Page 53 of Taste of Death

“Any reason for that?”

He shrugged with a small shake of his head. “I don’t know. Maybe I feel like she turned her back on me. Rathka did after all, why not her? In any case, there’s just nothing I have to say. Mainly I just keep the altar objects because they were my mother’s. They’re her only possessions I have.”

I pulled my legs off the ottoman, sliding my shoes off to curl my feet underneath me on the couch. The position had me leaning closer to Novak.

“Do you remember much of her?”

He sighed, slouching into the couch cushion. “Not what she looked like. Mostly her voice. She sang lullabies to me in Vampiric. And her voice was very soft as she spoke, not just to me but everyone. I get the sense that she was a very gentle person, and that made her an outcast in a very bloodthirsty, aggressive clan.”

“That’s too bad. I wonder if she was lonely.”

“I think she was.” Novak nodded. “My father kept a few blood pets. He had his favorite, my half-brother’s mother. And my mother just happened to get pregnant, so she became secondary in the ranking, you could say.”

I let my disgust show on my face. “That sounds like a very cold way to think of the mothers of your children.”

“It was. There was no relationship between them. Just sex and blood and heirs to continue our lineage.” He scoffed. “A whole lot of good that did.”

“Well your dad sounds like an ass, but your mother sounds lovely.” I rested my elbow on the back of the couch, facing Novak. “It’s a shame you didn’t have her longer.”

“Yeah.” He took a long sip of wine. “She was one of the first to succumb to Rathka’s Curse, actually. Some of my earliest memories are of her acting strange. Staring at nothing for hours. A craving for meat, and really intense mood swings. Those behaviors were so far off from her normal personality, they had to be early symptoms.”

“And the Curse never touched you?” I asked. “It wasn’t like you caught the illness and got better, you just never had it?”

“No.” Novak let out a dry laugh. “That’s the one thing that’s baffled me my entire life. The Curse spread like wildfire; it seemed so contagious. I came into contact with so many of those afflicted, and yet it never affected me.”

I paused to sip more wine and think. “I’m jealous of you.”

“Jealous?” His incredulous expression made me laugh. “Of what?”

“One,” I held up an index finger, “you had a mom, for however brief it was. Two, you must have been born with an iron-wall immune system, while I, as a preemie, had to live in an incubator for the first month of my life because my immune system was shit. And even after that, I had defects.”

“There is absolutely nothing defective about you.” The way he said it left no room for doubt, and his words warmed me all over.

“I guess that’s subjective now. But as a human, I definitely did.”

“All right, fine. Are you done humbling me?”

“Never, pretty boy.” I pressed my foot against his leg and curled my toes to grip his pant leg.

Novak made an exaggerated show of looking down his nose at my foot. “Remove your toes at once, peasant.”

“Peasant!” I cackled, waving my foot in his face. “How dare you!”

He set aside his wine and grabbed my foot, using his opposite hand to deliver a relentless tickle attack to my sole.

I screamed with laughter, kicking and flailing. “No, stop!”

Novak pulled my leg across his lap to more effectively trap my poor foot. His arm wrapped around my whole leg, bicep squeezing my thigh to hold me in place while he continued to ravage light, tickling touches across the bottom of my foot.

“I can’t breathe!” Tears squeezed out of my eyes from the force of my laughter. “Stop, I’m gonna die.”

At that, he released me, still wearing that haughty expression. “That’ll teach you.”

“Teach me what?” I struggled to catch my breath, still laughing too hard.

Finally he broke, his face stretching out into a laughing grin. “I don’t even remember what I was punishing you for.”

“Bravo.” I clapped mockingly. “You play a rich asshole very well.”

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