“It was passed to me through my mother,” Lissianna admitted. “But my mother wasn’t born with it.”
“Your father?” he queried, and realized he hadn’t asked how old Jean Claude Argeneau had been when he died just a couple years ago. “How old was your father?”
“He, his twin brother, and their parents were amongst those who fled Atlantis when it fell. Aunt Martine was born a couple hundred years later.”
Her father and his family had fled Atlantis when it fell, he considered silently. When had that been? He wasn’t sure. Certainly before Roman times, before the birth of Christ…Dear God, it didn’t bear thinking about.
“My father introduced the nanos to my mother when they were married,” Lissianna added when his silence continued.
Greg gave a start at this news. “So anyone could…”
“You don’t have to be born one,” she admitted softly when he paused. “They were introduced to the blood intravenously to start with and still can be.”
“And the blood doesn’t necessarily have to be consumed,” he said, his mind going back to that point. He didn’t know why. Maybe because it made them seem less alien when he thought of it as a blood disorder like hemophilia.
“Yes, but it’s somewhat time-consuming in comparison to proper feeding,” she explained. “Think of the dif
ference between downing a pint of water rather than waiting for a pint of saline to drip into a body using an IV.”
“I suppose that was inconvenient for you when the others could just down a pint and go,” he said, struggling to understand.
“It wasn’t that it was all that inconvenient,” she said quietly. “Mother used to wait until I was in bed for the day before bringing in the blood and IV. I fed while I slept. It wasn’t really inconvenient at all, but…” She hesitated, then admitted, “It made me feel like a dependent child, as vulnerable as baby birds who need their mothers to digest the worm and feed it to them. I
was
dependent.”
“And now you aren’t?” he asked.
“Now I feed myself,” she said with quiet pride, then admitted a tad wryly, “Not always well, but I feed.”
“If you’re hemaphobic, how do you feed?”
She sighd. “Greg, I don’t think—”
“How?” he insisted, though he thought he already knew the answer. If she fainted at the sight of blood, then the only option open to her—without someone’s setting her up with an IV—was for her to bite as she had done with him.
“The old-fashioned way,” she finally admitted.
“Is that guilt I hear in your voice?” he asked with surprise. While he himself would rather think she used bagged blood like the others than that she ran around biting people like some ghoulish female version of Dracula, he hadn’t expected it to bother her.
“Blood banks became the main source of feeding for my people some fifty years ago. Everyone switched over, and I started to be fed intravenously,” she explained. “After fifty years of not feeding directly from mortals you can almost convince yourself that they and the bag of
blood hooked up to the IV have nothing to do with each other. Mortals just become neighbors and friends and—”
“I understand,” Greg interrupted, and he did. He supposed it was similar to the phenomenon humans enjoyed, where meat came wrapped in neat little packages and one could forget that the veal they were eating came from the cute little calf with spindly legs and big eyes.
Greg’s mind went back to the conversation he’d had with Thomas his first night here, when the man had pleaded Lissianna’s case, explaining that her phobia was causing them all to worry she might turn out like her father. He puzzled over the matter, his mind slowly putting things together. Lissianna had struggled to be less dependent on her mother, she’d got a degree, a job, and her own apartment. She—
“You work at the shelter,” he said with realization.
“Yes,” she said warily.
“You feed there.” It wasn’t a question. This was the only thing that made sense. If she was feeding the old-fashioned way and had got a degree and a job to do so, she had probably picked a job where she thought she’d best be able to feed.
“I thought I could help people and take care of my own needs at the same time,” she explained.
Greg nodded to himself. It made sense. It would help ease any guilt she felt about feeding after doing so intravenously for so long.
“I also thought the people at the shelter would change nightly.”
“Don’t they?” Greg asked with surprise. He didn’t know much about shelters.
“Unfortunately, no. It’s often the same people over and over for months at a time, though there are a few who come and go quickly.”
