Page 13 of Blood Descendants
But he’s right.
If we’re going to sell it that we’re in love, that we’re engaged, we need to know each other.
I can do this. To get Ophelia back.
“Okay,” I finally say. “We’ll play twenty questions over the next few days.”
“More like a thousand questions,” he says, arching an eyebrow at me. “But yes. We need to go talk to your boss, get you some time off. And tomorrow, we need to go pick a ring.”
I can’t help but smile and shake my head as I look away. “This is just so damn weird. And it’s all just moving along at lightning speed.”
“For what it’s worth, you’re handling all this about a million times better than I think anyone else ever would.”
My eyes slide back to meet his. “You think so?”
He nods his head. “For starters, you learned vampires exist, and you haven’t tried to stake me or run away. You haven’t called the cops. And a vampire just begged you to pretend to be his fiancée and move in with him. And you’re here. If I didn’t know any better, I would almost say you were meant to be a part of this world, Vengeance.”
He holds my gaze for a long moment, neither of us saying a word. And I realize that there are two parts to Ares Hunt: the hard, dangerous, terrifying, near-mafia heir to the city and the man who is protective of a woman he doesn’t even know yet and says all the right words at just the right time.
“Maybe you could explain it to me now?” I break the silence. “Your world. I saw fangs and people all zoned out andput two and two together. But any of the details, I have no idea yet.”
“Okay, I’ll explain it to you, but then that’s it for tonight. It’s been a fucking day. You need to get some sleep.”
Two sides. Venom and valiant.
I don’t know if I’m tired. I’ve been running on adrenaline, disbelief, and pure stubbornness today. He’s not wrong, though, a breaking point is probably not far off.
“That’s the last of it, Mr. Hunt.” I nearly jump out of my skin when his voice comes from behind, back toward the bedroom. The movers all walk out into the kitchen, barely looking like they’ve broken a sweat after all their trips back and forth with my things.
“Thank you for your help on the short notice,” Ares says as he walks over to the man. He pulls out his wallet and extracts some cash. I don’t catch how many of them there are, but I see they’re all hundreds. He hands the money off to the man, who gives Ares an appreciative tip of his head before all three of them disappear out the door.
I follow Ares back to the living room. He settles into one of those expensive looking chairs, and I lay down on the couch after I kick my shoes off.
“I don’t know how vampires came into existence,” Ares admits. He sits there, both feet on the floor, both hands resting on the arm rests. He looks powerful sitting there. Dangerous. “Some kind of evolution. A curse. A science experiment. I don’t know. But I do know we’ve been around a long time. Some of us are old.”
“How old?” I pry. My curiosity is running wild now, despite the terrible, impossible subject of my curiosity.
“Hundreds of years,” Ares says.
I blink hard and wonder if I need to clean my ears. There’s no way I heard that right.
“The oldest Born I’ve ever met was over four hundred years old,” Ares elaborates. “Augustus himself is over eighty years old but doesn’t look a day over forty.”
“So, you stop aging at whatever age you die and— what did you call it? Resurrect?” I ask.
He nods. “Like I said, I was twenty-six when I died. I’ve been twenty-six for six years.”
“So, you’re really thirty-two?”
“I guess,” he says. “As I told you, you create more Born with a vampire father and a human mother. Once a woman Resurrects, she can’t have any children.”
“Of course,” I say, annoyance dripping from my tone. The gender unfairness of the world doesn’t stop at being human or vampire.
“We’re getting off track here,” Ares replies with a hint of annoyance. “Some of the rumors about vampires are true. We do have to have blood to survive. We do crave it. We’re faster than humans, immeasurably stronger. We’re predators.”
“And humans are your only prey?”
“I don’t crave blood from anything but,” Ares acknowledges. “We’re immortal, but as I told you, we can be killed.”
