sun, male and female vampires with golden eyes companionably held the hands of human Hunters. The final illustration showed a bloody battle, with many dead on both sides.
He closed his eyes and brought the illustrations to mind. Would Pedro be able to tolerate sun?
He’d like to get his hands on that book now, to learn what he could about Pedro’s new status as a golden-eyed vampire.
Marasović’s home seemed safe enough, for a while. But he wasn’t ready to ally himself with the vampires and reveal his theories—let Pedro believe he was a regular vampire for now.
Pedro is a vampire.
He had been raised to hate vampires; revulsion had been drilled into him every day of his life. Yes, he’d felt like an outsider. Yes, he’d questioned the Hunters’ tactics against humans. Still, he had always hated vampires.
But he did not hate Pedro. When Pedro fed from him, he was terrified, sure his throat would be torn out even as waves of pleasure assaulted him. The unexpected bliss had confused him.
He had done all the club drugs. He liked ecstasy best, but the sensual euphoria of that little pill had nothing on Pedro’s bite. The arousal came from the inside out. First a gentle relaxation bloomed throughout his body. Then his skin tingled and burned for contact. He’d sucked his lower lip into his mouth because he’d longed to feel something between his teeth and against his tongue: a finger, another tongue, a nipple, anything. Every part of his body became an erotic receptor, yearning for stimulation.
The second time Pedro was on top of him, there was less fear—he was too aware of Pedro’s newly powerful body covering him and radiating anger while his cock hardened between them. Had Pedro noticed Lucas’s own hard-on? What a mess.
He couldn’t blame Pedro for his anger. It wouldn’t be easy for him to shake the memories from the shed either: Pedro’s screams, his terror and his request that Lucas kill him—they would haunt him for a long time.
Chapter 31
ZOEY WAS CRAMPED IN PEDRO’S ROOM with four big men circling, so she climbed onto the bed and sat cross-legged, leaning against the headboard. Everyone followed her cue. Kos winced when he sat on an unfriendly looking stool. Pedro sat on the other side of the bed with one foot on the ground. Now there was enough room to breathe.
Her gaze kept going to the crimson spot on Andre’s shirt. It made her angry. She didn’t like those friends of Kos—especially whichever one had fed Andre. She shook her head, trying to clear it of jealousy. He isn’t mine. He won’t ever be. He needs to eat, and from someone other than me. Let it go —
“Where should we start?” Kos asked Andre.
“With the most important thing: the ways we die.”
“Right,” Kos said. “There are three ways a vampire dies. Fire, decapitation, and the wasting disease we told you about already.”
Wasting disease? She glanced at Andre, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Apparently she wasn’t going to learn any more about that tonight.
Andre jumped in. “Fire includes the sun. Any exposure to direct sunlight and you’ll burn right up.”
“What about all the windows in the house?” she asked.
“Treated to block the damaging rays,” Kos explained.
“I wouldn’t want to be the vampire who had to test which rays were the bad ones,” she said.
Bel snorted.
“Indeed,” said Andre.
“What about a stake through the heart?” Pedro asked.
“A convenient misinformation campaign our kind started in the middle ages,” Andre replied.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s good PR work.”
Amusement showed in his handsome smile. Her heart thudded in reaction. His brow creased a tiny bit. Could he hear her heart from across the room? It was hard for a girl to have her secrets around vampires.
Andre turned back to Pedro. “At first you will find it disorienting that you no longer need to sleep.”
Pedro’s Adam’s apple bobbed in a silent gulp. Zoey understood why—never sleeping again sounded miserable.
“You’ll need to let your mind rest, probably in a dark, quiet room, which will allow your brain to process things it currently does in sleep. Over time, your brain will adjust and you’ll need less and less quiet.”
“Pedro informed me that while you two are lamely amusing yourselves playing cards, he’ll be in San Francisco cruising,” Bel said.
“I meant dancing, asshole.”
“Whatever,” Bel replied.
For some reason it made Zoey happy that they were already acting like brothers.
“Enjoy it now,” Andre said. “You’ll find that bars, like everything, get rather boring after several decades.”
He said it playfully, but sadness colored his words. That was why he’d found Mila and Kos so full of life when he met them. Clearly Andre tolerated boredom, because he preferred it to risking his heart again. But with the way he’d described his broken blood bond—more than his heart was at risk.
“You haven’t told him the worst part yet,” Bel said.
“What part?” Kos asked.
“You know, that thing you told me the other night when Zoey was upstairs…” Bel looked at her like he had put his foot in his mouth.
What was he talking about? “I’ll tell him later,” Kos said, trying to smooth things over.
