by Ella M. Lee
I stared at Ren, breathless. I’d never seen magic like that before. Vampires had magic, but they couldn’t make things appear and disappear. They couldn’t casually flick their fingers and have things happen.
Ren sensed my unease. “Hmm?”
“What was that?”
“A thing I can do,” he said.
“Where did it go?”
“Nowhere. It just…ceased to be.”
Okay, that wasn’t scary phrasing or anything.
“Uh,” I said, at a loss. “Can you do that to me?”
His eyes flicked up and down me for just a moment. “Unlikely. You are tiny, but you still have too much mass for my power. When I’m older, maybe.”
Great. Well, that was a relief.
I put the box of crackers away with shaking hands, resting the bag on the floor at my feet. I huddled in my sweater and tried to craft a question that wouldn’t annoy the strange demon beside me.
I let down my hair, wanting to hide my covert study of Ren. I combed my fingers through it, letting it float around my face as I watched him.
His relaxed posture and even breathing told me he was probably calm. He hadn’t implied that he was going to kill me tonight. I could get through this. I’d gotten through a year with Franklin, and he was a piece of work. Ren was acting pleasant, at least right now.
It probably wouldn’t last, of course, but I would deal with any changes when they happened. I could always turn off if I needed to, if he decided my blood sounded good after all or something equally undesirable.
My eyelids fell once then twice. I didn’t force them open again, but a moment later, a gentle hand touched my hair. I jumped nearly out of my seat, straining at the seatbelt, my hands pressed against the cold window frantically.
Ren reacted, tensing and freezing with his hand still outstretched.
My heart pumped adrenaline through me as I stared at him, wide-eyed.
“Okay,” he said. “You don’t want to be touched.”
I swallowed. “You can’t…” I started, before realizing how stupid it would be to tell him what he couldn’t do. “I mean…it’s just… Strangers don’t touch each other’s hair unannounced.”
“I thought human women liked being touched?”
Where exactly did he get his information? “Um, not all of them. And not without warning or, or…consent.”
“Ah. I should ask next time.” His tone indicated that he thought he was smart for grasping this piece of subtle understanding.
“Yeah,” I said, to avoid an argument.
“But I touched you earlier—at the event—and you didn’t say anything.” Confusion. A flicker of annoyance in his otherwise even, plaintive tone.
“I thought you were a vampire. My experience with vampires is that you don’t say no to them. In fact, you don’t say anything at all.”
“So you didn’t like it?” he pressed.
A direct question. Damn. I couldn’t ignore it. I took a deep breath. “No.”
“But you were afraid, so you didn’t say anything.”
“Right,” I agreed.
He seemed agitated, but I had no idea why or what to do to calm him.
Finally, he said, “Why were you afraid?”
Another direct question. He was learning very quickly, despite not liking rules.
I cleared my throat. “You scared me. You’d just broken a vampire’s arm. Several times. Without much consideration.”
“You thought I would do the same to you?”
I shrugged. “I told you, you look like a vampire.”
His fanged, cat-like smile peeked out. “You wouldn’t say that if you saw my other forms.”
Did he realize how not-reassuring that sounded?
“You were looking at me across the room, before that,” he added.
“You were just there, in my line of sight.”
“Hmm,” he said, his hands fidgeting on the steering wheel.
I frowned. Should I have said something nicer? Called him handsome? He was handsome, in the way that you might find a panther handsome—until you realized he could chew you up and spit you out and not give a damn about it.
But Ren didn’t say anything else. No questions, no reprimands, no requests for clarifications on interesting human behaviors. A few minutes went by. He didn’t reach for me.
My eyelids drooped again. I shouldn’t sleep. I shouldn’t. Who knew what might happen? But I’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours, unable to sleep the previous day, desperately nervous about the auction. Without thirst and hunger twisting my stomach—as they would normally have—my body didn’t have anything keeping it awake.
There’s a demon sitting next to you, the tiny, nagging part of me said, but my body didn’t seem to care.
The steady hum of the car engine and the comfortable warmth of the leather seat lulled me to sleep.
Chapter 10
“Ari?”
That name. An important name, but foreign, like an old friend I hadn’t talked to in a long time. That smooth purr was familiar, too, but I couldn’t place it. Drowsiness clogged my brain and pressed against my limbs. My eyelids flicked open but closed immediately.
“Ari?”
That name again, in that throaty purr. I sighed, not ready to let this comfort slip away.
“Arianna?”
The purr had an edge to it now, and I realized it was addressing me. I was Arianna. I opened my eyes with a start, sitting up. I swung my head left to be met by curious green eyes.
Ren.
Memories of the night hit me in a rush. Deep down, something panicked, some inner version of me that knew what bad news this whole situation was, but it was muted. Weighed down by sleepiness and the numbness of a year of crushing fear and torture.
My body didn’t feel like bending to any of that panic right now. Instead, I said, dumbly detached, “Hey.”
Ren blinked, confused.
I tore my gaze from him. We were still in the car, but it was parked now, facing the concrete wall of yet another underground garage. I looked back into his pretty eyes.
My instinct to ask where we were was suppressed by all the good sense I’d learned in the past year, but Ren seemed to understand the unasked question.
