“This crack begins on the inside,” Freyja said, inspecting it more closely. “I will ask you one more time, Phoebe: How did this happen?”
“I told you!” Phoebe said, defensive. “A bird. It was outside in the tree. I wanted to get its attention, so I tapped on the glass. I didn’t mean to break anything. I just wanted it to look at me.”
The bird would not stop singing. At first Phoebe had found the song enchanting, her vampire ears attuned as they never had been to the trills and warbles. As it went on—and on—however, she wanted to wring the bird’s neck.
If she drank the blood of a bird, would she understand why they sang all the time?
Phoebe’s stomach gurgled.
“I’m too damn old to be a mother. I’d completely forgotten what a pain in the ass children are.” Miriam had arrived. She put her hands on her slender hips and adopted her preferred stance: legs slightly separated, usually clad in some sort of boot (today’s were high-heeled and suede), and her elbows pushing into the surrounding space at sharp angles, daring someone to dismiss her as insignificant.
The rush of pride in her maker was instantaneous and surprising, engulfing Phoebe. Miriam’s blood flowed through Phoebe’s veins, strong and powerful. She might be small and worthless now, but in time Phoebe would be a vampire to reckon with, too.
Disappointment crashed down on her. Phoebe’s throat tightened.
“What is it?” Freyja asked, concerned. “Is the light too bright? Fran?oise, close those drapes immediately.”
“It’s not the sunshine. It’s just I’ve grown only an inch.” Phoebe had been marking her progress every ten minutes or so on the frame of the door that led into the bathroom. The mark hadn’t risen for the past eight hours. Phoebe had scratched so many lines into that single location with her fingernail that the paint was ruined.
“If height was what you were after, you should have had Freyja sire you,” Miriam said tartly, moving into the room past the nearly six-foot-tall Dane. With one sweeping glance she studied the mess Phoebe had made, confirmed that the window glass was indeed cracked, and fixed dark eyes on her daughter. “Well?”
There was no mistaking the demand for an explanation in her maker’s tone.
“I’m bored.” Phoebe said it quietly, embarrassed by the puerile confession.
“Excellent. Well done.” Freyja nodded approvingly. “That is a tremendous achievement, Phoebe.”
Miriam’s eyes narrowed.
“And,” Phoebe continued, her voice increasingly plaintive, “hungry.”
“This is why no one should be made a vampire until they are thirty,” Miriam told Freyja. “Insufficient inner resources.”
“You were twenty-five!” Phoebe said hotly, her defenses rising at the insult.
“Back then, twenty-five was practically old age.” Miriam shook her head. “We can’t come running every time you feel restless, Phoebe. You’re going to have to figure out how to fill your time.”
“Do you play chess? Embroider? Like to cook? Make perfume?” Freyja began to rattle off the activities of a medieval Danish princess. “Write poetry?”
“Cook?” Phoebe was bewildered at the prospect—and the mere thought made her empty stomach rise up in rebellion. She hadn’t enjoyed cooking when she was human. Now that she was a vampire it was out of the question.
“It can be a very rewarding hobby. I knew a vampire who spent a decade perfecting the soufflé. She said it was very soothing,” Freyja replied. “Veronique did have a human husband at the time, of course. He was quite happy with her efforts, though in the end they killed him. His heart was so blocked with sugar and eggs that he died at fifty-three.”
“Do you mean Marcus’s Veronique, who works in London?” Phoebe didn’t know that Freyja and Marcus’s former lover were acquainted.
Marcus.
The thought of him was electrifying.
When Phoebe was a warmblood, Marcus’s touches had made her veins turn to fire and her fragile human limbs to liquid. Now that she was a vampire . . . Phoebe’s restless mind dwelt on the possibilities. Her lips turned up into a slow, seductive smile.
“Oh, dear,” Freyja said, a bit of alarm in her tone as she detected the direction that Phoebe’s wandering attention had taken. “What about a musical instrument? Do you play something? Can you sing?”
“No music.” Miriam’s lilting soprano turned thunderous, something only a vampire could manage. “When Jason discovered the drum, it nearly drove his father and me around the bend.”
Phoebe had not yet met Jason, the only surviving child of Miriam’s long-dead mate.
She began to thrum her fingers on the tabletop in anticipation. Phoebe had never had a brother, only Stella. Sisters were different—younger sisters, especially. What might she do with an older brother? Phoebe wondered.
Miriam’s hand closed on hers, bone-crushing and painful. “No. Drumming.”
Bored, hungry, and restless, held captive by Freyja and Miriam—how was Phoebe supposed to endure it? She wanted to run outside and breathe fresh air.
Phoebe wanted to chase something that wasn’t a thought, run it into the ground and then—
“I want to hunt.” Phoebe was amazed by the realization. She’d worried about hunting for weeks before she became a vampire, and for the past six hours she’d been pushing the idea resolutely from her mind. Because after the hunting came the feeding from a live human, and Phoebe wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
Yet.
Phoebe instinctively understood that hunting would push her restless thoughts to the background. Hunting would feed some part of her that was hollow and yearning. Hunting would bring peace.
“Of course you do,” Freyja said. “Isn’t Phoebe progressing marvelously, Miriam?”
“You’re not ready,” Miriam pronounced, quelling Phoebe’s excitement.
“But I’m hungry.” Phoebe fidgeted in her chair, her eyes pinned on Miriam’s wrist.
Feeding from her maker was like getting a meal and a bedtime story all at once. With every drop of blood Phoebe swallowed, her mind and imagination were suffused with Miriam’s memories. She’d learned far more about Miriam in the past two days than she had in the fifteen months they had known each other.
Some of what Phoebe knew felt intuitive, a flood of scattered episodes from Miriam’s long life in which pleasure and pain were inseparable partners.
In subsequent feedings, Phoebe was able to focus on the strongest impressions in Miriam’s blood rather than being overcome by waves of blurry remembrance.
Phoebe understood now that the tall, rugged man with the wise, wary eyes and the wide, easy grin had been Miriam’s mate, and that she alone called him Ori, though others knew him as Bertrand and Wendalin, Ludo and Randolf, and his mother had called him Gund.
Miriam had sired more men than women in the centuries that led to Phoebe’s own conversion. She had to in order to survive, back when having men around you was some measure of protection against rape and robbery. Sons could pretend to be brothers, or even spouses in emergencies, and were a deterrent to both grasping humans with their incessant need for more wealth, and vampires with their desire for greater territory. Her sons, like her mate, Ori, were gone now, killed in the violent warfare that ran through Miriam’s memories in a dark ribbon of grief.
Then there were the daughters. First, there had been Taderfit, killed by her vampire mate in a fit of jealous rage. Lalla, Miriam’s second daughter, had been set upon by her own children, crushed and torn to death in a competition over who would rule their clan once Lalla was gone. After Miriam had disposed of Lalla’s feuding children, she stopped making daughters for a while.