Page 50 of Flock Around and Find Out

“Well thank fuck for my promiscuity, because that hasn’t been a risk with me for a long time.”

“Are you certain?” He tugged me over until I moved into his lap, my knees parted around his hips. “I feel as though we could be extra careful, that I could ensure there’s no chance of such a fate befalling you.” He leaned in and whispered the words into my ear, his tongue flicking against my lobe in a blatant tease.

I shoved his chest as I sat up straight. “It’s good to know a man whore like yourself is safe as well. Now, back to the rituals.”

He let his head fall back to the couch, his arms flopping down beside him as though I were just far too exhausting for his liking. “Are you that concerned about the Weres?”

“You should be, too. Didn’t you threaten Galen over this?”

“I threaten everyone over everything. It’s not personal. Besides, if the Weres continue to go mad, it just means we’ll get the okay to hunt them down and…” He paused, as though rethinking his word choice. “Handlethe situation. If anything, any attempts by you might make the problem worse. You are known for that sort of thing.”

“That isn’t true.” I thought back and fought the desire to frown as I considered the many times I’d made things significantly worse.

Like when instead of just looking for drugs I’d started selling them to kids, or the time I hid from the vampires by stayingintheir stronghold.

Okay, so maybe I had a slight history of escalating situations beyond where they started, but that didn’t mean I did it every time. Plus, even when it happened, I typically solved them at the end, didn’t I?

It felt slanted to only remember the hiccups along the way.

“Besides,” I said, so perhaps he didn’t think back on my many fuckups, “for all we know, what’s happening to them could happen to you.”

“We don’t turn into strays.”

“No, but it sounds as though other clans have gotten sick from this, died off from many different causes. Isn’t it better to find a cure while there are more people searching for it?”

He lifted his head again to look at me. “You really push my buttons, you know that? I would never even think about doing something to help another clan, not without a direct benefit to my own, yet you bat those lashes and spread those legs of yours and I act entirely unlike myself.”

“I haven’t spread my legs.”

He glanced down at my position and lifted his eyebrow.

“Tell me about the sacrifices.”

“Then I can feed?”

We were a few days early from our normal schedule, but it seemed a fair trade. Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t enjoy it, even if I’d never directly admit that.

“Fine. Deal.”

He smiled, as though finally interested in our conversation. It amused me how quickly he went from bored and sullen to a boy reciting a book report he’d worked really hard on. “The sacrifices were done in the past to appease the royal blood. It was believed that we were vampire because we held sparks of royal blood, from a queen, and that she had to be fed and appeased or she would come to reclaim the blood we had taken from her.”

“How did you do that?”

“They haven’t done this in centuries, at least not that I’m aware of. There could still be small cults in places that practice it, but I don’t know of any. I believe I heard it that the elders would draw lines in the sand beneath the bound victim, then slice them open and allow the blood to soak into the ground. They were not allowed to feast on these sacrifices, as it was a gift to the queen.”

I shivered hard as I thought about such a terrible fate for a person. To be helpless, to lose their life in such a way just to old superstition? It was truly terrible.

I didn’t blame the vampires, not entirely, since countless human faiths had committed similar atrocities. It seemed people of any type enjoyed the suffering of others, would do horrible things just because they imagined some being told them to.

I didn’t know if I believed in some old queen, but perhaps there was something to be said about that ritual, something that let that energy flow freshly when they did it. It was hard to believe it mattered, that it would make a difference, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t.

Before I knew about this world, about the vampires, the idea that a being could be dead, that they could feed off the blood of the living as their only source of sustenance, that made no sense to me. I would have disregarded it as a pipe dream, as a nightmare from someone who had too much time on their hands.

It meant I didn’t write off stories as quickly as I used to. Besides, just because they used to do it that way didn’t mean theyhadto do it that way. It was like when I thought that getting into fist fights made me skinny, and it turned out it was the fact it hurt too much to eat afterward that I skipped meals.

So the ritual might have given them something, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t change it to something that didn’t require slicing people open and allowing them to bleed out.

Maybe some sort of vegan option?

---