“Home,” he said. “We’re home.”
I clamped my lips together on the words I couldn’t say. This isn’t my home.
“Okay,” I said instead.
Ren got out of the car, and I mirrored him, stumbling from the high SUV door to the ground. He watched me right myself with the tiniest amount of concern ruffling his brow. It didn’t feel like I was connected to my legs, but I followed him through the too-bright garage, squinting. My head throbbed.
He swept elegantly in front of me and didn’t seem to care that I languished behind him, looking around carefully. Rows of cars, all fancy. No obvious exits except a car ramp going up at the other end of the room, maybe a hundred feet away.
We headed in the opposite direction, toward a glassed-in elevator room. Ren swiped a keycard through a black panel and the door clicked open. He held it for me. We waited a long time for an elevator. Once inside, he swiped his keycard again and pressed the button for floor thirty-eight.
The elevator opened into a small, carpeted lobby, dimly lit, very posh. Several doors lined the short hallway.
Ren swept in front of me toward the far door. He unlocked it with a key then pressed his fingertips to the wood right underneath the lock and twisted them, as though rotating another, invisible lock. His eyes closed for a moment, and I felt a surge of power—like pressure and invisible sparks in the air—ripple through him. Whatever he’d just done had been more apparent than the slight shift earlier with the apple.
I took a step back.
A second later, he opened the door, ushering me inside once again. I stood awkwardly in the dark space while he did the same thing in reverse: locked the door and engaged some sort of magic.
Once done, he reached pas
t me and flicked a set of dimmer switches by the door. The lights activated, spilling like warm liquid into the cool space.
“My bedroom,” he said, pointing behind us to a closed door. He started down the long gallery-like hallway, pointing at two more closed doors as he went. “The other two bedrooms.”
The hall ended in a huge great room, so lovely and impressive that I gasped. To my right was a chef’s kitchen with a massive central island, a giant stovetop, a stark bowl of red and green apples sitting gracefully among the black granite and stainless steel.
The rest of the space was an expansive sitting room with two giant couches arranged around a fireplace, a long glass dining table spread with ancient-looking books and scrolls, and an oak desk and set of bookshelves by the windows.
And the windows…
They looked out over the vast length of Central Park, dotted with lights right now among the twinkling of the rest of the city.
I took an involuntary step closer, mesmerized.
“Pretty, right? I enjoy heights.”
Ren’s words startled me. I’d completely forgotten about the demon behind me.
I spun, studying him. He leaned against the kitchen island, more relaxed than I’d seen him before. But, of course, this was his home, a beautiful and odd combination of modern and ancient—woven rugs and old books and some interesting bronze statues spread among the elegant glass and metal. He’d taken off his suit jacket and tie and thrown them over one of the seats of the island, leaving him in a white button-up shirt.
“There’s food, if you want it,” he went on. “If you’d rather sleep, I put your things in the first bedroom. If you prefer the other one, you can move them yourself.”
“My things?” I repeated numbly. I’d come here with nothing.
“I bought you things,” he said, with a slightly amused expression. “Well, I didn’t buy them. I had them bought for you. I wouldn’t know what a human woman would like.”
“When the dawn comes, are you going to lock me up?” I tried to make the words as bland as possible.
“Dawn?” he asked, puzzled. “I’m still not a vampire. I don’t fear the dawn.”
Interesting. “When do you sleep?”
“I don’t,” he said. My expression must have been odd because he added, “I can sleep, of course, but I don’t need to sleep. It’s helpful in some scenarios, but none that usually apply to me. Extreme exhaustion, magical exertion…”
“Why do you have a bedroom, then?” I asked.
He smiled. “I like to read there sometimes. It’s cozy. Don’t you like to lie around in bed?”
“I don’t remember,” I said truthfully. I hadn’t lain around in recent memory. Fear and pain and hunger and despair made that impossible. Not to mention, I didn’t have a bed most of the time, either.
“What do you like to do?” he asked curiously.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten to do anything in…well, a year.”
“What did you do before vampires?” Ren asked.
I shrugged. “Went to school. Swam. Ran on the track team. Painted. Drew.” I smiled slightly. “I like art.”
He smiled again, this time more widely. “Painting and drawing is part of my culture. I enjoy it, too.”
Something we have in common. Hearing that irrationally eased the tight coils around my chest.
And then I remembered that he hadn’t answered the question about locking me up. He still owned me, and I was still in trouble, even if he’d happened to seem slightly more human for a brief moment.
I looked down at the gleaming floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him push himself off the counter. His polished shoes came into my view, and I twisted my hands in front of myself.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t look down like I scare you.”
It took just about every last shred of courage I had to look up, to meet those brilliant eyes. When I did, power glistened behind them once again.
I couldn’t make myself open my mouth and tell him that he did scare me.
“Do you want me to treat you like a slave? Do you want me to lock you in your bedroom?” he asked, his tone firmer than before. That power shifted again, turning his eyes briefly into a forest at night, full of shadows, the green darkening to almost black before brightening to the hue of a vibrant jungle.
“No,” I squeaked.
