Page 11 of Cassian

Danny stared at him.

“Like, sprouting fangs and drinking their friend’s blood after a wild night out?”

Danny continued to stare for a long moment. Then he snapped his gloves off, shaking his head, and poked it out of the curtain. “Chloe, we’re gonna need the isolation room!”

Without another word, he transferred them both to a real room instead of an open bay, one with sliding glass doors. He pulled a curtain over the doors so they were cut off completely from the rest of the ER. “Sorry, just…more privacy.” He turned back to Cass, who he’d placed on the edge of another gurney. “All right, what exactly were you given last night?”

“Blood, I think?”

Danny bit at his lip. “After someone bit you?”

Cass nodded.

“Show me,” Danny ordered.

Before Blake could ask what exactly Cass was supposed to be showing, Cass did the whole face thing again: black eyes, little fangs peeking between pink lips. It was even more disconcerting under the bright hospital fluorescents than it had been in their hotel room. Not scary, just…different.

“Okay. Well.” Danny took a minute, studying them with a furrowed brow, and then out of nowhere, he was smiling warmly at them both. “Welcome to the club, then.”

There was a long silence after that, with Danny still smiling like they’d just signed up for some exclusive membership.

It was Cass who found his words first, his face back to normal, clearing his throat timidly. “You, um…believe me?”

The hopeful hesitance in his voice just about gutted Blake. Had his denial over the whole thing been hurting Cass? He hadn’t meant to make him feel alone. It was just… Who believed vampires were real based on the words of some hotel creep? Hadn’t Blake been doing his part as a—as afriend—making sure they weren’t letting some strange guy’s lunacy become contagious?

“Of course I believe you,” Danny said calmly. “You’re not the only vampire in Hyde Park, you know. Brave of you to come to the hospital with it though.”

“Well, Blake thought—” Cass was avoiding Blake’s eyes as he spoke, and Blake suddenly missed when they’d been huddled together in the emergency room, two against the world. “He thought it might be something else.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t know about our kind before last night?”

Cass shook his head. “Nuh-uh.”

Danny’s big brown eyes filled with sympathy. “Oh God, you poor baby. Okay. Tell me everything that happened to you.”

Cass did, explaining the events leading up to their ER visit, glossing over some of the steamy bits of the morning, although not enough to keep them both from blushing. When he reached the hotel creep’s insistence on the “tether” part, Danny glanced over to Blake with a knowing look.

When Cass was fully done, Danny took a moment, seeming to collect his thoughts. “Okay. Wow. And you’re sure this vamp left town?”

“He seemed pretty eager to go.”

Danny nodded thoughtfully. “That’s one problem solved. So… Man, where to start? Some vampire basics, I guess. A lot of the myths are…myths. Sunlight doesn’t hurt you, as you clearly already know. Same with garlic and crosses and all that jazz. Some other stuff is true: you won’t age. You won’t die unless killed, and that’s pretty hard to do. You have to drink blood to survive, usually about once a week, but you might need more at first while you’re new. Newbie vampires tend to be…hungry.” He looked between Cass and Blake again. “They also tend to be unstable. More aggressive. They have a harder time ending a feed. But you did feed? On Blake?”

Cass nodded, looking mesmerized by the words coming out of Danny’s mouth. It was enough for Blake to feel an inappropriate stab of jealousy.Hewas supposed to be the one helping Cass.

Still, Blake could feel his face heating at the memory of that feed, jealousy fading. Danny glanced at him knowingly. “I bet that was fun. Vampire bites tend to be very…pleasant…for the human.”

“I didn’t have any trouble stopping.” Cass’s lips formed a small pout. “I don’t think I hurt him.”

“You wouldn’t, I don’t think,” Danny said. “Not if he’s your tether.”

Blake finally found his voice to ask, “What is that? The other vam—the other guy said it too.”

“All vampires have a mate, one that tethers you securely to your humanity. Fated, we think. Your inner vampire, that presence you feel inside you? The one hungry for blood?” Cass nodded back at him like he knew exactly what Danny was talking about. “It recognizes them.Cravesthem. Vampires who never find them tend to lose hold of their humanity. They go feral and have to be put down.”

Cass cocked his head, the same way he did when he was considering some piece of complex data during one of their study sessions. “But I’ll still lose him eventually, won’t I? If I never age, or die, and he’s human…”

Blake felt like their words were coming from very far away all of a sudden, and not only because Cass was talking about his inconvenient mortality. Because, what, now he was not just not so straight but also possibly fatedmates? With Cass?

---