you."
"Why have you told me all this?"
Rayven took a deep breath. "I needed to tell someone. After four hundred years, I wanted someone to understand." Slowly, he shook his head. "I know now that is impossible."
"You've been alive for over four hundred years?"
He shook his head, a rueful grin on his lips. "I was alive for twenty-seven years. I have been Vampyre for four hundred and three."
"But that would mean you were born in..."
"Fourteen hundred and twelve, my sweet."
"It's not possible."
He said nothing, simply watched her through fathomless black eyes.
"And you drink human blood to survive?"
"Rarely, and only a little at a time."
"How can you?" she asked, repelled.
How to explain it to her, to make her understand that it wasn't awful? He shook his head and then sighed, knowing she deserved an answer, abhorrent as it might be.
"I don't know how to describe it to you, Rhianna. There's nothing in your experience I can compare it to.
When I drink, it's like becoming a part of that person. I can feel the beat of their heart; I know their thoughts, their fears. You cannot imagine what it's like - the power, the hunger. Before I learned to control it, when I thought I had to take a life to survive..."He shook his head again. "I can't explain it."
"If you no longer drink human blood, what do you drink? What is it that Bevins brings you in the evening?"
"It's wine mixed with blood. From sheep, usually, although any kind of blood will do." But he needed human blood, as well, though he didn't tell her that. It was why he had bought Rhianna in the first place.
There was a freshness, a strength, in the pure, sweet blood of a virgin that could be found nowhere else.
"You drink the blood of sheep?"
"I keep a small flock on the north side of the castle beyond the gate."
"Oh?" She was staring at him, her expression dazed.
"I've sickened you, haven't I?"
"A little," she admitted. But, mostly, she felt sorry for him. Four hundred years of living alone, never able to trust another living soul. Four hundred years since he had seen the sun, felt its warmth on his face. Four hundred years since he had tasted food, drunk a glass of cool, clear water. Four hundred years without a friend to confide in, a woman to love.
She envisioned him bending over her, his teeth piercing her flesh, drinking her blood. Tried to imagine herself living as he lived, forever cursed to dwell in darkness, to forego the simple pleasures of life.
Wanting to comfort him somehow, she gazed deep into his eyes and there, in the inky black depths, she caught an image of Rayven as he had been four hundred years ago. The pain and fear and rage he had experienced when he first became Vampyre, the centuries of loneliness that had followed, and overall the never-ending scent of blood and death. He was a vampyre. Child of Darkness. Undead...
Darkness engulfed her, deeper than hell, darker than black. With a strangled sob, she felt herself slipping into a swirling vortex that had no beginning and no end.
Chapter Fourteen
Rayven caught her before she toppled from the bench. Lifting her easily in his arms, he looked down at her, his gaze instinctively drawn to the pulse beating in her throat. Perhaps he should not have told her. If he wished, he could wipe it all from her mind, make her forget everything he had said.
And yet, it had felt good, cleansing somehow, to tell her the truth. He had wanted her to know, had wanted no lies between them in the time they had left. And when their year together was up, he would leave this place, and it wouldn't matter if she told anyone or not. No one would believe her. In spite of all the stories and rumors that circulated among the villagers, none of them truly believed him to be a monster.
Rhianna had never believed it, either, but she knew the truth now.
Tomorrow he would find out if she was strong enough to accept it, to live with it. And with him.
And if she wasn't...
He shook the thought away as if it were no more than a troublesome insect. There would be time enough to worry about that tomorrow. Tonight, he would hold her while she slept and pretend, for a little while, that she knew what he was, and loved him in spite of it.
Effortlessly, he carried her back to the castle, up the