absolutely wanted to get away from us, likely from temptation, and that was me. I pointed to the grass beneath him. “Devinshea has tricks up his sleeve.”
His gaze followed the trail he hadn’t intended to make and he sighed. “You should use that trail to take you back to him. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be here.”
“Because you don’t want the addiction? We’re not entirely sure that will happen. Despite the fact that I was conceived on the Earth plane, I’m not truly a consor…companion. I’ve allowed my body to become mortal, but I’ve never been human. That’s what it is, right? I read somewhere that humans with angelic ancestors are companions or consorts, as we would call them here.”
His eyes came up and found mine, practically singeing me, but I didn’t move back. “Make no mistake, Summer. You are a companion. You are the brightest companion I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen your mother. If your father is a vampire king, then she is definitely a queen. You are something more. I know that if I tasted you, I would never want to feed from another again. You would be the end of me, and I would welcome it in a heartbeat if I thought you were ready. You are not. You don’t want me.”
I hated the sorrow in his voice. “I don’t know you.”
“I don’t need to know you. I know deep inside that we were meant to be together. I knew it the moment you attacked me.”
So he was a guy who was into bad girls who glowed. “Devinshea said something about a prophecy.”
He seemed to realize I wasn’t going away. He turned toward me. “Years ago, I was approached by a prophet named Jacob who wanted me to protect a woman. She was a companion and the prophet wanted to ensure that she was never found and taken by a vampire. Back in those days, any companion would have been immediately taken to the Council headquarters in Paris and sold to the highest bidder. It would not have mattered if she had a husband or lover. She would have been viewed as property of Vampire and her previous life would have been erased.”
“Yes, I understand how that goes. Here it all depends on what plane they find you on. Fae women and men can choose to place themselves up for auction or tournament. But if you aren’t from an easily accessible plane, if you’re brought here via Planeswalker, you don’t get a choice.”
“Yes, I will be talking to your father about that as soon as I can,” Marcus vowed.
“So this woman was a companion and the prophet didn’t want to see her sold to a vampire. He promised you something? It must have been hard for you to not take her.”
“It wasn’t. I don’t keep a companion with me at all times. I have to form a connection with a woman. I want connection, not merely the strength I would get from her blood. What I truly crave is the strength I get from being close to a woman I care about. So I didn’t have a difficult time protecting the companion.”
“What did he promise you?”
“He promised me that if I protected this woman, if she was allowed to find love in the human world, one day her descendant would be the woman I would fall so in love with that I followed her out of this life.”
“Earthbound vampires are immortal.” I knew that much. The vampires I knew were long lived, but then so were the Fae. But vampires here did age, though more slowly than a human. That wasn’t the case with my father or Marcus. If they didn’t get a stake to the heart, burned up in a fire, or get their heads lopped off, they would live for as long as there was a plane to walk upon. I’d often thought about how horrible it would be when my father lost my mother to old age.
“Unless we get a condition called sympathetic transference,” Marcus explained. “It’s particularly bad with a class of vampires called academics.”
“Class?” I sat on a tree stump and found myself happy to have the vampire to myself for a moment. He wasn’t pressuring me, and I liked the sound of his voice and the lyrical quality to his accent. I liked simply being with the male.
“We classify ourselves by our powers, which from what I understand, vampires here don’t have.”