“I don’t think so,” Zoey said. “I want to know.”
“Zoey, sweet, I don’t think you do,” Andre said.
“Out with it.”
“Fine,” Bel said. “Vampires can’t—” he searched for the word “—masturbate.”
Zoey felt herself turn crimson. “What? Jesus Christ, there is no privacy around here. You all can hear everything.”
“And smell it,” Pedro added.
Andre said he could
smell her when—suddenly she realized what Pedro meant and turned so quickly to look at Andre that her ponytail slapped her face.
He nodded, confirming that anything he had smelled, Kos had too. Every time she had gotten hot and bothered for Andre…
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said. “What about you, Bel? Do you have super hearing and smell too?”
“Nope. Not me,” he answered easily. “Quite a mouth on her, Dad. Part of her charm?”
“Definitely,” Andre replied. “I told you that you did not want to know.” His smile was almost apologetic.
“So anyway,” Kos said. “For whatever reason, vampires are unable to bring themselves to orgasm.” In spite of her embarrassment, Kos’s formality was almost funny.
Pedro raised his voice. “You think that’s the worst part, Bel? Worse than never seeing the sun?”
“Kind of.”
“That’s pathetic. You guys are so pussy whipped. Let me tell you, a man never says, ‘not tonight, honey, I have a headache.’”
Kos turned as pink as Zoey felt.
Pedro noticed too because he asked, “What’s bothering you, ugly?”
Kos shot him a bird in reply.
“Can we talk about something important now, like how much blood I will need?” Pedro asked. He seemed suddenly anxious to continue his tutorial.
The Maras men—or vampires, or whatever—exchanged glances.
“That’s tricky,” Kos said. “For whatever reason, you’re not experiencing the blood hunger. We think it’s got something to do with Lucas’s blood.”
Andre shifted his weight. He seemed a little anxious too. “I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands of vampires made. I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes change color. There’s something odd happening to you that we don’t understand.”
Pedro’s hand trembled as he smoothed the hair on his forehead. “Great, that’s just great. You guys really know how to comfort a baby vampire.”
“I’m sorry, Pedro,” Andre said. “If I’d known that would happen, I would have had someone else feed you.”
Bel stepped closer to Pedro. “I’ve been doing some tests with Andre’s blood and Kos’s, and the wine. I’d like some of yours too. And I’ll get some of Lucas’s, whether he likes it or not.”
The wine? Questions were queuing up on Zoey’s tongue when a phone rang.
Kos answered his. “Lena? What’s wrong?…A fire? Are you okay?” His face went gray, and he looked out the window at the setting sun.
Strange—he seemed to care deeply for the bitchy woman who’d tried to seduce his father only the day before. Maybe vampires had different rules about these things.
Kos glanced back and forth between Andre and Bel, repeating details from Lena. “Two Hunters, chased off by the highway patrol. She’s unhurt.”
Sweat beaded on his high forehead and he wiped it with the back of his hand. His obvious worry stirred Zoey’s sympathy—if not for Lena, at least for Kos.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Lena…” He turned his back, and Zoey could only imagine the emotions he was hiding from the family gathering. His voice was a whisper. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d be safe.”
He hung up. “They tried to set fire to my house with her inside. She called the cops and they showed up before the fire caught. Chased off the Hunters.”
“Damn,” Bel said.
“You’ll have to bring her back here, of course,” Andre said. “So she’s safe.”
All of a sudden, Andre and Kos spun to face Zoey, and she realized she was growling. Again.
Kos’s jaw hinged open in disbelief.
Andre winked one sparkling hazel-green eye at her.
Shit, she couldn’t even keep her jealousy a secret. Without a word, she turned from them and went to sulk.
Chapter 32
“SO, MR. WIZARD, CAN I WATCH your experiment?” Pedro asked, startling Bel, who jumped, barely managing to keep the contents of his graduated cylinder from spilling.
He added its contents to a beaker of solution.
Pedro took stock of the makeshift lab, erected in the warehouse-like room where he and Andre made wine. The sink and large work surface made it a good space for Bel’s little project, and his supplies covered one of the long stainless steel counters in the facility.
When Bel squinted at him, Pedro felt strangely self-conscious.
“What? Spinach on my fangs?”
Bel shook his head, returning his focus to mixing the solution. “Dude. You should rest. You’ve been to hell and back twice today.”
“Right, so you can understand if I don’t want to sit by my lonesome and think about it.”
Bel stared into the solution, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. If he was anything like Andre, which he clearly was, that meant he was stressed about something.
