She rubbed the raw patch at her sternum. “I'd really like to go, if you don't mind.”
There was a long pause.
“Ah, hell…” he muttered, letting out his breath. “This isn't right.”
“No, it isn't.”
“I thought that you deserved… I don't know. A date. Or something. Something normal.” He laughed harshly as she looked at him with surprise. “Dumb idea, I know. I should stick to what I'm good at. I'd be better off teaching you how to kill.”
Underneath his thick pride, she sensed a kernel of something else. Insecurity? No, that wasn't it. Naturally with him, it would be more intense.
Self-hatred.
Fritz came in, picked up their salad plates, and reappeared with soup. It was cold vichyssoise. Interesting, she thought absently. Usually it was soup first, then salad, wasn't it? But then, she had to imagine vampires had lots of different social traditions. Like the men having more than one woman.
Her stomach lurched. She wasn't going to think of that. She simply refused to.
“Look, just so you know,” Wrath said as he picked up his spoon, “I fight to protect, not because I've got a jones for murder. But I've killed thousands. Thousands, Beth. Do you understand? So if you want me to pretend I'm not comfortable with death, I can't do that for you. I just can't.”
“Thousands?” she mumbled, overwhelmed.
He nodded.
“Who in God's name are you fighting?”
“Bastards who would kill you as soon as you go through the transition.”
“Vampire hunters?”
“Lessers. Humans who have traded their souls to the Omega in return for a free reign of terror.”
“Who—or what—is the Omega?” As she spoke the word, the candles flickered wildly, as if tormented by invisible hands.
Wrath hesitated. He actually seemed uncomfortable with the subject. He, who wasn't afraid of anything.
“You mean the devil?” she prompted.
“Worse. You can't compare them. One's just a metaphor. The other's very, very real. Fortunately, the Omega has a counterpart, the Scribe Virgin.” He smiled wryly. “Well, maybe fortunately is too strong a word. But there is a balance.”
“God and Lucifer.”
“Maybe according to your lexicon. Our legend has it that vampires were created by the Scribe Virgin as her one and only legacy, as her chosen children. The Omega resented her ability to generate life, and he despised the special powers she gave to the species. The Lessening Society was his defensive response. He uses humans because he is incapable of creation and because they are a readily available source of aggression.”
This is just too strange , she thought. Trading souls. The undead. The stuff just didn't exist in the real world.
Then again, she was having dinner with a vampire. So was anything really all that impossible?
She thought of the gorgeous blond man who'd stitched himself up.
“You have others who fight with you, right?”
“My brothers.” He took a drink from his wineglass. “As soon as the vampires recognized they were under siege, the strongest and most powerful males were weeded out. Trained to fight. Turned loose against the lessers. Those warriors were then bred to the strongest females over generations until a separate subspecies of vampires emerged. The most powerful of this class were indoctrinated into the Black Dagger Brotherhood.”
“Are you brothers by blood?”
He smiled tightly. “In a matter of speaking.”
His face shuttered, as if the matter were private. She had the sense that he would say no more about the brotherhood, but she was still curious about the war he was fighting.
Especially because she was about to turn into one of those he protected.
“So it's humans you kill.”
“Yes, although they're basically dead already. In order to give his fighters the longevity and strength they would need to fight us, the Omega had to strip them of their souls.” Distaste flickered across his harsh features. “Not that having a soul ever prevented a human from coming after us.”
“You don't like… us, do you?”
“First of all, half of what's in your veins is from your father's side. And secondly, why would I like humans? They beat the crap out of me before my transition, and the only reason they don't fuck with me now is because I scare the hell out of them. And if it got widely known that vampires existed? They'd come after us even if they weren't in the society. Humans are threatened by anything different, and their response is to fight. They're bullies, picking on the weak, cowering from the strong.” Wrath shook his head. “Besides, they irritate me. Look at how their folklore portrays our species. There's Dracula, for