Chapter 4
Ethan looked at the woman shaking in front of him — shaking, and still upright — and tilted his head slightly, examining her.
He was wearing night vision. In all that darkness he could see everything.
He’d watched her inch her way toward the door. He’d watched her go on looking for a way out while she was terrified enough to be sick. He’d watched her nostrils flare with her breathing and her lips tremble and her eyes catch the faint infrared and shine.
The itch came back into his teeth.
On the monitors she’d only looked alive. Up close he could see that every part of her face was better suited to taking a mark than the screen had suggested.
Not thin. Not angular. Full, and soft, and springy with it.
He could imagine exactly how the flesh would give.
Every part of her happened to be the way he liked.
The wanting was undifferentiated and complete, which was inconvenient, because it left him unsure where to start.
Then his eyes found her lower lip, where she’d caught it between her teeth without noticing.
That settled it.
There. He’d start there.
It looked sweet.
He moved toward the small shape in front of him, and his sense of smell went to work.
She didn’t smell good, exactly. Kitchen grease. The faint salt of somebody who’d been moving all day.
But underneath that was something older and much more interesting.
Not perfume, not any plant. Warmth coming up out of the skin itself, out of living tissue — the smell a body temperature has.
It was comfortable.
It was warm.
He wanted to put his face in it and stay there, and even the grease and the sweat became things he could tolerate.
Which excited him further.
If the smell alone was this specific, the taste would be extraordinary.
Just anticipating it sent a fine tremor through him that he couldn’t suppress.
He had been watching her for three months by then. The decision itself was only a week old.
He was, by nature, a careful man.
Once something took his interest he had to understand the whole of it — where it had come from, who it was, what its history was, and why it had produced a response in him at all. He did not act on things he hadn’t finished examining.
Investigating this one had been a problem.
She’d come across the Mexican border. There was no legal record of her anywhere in the country. The personal history she’d given her coworkers was invented from the first sentence. In any official system, she did not exist.
An undocumented woman with no traceable past — fine. But whether she was clean, whether she carried anything, whether she was tangled up in something: those things mattered to him a great deal.
He had never been a patient man.
Ordinarily the interest went out before the research was done, and the thing that had held his attention stopped holding it, and that was the end of it.
Not this one. This one kept climbing the entire time he was looking into it.
Last week he’d been sitting in front of the monitors watching her again.
It had been brutally hot that day, and she’d arrived with a bottle of water in her hand.
Before she came through the gate she’d stopped on the step, tipped her head back, and drunk.
The camera at the door was very good. He watched what she failed to swallow slide from the corner of her mouth and run down along the line of her jaw.
Her lip, wet, caught the sun and held it.
Full. Ready.
That was the moment he decided he would find out for himself.
Which was how today’s arrangement came to exist — a careful little construction, with the thing he’d been watching for three months standing in the middle of it.
Lily felt something approaching and got both hands up in front of her.
Her palms landed on a body.
Silk under her hands, and heat under the silk.
Before she could work out what part of him she was touching, weight came down on her and there was nothing to be done about it.
An arm went up against the wall beside her ear. A thin, clean smell reached her — antiseptic.
Warm breath moved across the shell of her ear and every hair on her body came up.
And a low voice arrived, very close, very clear:
“May I bite you?”
For a second Lily’s mind produced nothing at all.
Bite her?
Was this a pervert or an actual vampire?
The heat under her palms answered that. This was a living man.
She got hold of herself enough to pull her head back, trying to press her whole skull into the door.
“Let go of me first.”
He ignored it completely.
He had put his face down into the side of her neck and was breathing there, testing something, and while he did it he reminded her: “You haven’t answered my question.”
It was obscene.
Lily was frightened and furious in equal measure. She wanted to shove him off. She was afraid of what shoving him might start.
He hadn’t bitten her yet, though — for all that he’d walked straight through every line there was. So she’d talk.
“Why — why do you want to bite me? Do you — do you eat people?”
A news story surfaced, from a few weeks back. Somewhere in the Midwest they’d finally caught a man. Twenty-some victims, they were saying.
She shuddered without meaning to.
He registered the fear and answered in something almost like a soothing tone. “Don’t be scared. I don’t eat people. I only want to bite you.”
Then something firm touched her cheek. The tip of his nose, she thought.
He drew it along her skin, breathing her in, and then explained himself. “You look healthy. Full of life. It makes me want to bite you.”
Lily could not follow the logic at all. Healthy, therefore bite.
It was insane.
In her panic she reached for something her mother used to say — good color is the best thing you can wear — and it came out of her mouth before she thought about it. “I know how to fix your diet, how to get your energy up. You really don’t have to get it this way.”
Another one of those almost-laughs, very low.
Ethan’s patience was going.
The thing he’d wanted for months was directly in front of him and he still couldn’t have it, and the waiting had become a physical problem.
But he believed, with total conviction, that anything taken against the will had something missing from it. Only what was offered gave the whole flavor.
“May I bite you?” he asked again, slower.
This time she was definite. “No.”
“Why not?” His head withdrew a little. A few inches of space opened between them.
Lily got half a breath of relief before it evaporated.
She couldn’t see him. It made no difference. He took up the entire room.
The pressure of him sat on her chest.
And that look — she couldn’t see it and she could feel exactly where it was, and she understood that if she gave him the wrong answer, teeth were going through her skin.
She swallowed. Her voice wasn’t steady. “Because biting people — is wrong.”
“Which is why I’m asking your permission.”
“But I don’t want to give it.”
“Why don’t you want to give it?”
