? ? ?
My car was a sweet, sinister ride . . . deep black, with murdered-out wheels and chrome. Ninja black. Since I wasn’t a vamp like my passenger, I had to keep the headlights on, which spoiled the stealth effect, but image wasn’t worth dying over.
I half expected to argue with Myrnin about how to ride in a car like a human, but he got in, fastened his seat belt, and seemed perfectly at home. I eyed him suspiciously while I started up the engine. “Where’d you learn to buckle up?”
“Claire has explained to me the rules for riding in a motorized vehicle,” he said. “Also, I understand not to attempt to drive from this position. She got very upset when I tried it last time.”
“Touch this wheel, and swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
“I see what she likes about you,” he said. “How long have you been wedded now?”
“Coming up on a year,” I said. It still felt weird, really weird, to say that. I’d never thought past having the wedding—it seemed like the biggest possible goal there was in the world, and I hadn’t bothered to think about what would happen after.
And the wedding day came, and the fear and pride and rush of something so big I couldn’t even define it. Love, I guess. So much love.
Then the world turned, the sun came up, and . . . we were married. And that was weird, because it turned out getting married wasn’t an achievement so much as a level-up, play-on kind of deal. Life was more different now than I’d ever imagined, because there was this other person entwined with me who was there every day. Not in the boyfriend/girlfriend I-can-leave-if-I-want way, but in an I’m-never-leaving-you way. Took time to figure out how to live with that, for both of us. We had amazing times and stupidly bad times and days where nothing happened at all, because . . . life. Life was happening together now, not separately. And it was only just beginning to dawn on me how incredibly wonderful that really was.
Every morning when I opened my eyes, I was still amazed she was lying in the same bed with me. But I didn’t want to say any of that. Not to Myrnin, anyway.
“She seems happy,” Myrnin said. He was looking out the window as I drove, and he sounded quiet. Thoughtful. Not the usual thing for him. “I thought she would be more . . . restless.”
I guessed he was meaning to be nice and make small talk, but talking about Claire was creeping me out. I knew he’d had some kind of feelings for her—what they were exactly was a mystery, because he wasn’t even as normal as most vampires, never mind regular human guys. When he said he loved Claire for her mind, I think he meant it, and from him, that was equally creepy.
“How’s Jesse?” If we were talking about girls all of a sudden, it seemed only fair we should talk about his . . . though it was hard to figure out exactly what attraction crazy, wardrobe-challenged Myrnin had for hot, funny, savage Jesse, except they shared a liking for plasma.
“Lady Grey is . . . indescribable,” he said. “But then, she always was. She rescued me twice, you know, from a particularly awful kind of hell. And she was very kind to me in my recovery. I’ve missed her.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“And what?”
“Seemed like the two of you had a thing.”
“A thing?”
“You know.”
“I do not know, and I might prefer not to know.”
“Let me put it another way: Do vampires . . . ?” I left it right there, filling in the blanks with raised eyebrows. He sent me an irritated look.
“Do we what? Your generation’s infelicity with verbs fills me with despair.”
I didn’t even know what infelicity was, but I guessed it meant we were bad at them. So I spelled it out. “Do vampires have sex?”
He seemed shocked. That was pretty funny, because I could swear he was about a thousand years old, and surely someone had mentioned sex to him before. If not, holy crap, this was going to be awkward.
“I . . .” He clearly had no idea what to say, and flapped his hands as if he was shooing the whole subject off. “That is far too personal a question, Shame, far too personal!”
“Yeah, the name’s still Shane.”
“No, I believe I had it quite right this time. It suits the moment much better.”
It was pretty great, watching him squirm. “Are you actually a virgin? Because I don’t think I’ve seen this much nervous fidgeting from anyone out of grade school.”
“I come from an age when what happened behind closed doors was kept there. And since you clearly will not abandon the subject, vampires are fully capable of . . . such things. Just not as driven by them as humans, since we are not constantly hounded by the shadow of death. And we do not . . . procreate in the same way.”