“It doesn’t matter,” he insisted. “Please, just release me from our bargain and protect your own life.”
“I’m protecting the life I want. I—”
Sorin didn’t know what she’d been about to say, but something on his face must have gotten to her. Her face softened and she took a deep breath.
“Sorin, I am the lupa of my pack. I’ve helped countless men and women come to terms with their beasts, helped them to protect their humanity in the face of the change.” She stared into his eyes. “Sorin, I can see you’re in pain, and I can help you. I will help you merge your two lives so that they exist in harmony. But you have to tell me what’s going on.” She leaned forward. “How long have you been a werewolf?”
A thousand responses swirled through his head, most of them lies. He didn’t want to talk about this—didn’t want to share his shame with her. The memory of her hands pushing his beast away, freeing his human side to come forward leapt into his mind. Maybe she could help him. Maybe if he told her what she wanted to know, she would help him lock the beast away.
“I am not a werewolf,” he answered finally, forcing the words past dry lips. “I am a vukodlak.”
Gia frowned. “What is that?”
He shifted, pulling a sheet into his lap to cover the worst of his nudity. The little gesture of decency made him feel more human.
“I was a werewolf in life. When I died, I rose as a vampire.”
“How were you turned? Werewolves are immune to vampiric infection.”
He didn’t like the term “infection,” but he let it go. “I was not ‘turned.’ I was born a vukodlak. The transformation to a vampire after death is just another part of who I am.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that.” Her eyebrows furrowed as if she were turning the information over in her mind, weighing his words. “So are you still a werewolf?”
Werewolf, werewolf, werewolf. God, how he hated that word. Anger welled up inside him and he glared at her. “What exactly is the point to all these questions? You’ve seen my monster’s form, what else is there to being a werewolf?”
Gia’s eyes narrowed and the golden orbs flashed. She fixed him with a look that could have withered crops and when she spoke her anger echoed in her words like thunder.
“Any idiot with a grimoire can take on the form of a monster.” The accusing way she said it made it clear what she thought of his word choice. “A werewolf is the best of man and beast. We’re closer to nature, less corrupted than ordinary humans, and yet we have the heads and the hearts to love and think beyond an animal’s capacity. We form packs that are stronger than most families and we support one another in all things.”
She paused as if something had just occurred to her. Sorin crossed his arms, struggling to avoid pissing her off any further. He wanted her help and telling her what he really thought of her kind wouldn’t help his cause.
“What happened to your pack? I mean, do vukodlaks have packs?”
Her question caught him off guard. Images crept through his mind, faces of people he thought he’d forgotten long ago. Some human, some wolves, all familiar and all dear to his heart. Nostalgia raised a lump in his throat. He hadn’t thought about them in so long.
A feeling of loss stole over his body, squeezing his heart until tears threatened to form. He fought it briefly, but it was no use. The chaos of the previous day had taken its toll and he was helpless against the emotions that assailed him now.
“I had a pack,” he said softly.
“Were they all vukodlaks too?”
Sorin shook his head, still entangled in the ghostly arms of the past. “No. I was the only one. The rest were vrykolakas. Werewolves.”
Gia stared at him and he could practically see the wheels turning in her head.
“You don’t have a pack now.”
He shook his head again. A strange emotion wrapped its hands around his throat and began to squeeze.
“Do all vukodlaks choose to live solitary lives away from their original packs?”
Her question brought a gravely voice roaring back from his past. An icy chill ran down his spine as his voice from long ago echoed in his mind.
“Where is my pack?”
The vampire’s face contorted into a mask of disgust. “Your pack? Your pack? Are you an animal, a beast to roam the wild urinating on trees and savaging livestock?”
His sire drew himself up so that he towered over his new charge. The grandfather clock against the wall seemed painfully loud in the cavernous room of his mansion home, ticking away the seconds with no care for the chaos going on inside. The vampire glared at the spot where Sorin crouched on the floor, still covered in the dirt from his grave.
“This night marks a new night for you, Sorin,” he hissed. “You are no longer a beast. You are a man and in order to live as a man you must let your old life die.”
“Sorin?”
With one last desperate heave, Sorin slammed the door shut on his memory, closing out his sire’s voice and the pain it had always brought him. None of that mattered now. What was done was done. He’d chosen his path, a path he walked down on two legs like a man rather than loping on all fours like a beast. For decades he’d succeeded in controlling his lesser half and only the meddling of women seemed to destroy his hard won self-control.
His fear turned to anger and sharpened to a fine point. He glared at Gia, straightening his spine so he could look down at her.
“When a vukodlak dies, he is assigned a vampiric sire who helps him transition to life as the undead. I was fortunate enough to get a sire who saw me as more than a beast. He looked past the fur and saw a man, he helped me to become a gentleman and leave my savage ways behind me.”
