Jake shifted uncomfortably, and then sighed and said, “You have to understand, I was a horror buff. I watched every monster movie ever made. They scared the crap out of me and I slept with a nightlight until I was twelve, but I had to watch them. I was crazy for horrors.” He shook his head slightly at the memory. He’d lost his taste for horror since then, but he’d been addicted to them then and that hadn’t really helped the situation. “Back when I was a kid, they didn’t have your Twilights and True Bloods. In every movie where vampires made an appearance, the vampire was the bad guy and the Van Helsing types were the good guys running around staking them and ridding the world of their evil.”
Jake grimaced. “So, essentially, on my eighteenth birthday, my mother told me that not only was my stepfather and his entire clan a bunch of bloodsucking fiends, but that she’d allowed him to turn her into one, and that the half brother I adored and looked out for was one too . . . and I’d been living with them all, unsuspecting all that time.”
“Seriously?” Nicole asked with suspicion. “Before they told you what they were, you didn’t have a clue?”
“They made sure I didn’t,” Jake said quietly. “I suspect they used some mind control to keep me unaware while they fed, or fudged my memory a bit here and there, not erasing anything, but adding things here or there to explain inconsistencies.” He shrugged. “I didn’t have a clue before then that I lived with what I thought were monsters.”
“And you didn’t agree to the change at that point,” Nicole said quietly.
It wasn’t a question, but he treated it as one. “No. I was shocked, horrified, repulsed. They were all suddenly monsters to me, and I didn’t want to be a monster too.”
“It must have been hard for you,” Nicole said quietly, moving to sit on the stool next to his.
Jake hesitated and then swung the seat slightly toward her and said judiciously, “Probably no harder than it is now for you.”
Nicole smiled wryly, but shook her head. Swinging her stool to the side and back with one foot, she said, “It’s a bit of a shock for me to find out such things exist. But for you . . .” She frowned and stopped swiveling to peer at him solemnly. “It was your family. You must have felt—I don’t know, alone?”
Jake nodded. He had felt alone. He’d also felt betrayed, abandoned, lost. “I guess at that point I felt like I was just finding out that I’d really been orphaned at four and had been living in a fantasy world all the years since Roberto came into our lives. In truth, I suppose I ran away emotionally that day, and my actual leaving seven years ago was just me physically following up on what happened emotionally years earlier.”
“Why didn’t you run away back then, at eighteen?” she asked curiously. “I mean if you felt they were monsters . . .”
“My brother,” Jake said quietly. “I was angry at my mother for letting Roberto turn her, but I was close to my little brother, Neil, and it wasn’t his fault he was born immortal. Besides, logically, after she explained everything, I understood that they weren’t monsters.”
“But there was still a part of your mind that thought of them as monsters,” Nicole guessed.
Jake nodded. “Eighteen years of training via horror movies can’t be eradicated that easily.”
“And then you were turned to save your life?” Nicole commented.
“Yes.” Jake’s mouth twisted at the memory. “My boss, Vincent Argeneau, who also happens to be Marguerite’s nephew, was being plagued by someone who was trying to ruin his life. They attacked me, and stabbed me just to the side of the heart. When Vincent found me I was dying and he turned me to save my life. I woke up an immortal . . . and didn’t handle it well.”
“Why?” Nicole asked quietly. “Surely it’s better to be an immortal than to be dead?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Jake said with dry amusement, and then glanced down. After a moment, he sighed and admitted, “I was fifty-one years old, miserable, and bitter.” He smiled wryly and lifted his head again, meeting her gaze. She was silent, waiting, wanting to understand, so he had to explain. “I was in a pretty dark place at that time. I’d had a happy childhood, but after finding out about everything, it felt like that childhood had all been a house of mirrors. After that I went through life feeling like an orphan. On top of that, nothing had turned out as I’d intended. I had no wife or kids, no one but my family and they were monsters as far as I was concerned. By the time I was attacked, I felt alone and tired and, frankly, I guess I was at a place where I was just killing time and waiting for the end . . . and then I got attacked. I remember lying there on the office floor, thinking, this is it, the end of my story. No more loneliness, no more disappointment, no more betrayal . . . and, instead, I woke up a vampire.”
“You keep saying vampire, but you told me you guys aren’t vampires,” Nicole pointed out quietly.
“Yeah,” Jake smiled faintly. “But I’ve been thinking of them as vampires so long . . .” He shrugged. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”
Nicole was silent for a minute, and then tilted her head to peer at him, a frown growing on her face. “Fifty-one?”
Jake smiled wryly. “When I was turned yes. I’m fifty-eight now.”
“You do not look fifty-eight,” she said firmly and then asked, “Is that something to do with the nanos?”
He nodded. “They were programmed to keep their host at their peak condition. I don’t think the developers intended that to include age, but the nanos are basically fancy, hybrid computers, and computers are pretty literal. Every immortal looks somewhere between twenty-five and thirty.”
Nicole considered that and then said, “So Marguerite . . . ?”
“I’m not sure of her exact age, but I know it’s over seven hundred.”
“Oh cripes.” Nicole sagged on her stool.
Jake eyed her worriedly, but waited, and then she suddenly straightened and peered at him accusingly.
“You said she wasn’t even in her forties.”
“I said she wasn’t in her thirties,” he corrected. “And she isn’t. I haven’t lied to you about anything, Nicole. I knew almost from the start that we were life mates and didn’t want to lie.” Jake grimaced and added, “I have kind of a thing about lying anyway . . . ever since finding out I was lied to for so long while growing up . . .” He shrugged.