Keeping his tone gentle, Balthazar said, “What happened to your brother?”
“He was spending his summer break in Australia with his girlfriend, Felicia. They went off-roading in the outback. His ATV flipped. He broke his neck.” Her eyes had reddened with unshed tears. “So when I saw that guy beneath the bleachers, and he looked like Dakota, and there was all that pain in his neck, it was like—like I was feeling my brother die, too.”
Skye looked away, apparently struggling for composure. Balthazar had learned over centuries that some grief could not be answered or consoled; the only service to give to people in that dark place was to bear witness. So he wrapped his hand around hers, accepting her sorrow, letting it flow through the space between them as her breathing slowed and became more steady.
After a few moments, Skye said, “We need to talk about Redgrave.”
“I know.” On top of all this, she still had Redgrave after her. How much would she have to bear? It was too much, and Balthazar felt a surge of anger—at Redgrave, at fate, at her brother for being such a daredevil—at anybody who had hurt Skye—
No humans, he reminded himself.
Skye then told him about Redgrave’s latest stunt. Though Balthazar felt slightly relieved that Redgrave wasn’t reckless enough to go after her in public—yet—the rest of it only made him angrier. “Don’t listen to any of his … bargains, or compromises, or whatever else he’s calling them. I did, once, almost four hundred years ago. I’m still paying the price.”
“You mean—is Redgrave the vampire who—”
“He killed me. He turned me into a vampire.” Balthazar realized his hand still clasped hers, and reluctantly pulled it away. It was difficult admitting this to her—to anyone. He disliked reliving their history even through the retelling. “Technically, I agreed to the change. But only after he took me to a place where I would’ve done anything just to have the chance to die and end it.”
Her face white, Skye nodded. “I don’t trust him. I never will. But—he still knows something about me that we don’t.”
“We’ll find out for ourselves.”
It was an automatic response; anything was better than turning to Redgrave and expecting answers. So it surprised Balthazar when Skye rose and went to the medicine cabinet. “Okay, then. Let’s start.”
When she turned back toward him, she held an empty plastic syringe, and he realized what she meant to do. “This is a bad idea.”
Skye shook her head. Though she was obviously still weakened from her ordeal, having a goal made her focus on that and nothing else. “The only way we’re going to understand what my blood does is for a vampire to drink it.”
“I may have already done that.”
“Wait—what?”
“After all that insanity at the gas station—right after Mr. Lovejoy crashed his car, I tasted a few drops of blood that were on the ground. I thought it might have been his, but… I felt strange afterward. So the blood must have been yours.” Shameful to admit how much he had wanted that brief taste of human blood, but it had become too important not to talk about. But the intense hallucinatory experience that had followed—the almost total immersion in his own past—that couldn’t be only about her blood. It was impossible. Or was it? “I can’t be sure.”
“You can be sure if you try it again, and you drink more this time.”
“It’s a bad idea.” Getting used to the taste of her blood—it was so insanely tempting that Balthazar thought it would be better if he never, ever knew.
The desire to drink living human blood was the most inescapable part of being a vampire … more inescapable even than death. Living off animals was possible—Balthazar had proved that—but their blood lacked the full lifeforce that vampires craved past the point of reason. In the past century, the practice of blood donation had created ways to get even human blood without hurting people, but only a few hours outside the body robbed the blood of its most precious qualities.
Drinking human blood allowed vampires to continue to look human, to continue to use reason. Animal blood would hold the monster within at bay, too, but not for nearly as long. Trying to withstand temptation only led to madness—only brought the monster closer to the surface. To resist becoming nothing but a homicidal predator, Balthazar had to drink human blood from time to time. It was the governing irony of vampiric existence.
But to get hooked on the blood of one human in particular—that was far more dangerous than not drinking blood at all.
Her expression only became more stubborn. “It’s the only way to find out what they’re after, so we’re doing it.” Skye hesitated as she looked down at the needle. “I never actually did this before, but it looks easy enough on TV.”
“So does flipping over your car at a hundred miles per hour and not dying.” Balthazar took the syringe from her. “I did some medic duty during the Korean conflict. I can handle this.”
She was right, of course. They had to investigate, and there was no other place to begin than with testing her blood’s true power.
But as Balthazar looked at Skye, he knew they courted danger. The vision he’d had before had been overwhelming; so real, he’d lost all control over the here and now. Bad enough at any time, but here—where he was being offered the blood of a living person, the human blood he so desperately missed and craved—in this small, private, closed-in room with a girl who drew him even more strongly than blood—