Page 73 of Sinner's Secret

“Yes.” He gave her a wry smile. “I should also mention that getting shot or injured still hurts.”

She looked at him speculatively, with narrowed eyes and pursed lips. “You said someone tried to kill you with a truck and you showed up in a paramedic’s uniform to rescue me. Tell me that story.”

He did. “I hadn’t taken blood from a human who hadn’t had alcohol in their system in five or six hundred years.”

Her eyebrows crowded low over her eyes. “Why would that matter?”

“Because alcohol is a poison to us. It causes physical damage to our bodies and its effects can last for a while.”

She frowned. “It hurts every time? You don’t get used to it?” She leaned toward him. “Didn’t you say you were an alcoholic?”

“Yeah, I only drink blood from someone who’s been drinking. But only a little bit, and it hurts every time.”

“Why would you torture yourself like that?”

“Because, for a while after I was changed, I really was the worst kind of monster there is. I wanted power and little else. I killed thousands of people, and committed atrocities you can’t imagine in my pursuit of it. Until...I met her. My wife. She was a healer in her village, a woman who knew what remedies would help and what wouldn’t. She had a son, but no husband, and the villagers were about to stone her and her two-year-old to death.

I intervened, but she stopped me from killing all the people who were going to kill her. She lectured me on what my duty to the average person was, and her son smiled at me.” His throat closed up for a second, regret a vise around his heart.

“What did you do then?” Nika’s voice, kind and curious, released him from the hold of the past.

“She wasn’t afraid of me. She knew who I was, but she wasn’t afraid. I’d been alive for a couple of hundred years by then, and all I’d seen from other people was fear, rage, and horror. She didn’t call me names, she asked me to do better, to be better. I told her I didn’t know how to do that anymore. She told me to stop wallowing in self-flagellation and revenge, and become the leader my people needed me to be.”

“Wow,” Nika said.

“Yeah.” He smiled at the memory. “So, I asked her to marry me.”

“Right then and there?”

“Yup.”

When he didn’t continue right away, she elbowed him. “Well, what did she say?”

“If I accepted her son as my son, yes.”

“She sounds...amazing.”

“She was. I took her home and the next two years were the happiest of my life.” He said it like a man who’d had his house burn down.

“I can hear a but coming.”

“I was called away. Our land and people were under attack. I took the majority of my forces into the field to defend us, and while I was away...one of my own family members murdered her and my son.”

“When you say one of your own family members, do you mean a normal human or one like you?”

“Like me. You can call us vampires, it’s what we’ve been called since the beginning, though we’re not as superhuman as modern books, comics, and movies make us out to be.”

“You don’t age and you heal fast, those are some huge pros. What are the cons?”

“Human beings rarely live longer than one hundred years old. Living past that, in a perfectly healthy body, unable to sleep, or eat regular food, results in...some problems.”

“Such as...”

Chapter Thirteen

“Most of us are paranoid, obsessive/compulsive, power hungry assholes,” Baz said.

“Sounds like every CEO of every major corporation in the world.”

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