“How can I believe you?” She shook her head, as if to dispel the memory of what had happened the night before. “I saw what you did. I saw your eyes . . . they were”—she wrapped her arms around her waist—“they were red, and you looked like . . .”

“Go on,” he said, his face and voice devoid of emotion. “How did I look?”

“Like death,” she whispered. “You looked like death.”

“I never wanted you to see me like that.”

“Please, I just want to go home.”

“You are my wife. This is your home now.”

“No! We never consummated our marriage. Please, just let me go back home. I won’t tell anyone what you are, I promise.” Who would believe her?

“Is that what you really want?” Drake asked, his anger surfacing. “To go back and marry that fat old man? To have his hands on you?”

She forced the word through clenched teeth. “Yes.” The lie tasted bitter on her tongue.

“Now who is lying? You want me, Elena. You have wanted me from the first night, and we both know it.”

“No!” She shook her head again, more vigorously this time, as if that would make her denial true.

Drake took a deep breath, and changed tack. “Have I mistreated you? Hurt you in any way? Done anything to make you fear me?”

“You lied to me.” She blinked rapidly in an effort to hold back her tears. She didn’t want to go back to her uncle, but how could she stay here? With a vampire?

“I never lied to you.”

“You let me believe you were human,” she retorted. “I’d call that a lie, wouldn’t you?”

“A sin of omission, perhaps,” he allowed grudgingly. “But I had no choice. Telling mortals what we are is forbidden. I could not have told you the truth even had I wished it.”

She stared at him in astonishment. “There are more of you?”

He nodded.

“How many more?” The idea that there could be other vampires living here . . . She felt a burst of hysterical laughter bubble up in her throat. Where else would vampires live but Transylvania? The laughter died in her throat. There were more of them. How was that possible? How on earth was any of this possible?

“I am the only one here,” Drake said, “but there are others. Perhaps half a million of us worldwide.”

It wasn’t a vast number, given the world’s population of over six billion people. Still . . .

“If that’s true, why doesn’t anyone know? If there are vampires running around drinking blood . . .” She paced back and forth a moment, trying to clear her head. “Sooner or later, someone would find out. Wouldn’t they?” When he hesitated, she said, “The truth, Drake. I want the truth.”

“The knowledge of our existence is erased from the mind of anyone who discovers it.”

“Erased?”

“Wiped away. Obliterated.”

“How? How can you do that?” The bitter taste of bile rose in the back of her throat as her imagination conjured visions of Drake cutting away a part of her brain.

When she swayed on her feet, Drake took her by the hand. “You need to sit down,” he said. Guiding her to one of the sofas, he eased her down on the cushions, then went to the carafe on the table and filled a glass with water. “Here, drink this.”

She accepted the glass with a hand that shook visibly.

Drake watched her, his arms folded over his chest, wondering if she was going to faint.

She drained the glass, then looked up at him. “How?” she asked again.

“Nothing as bizarre as what you are thinking,” he assured her. “It is done by a form of hypnosis. Quite painless.”

“Are you going to do that to me?”

“No.” It was true, for the moment.

“What are you going to do to me?”

He lifted one brow. “Do?”

She touched the side of her neck, her gaze on his face.

“Ah, that.” He sat beside her, an oath escaping his lips when she flinched.

“Are you going to . . . to . . . drink from me?”

“I already have.”

She blinked at him. “I don’t believe you. I would have known . . . wouldn’t I?”

“I took only a taste now and then, while you slept.”

Her eyes widened. “Am I going to become a vampire?”

“No.”

She sank back against the sofa cushions, relief evident in every line of her body. “How did you become a vampire?”

“I did not ‘become’ a vampire.” He looked at Elena. She was shivering. He glanced at the hearth. A thought touched the banked coals, bringing the fire to vibrant life. “Vampire.” The word rolled easily off his tongue. “It is what I am. What I have always been.”

