Count

26. I'm a Legit Snack

I could tell something was wrong as soon as Sergio exited the king's office. He looked like he was in a trance, and the strangeness grew as we traveled home. Perhaps the king had said something to unsettle him, or maybe he regretted having brought me there.

He often glanced at my neck, fingered the pulse on my wrist. Were his eyes turning scarlet?

I wasn't an idiot. I was dating a scary vampire, and I wouldn't be one of those girls in stories who made stupid choices like sticking around to see if he got better. "I'm leaving," I said when the car dropped us off in front of his place. "I'll just catch a cab." I planned to walk a few blocks away first, or sprint.

"Leaving? No, no," he said in a sing-song. He pulled me close like we were dancing. "Not when the night is young as a budding flower."

I tried to pull away, but his hands around my wrist and on the small of my back were like iron. Moving them was like trying to budge a statue. "Sergio, let me go," I said as calmly as I could, trying to pierce whatever haze had come over him.

"How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!" he intoned. He opened the door and dragged me inside. Then he stood still for a few moments, gaze unfocused, like he forgot what he was doing.

"Sergio, how are you feeling?"

"Lust like starvation," he said, bringing my wrist to his face and inhaling deeply through his nose. His body curled around it, dark and sensual.

Being calm wasn't working. "Sergio!" I yelled. "Snap out of it."

"But how many times can one snap before the pieces are too mangled to reassemble?" He kissed my wrist—no teeth, just lips—and I imagined I could see what he did: the blood pulsing through my veins, pumping faster out of fright like it longed to be free.

I started struggling. The door, I had to get to the door. But would I be safe then? The sun was down, he could follow, and he was so much stronger and faster than I. Looking around for a chair leg, anything I could use as a makeshift stake, I began to laugh hysterically as I realized how little of his furniture was actually made of wood.

Splendid. I'd thought to myself that I wasn't going to be stupid, and then I had returned with him to his lair. "Are you going to eat me?" I asked.

Sergio's eyes shot up to mine, red as rubies. "I seem to remember resolving never to bite you, but I cannot think why now. Not when I've gone to all the trouble of acquiring such a gorgeous woman. What are the kids calling it these days? A snack."

It wasn't funny, it wasn't funny at all, but I couldn't stop laughing. Not even when he tossed me over his shoulder and carried me up to his room. This was how I would die, and I'd done it to myself, all because I couldn't resist a piece of hot dick. Would Katie and my parents ever learn that I was dead, or would I simply go missing? Missing and never to be found?

Sergio dumped me on the ground, watching me scramble backward with those unnatural eyes. "And I would that my tongue could utter," he said, "the thoughts that arise in me."

"Sergio," I warned, holding my hands up.

"Inari, Bellissima, you would make a lovely corpse." And then he was on me, pinning me to the floor with his inhuman strength.

I writhed and twisted, trying to escape this monster that had been Sergio.

"Can't you see it?" he asked. He transferred both my wrists to one hand, leaving the other free to tilt my head to the side. "Your blood spilling like garnets on the ground?"

"What did the king do to you at the party?" I asked because when he was talking, he wasn't biting me.

"The party..." he looked far away. "They asked me if I still respected the old ways, and they took a lot of blood, they—" Realization flooded him like ice water. "They took a lot of blood, so now I'm hungry." He cursed in Italian.

In an instant, he was off me, dragging chains out of a drawer and winding them around his torso and a metal pole whose purpose I had never deduced.

"You must run, Inari," he said. He shut the padlock with a click. "You must run very far from here."

Relief not to be dead made me sob. I crawled back, as far as the wall would let me. But Sergio was still starving, and he had chained himself to a pillar. "Are you going to be okay?"

"You worry for me? You've taken Death as a lover, yet you worry not for yourself?" He closed his eyes like he was trying to avoid looking at my appetizing skin. "There is blood in the refrigerator downstairs. If you could bring some..."

I crawled over the bed to stay as far as possible from him while I made for the door. I tore down the staircase, into the kitchen, and rooted around. There were medical bags of blood, and I grabbed two, unsure how much he needed.

The smart thing to do would be to get the fuck out of this house immediately, but I didn't know what would happen if he didn't feed. I couldn't bear the thought of him dying, chained up because he was trying to protect me from himself.

Back up the stairs, into his room.

He was on one knee, straining against the chains, a wild look in his crimson eyes. He grinned. "Come a little closer," he said.

"Heck, no." I tossed the bags at his feet.

"You want me to drink this cold, dead blood when you are standing there, so warm and pulsing and alive? Just a taste," purred the beautiful predator, struggling to get to me, but the restraints held firm. "Don't you love me, Inari? Come, come closer. I swear you will enjoy it."

"Goodbye, Sergio," I said, and hightailed it out of there. I popped a chill pill on the way home. I could imagine the next psychiatry visit.

So, have you been putting yourself in any unnecessarily stressful situations?

Hmm, no, I can't think of any, sir.