Page 14 of Roman

“When will they change back?” Danny questioned.

“When I force the demon back again.” Roman was so intent on Danny—and Danny’s study of him—that he wasn’t paying attention to his own words.

Danny leaned his head back sharply. “Demon? You’re, what, apossessedvampire?”

Was that where this curious boy drew the limit?

“That is simply what I call the…nonhuman…part of me,” Roman reassured him. “The part of me that awoke when I turned. The part that craves blood and…other things. My demon. I have heard others like me call it different names.”

“You’re like…two separate beings? Or the same person?”

Roman shrugged slightly. “Sometimes it feels like just another side of me; sometimes it feels like a completely different entity. I never received a handbook on any of it.”

Danny tilted his head slightly, as if sizing Roman up. “And why is it—he?—still…out right now? Are you planning on biting me?”

Despite his question, Danny hadn’t taken any further steps away from Roman. He shook his head gently at the boy in response, pushing his demon back and allowing his eyes to return to their natural blue state.

“I don’t know which version unsettles me more.” Danny’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t actually work at the hospital, do you?”

“I do not.”

Danny gave a small, tired smile, then glanced around as if suddenly remembering where they were. “I need to go home now.”

“I will take you,” Roman blurted out. He prepared himself for the arguments against it, but once again, Danny didn’t react the way Roman would expect him to.

“Okay,” was all the boy said. “But I don’t want to leave my car here, so you’ll have to drive it. I’m that one.” He pointed to a dark-blue Toyota that had seen better days.

“You are…not afraid I am going to bite you in the car?”

“You just said you wouldn’t. And to be honest, Mr. Handsome Vampire Creep, I am too fucking tired to care. I think I have a higher chance of survival just having you drive instead of my exhausted ass. We can take the rest as it comes.”

Roman looked at the boy—reallylookedat him. He took in the pale complexion, the dark bruises showing under his eyes, and realized how exhausted the young man must really be.

Danny looked tired, not in the way of someone who’d just had a long night, but in the way of someone who had been working too hard for too long with no one to take care of him.

And that, Roman decided, just would not do.

Ours, his demon rumbled.

Ours, he agreed.

“It’s here, on the left. The yellow one.”

Roman pulled into the driveway of a small yellow house near the end of a cul-de-sac. All the houses on the road backed onto what looked to be forest lands, and Roman could see the tops of pines behind Danny’s home.

It had only been a short drive from the hospital, and they’d driven in silence, other than Danny’s few soft-spoken directions.

As they approached the front door, he held up the key ring for Danny to pick out the house key, biting back a grin as Danny just pointed to the correct one, allowing Roman to unlock the door for them.

He’d been preparing himself for a “thank you for the ride, now go away forever, you blood-sucking monster,” but apparently he was being allowed inside the house.

“You live here alone?” Roman questioned.

Danny nodded as he shrugged off his jacket, hanging it on a coatrack in the entryway. “I grew up here. It’s the family house, but Gabe wanted his own apartment and my mom is living…elsewhere…right now.”

Roman found himself stuck on one part of that statement:Gabe wanted his own apartment.

His demon went on alert as well. Who wasGabe? A boyfriend? Maybe that handsome, cocky doctor that had felt so comfortable putting his arm around Danny earlier that night?

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