Garin stole a sideway glance at her, a gesture he perhaps did not expect her to pick up—and when he caught her looking, he returned to plucking an invisible ball of dust off his black pant leg.
Knowing Piper would be fine, or at least some variation of fine, Lilac’s adrenaline finally began to burn off. Her eyelids grew heavy as the past couple days’ journey began to catch up to her.
The vampire had shifted down, now resting with his head soundly upon the pillow. When Garin felt her eyes on him, he scowled and turned to his side and shoved his back to her.
“Your brother,” she began as a sleepy afterthought. “He’s… alarming. And his eyes…” Lilac shuddered. “Human blood really makes them that way?”
“Yes. Mortal blood taken from the vein, though.”
There was that phrase again. From the vein.
“Can your kind ever feed off of other Darklings?”
“Why on earth would we do that?”
“I mean, if you ever had to. Like witches and warlocks, they at least look human. Would a vampire’s eyes be red, then?”
“I’m not sure. Warlocks are easy to spot by their signature silver hair at any age. All witches smell strongly of sage and foxglove, which, I wouldn’t imagine tasting very good. I’ve personally never tried, but I’ll be sure to ask Bastion the next time he mistakes a witch for a mortal,” he replied sardonically.
“Did he banish you? How would he have done that if you were rightfully second in command and next in line?”
“He didn’t banish me. Not exactly.” He rubbed his eyes and grunted like a tired child. “Years ago, something happened, and suddenly, I wasn’t able to feed.”
“From the vein,” Lilac echoed distantly.
“As you can guess, Bastion didn’t like it. Believing I’d stopped feeding as a matter of preference, he convinced the entire coven to abandon me. I left and found work and a place to stay at the Fenfoss Inn that doubled as a tavern.”
With a groan, he shifted on the pillow. “Bastion was right… It would’ve been laughable for me to take on the role as leader. The one member who couldn’t even drink from people anymore. And I wasn’t second in command; it isn’t anything like that. Vampires don’t have special ceremonies or coronations, ascensions or anything frilly like you humans have. The leader dies, the next one immediately takes his place. It’s that simple. I was the one set to take Laurent’s place had anything bad happened to him, because I am his first sired. Bastion was his second. So on, and so forth.”
“So, Bastion doesn’t know the real reason you can’t drink from people anymore?”
He paused. When he finally answered, he sounded annoyed at the fact she’d clung to that detail. “No,” he said curtly.
Lilac cleared her throat, curiosity burning at the tip of her tongue. She wanted to ask him about it again but thought better of it. Whether he was aware of it or not, he was opening up to her. He was a hard nut to crack, so to speak, and any prying she did needed to be tactful. If she could tap into any sort of vulnerability, if they actually opened up to each other, maybe then he’d consider releasing her sooner.
“Do you plan on telling him?”
“Certainly not.” Garin’s sullen laugh was tinged with bitterness. “The only one I should’ve told was Laurent, but he was so polite, so fatherly that he never pushed. Laurent wasn’t convinced that I one day decided to stop hunting humans out of choice, but he respected me enough to know I’d tell him when I was ready. Even as our leader, he was extremely… progressive. He was different.”
Garin rolled slightly to peek over his shoulder. “If I share something with you, do you promise to keep it between the both of us?”
“That depends.” Lilac’s stomach swam at the sudden intimacy of the question. “Is it incriminating?”
He snorted. “Your botched attempt at murdering me and then agreeing to follow me was incriminating, as is every unhostile word we’ve spoken to each other thus far. Anyway, I suppose it doesn’t really matter now that he’s dead—Laurent looked forward to your reign.”
At this, Lilac propped herself up on her left elbow to look down at him.
“He did?” she asked, unable to suppress the small smile that crept onto her lips. She foggily recalled the korrigan chief mentioning something similar.
“After it became known publicly that you speak to Darklings, it was like a light went on in his head. I put the