Authors: Rebecca Trynes
Greyvian raised an eyebrow to show his surprise at the blurted question and then answered with a casual shrug and one word that made Jacob’s blood run cold. “Thousands.”
Jacob frowned. “You don’t seem too cut up about the fact.”
The male pursed his lips. “No. I don’t suppose I do.”
“How can you be so blasé?”
There was a long moment of silence as Greyvian stared off into the distance once more, lost in thought. When he spoke, his voice was soft, even gentle. “I don’t really have a choice.”
Jacob snorted at the stupidity of that statement. “Sure you do. You could not kill people.”
Despite his father’s casual attitude, there was little humour in Greyvian’s smile as he said, “I suppose I could.”
Jacob frowned, confused. If the male had been cold and remote during the conversation, he might have felt the matter pretty clear cut—the guy was a murderer who didn’t see that he was doing anything wrong—but there was just something about Greyvian’s tone of voice and the almost sad expression on his face that left Jacob feeling as if there was a lot more to it than he was understanding.
“I really don’t understand,” he confessed.
That sad smile once again curved Greyvian’s lips. “I hope you never do.”
There was a moment of silence where Jacob just stared at his father, at a complete loss for words, and then the male looked at him and smiled.
“Come on,” Greyvian said, tipping his head in the direction they’d been walking. “Time to eat.”
Turning his attention down the alley, Jacob spotted a man in the distance who was talking on a mobile phone.
“You mean him?” he asked, striding forward to catch up with his father.
Greyvian nodded.
“Any particular reason?”
“Look closely,” Grey replied, “tell me what you see.”
Jacob squinted slightly, looking the man over from head to toe. Treating his reply as he expected a cop might (he blamed television for that), he recited the description in clinical terms. “Caucasian male, maybe 5’7”, black hair, solid build, tattoo of a scorpion on his right bicep. What of it?”
“Nothing else?” Greyvian asked, not slowing or lowering his voice as they came within ten metres of the man.
“Like what? The guy looks like a bouncer, but beyond that…?”
“Try losing focus when you look at him, as if you’re looking into him instead of at him.”
Stopping about three metres from the man, who was still chatting on the phone, something about stock that hadn’t arrived, he did as Greyvian said and tried to stare into the man, looking for… what, exactly, he didn’t know. When nothing happened and all he could see was a blurry image of the man, he gave up and looked over at Greyvian hoping for an explanation.
“What exactly am I supposed to be seeing?” he asked when the male just looked at him expectantly.
Greyvian searched Jacob’s gaze for a long moment and then shook his head, dismissing the subject. “Nothing, I guess.” His smile was more of a grimace as he said, “Trust me, it’s a good thing.”
Okay. Whatever. It was obvious that was as much as Jacob would get out of him. Then he remembered what they were doing in the first place and looked nervously at the human who seemed especially seedy-looking now that they were closer.
As if sensing his reluctance, Greyvian tipped his head in the direction of the man and said, “Go on. Get to it.”
Jacob looked helplessly at his father. He didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to go about this. What the hell was he supposed to do? His fangs seemed to be having performance anxiety and wouldn’t drop down no matter how much he willed them to and the small smile on Greyvian’s face wasn’t helping at all.
“If it makes it easier, make the guy Aware,” Greyvian suggested helpfully. “Everything should flow from there.”
Taking a deep breath, Jacob nodded and then pinned the male with a look. “Do not let me kill him.”
Greyvian nodded sombrely, and then it was game on.
Turning to the man, Jacob focused on wanting the guy to see him, and what do you know, Bouncer Boy immediately looked at him and didn’t seem too happy to find that someone had snuck up on him, a scowl disfiguring his already unattractive face.
“Get on it,” the man snapped into the phone and then hung up, shoving the phone into his back pocket. “What the fuck do you want?” he asked aggressively, eyeing Jacob from top to toe and then pinning him with a glare.
Greyvian was right, this was going to be easier now that the man could see him and was acting like a prick. Whether it was the man’s aggression or Jacob’s own reaction to it that did the job, his fangs suddenly popped down and his eyes went straight for the guy’s neck as his thirst rose.
The man had a single moment to suck in a breath at the sight and then Jacob was on him as if he had been doing it for years. There was something to be said for instinct, that magical thing that took you by the hand and let you get on with a job with confidence.
Stepping up to the man, he grabbed a fistful of the guy’s dark hair and jerked him forward while simultaneously aiming his fangs for the soft skin of his neck. The man didn’t stand a chance. There was no effort to fend Jacob off because there simply wasn’t time. Jacob had moved so fast that one moment he’d been a few feet away, and the next, his fangs were buried deep in warm flesh. Without thought, his fangs retracted, causing hot blood to spurt into his mouth.
One swallow and he was lost in a sea of ecstasy. Fittingly, an erection sprang to attention in his jeans. He knew he should be disturbed by the sexual nature of the feeding, at the intense pleasure he was receiving from the blood, but right now he couldn’t care less that he had a raging hard-on over the human male. It seemed right somehow that he should be hard as a rock, his body tight with arousal. If you really thought about it, drinking someone’s blood was about as intimate as it got. In essence, they became a part of you, their life essence feeding yours.
Time had no meaning. He could have been feeding a minute or an hour when his pleasure suddenly turned to pain and his knees buckled out from under him, sending him crashing to the ground, his hand going to the base of his neck as he wondered what had happened.
Focusing his eyes, he gaped up at Greyvian who stood over him, expression neutral, once more the Poker Faced King.
Now he knew.
“That’s what it’s like for you, isn’t it?” he asked, suddenly appalled. “You really can’t stop. I couldn’t even think to try.”
