"I wouldn't."
"But you just said - " The penny dropped with an almost audible clang. "Wait a second - you're not part of the Brotherhood?"
"Would that I were so I could see them pay for their crimes," he said, biting off each word.
"Pay for what?" I was feeling more and more like we were talking in circles.
His knuckles went white on the steering wheel. "They killed Angelica."
"Your girlfriend?"
He nodded.
"I'm sorry. Alec said something about you losing a loved one a few years ago." Against my better judgment, a small well of sympathy opened up. Having lost both of my parents to a drunk driver some eight years before, I knew how long the grief of sudden, tragic death could remain. If he was on a vendetta against a murderer, I could understand his desire to see someone pay. "I assume the person responsible was never caught?"
He shot me a quick, unreadable look.
"I'm not asking just to be nosy - my parents were killed by a drunk driver with a long record and no license. It took my brother and me four years of legal wrangling before we finally got a vehicular homicide charge to stick, but I remember how consumed we were to see justice done."
"I killed the reaper who conducted the ritual upon her," he said flatly, his voice as hard as flint.
Horror stirred the hair on the back of my neck at the way he spat out the word "ritual." I remembered Anniki saying something about how the Brotherhood performed rituals on vampires...
That last word echoed in my head with a terrifying enlightenment, one that left me gaping openmouthed for a moment. "You're... you're... you're one of those vampires, aren't you? The ones Anniki was telling me about. The whatchamacallits... Black Ones?"
"We prefer the term 'Dark One,'" he said without the slightest sign of concern that he had just admitted he was a vampire.
"Holy Jehoshaphat and the wizard of Oz," I swore, fear skittering up my back. "A vampire. A real vampire. Oh my god. Does... does Alec know?"
He bent a look upon me that implied I was a moron, which at that moment was probably deserved. "Alec is older than me."
I stared at him, my brain trying to come to grips with the fact that the man sitting next to me, the perfectly normal-looking man, was, in fact, the evil undead. "What does that have to do with anything?"
He spun the wheel, sending us careening off the main road and down a winding track that led into the small fishing town. "You can't expect me to believe you're that naive."
I gasped, really gasped as his meaning struck me. "You're not saying Alec is one, too?"
"I just told you he's older than I am. I was born in 1623. He has at least eighty years on me."
My jaw dropped again, so stunned was I that it only dimly filtered through my brain that Kristoff had stopped the car in the shade of a squat stone building that was perched on top of a cliff that overlooked the small fishing village. "But... a vampire? Alec? No. I don't believe it. You're just trying to scare me."
"If I wanted to scare you, I'd tell you what I was thinking at this moment," he said dryly.
"Alec is no more a vampire than I am," I told him, absolutely confident in what I said.
Kristoff raised an eyebrow.
"Answer me this, then, Mr. Fangs - vampires drink blood, right? So if Alec is a vampire, why didn't he drink my blood?" I asked in tones of indisputable reason.
"I have no doubt that he did."
"A feeble answer at best," I said smugly. "I'd know if someone was drinking my blood."
Kristoff suddenly leaned over me, turning my head to examine the side of my neck farthest from him. "I thought so," he said after a moment's silence, releasing my chin and sitting back in his seat. "You are mistaken. You bear a mark."
"What?" I pulled down the overhead sunshade, examining myself in the mirror contained on its back. Sure enough, there was a small bruising on the side of my neck, right where I remembered Alec nuzzling me. "That's not vampire teeth marks. It's a hickey."
I could swear that Kristoff was having to fight to keep from rolling his eyes. "It is the same thing."