* * *
The sound of the door opening woke me. The light slanting through the window was at a slightly lower angle, but it was not yet evening. It hadn’t occurred to me to lock the door—I felt safe enough here, and it seemed kind of a silly thing for me to do when I was a guest in someone’s house.
That ‘someone’ is supposedly a demon, my inner cynic pointed out.
I blinked rapidly and rolled into a sitting position, just in time to see Rans catch himself against the doorframe with one hand. Blue eyes fell on me, but there was a dazed look behind them that I hadn’t seen there before. He froze, as though he hadn’t expected me to be there.
“What are you doing in my room?” he asked, confusion underlying his normally smooth voice.
“Rans?” I asked a bit groggily. “This is my room. Yours is across the hall.”
He stared at me with a sort of brain-rebooting-please-stand-by expression on his face. That expression woke me up fast, and I slid off the bed to cross to him. That was when I noticed his extreme paleness. I mean... Rans was a vampire, yeah—and an English one, at that. He wasn’t going to be winning any awards for ‘Best Tan Lines’ anytime soon. But this was the same sort of pale he’d been when I found him shot in my back yard.
It was the sort of paleness that belonged to a corpse, not a man.
“You don’t look so good,” I whispered in the understatement of the week. “What happened, what’s wrong?”
Without even thinking about it, I took him by the arm and pulled him inside, closing the door behind us for privacy. He shook his head as if trying to dislodge something rattling around in his brain.
“I...” he said. “I don’t...”
His voice trailed off and he lifted a hand to his forehead.
“Okay, you’re scaring me now,” I said.
I herded him toward the bed and pushed at his shoulders until he sat on the edge of it, his thighs bracketing mine as I stood in front of him. He glanced up at me through dark eyelashes from the slight disadvantage of height. Something about the look of vulnerability hiding just beneath the surface combined with the odd intimacy of our position to make me wonder if I should be backing off. Giving him space.
But—well, he’d saved me from a bunch of faeries and I’d had his dick in my mouth only yesterday, so maybe a bit of intimacy wasn’t unreasonable at this point.
“Rans. Talk to me, please. Did something happen with Nigellus?”
A deep furrow formed between his brows. “No, I...” he trailed off. “That wasn’t...” He shook his head sharply again. “Sorry. I seem to have... a bit of a hole in my memory. A new one, I mean.”
Misgivings flooded me, but I tried to focus on the practical. He was pale and disoriented. He was a vampire. Those two facts could be related, right?
“Do you need blood?” I asked slowly.
His absent blue gaze turned inward, like he was taking stock.
There was a long pause. “Maybe so. I don’t... feel right.”
Yeah, you think? Sherlock Holmes would be proud right now.
He moved restlessly under my hands. “I should... find Edward.”
“What?” I yelped, pushing him back down when he tried to rise. “No way. You are not drinking blood from an octogenarian butler!”
His eyes cleared a bit as he focused on me in consternation. “But—”
“No,” I reiterated. “In fact, that’s a great big fuck, no.” I drew in a breath to figure out an alternative, and the words tumbled out before I had a chance to run them through my brain-mouth filter. “Drink from me instead.”
Oh, shit. Did I really just say that out loud?
Flashes of conversation flitted through my mind.
Your blood. It’s unusually... what’s the word I’m looking for? Stimulating.
Oh, dear. For an undead erection lasting more than four hours...”
Shit. This was a self-serving and totally uncool thing for me to be doing, wasn’t it? Blue eyes sharpened.
“You’re already weakening,” he said. “That would only make it worse.”
I shrugged carelessly. “No it won’t. You feed from me first, and I’ll, uh... I’ll feed from you afterward.”
The strange, shaky need I recognized from the night in Guthrie’s penthouse was rising inside me. The heady desire to take, pull, consume... to draw pleasure from Rans’ body into mine.
He was still staring at me intently. I couldn’t tell if he was wavering or not.
“Maybe I still don’t believe you about being part demon,” I added, trying to tip the balance in my favor. “Maybe I want to see if having sex again really makes me stronger.” I lifted one hand from his shoulder, cupping the elegant planes of his cheek. “You said it yourself. I’m weakening. Who else around here am I going to screw? Nigellus isn’t really my type, and somehow I doubt Edward would be interested.”
That did the trick. Evidently, Rans was hiding an unexpectedly territorial streak beneath that devil-may-care exterior. Maybe I was, too, because when I ended up on my back on the bed a moment later, my immediate response was oh, hell yes.
Glowing eyes blazed down at me, a hard-muscled body caging mine against the softness of the bed.
“What are you doing to me, Zorah Bright?” he asked.
“Feeding you, I hope,” I said a bit breathlessly, “and then fucking you. Maybe between the two of us, we can manage to be a little less broken.”
He let out a sharp huff of breath as though someone had hit him in the chest, and dropped his face to rest against the crook of my neck. Gooseflesh pebbled across my body at the
