Blood and Kisses - By Karin Shah Page 0,18

floated on the air. Neither looked up, apparently too absorbed in each other to detect his presence.

He smiled. His enemy had become weak.

The car peeled out of the driveway in a spray of gravel. As their headlights faded like dying embers in the distance, he burned at the delay. His human slaves were late.

He sighed. He wished it weren’t necessary to use them at all. It was rather like playing with one’s food, but without an invitation, he couldn’t breach the Champion’s walls. His human puppets had no such prohibition.

Dark shapes glided out of the depths of the night. His playthings had arrived.

The rhythmic thump of the tires on the road along with the rumble of the engine filled the silence as Gideon subdued his rage.

As unbelievable as it seemed, she was safer with him.

But he had to keep his distance. She’d taken him into emotional territory he hadn’t charted since he’d been human. Dangerous territory. Territory that could get people killed. Perhaps when this was all over, he should move on. Find a less populated corner of the globe.

He searched for the hard-won calm he had fostered over the millennia. He’d kept the beast chained for thousands of years; surely he could handle one small woman.

“Tell me about vampires.”

Gideon spared a glance at Thalia before returning his eyes to the road. “What do you want to know?”

“Well, I thought vampires fell into a kind of coma during the day.”

Gideon paused. Thalia had already betrayed his trust once. Still, as much as he resented her distrust, he understood her reasons, and in this case, ignorance could be deadly. “The eyasses do.”

“Eyasses?”

“Nascent vampires, fledglings you might say. At my age, I fall into an almost irresistible sleep at dawn, but it soon lightens to a normal sleep. I can be active during the day as long as I stay out of the direct rays of the sun.”

“How old are you?”

Gideon had to think for a minute. “Twelve thousand two hundred and twenty-three.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Thalia’s jaw drop. “More or less,” he added. “The calendar has changed several times since I was born. It’s hard to keep track.”

“What do you consider young in a vampire?”

“Five hundred years or less.”

Thalia’s eyebrows twitched over her expressive eyes. Gideon could see her considering her next words. “How can you tell a vampire’s age?”

“It depends on the vampire. The older they are, the more talents they’ve learned, illusion, transformation, telekinesis, and so on. That’s why the older vampires are expected to enforce the Code.”

“The Code?”

“We call the loose set of rules governing vampires the Code. They include unspoken laws, like not hunting in another vampire’s territory. And written laws, such as not taking a life while feeding. But taking a life while feeding has consequences that have nothing to do with the Code. If a vampire takes a life while feeding, he drains more than blood. He receives the life energy of his victim. We call it the Claiming. It gives him a burst of incredible power, but that power has its own price. After a time, the effects wear off, and he begins to age. He has to continue taking lives to sustain himself. The interval between each feeding grows gradually shorter, until he can’t face a sunset without killing.”

A pair of innocent brown eyes flashed into his mind. They belonged to Everett Fale, an eyas Gideon had turned during the American Civil War. In life, Everett had been too young to shave. From Company A of the One Hundred and Fortieth Infantry, he’d been wounded at Gettysburg and deserted when surgeons had threatened to amputate his leg. A native of Brockport, all he could think of was getting home, and he had gotten close, but the infection had spread rapidly, and by the time he’d reached Gideon’s home, he could go no farther.

Gideon remembered finding him hiding, close to death, in one of his outbuildings.

How he’d pleaded to live.

Everett had grasped Gideon’s shirt and begged him to save him, his eyes burning peat in his pale, freckled face. Although Gideon had turned only a handful of vampires in the lengthy span of his life, he had been unable to ignore the boy’s desperate pleas. As the last gasps of air slipped past Everett’s bloodless lips, Gideon had brought him over.

Everett had been pathetically grateful. He’d followed Gideon like a duckling, and Gideon grew fond of the boy. Had begun to think of him almost as a