Greyvian nodded once in the affirmative and then gazed off down the alley. Jacob took a moment to compose himself, rubbing the sore spot on his neck and had to ask, “What the hell did you do to my neck?”
Grey glanced at him, a crooked smile on his lips. “Pressure point.”
Jesus Christ. He’d have to get the male to teach him that move. It was awesome. Crippling, but awesome.
He was just about to ask why Greyvian didn’t go hunting with another vampire so that they could do that to him to keep him from killing, when the male said, “Stay here,” and headed off down the alley, disappearing around the corner.
Getting to his feet, he waited for all of two seconds and then headed off after his father, too eager to hear the answer to his question to heed the male’s order. When he rounded the corner to find Greyvian’s face buried in the neck of the man Jacob had just been feeding from, he wished with all his heart that he had obeyed. Especially when Grey’s head rose and the human sank bonelessly to the hard ground, his glassy eyes staring sightlessly in Jacob’s direction.
“What the fuck?” Jacob whispered, horrified.
Greyvian turned to him slowly, no expression on his face, nothing in his eyes but a deep dark pit. “I told you to stay put.” At least his voice betrayed a hint of some dark emotion.
Jacob gaped at him. “So you could kill the guy?! What the hell! I guess now I have my answer as to why you don’t hunt with anyone else to keep from killing. You enjoy it!”
“It had to be done,” Greyvian replied, ice cold once more, no trace of his earlier dry humour to be seen.
Thoroughly confused, exasperated and half-crazy with the emotional stress that came with everything he’d been through, he glared at Greyvian. “For the love of God, why?”
Greyvian didn’t seem inclined to explain himself, his expression closed, arms folded across his broad chest, but Jacob wasn’t about to let the male get away with silence right now. Their future depended on it.
“If you have any hope for any kind of relationship with me, you will fucking tell me what the hell you meant by that.”
* * *
“They’re taking a long time,” Sienna noted to no-one in particular, not worried so much as antsy for Greyvian’s return. “You’d think it wouldn’t take that long to go downstairs and find someone to eat.”
The thought of Greyvian feeding on someone else, of his fangs sinking into their neck, their blood pumping into his mouth, his erection straining against their body, was almost more than she could bear. She wanted to be the only one he drank from, the only one he desired, but she knew that wasn’t feasible. She needed blood to survive just as much as he did and her quality of life would no doubt suffer from being anaemic all the time. Not to mention the threat of him taking too much and ending it completely. As to being the only one he desired, well, she’d just have to hope that was the case, and that maybe it was enough to bring him to her door again when he finally went back to his life now that Jacob had transitioned.
She liked to imagine that Jacob would still live here, that Greyvian would pop round now and again to say hello and check up on his son, but logically she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Grey just wasn’t the kind of male to come by for a social visit.
“Maybe they’re going on a rampage?” Katarina said bitterly, interrupting Sienna’s thoughts. “I wouldn’t be surprised to go downstairs later to find that half the city is lying dead on the pavement. Like father, like son.”
Sienna’s first instinct was to defend Greyvian, but when she saw Katarina’s expression of pain she bit her tongue and took a moment to think before opening her mouth. “Is that what it was like in the beginning?” she asked softly. “When Greyvian first found out that he needed human blood?”
Katarina’s nostrils flared and she squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s all my fault,” she whispered. “I’m the one who put the idea in his head. I’m the one who sent him off to that village.”
Knox’s voice was warm with compassion as he asked, “What happened?”
Katarina ran a hand through her dark hair, a distant look in her eyes as memories swamped her. “In the beginning it wasn’t so bad. He was able to take a little vampire blood a few times a day and that seemed to be enough to let him thrive, but by the time Greyvian was sixteen he was but a shadow of life. The size of a child, thin, frail, barely alive. Our father had tried everyone and everything he could think of to cure Greyvian when it became evident that he was getting weaker; animal, male, female, young, old, even half-breed and finally, rumours of vampires with special abilities, but it was all for nought. Nothing helped him; no-one’s blood could feed him.
“Father wanted to kill him once he’d run out of options. A mercy killing, he called it. I knew he loved Greyvian, that he couldn’t stand to see his son suffer, but I couldn’t let that happen. Not when there might be a chance that Father was ignoring an option. I think that, more than anything, was why I put him in that wagon and sent him to the village.”
She swallowed convulsively and tears sprang to her eyes. They all listened with rapt attention as she continued. “I didn’t know—didn’t think—that he would drain them all. I only wanted him to ask someone if he could take a little. I didn’t realise that years of starvation couldn’t be appeased with a few mouthfuls.
“If only Father hadn’t mentioned that mercy killing. I could have brought someone to him, could have helped him control his thirst, built him up gradually, kept him from killing.” The tears that had been filling her eyes finally spilled over and left trails of moisture down the female’s face. Sienna distantly noted that they were clear, not bloody as was constantly portrayed in vampire fiction.
“He went through multiple villages before Father finally caught up with him. I didn’t want to believe him when he told me what my brother had done, couldn’t admit that it was all my doing. But then one night Greyvian slipped into my room and I couldn’t hide from the truth any longer.
“I’d turned my brother into a killer.”
Nobody said anything as Katarina wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand. What could you say to something like that?
“I had friends in those villages,” the female admitted, sniffing. “Humans who I looked forward to seeing whenever I went with my mother for supplies. Greyvian killed them all and did it without remorse.” She laughed bitterly. “You should have seen him when he came to me that night. He was so happy! He had no care for the lives he’d taken. None.”
She shook her head and sighed shakily, then looked around at them as she came back to herself and realised they were all looking at her with stunned expressions on their faces. Her tortured expression turned into a scowl as she met Knox’s eyes. “And now you’ve helped to make another one just like him.”