I paced around the house for another hour, tired but knowing I’d never sleep. My cat got bored of chasing my ankles as I attempted to wear holes in the carpet, and went upstairs. Still I paced, Bones’ words haunting me. I’ve been looking for you every day since you left me... You’ll live as long as you want to, just as you are... You’ve had your shot at things, now let me have mine...
“Who am I kidding?” I finally asked out loud in frustration. I was less concerned about Ian’s intentions to track me down, the contract on my life, or anything else, than about this: Did Bones and I actually have a chance together? With finding out about my longevity, the single biggest obstacle to our relationship had been removed. Sure, I worked for the government version of Graveslayers Inc. and my mother would rather poke needles in her eyes than see me date a vampire... but what if Bones was right? What if the two of us weren’t hopeless together? God, after all these years, I could hardly believe I had a chance to ponder that again.
Now the question was, What was I willing to risk to find out?
SIXTEEN
DON REGARDED ME WITH tempered curiosity when I walked into his office later that day. It changed to suspicion when I shut the door and locked it behind me. Normally I had to be reminded to even close it.
“What’s going on, Cat? You said it was urgent.”
Yeah, I had. I’d thought about Bones saying Don knew the secret of my longevity, and it had gotten me good and mad. Time to rock the boat.
“See, Don, I have this question, and I hope you’ll be honest with me.”
He pulled at the end of his eyebrow. “I think you know you can count on my honesty.”
“Can I?” I asked with an edge. “All right, then tell me: How long have you been fucking me?”
That caused him to stop tugging his brow. “I don’t know what you’re saying—”
“Because if I was going to fuck you,” I interrupted, “I’d get a bottle of gin, some Frank Sinatra music... and a crash cart for the heart attack you’d have. But you, Don, you’ve been fucking me for years now, and I haven’t gotten any liquor, music, flowers, candy, or anything!”
“Cat... ” He sounded wary. “If you have a point, then get to it. This analogy is wearing thin.”
“How old am I?”
“You just had a birthday; you know how old you are. You’re twenty-seven—”
His desk crashed to the far side of the room, splintering in shards of mahogany. Papers flew, and his computer thumped to the carpet. It happened in less time than his shocked blink.
“How old am I?”
Don glanced at his demolished furniture before straightening and regarding me across the now-empty space between us.
“Nineteen or twenty, if you judge from your bone density and pathology reports. Your teeth match up to that as well.”
The end of puberty, when my body apparently decided it was done aging. I gave a harsh chuckle.
“Guess I won’t need to stock up on any Oil of Olay, will I? You ruthless motherfucker, were you ever going to tell me? Or were you just waiting to see if I lived long enough to notice?”
The pretense was gone from him, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say he looked relieved.
“Eventually I was going to inform you, of course. When the time was right.”
“Yeah, and you knew you had lots of it, didn’t you? Who else knows?” I paced, keeping an eye on him as he sat calmly amid the ruins of his office.
“Tate, and the head pathologist here, Dr. Lang. His assistant, Brad Parker, probably.”
“Did you tell Tate about the added decades to his own life? Or were you waiting for an ‘opportune time’ for that as well?”
Don changed from composed to uncomfortable in the space of those sentences. When he hesitated, I pounced.
“Don’t even try to say you don’t know what I’m talking about! You tested all of us that night in Ohio, and every fucking week after that as always. You didn’t tell them?”
“I wasn’t sure,” he hedged.
“Well, let me assure you then! They had about a pint each of decently aged vampire blood. That’ll give them, what? Another twenty years at least? You know, I always thought you forbade us from drinking straight blood because you worried we’d grow a taste for it, me especially, but you were concerned with more than that, weren’t you? You already knew what it would do! How did you find that out?”
His tone was cold. “Someone I knew many years ago started out fighting on the right side like I did, then ended up liking the enemy more. He didn’t age in decades. That’s when I knew what vampire blood could do, and it’s why the Brams is so minutely screened and filtered. It carries none of that dangerous poison in it.”