Page 10 of Unholy Gambit: Checkmate in Blood
He paused to listen in on her thoughts when her pulse rate spiked, a proportional blend of relief and shock he’d seen before in others, but never cared about. She believed him, when he told her what he is. Not an ounce of doubt.
Most people reacted like startled livestock: panic first, then thoughts of escape. But not his Aurélie, she sat still, ignoring her biological response while she turned it over in that sharp mind of hers, measuring risk, cataloging it, realizing truths in rapid-fire order.
He wanted to touch her, anchor her, but the moment felt too precarious. One wrong move and he could tip her from measured logic into fight-or-flight. Better to keep his hands to himself and keep moving forward.
“I’ll need a few drops of your blood, which can go into the water bottle. Before we drink, you’ll say you promise to keep my secrets, and then think of what you’re agreeing to hold secret while you drink the wine.”
* * * *
Aury took a moment to consider his explanation and her options.
It was about moving forward. Risk versus reward.
If he was lying, a few drops of his blood might change her into whatever he was, but vampire lore said you needed a lot of the creature’s blood.
But she didn’t see Axel as acreature. Was that his doing? Had he messed with her mind?
Obviously, he had when she was a child, but the irony was that what had broken through made him a good guy. He’d tried to hide from her the fact he’d saved her life.
Back to lore, she wasn’t aware of any about drinking a few drops of a demon’s blood. Or an angel’s. Or any of the pantheon deities.
But she hadn’t thought any of those things about him when she was five. Nothing religious. The bad monster and the good one.
The terror of her nightmares came back to her. Her heart thudded low in her chest, her body reacting to the pull of whatever this moment was becoming. Her palms went damp, her throat tight, breath coming faster no matter how she tried to control it.
If she saidno, he’d stop talking. She’d lose the chance of finding out the actual truth of what she’d seen in her dreams. She’d always known the memories were bullshit, despite what the psychiatrists had said.
Sheneededto know whatever he could tell her. Not wanted, not hoped for. Needed. A necessity rooted so deep it felt like part of her bones, seeded the night she was five years old, and had only grown sharper, hungrier, exponentially more relentless with every year since.
She didn’t trust her voice, so she looked straight ahead, out the windshield, and nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “I need to tell you a few secrets beforehand, so you’ll know what you’re oathing, what you’re promising. There are different kinds of vampires. The one who attacked your mother was evil. Anyone turned by them, even a good person, will become evil.
“I’m a different kind of vampire. We can choose whether to be good or bad. I won’t tell you I’m good, because I haven’t always been, but I’m doing my best to not be evil at this stage of my long, long life.”
“How old are you?”
* * * *
Axel had been hoping to guide her to easy questions, and that one had worked. He understood how her complicated mind strategized though, so he didn’t expect the plan to sustain.
“Seven hundred years old. A baby compared to the most powerful of us, but I have enough strength to hold my own.”
He shook his head when she’d have asked another question, and told her. “I didn’t know my heritage when I was human. I knew I wasn’t like the others, that I didn’t possess the emotions they did, or what we thought of at the time as sympathy, though now I understand to be better described as empathy.”
He paused. This wasn’t something he was used to sharing, but she needed to know everything up front. Her martial mind would accept nothing less.
“Even now, I don’t experience either as an emotion, only as a thought process. Concepts. My maker turned mebecauseof my ruthlessness, and vampirism only made me a better monster, in those first centuries.”
Her brow furrowed. “What kind of heritage would make you ruthless?”
“As a human, I was…” He exhaled, struggling to explain what he’d never spoken aloud. “I’m now aware my grandfather on my mother’s side was a full-demon, and my great-great-grandfather on my father’s side was one, too.”
He double-checked their surroundings. No brains in the parking lot or the woods. None in the restaurant with the power to pick up on what he was saying. When he was certain Aury had processed the math, if not the implications, he continued.
“This explains why my maker’s master had to control me, as my maker wasn’t able to, which is unheard of. They nearly destroyed me in those early months. No one understood the reasons for my unusual reaction to vampirism, at the time.”
He gave her a few seconds to absorb that, listening in on her thoughts. She catalogued the information with clinical precision — unemotional, without judgment.
