Page 13 of Taste of Fate

I pushed off the door and headed for the stairs, not looking back at the portrait of me and Kalix on the wall. I could feel his heavy gaze on me as if he were actually here, judging my new lot in life.

But because of me, he wasn’t.

Chapter 5

Tavia

Islept deeper and longer than I expected. Cyan’s spare bedroom was pitch-black without any lights on, and the bed more comfortable than anything I’d slept on in my life. When I woke up, I fumbled around for five minutes looking for a light switch.

After a shower, I took in my new surroundings with fresh eyes and less panic. There were no windows in the suite, probably none at all on this underground level. A clock on the wall noted the time as four-thirty, but I had no idea if that was morning or afternoon.

I puttered around Cyan’s empty place for only a few minutes before a soft—way too soft to be any of the male vampires—knock came to the door. A spark of fear jolted me at the sound. Should I open it? I had just been considering snooping through Cyan’s bedroom when the knock came, like I was being watched and had been caught.

Were blood pets even allowed to open the door? Could I leave the suite and just explore? With zero notion of what I was supposed to do, I just froze.

“Hello!” A feminine voice called through the wood, followed by more soft rapping. “Cyan’s blood pet, are you awake? I’d just like to introduce myself, one human to another.”

Human?

My body shot into action, rushing to the door like it would self-destruct if I didn’t get there in time. When I flung it open and met the gaze of the woman standing across the threshold, a small part of me wanted to slam the door shut again.

She was not human.

What were supposed to be the whites of her eyes were completely black. Her smile showed fangs and her olive skin had that perfectly smooth, unblemished look of a vampire. Her irises though, were not red as all vampires seemed to be. They were an aquamarine, shining bright like gems against her black sclera.

“Ah,” she said, taking in my reaction. “First time you’ve seen a brusang, huh?”

“A what?”

“Is it okay if I come in?” She held up a plastic bag with styrofoam containers inside. “Figured you’d be hungry, so I brought breakfast.”

The scents from the bag hit me then like a slap to the face. Cheese, meat, grease, salt. My stomach didn’t so much as rumble as it roared. I hadn’t eaten since the morning of the Selection, and that was at least a full day ago.

“Um, sure.” I stepped aside, not caring if this person was permitted inside Cyan’s place or not as long as I got fed.

She breezed in gracefully, her long black hair barely fluttering from her movement. Even with the jarring black eyes, she was pretty. After setting the bag on the small, high-top table, she turned to me.

“I got you two breakfast burritos. Wasn’t sure how you felt about avocado, so I had them leave it off. Dig in and I’ll explain everything.” She made herself comfortable on one of the barstools, pulled out a small paper bag of tortilla chips and a container of what had to be salsa.

“Mexican food in a vampire world, huh?” I went to the barstool across from her at the small table, reaching for the bigger container.

The woman laughed before crunching down on a chip. “I know, right? The market is supposedly near one of the borders to the human world, specifically somewhere in LA. So, the humans who stumbled their way into that area love their Mexican food. The deli specializes in it because of that.”

I paused in my unwrapping of the burrito. “There’s an entrance to the human world all the way out here?” The only one I knew of was a half-day’s hike from Sapien. A barely-marked, winding trail through a woodland area dumped out into a small town called Jacksonville, Oregon.

No one was completely sure how our worlds connected, or if they overlapped in some way. But we’d always known growing up that there was a world full of humans with no vampires, angels or any shifters at all. Crossing between the human world and ours was tricky, and only done when absolutely necessary.

I’d been to Jacksonville a few times to help buy essential supplies for Sapien, but Oregon always felt different in a way I couldn’t explain. Robin said it was because there was no magic in the air, which was probably true. It would explain why no one over there believed in vampires.

“Oh yeah!” The woman’s eerie eyes flashed excitedly. “Like all of ‘em, it’s hard to find. I heard you gotta walk down this maze of alleyways, give a drop of blood to a bat statue, say a prayer to Temkra, and if you’re lucky, she’ll show you the way. All the market suppliers know, but they’re keeping it under wraps.”

“So wait, there’s a market?” I chewed and swallowed the most heavenly mix of tortilla, potato, egg, cheese, and sausage I’d ever eaten.

“Mm-hm. It’s the only place in Sanguine that sells human-specific grocery items. It’s not big like a Wal-Mart or anything but they make so much of their own stuff.” She pointed at the salsa as she chewed. “Mmm, I watched Alejandro blend this up himself before he sold it to me. Can’t get any better or fresher.”

I got up to retrieve two water bottles from the fridge. “So you uh,” I tried to phrase the question in a way that wasn’t offensive, “eat food?”

The woman licked her lips and laughed. “Sorry, how rude of me. I’m Bea, by the way. And yes, brusang do need to eat, although not as much as you unturned humans. I need to eat human food about every other day. For the rest, I feed on blood.”

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