goodbye it got iffy,” she conceded. “I found myself nuzzling her neck, and then realized what I was doing and ended the hug, told her I loved her and walked her out. Then I went in search of Señorita Ana. I was hoping she wouldn’t make me wait long to take me out to feed. Actually, I was surprised that she didn’t have someone keeping an eye on me. Or maybe she did,” she added thoughtfully. “There was security all over the place that day.”
“And yet they didn’t stop you from running,” he murmured thoughtfully.
Ildaria nodded slowly as she thought about that now too. “I didn’t see anyone in the hall when I walked out, and I was walking not running. They may have thought I was just . . .” She shrugged. “Going for a walk.”
“Until you ran,” G.G. said.
“Si.” Ildaria picked up her own water and took a long gulp, but it didn’t really quench her thirst any better than the hot chocolate had. Realization striking, she rolled her eyes at her own stupidity and moved to the refrigerator to retrieve a bag of blood.
G.G. smiled faintly as he watched her pop it to her fangs. He was used to immortals feeding in front of him. Clients might drink it from glasses at the Night Club, but his mother and father were both immortal and would drink from bags at home as she was doing, so she wasn’t surprised he seemed more amused than anything.
“All this talk of blood made you hungry, did it?” he teased.
Unable to talk with the bag at her mouth, Ildaria just shrugged. But the truth was she’d been so distracted with their talk that she’d made the rookie mistake of missing the signs that she needed blood. Seriously, how stupid was that? She could have accidentally bit G.G.
“So you didn’t go see your abuela right away because you needed to feed,” G.G. said when the bag had emptied and she tore it from her fangs.
Nodding, Ildaria tossed the bag in the garbage and then leaned against the counter. “Unfortunately, when I ran from the plantation, I used immortal speed, which means using blood that was already low,” she explained. “By the time I stopped I was well into the stomach eating itself phase and verging on the acid in the organs stage.”
She grimaced at the memory. “That meant I couldn’t risk going anywhere there were a lot of people. The smell of their blood would have been overwhelming and I might have just attacked someone. I needed to find someone on their own. So, I went down to the waterside, hoping to find a fisherman on their own, or someone walking the beach in the moonlight. Tourism wasn’t a thing in the area back then,” she added. “This was 1826. We were under Haitian occupation, which had caused a lot of upheaval, but it was still safer to walk around at night than it would be now. Well, mostly,” she added to be honest, because the soldiers had been a problem. Haiti hadn’t been able to provision their soldiers properly, so the men were stealing the food and supplies they needed locally. They had called it commandeering or confiscating, but it was stealing.
Food and supplies weren’t all that the soldiers had taken without permission. A lot of half-Haitian babies had been born during that period. Though Ildaria had been relatively ignorant of all that at the time. She and her grandmother had been left alone. She supposed that had something to do with Señorita Ana. She had always protected her people.
Ildaria turned to glance at the stove’s clock and then opened the door to check the muffins. Deciding they needed another couple of minutes, she closed the door and continued. “I did eventually find someone on their own, but it took a while, and really I needed more blood than one donor could safely supply. Fortunately, that first man eased my need enough that I thought I could safely be around crowds again, so I decided to head back toward my abuela’s and look for someone to feed from on the way. Still, by the time I neared my abuela’s home, it was more than an hour since I’d left Señorita Ana’s.”
She paused briefly, as she remembered the moment her abuela’s home had come into view. “Juan and Ana were there. They were arguing in front of my abuela’s house. I couldn’t hear it all, but caught enough to gather that Señorita Ana