“Uh,” Christian said. “No.”
“I highly recommend it.”
She was one of the vampires he’d read about, the ones who drank from human beings.
“So, Chris,” Lucille said. “Are you going to share information with me willingly?”
She did not describe how she might persuade him if he was reluctant. She did not have to.
He could almost manage to look at her now, stealing glances and every time coming up with a new way in which she did not look human. Even the position in which she leaned back against the sofa, the precise arch of her spine, did not look right, as if she had forgotten entirely the limits her body used to have and the way her body used to work.
“Let’s not play games, Chris,” Lucille said softly. “What nest do you belong to?”
“Uh,” Christian said. “Nest?”
“The other vampires you are associated with,” Lucille explained. “Your eternal family.” The expression on Christian’s face must have remained pretty blank. Lucille’s lip curled. “Who sent you here? What’s your agenda?”
“I really don’t understand.”
“Come now, Christian,” Lucille said, her voice more like an actual jungle c
at purring than a noise an attractive woman should be able to make. “I’m entirely in sympathy with you. Making vampires more popular, making them part of the mainstream. Starting this whole revolution in how vampires are seen. It’s quite brilliant. My nest is interested in forming an alliance with the vampires behind this scheme. So tell me, who made you?”
Christian looked away from her. “I was attacked,” he said quietly. “They never caught the man who turned me. He never even meant to turn me. I cut him when I was trying to fight him off and swallowed the blood.”
“Oh,” said Lucille, her voice as hushed as if she were in a library.
Christian glanced back at her. She was looking at him as if she was seeing a human being for the first time.
No, wait; of course she wasn’t: she was looking at him as if he was a person. And to her, the real people were vampires.
“Not a lot of vampires come into this alone, I take it,” said Christian.
“Not a lot of vampires survive this alone,” Lucille corrected. “So you have no nest?”
“There’s no nest. There’s no scheme,” Christian said, and added quickly, “Sorry.”
Lucille’s alabaster brow wrinkled. “Seriously?”
“You’re the second vampire I’ve ever met,” Christian said. “Seriously.”
Lucille regarded Christian with cool, suspicious eyes. Christian hoped she found his total fear and confusion convincing. They certainly convinced him.
“Why are you doing this, then?” Lucille asked at last. “If there’s no plan, why?”
Christian thought of being up onstage tonight, facing the Beatles’ legacy and smiling at it, listening to the surge and roar of the crowd, and being companionable in the dressing room afterward.
Lucille had come here because of some gathering of vampires she’d called her nest. She might understand the urge simply to not be alone, to belong.
But Christian didn’t want to have anything in common with her.
“I enjoy it,” he said.
Lucille stared at him with cold, cold eyes, as if trying to judge his sincerity, as if measuring whether it would be worth her time to kill him.
“Well,” she responded eventually. “I suppose there’s nothing more to be said.”
She got up, the movement a sliding, gliding thing more like an eel’s than a woman’s, and left.