Page 73 of Ruthlessly Mated
The vampire moves faster than any of us ever could, catching her by the throat and holding her aloft.
“Choose your next words very carefully,” he whispers. “Your blood is richer than it has ever been. You are ripe for the consuming.”
I could lunge forward, try to save her physically, but there is no point. The vampire’s strength is legendary. He could rip her into pieces before I could reach him.
Instead of rushing in, I watch. A good predator studies his prey.
The vampire is not human. An obvious conclusion to come to, but the depths of it often remain unplumbed. The feeling, the sensibilities, the existence, the heart, the soul, they’re all missing. He can play these little games and seem somewhat person-ish from time to time, but really all he is, is a walking hunger.
He seeks to consume. That is it.
He needs to fill himself with the essence of others.
We have to stop considering him a mortal enemy. We have to treat him like a force of nature with a veneer of consciousness.
He needs to feed. On blood, on fear, on joy—on life.
That is why he is keeping Kita around. I have never encountered anybody as full of life as Kita. She burns with it.
All this chaos, the messing with us, burning the port, it was all about getting him fed. He’s starving for something he can’t make for himself. He finds energy in pain, in chaos, and in the energies of those who are naturally pure.
“Why do you need the heart back so badly?” I distract him with a question.
“It is not that I need it back so much as it should not be out in the world,” Alexander says. “You see, your mate has an unerring instinct for doing things that will lead to chaos.”
“I have noticed.”
He and I smile, for a brief moment united by our mutual attempts to control the uncontrollable.
“It is not actually the heart of my maker,” he says. “I was not made. I was incarnated here, fully formed. I was never born, and I will never die.”
“That is a bold claim.”
He pulls up his shirt, exposing his belly. For a moment, I assume it is some kind of dramatic gesture, but then I realize he is showing me an absence. He has a belly. But no belly button. No umbilical cord ever connected him to a mother.
The slow chill that creeps down my spine at this reveal makes me feel a way I have never felt before. This is true horror, seeing something so incredibly unnatural, something that does not at all fit within the circle of life. Alexander is not just a twisted old vampire. He is the origin of all vampiric hunger; he is a thing, not a person.
“I believe you,” I croak out.
“What you need to understand, wolf of flesh and blood, is that my maker’s heart is not a relic, or a memento, or a well-preserved body part.”
“It’s not?” Kita pipes up with the question.
“No,” Alexander says, with barely contained annoyance. “It is closer to a weapon. It is an item of power.”
“A weapon?” I repeat the word.
“A weapon?” Kita echoes me in turn.
“It is capable of exploding with the force of a thousand suns. That is why it was held in the chamber you stole it from. The chamber was designed to keep it in stasis—alive. But encased in concrete and explosives? The last of the lifeblood will leach out of it. It will die, and when it does, there will be nothing but a crater where the city once stood.”
“And your maker will never incarnate again. Because it is his heart,” Kita says, far too cheerfully not to be deliberately annoying. I do not know what she gets out of tormenting this creature. Maybe it is just the satisfaction of striking back against the tyrant in some small way.
“My maker will never incarnate again because my maker does not exist,” Alexander snarls. “You understand that this is not actually a body part, right? It is a dark object, not something that ever resided in a human body.”
“Then why did you always call it your maker’s heart?” Kita is really pushing for information that cannot possibly matter in any way.
“Because it comes from the same place I came from. It is an entity of pure malevolent darkness, and it is mine to guard, not yours to drive around the countryside like you’re on a roadshow of antiquities!”