“But a lot of the homeless have drinking or drug problems,” he said, understanding what was concerning the family. If a large percentage of the clientele at the shelter had a substance abuse problem, and she was regularly feeding from them…
“Some do,” she said quietly. “Not all. For some the alcohol or drugs are what helped them become homeless; they lost their jobs, families, homes…For others, circumstances left them homeless, and they may now drink or take drugs to forget their situations for a while. But they aren’t all substance abusers.”
Greg smiled faintly at her defensive tone. She obviously cared about the people at the shelter as more than just dinner. That was good to know.
“But many of them aren’t healthy either,” she went on. “They have little or no money and aren’t eating properly. Some only get one meal a day, breakfast at the shelter in the mornings.”
“Which is why your family are worried and want me to cure your phobia,” Greg guessed. “If you aren’t feeding from people who have alcohol or drugs in their systems you’re feeding off people who aren’t eating healthily, so
you
aren’t eating healthily.”
“Yes.” She grimaced. “I exist on the equivalent of a fast-food diet; filling, but containing very little in the way of nutrients. But I really don’t think that bothers Mother as much as the alcohol.”
Greg nodded, but he couldn’t seem to take his gaze away from her mouth. He’d never paid much attention to her teeth, his attention until now had always been focused on her lips and what he’d like her to do with them. Still, he thought he should have noticed her fangs at some point. “Can I see your teeth?”
Lissianna stilled, her eyes locking on his face. “Why?”
“Well…” Greg shifted his weight and frowned. “I mostly believe you people are what you say you are. I saw the bite marks, I know I’ve been being controlled, but…”
“But you want more proof. Physical proof,” she guessed when he hesitated.
“I’m sorry, but what we’re talking about here is pretty incredible,” he pointed out. “Vampires from Atlantis who aren’t cursed or soulless, but live forever and stay young and healthy-looking? It’s rather like being asked to believe in the Easter Bunny.”
Lissianna nodded in understanding, but still hesitated another moment before opening her mouth, revealing her teeth. They were straight, pearly white, but—
“No fangs,” he said with disappointment.
In response to his comment, Lissianna leaned a little closer. He saw her nostrils flare slightly as she inhaled, and her canines shifted, sliding smoothly out as is if on tracks under the outer teeth. Two long, pointed fangs suddenly protruded from her mouth.
Greg felt himself pale and went still. “Does—” He paused to clear his throat when his voice came out unnaturally high, then tried again, “Does that hurt?”
Lissianna let her teeth slide back into their resting position before trying to speak. “You mean the teeth extending and retracting?”
He nodded, his eyes still fixed on her mouth.
“No.”
“How do they—?”
“I gather it’s like the claws on a cat,” she said with a shrug, then raised a hand to cover a yawn before finishing with, “At least that’s what my brother Bastien says.”
“So, you were born with them?” Greg questioned, and when she nodded, he asked, “But surely your ancestors, I
mean the original Atlanteans, they didn’t have fangs, did they?”
“No. My ancestors are as human as yours.”
Greg couldn’t keep the doubt from his face, and she frowned.
“We
are
,” she insisted. “We’re just…” She struggled briefly, then said, “We just evolved a little differ—The nanos forced us to evolve certain traits that are useful, that will help us survive. We need blood to sustain us, so…”
“So, the fangs,” he finished, when she hesitated.
Lissianna nodded and yawned again, then said, “I should probably go to bed.”
Greg frowned. It was morning for him, and he was wide-awake and curious as hell, but he also knew she worked nights at the shelter and that it was her time to sleep. He wrestled with his conscience for a moment, but his selfishness won.
“Can’t you stay a little longer? Here, sit beside me and lean against the wall. It’ll be more comfortable for you,” he suggested, shifting as far to the side as he could with his hands tied as they were.
Lissianna hesitated, then shifted to sit beside him in the bed. She fluffed her pillow, arranging it over his arm, then leaned against it and got comfortable.
Greg peered up at her, but his mind was on the fact that she smelled really, really good, and she was close enough he could feel the heat radiating off her. After a moment, he managed to draw his mind back to the questions whirling through his head. “What else? What other ways did the nanos evolve you?”
