Or if you’re trying to get pregnant. Then he’s all about lending a girl a hand, but he can be a raging asshole to others. His wife usually tempers him, but I didn’t sleep with the dude. “She’s known him for five minutes. Could you give them a chance? You know the prophecy.”
“I know Jacob told Marcus what he needed to hear. He was trying to get Marcus to do an important job.” Dev loomed over me. “That doesn’t mean I should sacrifice one of my daughters to him. You know he hasn’t always been the paragon of virtue he portrays himself to be now.”
I wasn’t going into that. We had an audience. I had one guy I might be able to go to when it came to Quinn. “What does Bris say? Bris can sense compatibility. He’s had enough time around them to have formed an opinion.”
Quinn’s jaw went stubborn.
“I’d like to talk to Bris,” I said, enunciating each word.
His eyes changed and so did his stance. His shoulders relaxed and his lips curled up. His accent became a lyrical Irish. “Please forgive my host. He’s unsettled. He will pretend to be confident, but he’s worried about getting back to our home.” The fertility god turned to Summer. “And he’s worried about you, sweet daughter. Guilt can be a hard thing to bear, and Devinshea feels it sharply in your case. He’s quite desperate to ensure your safety and to get you back to the Earth plane. He fears if you form a connection with Marcus Vorenus, he’ll lose his chance to be important in your life.”
“She’s not getting close to a vampire,” Dean said.
Bris turned those eternally green eyes on the boy. There was more than a bit of sympathy there. “That will not be up to you, but you should know that what you feel now will seem like nothing when you finally meet the woman you are destined for. I cannot see in the way of a prophet, but I feel your destiny, child. Remember that great sacrifice is often repaid with great love. Open yourself to it. No matter how it comes to you.”
“What did he mean about withdrawl? I remember my father being worried about it the night I was born.” Summer had her hands on her hips, but her eyes trailed off to where Marcus had disappeared.
I hadn’t even thought about that. The problems were piling up and I still had a headache. If I couldn’t get him to drink from me or Quinn, I wasn’t sure what the hell I was supposed to do. I was going to have to find a way to make this a less intimate experience. “Companion blood is addictive to earthbound vampires. If he does feed from you, he’ll go through some pretty painful withdrawal if you don’t feed him next time.”
“Daniel said it was terrible, and he only fed from Zoey once that first time,” Bris explained with a long sigh, as if he was finally realizing the trouble we would have. “It took him months before he felt normal again, and I don’t think he ever stopped craving it.”
“Marcus has been through it before.” I knew all about Marcus’s past. He was open with me when it came to the women who had come before me. Given how long he’d lived, it was a surprisingly short list. Marcus liked to flirt, but he wasn’t what I would call a player. “He wasn’t one of those vampires who constantly kept a companion. He fell in love with them and when they died, he mourned them.”
“He would be ill, Kelsey,” Bris said. “You would be exchanging a day or two of good health for a very sick vampire. He wouldn’t even be able to take regular blood for a few days. In this my host is right. We need to get him to take our blood.”
“Plenty of vampires live off animal blood.” Dean wasn’t moving.
“Not earthbound vampires,” Bris explained. “I am a creature of the Earth plane, but I know a bit about how the planes were populated. Vampires all come from the Earth plane, as do all creatures. The Earth plane is the cradle of all life. As humans became the dominant species, many supernatural tribes sought their own home worlds and learned how to pierce the veil, and they left the plane to establish their own. As all living things do, they adapted. Marcus is not like the vampires you know. He requires human or