Page 72 of B Positive

Mild cursing in the background from male voices I didn’t recognize came through the line.

“Everything good, B?”

“Uh, yeah. I need to finish up here, but I’ll have some time later this afternoon. How’s that?”

“Perfect. Just find me in the basement when you’re ready.”

I ended the call and headed back to the safes. If anyone could explain what I didn’t know about being a vamp and teach me what a perceptibly increased heart rate from Sunny actually meant, it was BDD.

I hunkered down next to Ricardo once more to figure out the last of his traps and soon enough, I’d moved on to the Lester model. Then Caroline. Then Stacey—she was a real asshole and it took me forever to get my head around her redundancies, but we got there eventually.

It wasn’t until I heard a soft “ahem” from the bottom of the metal stairs that I came back to reality once again.

“I have some time now, if you’re ready to—”

“Oh, yeah, great!” I stood from my crouched position inside Cornelius, and weaved my way through the rows of safes to meet B at the work table. I gave his all-black uniform, complete with shit-kicking boots and earpiece, a once-over. “You look like the guy in the movie who has special ops training.”

He didn’t reply, only smiled in a way that said I was dead-on but he’d never tell.

I moved on. “I’ve got a bunch of questions.”

BDD stiffened, just as Sunny had.

I swallowed the urge to curse under my breath. Julian must have given them both instructions to only give me certain information.

Julian had an earful coming.

“Don’t worry, I’m not trying to get you in trouble, B. I just want to know how you managed to stand outside the safe room door without me hearing your heartbeat. Or your approach, for that matter.”

The man relaxed and sank into the chair across from me. I sat as well.

“We have control over those things.”

“Over your heart rate?” I glanced down at his enormous work boots. “You’re telling me you can control how loudly your size Sasquatch boots hit the floor?”

The large vampire shrugged. “Well, yeah. If we want to be stealthy we turn all that off.”

Turn it off?“How do you turn off yourfeet, Rory?”

BDD’s lips pulled into a small frown but he answered all the same. “It’s kind of like covering every part of your physicality in compulsion. I don’t just mean your outsides either. You flow it around everything, your heartbeat, breathing, even your digestive noises.”

It was my turn to pull a face at him. “Gotta say, I don’t like the sound of compelling my internal organs, B.”

“Well, you’re not. Not really. You’re just masking them with vamp magic.”

I gnawed on a bit of skin inside my cheek. “And could you teach me to do that?”

BDD mulled it over for a few seconds. “Yeah, probably.”

I asked my next question more delicately, trying to project idle curiosity instead of the intense suspicion at the root of my question. “And how many vamp abilities does a living vampire have before they’re a full vamp?”

“Eh, all of them. They just aren’t as strong or developed in a living vamp before they’ve become a full vampire. Your best bet would be talking to Sunny, though. She can tell you all about the things she can do.”

I nodded slowly, letting the information settle in me.

I’d assumed as much. I’d seen her flip through pages on her tablet at more than human but not quite vamp speed. And given that I’d never heard her heartbeat before, I knew she could control that as well.

The only question was: had she let that control slip on purpose? Or was it that she was hiding something so big and terrible, she couldn’t help letting it slip?

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