Eternal Kiss of Darkness (Night Huntress World 2)

"Silver," Kira said.

His brows rose. She couldn't see it, but she must have sensed his reaction, because she shrugged.

"That must be what those other, ah, vampires were using on you this morning. The knives didn't quite look like steel, but of course, they were so bloody . . ." Her voice trailed off again and she looked away, biting her lip. Amidst the shocking silence of her mind, he caught a changing of her scent into something that reflected an emotion he was well acquainted with.

Regret.

She did wish she hadn't stepped in to help him this morning. Mencheres couldn't blame her, but to his surprise, he found that it actually . . . hurt.

By the gods, was he really saddened over what a stranger thought of him? He was over forty-five hundred years old! Perhaps it truly was time that he passed on from this world. Before he manifested other forms of what had to be undead senility.

"Those other men were not vampires," Mencheres corrected her coolly. "They belong to another race known as ghouls, or flesh-eaters."

It sounded like Kira gagged. "This morning I walked in on ghouls, who eat flesh, hacking away at a vampire who drinks blood. Is that what you're telling me?"

"Yes."

Now fear sharpened Kira's scent, and a fine tremble went through her limbs, but her spine stayed straight. "Is that what you're keeping me here for? To drink my blood?" Mencheres couldn't stop himself from glancing at her throat with its temptingly rapid pulse before he replied.

"No. I told you - you have nothing to fear from me. I would have already returned you to your home except I am unable to erase your knowledge of this morning yet. Once my blood has left your system, and I can clear your mind of this, you will be freed. Until then, you will be unharmed. I give you my word."

That tremor slowed, but her heartbeat didn't stop its racing. "This is like a bad dream," Kira whispered. "You might promise not to harm me, but someone else brought me dinner, and I'm guessing he wasn't human, either. If you mean it when you say you don't want me harmed, you have to let me go. If not, I'm only safe until one of the other vampires around me gets an appetite."

Mencheres couldn't stop the snort that escaped him. "My word is law among my people. No one would dare to touch you without my permission, and I've expressly forbidden it. You are quite safe from anyone getting an 'appetite' around you, Kira." She was silent for several moments. Mencheres concentrated on her mind, but it remained frustratingly elusive to him. Her scent wavered between mistrust and shock, though, telling him as much about her internal struggle to digest this information as her thoughts probably would.

Kira's distress was to be expected. Considering she'd started the day knowing nothing about the creatures that existed alongside humanity, then had almost been murdered by some of those creatures and was now held against her will by others, she'd shown remarkable strength. Mencheres had seen leaders of nations reduced to incoherent sobbing under lesser circumstances.

"Even if my life isn't in danger, I can't just stay here waiting for my mind to become malleable again," Kira said at last. "I have a job, and, ah, other very important responsibilities. Please don't misunderstand, I'm more than relieved that you're not intending to eat me, but I can't just disappear for several days. If you let me go, I'll go home, and I won't breathe a word to anyone about any of this."

"Is that where you were intending to go when you ran tonight?" Mencheres asked, his hand shooting out to stop Kira as she started to turn away. "And do not lie to me again." Kira's face flushed as she met his gaze.

"I was headed for your nearest neighbor's house to call the police," she replied softly.

Mencheres dropped his hand from her face. "And that is why I cannot let you go while you remember anything about what you've seen."

"But that was before," Kira said insistently. "When I still thought you were going to kill me, so yes, the police sounded like my best option. But you've proven that I can't run off without you knowing, and you could clearly overpower me anytime. I can't imagine you'd go through the effort to lie to me this much if you just intended to kill me. And if you're not going to kill me, then you must not be the insatiable murderers legend paints you to be, so I don't need to warn humanity about you. Yes, you killed those people who were torturing you; but that's justifiable homicide in any court, so there's no need for me to tell anyone anything."

Kira's voice had risen in her agitation, and her pulse accelerated again. Mencheres said nothing, knowing she was trying to reconcile the facts out loud more than anything else. It was always frightening for humans when they realized their belief in the superiority of their race was false. When they realized how vulnerable they truly were to the other species that shared the dark with them.

"Besides," she said at last, expelling the word on a ragged sigh. "No matter how many people I'd tell, who would believe me? I'd never believed any of the clients who used to talk about weird, impossible things, and I heard more than a few of those stories as a private investigator . . ."

Kira's eyes widened even as she stopped talking in midsentence. Mencheres couldn't hear the thoughts form in her mind, but from her expression, she was realizing some of the stories she'd summarily dismissed might have been true. Then she looked around the darkened yard as if seeing it with new eyes, her breath hitching.

Mencheres watched with pity, knowing it was the moment Kira truly accepted that all of this was real. The small part of her that still hoped there was another explanation had finally given up. He'd observed this same mental surrender in humans before, too many times to count, and though Kira might believe she could return to a normal life with this information, Mencheres knew she couldn't.

"You do not want this knowledge," he said, his voice quiet but firm. "It will destroy your life. You will see every shadow in a different way, and every strange sound will make you wonder - is that a person, or a monster? Humans who are not part of a vampire's or ghoul's line do not do well with this information. Time has proven that repeatedly." What he didn't tell Kira was that time also proved that such humans usually ended up dead. Eventually, those mortals tried to make someone believe them about the supernatural world, and an unclaimed human spreading tales about the undead was a threat to both species. Both vampires and ghouls did claim a certain number of humans as property, but those humans were specially chosen, then removed from their own world. They lived with their undead protectors in full knowledge that if they spilled the secret about either species to mainstream society, they would be eliminated.