“Savage?” Gia repeated. Anger sharpened her voice. “You’re not suggesting that vampires are more civilized than werewolves?”
“Oh, but I am,” Sorin sneered. “In order to survive, a vampire must charm those around him. He must present a gentlemanly front to procure the cooperation—”
“You think because you sweet talk your food into tilting her head that you’re better than me?” The outrage in her voice was palpable and Sorin met her anger with his own.
“At least I do not run through the forest snapping my jaws and taking a bite out of the first rump to cross my path!”
“How dare you act all high and mighty?” Gia screamed. “You nearly killed me! Any one of my brethren could control his hunger better than you!”
Rage born of guilt and shame reared its ugly head and Sorin lunged forward to grab Gia by the arms. “It is you! Your blood and your body call to me and I cannot resist.” He shook her once, hard. “What have you done to me?”
He wasn’t making sense and he knew it. She was a werewolf, not a witch. There was no magic for him to blame his lack of impulse on. It was the carnal desire of his beast that ate away at his control. The monster delighted in flesh and blood and now that it had gotten a taste of it, it wanted more.
Images of sinking his cock into her soaking depths as his fangs plundered the blood in her veins filled his mind and body with such pleasure that for a moment, his vision blurred. His hunger rose again, tempted by the delicious scent of her skin. It called to him, pulled his face closer to the veins that throbbed just beneath the smooth skin of her neck.
“Perhaps being around another werewolf makes it more difficult to deny that half of yourself,” she whispered.
His gaze flickered up to hers, momentarily distracted from the hunger rearing its ugly head within him. For a split second he swore she looked . . . guilty. Then the moment passed and her face was a mask of empathy again.
“I can help you.”
“How can you help me?” Sorin moaned. “Grigore’s alchemy cannot continue to reinvent your blood and even an alpha must admit some limitation. You cannot think to provide me with the amount of blood it would take to dull the massive hunger you inspire in me.” Even as he denied her offer, he didn’t let go of her arms
. He couldn’t.
“I’m not inspiring your hunger,” she protested quickly. He frowned and she cleared her throat. “And I’m not offering you my blood.”
“Then what—”
“Hunting will ease your bloodlust. Despite your . . . distaste for that part of your nature, it is a primal urge. If you let your beast out to hunt the prey it needs, your hungers will ease.”
Sorin tore his fingers from their grip on her arms and shook his head. “I cannot eat the flesh of a kill.”
“Animals bleed too.”
His face twisted into an expression of horrified disgust. “You want me to lick at the bloody carcass of an animal like some sort of—”
“Think very carefully about your next words,” Gia interrupted, her eyes and voice as smooth and cold as a butcher’s knife.
Sorin swallowed his insulting retort and struggled to think of a different way to phrase it. What she was asking flew in the face of everything his sire had trained him for. She was asking him to give up on being a gentleman and become the monster his sire had forced him to face, oh so many times. Sorin closed his eyes. This will end in blood and death.
“Sorin.” This time Gia’s voice was soft and soothing, a voice to heal not to injure. “Sorin, I’ve known many men like you. Men who thought accepting their wolf meant leaving the world of humanity and becoming a beast covered in blood and surrounded by carnage.” She shifted to put a hand on his shoulder, the soft creaking of the bed giving away her movement before he felt her fingers on his flesh.
“I don’t know how you’ve managed to go this long repressing your beast. I would never have believed it was possible and I can only imagine how painful it was for you.” She took a deep breath. “But I know what I’ve seen since I got here. Your appetite is getting out of control. Your beast wants out and if you don’t accept that it’s a part of you, an equal part that deserves respect, then it will destroy you.”
“You don’t understand,” Sorin whispered. He opened his eyes. “Don’t you think I tried it your way?” He covered her hand on his shoulder with his, needing the feel of another person’s flesh to keep his mind from losing itself in the past. “After my death, my sire told me I had to cut ties with my pack and I reacted as you did. I told him the beast was a part of me, that I could not just pretend it didn’t exist.” His sire’s eyes bored into his even through all the years separating them. “He didn’t try to stop me. He told me if I wanted to be a beast than so be it. He told me to return to my pack and see where my animal nature got me.”
He stared off into space, his mouth continuing to narrate what his mind was seeing as a numbness crawled over his body. “I went back to my pack, but . . . it was different. I couldn’t feel them anymore, couldn’t . . .” The rest of the words wouldn’t come. There were no words that could capture what had happened that night. He could still see their faces, still taste their blood. There was no going back.
“When I finally returned to my sire, he took me back. He refused to let me wash the blood off my body, told me I had to sit covered in the evidence of my sins so that I would never forget what it meant to ignore his teachings.”
Gia stared at him, horror plain in her face. “You can’t blame yourself for one night. You had just died, for cr—”
“It wasn’t just one night.”