Finally, Bel shrugged. “Watch if you want. It promises to be boring.”
“Suddenly, I have all the time in the world. Is that a chromatograph?”
“Yeah.”
Bel’s answer was really a question, but Pedro didn’t bother answering it. Instead, he leaned over the portable unit, smaller than the type he was familiar with. It looked more like a disc player than a piece of lab equipment, except that in the place of speaker cables were tiny tubes that would pump precise amounts of fluid into the machine.
“Where did it come from?”
“Vania brought it from London.”
“So you’re going to run the blood samples and the wine to test for chemical composition?”
Bel cocked his head, and Pedro felt smug. Bel wasn’t the only one who knew about chemistry.
“Just a few elements, actually. How did you know?”
“I used one all the time at university. But mine was bigger than yours.”
“Piss off,” Bel said, chuckling. “Did you study chemistry?”
“No, viticulture and winemaking. But I—”
“Viticulture? That a fancy word for growing grape vines?”
“Exactly. Why use a normal word when you can use a fancy one?” Pedro flashed his teeth. In a bar, that smile usually made guys cross the room, but Bel went back to work, oblivious to his charm. The silence made Pedro itch, so he continued to talk. “When I was in school, it was trendy to use trace elements to identify the provenance of wines. The soil where a plant grows has its own signature of elements—tiny amounts of those elements get into the plant.”
“So you can test for those elements in wine and know where the vine was grown?”
“Yes. Cool, but rarely useful since you can just read the label.” Pedro picked up an opaque black plastic bottle. “What elements are you going to look for in the blood?”
“Iron and copper.”
Pedro glanced over the bottles spread across the table. From the look of things, Bel still had a lot of mixing to go—for each element he wanted to trace, he would need a different solvent. He pointed at a bottle, which happened to be closer to Pedro. Handing it over, Pedro said, “I’m guessing iron from hemoglobin. But why copper?”
Bel poured a measure of solvent into his solution. “In human blood, the iron in hemoglobin binds with oxygen to transport it through the body. Vampires’ blood has a different protein—it uses copper to carry oxygen.”
“No shit?”
“It’s true. I isolated it a few years ago and named it Hemocuprum. Not that it matters, since I’m the only one on the whole planet doing scientific research on vampire blood.”
“I guess you can’t exactly submit your results for publication.” Pedro laughed at his own joke as he read the label on another one of the bottles. When he looked up, Bel was not amused. “So vampire blood is completely different from human blood?”
“Completely different. Animals like clams and snails also have copper in their blood, but they don’t have the vampire protein, Hemocuprum. That bad boy is a super protein—it delivers four times more oxygen to the cells of a vampire than hemoglobin for humans.”
Pedro o
pened an unlabeled bottle and noxious acetone fumes burned his sinuses and tightened his throat. Maybe being a vampire made his nose more sensitive. Coughing, he resealed the bottle.
Bel finished mixing the iron solvent and set the beaker down. “Time for the copper,” he said, pointing at another bottle.
“And that oxygen makes them…us…stronger?”
Reaching for a clean beaker, Bel said, “Yes, and your brain processes faster. Have you noticed?”
Pedro squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them. “Seriously? I thought I was just on overload.”
“Nope. Your brain is assimilating everything much faster than it’s used to.”
“Is that why I have all this pressure in my head? It doesn’t hurt, but it’s intense.”
“Totally normal. Your brain will feel really full for a while. Especially since you won’t sleep. Now that you’re a vampire, you will have twenty-four hours’ worth of data running through your noggin super-fast. Before you’re used to it, you’ll probably feel like you’re about to explode. Or so I’ve been told.”
Pedro leaned heavily against a wall. Closing his eyes, he tipped his head backward. Everything Bel said made sense. His thoughts came faster and clearer. Too fast, and far too clear.
He couldn’t say how, but with one of his new vampire senses, he knew that Bel was watching him. Then the meaning of Bel’s words registered. He opened his eyes and the fluorescent lights stung. “You’ve been told? You were telling the truth then—you’re really not a vampire?”
“No. Although I age like one. I’m eight years younger than Kos—one-hundred and seventy…” he looked at the ceiling while he did the math “…nine. One hundred and seventy-nine. I stopped looking older in my early thirties. All vampires do.”
“But you don’t—”
“Nope. Meat and taters sort of guy—rare and bloody, but no actual blood. I’m not especially strong. No super hearing or vision, or, thank God, smell—that sounds nasty, or around a pretty girl, distracting. Kos must be thinking about sex constantly.”
“Maybe, but he’s too polite to tell us.”
Blood Vine Page 20
