from France around the same time, though that “epidemic” of wasting illness hadn’t been his doing. I was hoping he would know something the modern doctors and witches didn’t about whatever the hell was happening to Justine Henderson.
“Was she very thin when you met her?” he asked.
“No, she was a good, normal weight, not one of those women that starve themselves.”
“Then she has lost a great deal,” he said, fingers smoothing down the front of his white shirt in one of his nervous gestures, but there was no lace for him to toy with, just a plain shirtfront. His fingers went to the mandarin collar, but it was too plain for him to have anything to play his fingers over and soothe himself. He was actually wearing a tailored black suit with thin satin lapels so that it was vaguely tuxedo-like. It was the simplest clothing I’d ever seen him in, and his fingers kept trying to find something to fuss with, to no avail. Until this moment, I’d never realized how much fussing with the lace and complicated bits of his clothes helped him deal with stress. He’d dressed to meet the family and the doctors, saying, “It would be unseemly for me to look festive in the face of their grief.”
I took his hand to let him run his thumb over my knuckles to see if that would help. It was odd to think of the master vampire, ruler of all the bloodsuckers in America, as nervous. He was my fiancé, which made me feel like I should have understood what all the fancy outfits meant to him sooner than this.
“She looks skeletal,” I said softly.
“That is fitting since she is dying.”
“Do you agree with the doctor that this is some sort of vampire-caused illness?”
His hand went very still in mine, as if he were holding his breath, but that wasn’t it; he’d just stopped breathing. He didn’t have to breathe except to talk, but he usually did it anyway. Now he went still in that way that the older vampires could so that if I hadn’t been holding his hand, I would think he’d left the room.
“The illness the doctor refers to is when a newly risen vampire began to prey on their family. They would lure them out and drain them dry. Some would turn into vampires, but most simply died.” His thumb started moving over my hand in small circles and he began to breathe again, as if a switch had been turned back on. If he’d been human, he would have needed at least a bigger breath, or maybe a gasp, but he wasn’t human. “They preyed on their family because they could gain entrance to the house without permission,” I said.
“Oui, we can enter public buildings without being invited, but private homes are safe from us unless they were once our homes.”
“Shouldn’t the vampire who made the new vamp stay with them and make sure the family massacre doesn’t happen since it draws attention to them?” I asked.
“They should, and in Europe they would, or some older vampire would, but many of the ones that fled to America did not hold with tradition. They did not understand that some traditions weren’t whims of the council but logical precautions.”
“You heard the doctors—there are no marks where a vamp is taking blood from her.”
“There are other ways for vampires to feed, ma petite, as you know.”
I lowered my voice because it wasn’t common knowledge that some master vampires had secondary ways to feed. “I know you guys can feed through your human servants, like literally take some of the nutrition when we eat if you’re trapped in, like, the hold of a ship. It makes sense for long voyages, but if you drain your human servant to death, that could mean you’d die with them.”
“Harm to one can be harm to both,” he said. His fingers had found my engagement ring and he was now sliding his finger over it. I guess any fidget object would do.
“So, no vampire would do this to his own servant.”