Velvet

“Oh my gosh, you are a nerd.”


He clamped a hand over my mouth, smiling. “Lesson One: human biology. Being mortal and clumsy, you trip over your own shoelaces and scrape your knee.” I muttered something about being clumsy, my ass, but his hand muffled it. “Now, the platelets in your blood snag on the damaged blood vessels and explode”—he released my face to tap his fingers against my palm in an exploding motion—“releasing fibrin, which attaches to itself to form a net that your red blood cells can’t get through, which is called a blood clot, and it keeps you from dying horribly every time you get a paper cut. Now I, being an awesome vampire, get in a really cool fight—bullets flying, explosions, the works. Someone stabs my shoulder—do I die? Nope. My vampire platelets are hyperactive. They actually pull the wound back together while my injury heals—and I heal very, very quickly.”

I stared at his hand covering mine. “I still wish you had a flannel graph, but I gotta admit, that’s pretty bad ass.”

He rested his arm across my stomach and continued. “It is, and it isn’t. We kinda got screwed over in the red blood cell department. Their shape is amorphous, constantly fluctuating between randomly mutating structures. And they don’t contain hemoglobin. And they’re about ten times the size of a normal human red blood cell.”

I looked up at him, eyes narrowed questioningly. “And that’s bad.”

“It’s bad,” he confirmed. “The mutating shape prevents oxygen from bonding. Even if it could, there’s no hemoglobin to attract oxygen in the first place.”

“Science words,” I warned. “When you say hemoglobin I just think of little Irish tricksters who live in caves, or Lord of the Rings.”

“You mean goblin?”

“Yes.”

He rubbed his hand over his face, but he was smiling. “Your brain works on a completely different level from mine.”

“Apparently.”

“All right, how about you just give me a signal anytime I get too technical?”

I thought about it. “You cool with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach?”

He nodded. “That would be acceptable.”

I gave him a thumbs-up. He smiled.

“All right—take two. Because our red blood cells constantly change shape, they can sort of morph their way through the smaller blood vessels, but it takes longer. Slower surface circulation leads to a low oxygen supply—” I was starting to raise my hand in a thumbs-down gesture, so he said, “Okay, okay! If we don’t drink blood, we look really pale. Regardless of our ethnicity or geographic location or exposure to the sun. And we feel cold to the touch.” He paused and looked down at me in exasperation. “I am seriously trying here. Every instinct I have is telling me to use polysyllabic words to impress you.”

I squeezed his arm comfortingly. “You’re doing fantastic. But your information doesn’t add up. You’re not pale, and you’re not cold. In fact, you’re downright hot,” I said, remembering how my cheek had burned against his chest two days ago in the clearing. I saw a smile spread slowly across his face at my choice of words, and I rolled my eyes. “Not that kind of hot.” He arched a brow at me. I rolled my eyes again. “Okay, yes, that kind of hot. You know what I mean.”

“That’s because I’m very good about maintaining a consistent diet.”

I frowned at his typical answer-that-was-not-an-answer, but before I could call him on it, we turned a corner sharply and the bright morning sun reflected off a metal switchback-warning sign, casting a glare onto myself and Adrian. A thought struck me and I examined his hand in the light.

“According to legend, you should be bursting into flames right about now.”

He smiled, glancing out the window. “There’s a little truth to that, but only a little. If we haven’t had blood in weeks, our skin loses all its pigmentation—which is really weird if you’re a dark-skinned vampire, by the way—so if we’re outside in bright sunlight, we do burn. We just don’t spontaneously combust.”

“Glad to hear it—I’d never get your ashes out of these seats.”

“Try Lysol. Works like a charm.”

I smiled at him and he smiled back.

“Lesson Two,” he continued. “Vampire biology. All vampires are born with type AB blood, which is a universal receiver. Basically, it doesn’t matter who we get blood from, as long as we get it from a human.”

“So, no drinking the blood of innocent bunnies.”

“Correct,” he confirmed. “The bunnies are safe.”

“And all the bunnies rejoiced, and there was great joy in the land of bunnies.”

He looked at me funny and I shrugged as if to say, “Deal with my weird; I’m dealing with yours.”

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