Chapter 11

Elena stared at Drake, some of her fear receding as she considered what he had said. “But . . . I thought . . .” She had never heard of anyone being born a vampire. In books and movies, the only way to become one of the Undead was with a blood exchange. She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“We are not the monsters of myth and legend, but they do exist, although they are now few in number.”

“Have you ever met one?”

“Yes, years ago.”

“Do they live the way your people do?”

“No. We are enemies.”

“Why?”

“The Others are a more violent, more barbarous race. They tend to kill their prey and often each other. They have no clan loyalty, no sense of family or honor, no care for anyone but themselves. Centuries ago, the Others declared war on humanity. They killed men, women, and children without reason or mercy, threatening to expose us all. My father summoned the Master Vampires of the other Covens and they destroyed all of the Others they could find. It was a long and bloody battle, but it accomplished its purpose. The Others who survived changed their ways. They did not stop killing but they became more discreet.”

“More discreet?”

“They stopped leaving bodies in the street. They started preying on those who would not be missed—transients and the like. But the war continued. Each Coven vowed to continue to fight them, and to destroy any that they find.”

“Oh.” She blew out a sigh. “I’m glad I never met one of those. But tell me more about you, about your people.”

“We are a very old race, once hunted to near extinction by zealots and warrior-priests because we need blood to survive. We were accused of witchcraft, or of consorting with Satan, because, once we reach adulthood, the aging process slows as the need for blood becomes stronger.” Though he spoke to her, his gaze was on the flames. “Some give in to the burning need for blood immediately. Some fight it, but the pain of resisting is excruciating. Sooner or later, we all surrender to what is, for us, a basic need for survival. Once we have ingested human blood, three things occur—we are no longer capable of digesting mortal food, we can no longer abide the sun’s light, and we stop aging. The first year after we give in to the urge to drink, we must drink often. To resist can be fatal.”

It was a fantastic story, Elena thought, something one might read in an ancient book of fairy tales. She looked at him closely as a new thought popped into her head. “How old were you when you stopped aging?”

“Nearly thirty.”

She frowned, wondering how long he had fought the compulsion to drink blood.

“Vampires are considered mature at twenty.”

She marveled at his self-control. He had resisted the urge to feed for almost ten years. It was a long time to endure the kind of pain he had described, to fight against something that was a basic need. “How old are you?”

“Five centuries as of last month.”

The number was staggering. What would it be like to live that long? To never age? Never see the sun? Never consume anything but blood—no, that wasn’t true. He drank wine. How was that possible? Curious, she put the question to him.

“I can drink small amounts with no ill effects,” he replied, “as long as I feed beforehand.”

“What’s it like, to live such a long time?”

“It can be challenging. After a few hundred years, you have done everything, seen everything there is to see. For those who dislike change, the world can be a frightening place. Like mortals, our kind respond to the vicissitudes of life in a variety of ways. Some embrace them, some reject them, some choose to seek their own destruction. There are those who simply grow weary of living. They go to the Fortress and bury themselves in the ground.”

Buried alive? She choked back her nausea. She had always been afraid of small, dark places, couldn’t imagine anyone willingly entombing themselves in the ground.

Seeing the revulsion on her face, he said, “For us, it is a way to rest, to rejuvenate ourselves when we have lost the will to live.”

“Have you ever done that?”

“No.” His gaze caressed her face. “I must admit, I was considering it, until I met you.”

“So, the vampires of fiction are just that, fiction?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what, exactly?”

“The vampires of legend, Nosferatu, also exist, but in very small numbers. I have never met one.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Some believe a fallen angel found one of our kind thousands of years ago. The vampire was dying of injuries inflicted by another of our kind when the angel found him. With his last breath, the vampire bit the angel. The angel died. The vampire was reborn as Nosferatu.”

It was too much, Elena thought. Vampires who were made. Vampires who were born that way. It was all too bizarre to consider, too impossible to be real. She pressed her hands to her temples. She could feel a headache coming on, no doubt caused by the fact that Drake’s revelations had turned her world inside out and upside down.