Page 26 of Becoming D'Vaire
Delaney would like to be a total hardass and hang up with a curt comment about it being too late, but Grigori did sound as if he made a mistake that he sincerely regretted. He was also trying not to get distracted by the yummy image of him showering, since he was supposed to be annoyed. “Is this a problem for you? Forgetting your phone?”
“You’re going to think I’m a complete disaster…but yeah. It happens a lot. It drives the people around me crazy. I tend to have a one-track mind.”
“What’s your one track?”
“My lab. I’m a scientist. I get lost in formulas and experiments while generally forgetting the world around me. I hope you don’t think I’ll make a bad mate because of it. I do plan on making you and us a priority. I thought I did everything right to make sure I didn’t fuck it up tonight, but it looks like I need a better plan for the future.”
It was such a foreign concept to Delaney to think of himself as an us that he couldn’t really wrap his head around it, but the curious part of his brain was already hooked on knowing more about Grigori’s lab. “What kind of formulas and experiments?”
“I’ve been working with blood. As a vampire, it’s essential to our lives. I’m always intrigued by ideas on how to improve the experience of drinking it. Tonight, I was trying to see if I could make it taste like a dark cup of coffee. It was inspired by you—it’s one of the things I smelled when I met you.”
“Dark coffee?” Delaney asked; that was something he’d never heard before.
“Yeah, I remember freshly chopped wood, leather, and that deep, rich smell of ground-up coffee beans.”
“I smelled roses and raspberries,” Delaney confessed and was surprised at himself for supplying the information.
“Okay, I get the roses. They’re associated with vampires because that’s how Fate marked my mom as Vampyress but raspberries? Do they even have a smell?”
Delaney chuckled. “Yeah, they have a smell. It’s not overpowering, but it’s there. At least I wasn’t smelling leather.”
“You kidding me? That’s so…hot. I mean, I gotta warn you. Vampires have a long history of BDSM, and it’s not really my kink, but you in some leather pants. Yeah, I could get on board with that.”
Delaney was unsure how to handle Grigori’s words or his confession, so he chose to fixate on the part that didn’t directly relate to him. “Wait, vampires are into BDSM?”
“Not all of them but when you compare it statistically to the rest of magickind and shifters, there’s a disproportionate number of vampires who practice it. There’s nothing wrong with it—our butler Tigglesworth and his mate are into it—but I don’t think it’s me. It’s pretty fucking hot to watch—especially if it’s in person—but yeah, not my thing.”
“You’re blowing my mind. You’ve seen it in person?”
“Come on, vampires try to keep our clubs under wraps, but shit leaks. Sex is legal in clubs and in ours, it can be done in front of everyone. It’s tasteful and like I said, hot.”
Despite his terrible evening, Delaney’s blood headed south. “You know, I’ve always wanted to go to a vampire club.” Greggory apparently wasn’t enjoying the conversation, because he fluttered his wings, demanding to be free, and Delaney let go. The familiar flew over to his portion of the bedroom and his little television came on.
“My brother owns plenty of them. I’ll take you anytime you want to go,” Grigori promised huskily. Quiet fell over them for several minutes, and then he added, “Uh…please don’t ask me to actually do it in front of people, though.”
Delaney couldn’t imagine his virgin self stripping down and doing the dirty with an audience.Ever. “It’s okay, no problem there.”
“Oh, thank goodness. I was worried after I said that you’d think I was, I don’t know…a prudish vamp. I just think some things are private and especially with your other half, you know? I mean, I know vampires don’t have that taboo. If you’re mated to another vamp, Fate takes away that little caveat about not being able to perform with another, but luckily I’ve been paired with a nonvampire.”
He had no clue how they went from their ruined evening to the sexual practices of vampires, but Delaney was wondering what rock he’d lived under his whole life. “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s a dirty secret because magickind doesn’t approve, but it’s stupid. Shifters are the same way. Fate does it for whatever reason for them. As for vampires, feeding is a very sexual thing, so it makes sense you’d want to perform with your donor. I mean, you’ve gotten each other all worked up, and you’re going to walk away? No, I don’t think so. That’s how the public sex thing started. Mated vampires would do it in full view, so there was no secrecy in their relationship. Not all of them do it like that, though. My parents never did—they used to feed off humans but always together, and they didn’t, you know, do that stuff with them. Ugh, I really don’t want to think about sex and my parents. Why does my brain want to even skirt the edges of that subject?”
“Have you done that a lot? I mean, I know you need blood. I don’t know how often or anything. No one really talks about that kind of stuff.”
“My parents are very strong vampires. My mother’s one of the first of our people. Because I’m their son, I only need to feed about twice a month. I’ll need less in a couple thousand years. Younger or weaker vampires might need to feed as often as once a day.”
Delaney was glad Grigori hadn’t realized his question was more about performing with his donors than drinking blood. He certainly didn’t need to know about his past lovers and was currently punishing himself by imagining him with faceless men, doing all kinds of sex acts. “I guess things are easier now that you have synthetic blood.”
“Technically, it’s not synthetic. It requires a few drops of the real thing, and a chemical concoction is added to it to multiply the plasma portion of it, which is what vampires require for life.”
“Still, it must’ve made an enormous impact on your people and their lives.”
“It did, more than I could’ve imagined when I was fourteen.”
“You were fourteen when it was first created?” Delaney asked.
“Yep.”
