Chapter 14

I held the phone up to my ear without bothering to turn on the camera, my voice rough with sleep. "What is it?"

Morgana's mature, seductive voice came through the speaker, laced with amusement and a hint of mockery. "Rise and shine, darling. Honestly, sleeping more than ten hours a day? You really are starting to act like you're half-dead."

I rolled onto my other side, turning my back to the phone as if that would somehow make her go away. "There's nothing going on. Why would I get up? I'm not even hungry."

"You need to work on that artificial blood of yours anyway, don't you? That takes hours to prepare properly. Unlike me, who can just find someone and be done with it in minutes." Her voice carried that familiar note of disdain she always had when discussing my dietary choices, the same judgment I'd been hearing from her for decades.

The mention of my synthetic blood made me think of the mess Lysander had made in my laboratory, the wasted hours of work now scattered across the floor in shards of broken glass. I should have taken some of his blood as compensation for the destruction. I'd been so close last night, my fangs pressed against his throat, his pulse racing beneath my lips. It would have been so easy to just take what I wanted, to finally break the century-long streak of abstaining from human blood. But I hadn't. Some part of me, some stubborn prideful part, had refused to give in to that loss of control.

"You drink what you like and do what you want. I don't interfere with your choices, so don't interfere with mine." My voice came out sharper than I'd intended, the frustration of the night before bleeding through into my tone.

But Morgana, as always, refused to let it go. Her voice took on that lecturing quality I'd come to dread over the centuries, the tone of a mother who thought she knew what was best for her child. "If you have desires, you should indulge them, not suppress them. We're vampires, Vivienne. We're powerful, superior beings. There are countless ways to maintain control while still enjoying the pleasures our nature provides. Feeding and sex aren't about losing control, they're about controlling someone else's pleasure. You haven't even tried most of what's out there. How do you know you won't find someone who makes you lose yourself in the best possible way?"

I cut her off before she could continue down that particular path. "I don't have those desires. I'm going back to sleep." I moved to end the call, my finger hovering over the red button on the screen.

But even as I hung up, I knew she was right about one thing. I did have desires. Specifically, I had desires for one particular human with white hair and green eyes and blood that tasted like nothing I'd ever experienced before. Morgana's words had conjured up the memory of him so vividly I could almost smell his scent again, could almost feel the warmth of his skin beneath my fingers and the frantic beating of his heart against my palm. My stomach clenched with a hunger that had nothing to do with my usual need for sustenance and everything to do with the way he'd looked at me last night, the way he'd trembled when I'd touched him, the way his blood had sung to me like nothing else ever had.

I sat up in bed, fully awake now despite my earlier protests. The sun was still high in the sky outside my windows, bright enough that going out would require an umbrella. But I found myself reaching for my phone anyway, pulling up the map application and typing in the address I'd memorized last night.

I should have left him alone. I should have given him time to process, to hopefully rationalize away what he'd seen and convince himself it had all been some kind of stress-induced hallucination. But the need to see him again, to make sure he was alright, to perhaps explain or apologize or just be near him, was overwhelming. It had been less than twenty-four hours since I'd first caught his scent, and already I was behaving like some lovesick teenager instead of the centuries-old predator I actually was.

I threw back the covers and got out of bed, moving to my closet to find something appropriate to wear. If I was going to track down a terrified human who'd fled my home in fear, I should probably look as non-threatening as possible.