Page 76 of Cherished By the Sinners
They squeezed her hands in return.
“We will never allow harm to come to you again,” Magnus said, his voice no longer edged with fear, but determination.
She smiled and tilted her head back and forth.“Not sure you can get rid of the scary shit in my head, but you’re welcome to try.”
They didn’t say anything, but both men began rubbing their thumbs in a stroking motion on the back of her hands.
Their touch did something to the heavy rope wrapped around her lungs, picking apart the knots and loosening it.
She cleared her throat.“Eli’s uncle was a weird kind of crazy.He talked like he’d been Napoleon at one time, and was trying to make a comeback.He didn’t sound entirely rational.He seemed to jump from one topic to another with nothing connecting them.He raved about gaining power and bringing your family down.He seemed to think the Brezniks killed a bunch of his family members, and that he would kill me slowly in front of you by...drinking my blood.”
“He grabbed me by the throat and sniffed my neck, but didn’t bite me.Instead he brought in another prostitute I knew and killed her in front of me.”
“How?”Magnus asked.
“By biting her with his sharpened canines and drinking her blood.I think he...ate some of her too.It was hard to tell; he was just laughing insanely while he did it.”
She ran out of air in her lungs and had to stop speaking to take in a breath.When had she gotten so out of breath?
Both men opened their mouths to speak, but she shook her head.“Wait.Let me finish.”She swallowed.“He said, you were just like him—monsters who had to drink blood and eat people to survive.He said a normal person like me wasn’t worth anything to people like him.”She looked between them.“I know you have those pointy teeth.Were you born with them?”
“No,” Mason said.“We filed them down when we were younger.It was something all of us did.”
“But why?”
Magnus swallowed hard.“To do what Sebastien did.”His face drained of all color, as if he were dying in front of her.“Tear out the throat and drink the blood of a person.”
“You do that?Drink blood?”
They both nodded.
Nausea rose, crawling up her throat.They were monsters too.They were monsters too.Her breathing ran away from her, making her stretch to breathe properly at all.
“Why?”
“First, you need to know that we would never hurt you.We will never allow anyone to hurt you,” Magnus said.
She tried to tug her hand out of his grasp, but he wouldn’t let her go.
“We could never hurt you,” Mason said.“We love you, Darlene.”
No, no, no.She didn’t want to hear that.What point was love if they were so different from her?If she was nothing more than a pet.
But they wouldn’t let her go.Were, in fact,refusingto let her go.
“H...how are you different?I need to understand.”
“We’re as human as you,” Magnus said.“We were born and lived exactly the same as everyone else.”
“Until we got sick.Almost everyone in our family got sick.The disease killed most of us, but not all.Anna, Bazyli, Yvgeny, Mason and I got better.A lot better.We got stronger.When we were injured, it healed in seconds.Our senses were heightened.And, though we didn’t know until some years passed, we didn’t get any older than the day we began recovering from the disease.”
“How old are you?”
“Over eight hundred years,” Mason said.
“Wow.”She blinked a couple of times.
“There are some drawbacks,” Magnus said.“The changes to our immune systems affected us in some weird ways.We can’t take in nourishment like normal people.Drinking blood is the only way we’ve found that works.We can’t sleep either.We’ve learned to meditate, but it’s not as satisfying.”
