He ran cool fingers over the scarred skin of her arm, and for a moment she was too spellbound to go on. “I think you had a reason to be scared,” he said.
“Maybe. But the thing is that when I got to that camp, no one knew me. And by the time I went home, I saw myself differently. There, I had been the first one to swim all the way across the lake. When the sink backed up, I took apart the pipes and fixed it. I nearly killed some poor kid from the boys’ cabins who tried to scare us by pretending to be a vampire.”
“I’ll bet,” Gavriel said dryly.
“Laugh it up,” she told him, “but the thing is, I hadn’t known myself at all until I went away. I knew how Nicole and Amber saw me. And Lucien and the Spider and all the others—they’re afraid of you so they figure you must be pretty awful indeed. They think you can’t feel anything, because they’ve forgotten how. You’re very, very dangerous, I get that, and you’re prone to some very theatrical brooding, but don’t let yourself mistake that for some kind of inner corruption. They see themselves in you and are blinded.”
He leaned toward her, gazing into her face as though some great secret swam in her eyes, his hands drawing her closer, his mouth parting slightly, showing the very tips of his canines as he bent toward her, eyes hooded. “And what do you see?”
A shudder went through her, the chill of infection racing through her veins.
He pulled back, as though he’d been scorched. His lips were still apart and there was a wildness in the way he looked at her, as though he were a trapped animal expecting the lash of a whip.
“No,” she said. “I’m just Cold. It’s the sickness.”
He looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. “You didn’t drink enough blood,” he said, and lifted his wrist to his mouth, biting down.
Red staining his teeth and the inside of his lower lip, he held his hand out to her.
“I can’t,” she said softly, pulling away, the smell of his blood making her dizzy. “Something’s wrong with me already.”
He frowned, studying her face. Her eyes went to his red wrist. She wanted to kiss it, to drag her tongue across it, to sink her sharp teeth past his skin. And another part of her was screaming that she couldn’t do that, that she wasn’t like that.
She opened her mouth, letting him see the new points of her new fangs.
“Oh,” he said, clearly surprised, but not that surprised.
“Please just tell me if it’s really bad. Marisol said—oh, forget what she said. Just explain.”
“I’ll try,” Gavriel began, ignoring his bleeding wrist. “Long ago, we visited humans we wanted to turn, night after night, taking their blood and giving them our own. When they were ready—after they’d become something not quite human—we let them taste human blood and become vampires. You’ve, er, hastened the process by drinking so much vampire blood on your own.”
His explanation was like Marisol’s, except that he’d obviously seen it done. No, you idiot, she thought suddenly, he had it done to him.
“What now?” Tana asked, the words something not quite human echoing in her head.
Gavriel shrugged. “A vampire who’s been fed on vampire blood is stronger, that’s all. Most vampires turned after everything went Cold are weak, with weak blood. They’re what we used to call by-blows, accidents. Mistakes.”
Tana’s tongue ran over the points of her teeth. Gavriel’s blood was running down his arm in three lines, and she found it hard to tear her gaze away. It looked like strawberry-blueberry syrup, just as in her little-kid dream. “I’m still just Cold, though, right? In eighty-eight days, if I don’t drink any more—I’ll get better, won’t I?”
The look on his face told her more than his words. “I’ve never seen anyone go backward once the physical transformation began, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”
“So it’s also possible that I could be Cold forever?” she asked, her heart pounding. “Hungry, forever and ever?”
He was silent for a long moment, which was answer enough. Then he reached for a scarf to bind his wrist.
If she stayed Cold forever and ever, that would make her a living vampire. A living vampire that could never have what it craved.
Just when you think you’ve sunk as far as it’s possible to sink, there’s always a lower place. There’s always something worse to be scared about. Wasn’t that some saying? Some rule?