Gia trailed off and he met her eyes, letting her see all the shame and guilt in his gaze. “I didn’t give up my beast without a fight, Gia. Every time I felt stronger and in control I tried to let my beast out, just enough to keep it satisfied.” He swallowed hard, struggling not to look away. “Every night I tried, I ended up lying in a room with a corpse. Sometimes one, sometimes more, but always torn open and always staring at me with death-glazed eyes.”
Gia frowned. “You dragged your victims home with you? That doesn’t sound—”
“My sire retrieved them and put them in my room with me. He said I had to face what I’d done so I would be more committed to not letting it happen again.”
Saying the words out loud brought back the memories. He could hear the front door of his master’s mansion banging against the wall as he threw it open. The heavy shuffle of feet and the constant dragging sound of dead weight. How he’d hated the sound of the victim’s skull as it bounced against each step as his sire dragged it behind him. Up and up, closer and closer to Sorin’s room.
Thud . . . thud . . . thud . . .
The look on Gia’s face almost made him laugh in that semi-hysterical way one did when the mind was too horrified to function. He imagined he must have worn a similar expression at one time, all disbelieving horror and shock.
“So you see, Gia,” he said softly. “I must continue to fight. Giving up is not an option.”
“You’re a fool.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me?”
“Your sire was clearly a sick fuck. I’m sure denying his own beast just—”
“My sire is not a vukodlak. He is a strigori.”
Gia grit her teeth and narrowed her eyes. “I am going to ignore for a moment that you just told me you let someone who doesn’t know shit about being a werewolf tell you how to manage your beast. I am going to put off telling you what a colossal moron that makes you. Just for a moment, let’s clear up the matter of what the fuck a ‘strigori’ is?”
“To say someone is a vampire is like saying a lion is a cat. There is more to it than that. There are . . . breeds of vampire. Vukodlaks, strigori, iaras . . . Each group has its own customs, strengths, and weaknesses. My sire is a strigori.”
“So a strigori is a type of vampire.”
“Yes. And a very civilized one at that.”
Gia sat back on her heels, staring at him as if he’d grown a second head. “Do tell.”
A tiny flame of hope flickered to life inside Sorin as he settled into explain things to her. His sire had always spoken of the gift of the strigori, how they were unlike other vampires--more dignified. Hearing him talk had always inspired Sorin. Sometimes that had been the only thought that could pull him out of his fevered nightmares . . . the thought that if he tried hard enough, he would be the man he once was. He could leave all the blood behind.
“Strigori do not feed on blood. They feed on energy, the basic lifeforce that animates all creatures. A strigori can go anywhere, speak with anyone. All he has to do is concentrate and he can siphon a little bit of that energy from those around him. That energy animates and energizes him in the same way that lesser vampires must rely on blood.”
“How civilized.”
Sorin frowned at the mocking tone in her voice. The flame of hope inside him flickered and burned a little higher as anger rose in response to her disrespect. His sire had never tolerated disrespect. No gentleman tolerated disrespect. He opened his mouth to defend his race, to make her understand.
“If your sire wasn’t a vukodlak, and he didn’t drink blood, than how the fuck was he supposed to help you ‘transition?’” Gia demanded. “How can he understand what you’re going through to help you if he’s never been through it himself?”
Her questions halted Sorin’s prepared speech about the superior nature of the strigori. He shook his head, flustered with her determined lack of comprehension. “You don’t understand anything,” he snapped. “My sire did not need to ‘understand’ what it was like. He could see what a monstrous life I’d been living, all he had to do was teach me a new way of life.”
Gia stared at him. “And what if your life was not so easy to leave behind?”
“Upon rising, a vukodlak shares blood with his new sire. The blood bond forms a connection between them that allows the sire to calm the mind of his ward. My sire had the ability to reach into my mind and calm me when necessary.”
“I thought strigori didn’t--”
Whatever she’d been about to say, Gia seemed to change her mind. She closed her mouth, leaning back on her heels and just looking at Sorin. Finally, she took a deep breath. Some of the tension leaked out of
her shoulders and her brown eyes softened. Sorin eyed her warily, wondering what had caused the change in her disposition.
“You say your sire had the ability to reach into your mind and calm you?” she asked.
Sorin nodded slowly. “Yes.”
Gia moved again, settling into a sitting position on the bed with her legs crossed in front of her. “That sounds like a wonderful gift. I wish I could reach into the minds of my new wolves and calm them so easily.” She shrugged. “As lupa, my presence can have a calming effect on its own. I concentrate on being calm and looking into another wolf’s eyes and I can share some of that calm. But it doesn’t always work, especially if the wolf is too worked up, or too terrified of who they are.”
Sorin found himself nodding again without meaning to. “It is a frightening experience,” he agreed softly.
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