“Don’t you feel it? When you drink from him, don’t you feel it?” he asks.
“Feel what?” And err, present tense? As far as he knows, I only drank from him the one time. Oh crap, he does know. Sebastian must have spilled the beans. He is so dead. But no, CK hasn’t come at me with accusations about Xane so…ah, forget it. Freudian slip.
“The power rush,” he says and frowns at me.
“Oh that, well, yes, it was mildly boosting,” I say, drawing out the word “was” for his benefit and he looks at me somewhere between confused and amused.
“Mildly boosting? Is that all?”
“Well, more so than the average Vampire,” I say, now frowning at him. “It is supposed to be more?”
“Aefre, the rush is incredible,” he says with a look of wonder on his face. “The feeling of being invincible. And that is for me. For Lesser Vampires, it is so much more.”
“Oh, well I am clearly not a Lesser Vampire,” I say haughtily. “What’s this got to do with anything?” I have lost the plot and I want to fuck him now. Not talk about Sebastian.
“Hm, interesting. It must be your Queen status that makes it so. Normally anyone who drinks from him knows there is something different about him. All it would take is for someone to explore it further and…” he holds his hands up.
“And what about spelling them to forget then?” I ask, more than irked by now.
“He doesn’t have the power to make people forget, Aefre. It is suggestion. You can’t suggest to someone they forget something.”
Why not? I think to myself, but refrain from saying it out loud at the risk of sounding even dumber.
“Fine,” I say. “I get that you obviously know what you are talking about, having been dealing with it for thousands of years,” to which he looks relieved, “but I can’t do anything about it,” to which he looks annoyed.
“You can. You can be with him in the way that he wants, that he needs.”
I just stare at him, so he tries a different tactic. “How would you feel if you could have sex and feed, but not be fed from?”
“I do, all the time. With Lincoln,” I say and then really, really wish that I hadn’t.
“With your VAMPIRES!” he roars at me and I jump to my feet, hand over my racing heart.
“All right!” I snap. “Keep your pants on.” Although, I could really do with him losing his pants right about now.
He visibly calms himself and tries again, “I know you love it, Aefre. I know that you can’t live without it.”
Well, he has me there. He must see he is finally getting through to me as he continues, “He doesn’t even risk being intimate with other Vampires because of it. Apart from Vivienne, who he spells, he hasn’t been with another Vampire in centuries.”
Now he has my undivided attention. If I couldn’t be with another Vampire, I would probably lose my mind. Vamp and Human sex is fantastic, Vamp and Shifter sex is incredible, but Vamp on Vamp action beats them off with a very big stick. A tree even. Those big Redwoods you find on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada.
“Finally,” he says, crossing over to me.
“No but wait. Future him said he spells Jess not to bite him. Why not just do that?”
He sighs, a long-suffering sigh, as clearly, I still don’t get it. “Because he wants to be bitten. Aren’t you listening to a word I am saying? And it is a chore for him. It isn’t enjoyable. You know firsthand that your mind gets lost to his suggestions and your body takes over. He doesn’t want to be stuck with a mindless fuck – literally. He wants passion and intimacy, to make love and to feed from his lover as she does to him. All of the things that we want. That we all want.”
I gulp. “And you are asking me to do that with him?”
He closes his eyes in pain. “Yes.”
“Oh, Constantine, I can’t. You know that I can’t because of Cole. He would be devastated, and he wouldn’t understand. And you…” I grab his hand.
“He doesn’t have to know.”
“I’m not lying to him.”
“Aefre, you already are lying to him.”