“Then I won’t,” he said simply, as though that settled everything about our new situation.
Chapter 11
Ren turned away and opened the refrigerator. It was filled to the brim, mostly with fruits and vegetables and juice and other brightly colored items. He dug in the back and came up with a large, ceramic jar.
“Come here,” he said.
I padded closer, taking a seat at the kitchen island across from him. I leaned my arms on the counter, exhausted. It felt like I hadn’t really woken up yet, and I watched him through blurry eyes.
He placed the jar on the counter next to a small blue bowl. With his fingers, he scooped a small bit of some hard, white substance from the jar and dropped it into the bowl. From a rack below the counter, he took three jars of powder—bright sunset orange, dark magenta, and navy blue. He added a pinch of each to the bowl.
He studied it for several moments, flicking his eyes upward a couple of times as though recalling something before touching the bowl with a quick swipe of his fingers, that power ripping through him gently. The substances inside blended instantly, creating a small amount of dark, smooth syrup.
“Lean in,” he said, and I obeyed without thinking.
“This is for healing,” he said. “It’s fairly weak. I don’t have all the ingredients I need to make it stronger, but it should fix bruises and cuts well enough. Can I touch you?”
I stared at him, wide-eyed, and nodded. He dipped two fingers into the bowl and reached over the counter to paint some of the liquid across my cheeks, where I was bruised and bleeding. It tingled coolly against my skin. He pushed aside the collar of my sweater and did the same thing to the scratch Jenna had given me. The annoying pinpricks of pain were gone instantly.
“Are you injured anywhere else?” he asked.
I really hated these unavoidable direct questions. “I’ll be fine,” I said, by way of evasion.
There was an awkward moment of silence before—
“Take off your sweater,” he said.
I sighed. “That’s another thing you should ask a human woman about first, you know.”
He laughed, amused. “You sure do have a lot of rules. Do all humans play such games?”
“Sometimes, yes,” I said.
“Should we make this into a game?” he asked.
“What kind of game?” I asked, wary.
“We trade demands. Whoever refuses first loses?”
I didn’t like the sound of a game that could escalate so easily.
“What happens when one of us says no?” I asked.
“We stop?” he said, bewildered.
“Even if I’m the one who says no?”
“Of course. Those are the rules,” he said.
“I thought you were averse to rules,” I reminded him.
“I’m trying to be adaptable toward my new human,” he said. “Trades, temporary conditions, games…those are things my world has in abundance. They can be interesting. I like interesting things.” He studied me. “Why aren’t you agreeing? You’re scared again?”
“I’m nervous,” I corrected. “What if your demands are…” I didn’t know how to finish the question.
“You can say no if you don’t like a demand. That’s the point of the game.” Shadows danced in his eyes, enticing me to engage.
I saw what he was really asking for: trust. This was some sort of trust exercise. And I could use it to learn more about him. I could try to form a bond.
Franklin had never wanted that. I’d tried, in that first week. To make him see me as human, to see me as a person. He didn’t care.
He was uncomfortable with humanity, with anything that reminded him of life. Most vampires were, it seemed.
Ren was different.
He asked questions. He studied me with interested eyes. I didn’t know why yet, but he didn’t want to drink my blood, and he didn’t want to wring my neck. I could try with him, maybe.
He seemed to have forgotten that he merely had to threaten me to get his demands fulfilled, rather than offer anything in return. Or he had no interest in that type of compulsion. Too early to tell which.
“Okay.” Hesitantly, I grasped the hem of my sweater and pulled it over my head, leaving me in just a white tank top.
I braced for his next words, but he merely studied me impassively. My arms were mottled green and blue, old bruises layered on top of each other. Franklin grabbed me frequently, always harder than needed.
Ren reached out, but I pulled back. “My turn,” I said, bolder than I felt.
His eyes lit and his chin lifted in challenge, waiting patiently.
“Get me a glass of orange juice,” I said.
Confusion marred his handsome features. He tilted his head. “That is your demand?”
“Yes,” I confirmed.
“Very well,” he said, turning to the fridge. He retrieved a plastic bottle of fancy orange juice and filled a tall, blue-tinted glass. Carefully, he set it on the island and pushed it closer.
I took a sip. “Thank you.”
He eyed my arms again. “Let me heal your bruises.”
I sighed and leaned forward, reaching my arms out to him. “I think you’ll need more of that stuff.”
“I’ll make do,” he said. His cold fingers rapidly spread the liquid across my skin. I watched in awe as my bruises faded to almost nothing, the soreness behind them snuffed out.
“Tell me about your magic,” I said, taking another sip of juice.
He poured himself a glass of juice as well, dumping a significant amount of the sunset orange powder into it and making another one of those finger swipes against the side of the glass that included a ripple of his magic. He took a sip and grimaced.
“My magic? Hmm,” he said. “Don’t, by the way, touch any of these powders yourself. They’re not usable without the proper alchemical alignments. I guess that is where I can start.” He paused, studying the jar of powder. “I can…change things. I can create and destroy. I can alter and denature. I can identify matter and mold it to my designs. Mostly on a small scale, and it almost always requires touch. I’m still learning.”
