Dominic stiffened.
I jerked back, startled by the blood coating my tongue, a taste that wasn’t entirely unpleasant—was, in fact, not unpleasant at all. The blood was absolutely delicious, which was also startling, not to mention disturbing. Dominic had a gash across his lower lip, and I realized that I’d cut him.
I swallowed the blood in my haste to apologize and choked.
Dominic covered my lips with a finger and shook his head. His thumb swiped back and forth over my cheekbone as we stared at each other, and before my very acute eyes, I watched the intricacy of Dominic’s body heal. The split sides of his lip filled with blood, and that blood pooled in the crevice of his cut, coagulated, scabbed, and flaked to reveal new, shiny pink skin. That skin darkened to a faint thread, and if he’d still been human, the healing might have stopped there, but his body healed the scar, too, until his lips bore not one sliver of evidence of my clumsy lust. What had once seemed to occur instantaneously and magically was now a simple bodily function, but I suppose that in itself was a kind of magic.
I touched his lips, grazing my fingertips carefully over the perfection of his newly healed skin to the divots and pucker of the permanent scar gouging through the other side of his lower lip and chin, a reminder of his human lifetime and for me, a reminder of the few things we had in common. Although looking at the skeletal, talon-tipped hand touching him—the hand that I controlled but didn’t resemble anything I recognized as mine—we had much more in common now than I’d ever anticipated having.
He touched my lips with his fingertips, mimicking my movements with the human-looking version of his hand, and I couldn’t help it. Regardless of the impossibility of this situation and the state of my hands and what I could only imagine was the state of my face, I smiled.
“Sorry,” I murmured. Dominic’s blood had moistened the scratch in my throat, so it didn’t feel like my vocal cords were raking my esophagus with razor blades anymore. “I’m not myself this morning.”
Dominic grinned—full and genuine and lopsided from the pull of his scar—and the warmth and affection in his expression widened my own smile. I let that warmth soak into me, filling my unfamiliar body with hope, reminding me that I could survive. That I wanted to survive.
“No one looks or acts their best upon waking, not even you when you were human,” Dominic reminded me. “Not even me.”
I sighed. “I will miss working on my tan, though,” I said, only half-jokingly. The feel of the sun’s warmth on my skin had become a safe haven after discovering the existence of vampires. Having become one, I supposed the necessity was moot, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t miss it.
Dominic grunted. “Many things about you will never change despite the transformation, including your ability to enjoy the sun—and your stubbornness, it seems.”
I raised my eyebrows. “My stubbornness won’t cure a fatal sun allergy.”
“Look at the color of your claws,” Dominic said drily.
Ignoring the urge to resist looking at my claws just to defy him, I looked. The skeletal appendages coming from my body were long and knobby and honestly grotesque, a monster’s hands with four-inch, lethal talons sprouting from their tips.
And those talons were silver.
Dominic was right, as usual, and unfortunately, so was our dear friend, High Lord Henry. I was a vampire, but I wasn’t allergic to the sun.
I was a Day Reaper.
Chapter 2
The blood that Dominic raised in my direction wasn’t any more appetizing for having been poured into a wineglass. I couldn’t pretend it was anything but blood; besides its general crimson color, it didn’t resemble any red wine I’d ever enjoyed. I envisioned its sticky thickness clinging to the walls of my throat the way it clung to the sides of the glass and gagged at the thought of having to swallow it.
I leaned away from the glass and shook my head. “Unappetizing,” I said, but the few drops of Dominic’s blood that had wet my throat had already dried; my voice was nothing but a rattling growl again.
By the frustrated lines between Dominic’s eyes as he glared patronizingly down on me, he could understand my words just fine through the growl. “You need to drink now, here in privacy, before you come into contact with anyone. You don’t know it yet, but you’re ravenous, and once you realize it, it’ll be too late.”
I considered the blood-rimmed glass in Dominic’s hand thoughtfully, but I didn’t reach out to take it from him. “Shouldn’t I crave it?”
“If it was fresh blood pumping through a human’s veins, yes. And the first time the hunger hits, you will be overwhelmed by the inescapable urge to drink. I don’t want that urge to strike in public while others are watching, while you may be near someone like Greta, who won’t forget, or someone like Meredith, whose death you’d never forgive.”
“Don’t need the full cow to eat a hamburger,” I grumbled, throwing the logic he’d used on me multiple times in the past back in his face.
“No, you don’t, but the first time the hunger hits, it’s all-consuming. You won’t know restraint. You might not need the whole cow, but the cow will die anyway,” Dominic explained.
He lifted the glass minutely closer. I wrinkled my nose.
Dominic rolled his eyes, grabbed my arm, and forced the blood into my hands. My claws clinked against the glass as I cradled the bowl carefully. I didn’t trust myself to hold the stem and not snap it in half.
When it became obvious that holding the wineglass didn’t necessarily portend drinking its contents, Dominic tried a different tactic. “I’ll give you a mirror if you drink.”
I narrowed my eyes. Two could play that game. “I’ll drink if you give me a mirror.”
Dominic sighed heavily, my stubbornness one of the only forces of nature strong enough to test his iron patience.
“I have been a vampire for nearly five hundred years, and within that time, I’ve transformed dozens of night bloods, perfecting my technique with each vampire.”
“I don’t see how—”
Dominic held up a hand. “In all that time, after all those transformations, I know a thing or two about raising a healthy, contributing member of my coven. Drinking blood upon waking is essential. You must drink before coming into contact with your first human and before gazing upon your reflection.”
“I don’t think that—”
“This is important, Cassidy. I’ve learned from past transformations. I’ve learned from past mistakes. This is one pool you cannot simply dive headfirst into. You must acclimate your body to the temperature of this habitat in order to thrive in it.” His expression was imploring when he met my eyes. “Please, Cassidy.”
I considered his words, I really did, but I didn’t consider what he was describing as acclimation. It was a delusion. I could see my hands and imagine the face that matched those hands. Waiting until after I’d fed to look at myself was more than acclimation; it was a lie.
I lifted the wineglass carefully to my lips and swallowed one sip. The blood was still warm and fresh; I shuddered to think where he’d procured it.
“Happy? I drank,” I said. “Now let me see myself.”
He stared at me, his expression unreadable.
“You didn’t specify how much I was required to drink,” I defended.
Dominic’s expression didn’t change. Without taking his eyes from me, he strode to the bedside table, opened its drawer, and pulled out a hand mirror. He strode back to me, flashed the mirror with an imperceptible flick of his wrist, and just as quickly, hid the mirror behind his back.