Lissianna grimaced. “We have excellent night vision, and we’re faster and stronger.”
“To see and hunt your prey. They’ve made you perfect night predators.”
She winced at the description, but nodded.
“And the mind control?”
Lissianna sighed. “It makes feeding easier. It allows us to control our hosts or donors, and to wipe their memories of the experience afterward. We can keep them from feeling pain while we feed, and make them forget what happened, which is safer for both the donors and us.”
“So what went wrong with me?” Greg asked curiously as she yawned again.
Lissianna hesitated. “Some mortals are more difficult to control than others. You appear to be one of them.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps you have a stronger mind.” She shrugged. “I don’t know really. While I’d heard of it, this is the first time I’ve run across it. All I know is I can’t read your mind at all, let alone control you, and Mother struggled with you from the beginning.”
“She said something about not being able to control me when they first entered my apartment, but she didn’t seem to have any trouble getting me to come back here last night,” Greg said dryly, then frowned, and added, “Or perhaps it was that Martine woman. She kept touching my arm. She held it all the way here until they tied me up, and the minute she let me go my thoughts cleared; but the night before, it took a couple minutes after your mother left the room for me to think clearly and realize what I had done and the situation I was in.”
Lissianna let out a hiss of breath and rubbed her eyes wearily. “They have to be right in your thoughts then, and need to be touching you to make the connection now.”
Greg got the feeling from her expression that for some
reason she didn’t think that was a good thing. He did. He didn’t like the idea of being controlled at all, so the fact that it appeared to being getting harder for them to do so was a great thing in his mind.
He glanced her way to say so, only to note that her eyes had drifted closed. She’d fallen asleep.
Lissianna was sleepy and not at all
interested in waking up, but some sense that there was something looming over her kept tugging at her consciousness and urging her awake. She tried to burrow deeper into the nest of pillows and comforter and ignore it, but there wasn’t much give to her pillow and there wasn’t any blanket at all. Frowning, she blinked her eyes open.
It took Lissianna’s half-asleep mind a moment to figure out that it wasn’t a pillow her head was nestled on, but a chest. She’d fallen asleep while talking to Greg, she realized, and at some point during the day had apparently cuddled up against him. Sucking in a breath, she stilled, then started to ease away from him, only to freeze at the sight of her cousins. The six of them were gathered around the bed, looming as they stared down at her and Greg with great interest.
Lissianna opened her mouth to speak, then paused and glanced toward Greg to find his eyes open and on her. She quickly sat up and glanced toward her cousins, finding
them easier to face than he was at that moment. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re hungry,” Juli announced. “We haven’t eaten since your party.”
“The twins aren’t used to a liquid diet, and hunger pangs woke them up,” Elspeth said apologetically. “They checked the kitchen, but Aunt Marguerite didn’t get to buy groceries as planned because they brought Greg back. So they woke me up to see if I thought it would be all right for them to order in something to eat.”
“But the pizza place and Chinese restaurants don’t open for a couple more hours and Aunt Marguerite lives far enough out that no one else will deliver,” Jeanne Louise took up the explanation. “So I suggested we wake Thomas up to see if he’d drive them to a restaurant for breakfast, and then maybe a grocery store.”
“How did you end up being there?” Lissianna asked Jeanne Louise with confusion.
“They got Elspeth’s room mixed up with mine and woke me by mistake.” Jeanne Louise shrugged. “When they explained they were looking for Elspeth, I tagged along.”
Lissianna grunted. That explained why everyone was up but Mirabeau, but before she could ask, Mirabeau announced, “My room’s between Jeanne Louise and Elspeth’s. All the racket woke me up.”
“And when they came to see me about a ride, I suggested we check and see if Greg was hungry, too,” Thomas announced, explaining their presence around the bed.
“Oh.” She turned to glance at Greg.
“He’s starved,” Mirabeau announced dryly.
“You can read his mind, too?” Lissianna asked, recalling her conversation with Thomas the night before.
“He’d just told us that he was starved before you woke up,” Mirabeau explained, then added, “But, yes, I can read him.”