Page 19 of Unholy Gambit: Checkmate in Blood
“Right.” She exhaled. “This’ll take some getting used to. I’ll talk to him about it at my appointment.” She furrowed her brow. “But I won’t be able to, right? How does that work, with the oath?”
“I’ll contact the Master Vampire and tell him to let your therapist know you’ve been oathed. He’ll likely come at it cautiously, not telling you anything until he verifies it with you. The penalties for telling someone your secret and then letting them walk away without being oathed can be death or worse.”
Her brows drew together. “What’s worse than death?”
“Being made a sex slave for the rest of your life.” He let that sink in, and added, “If you try to tell Ruby, I’ll know. When you think of breaking the oath, considering a way around the promise, it rings a bell in my subconscious to tell me. I know you’re considering devising plans while I’m down for the day and then discarding them before I rise, so you can pick them up again the following morning. Please don’t. These aren’t my rules, and if you break them, I won’t be able to save you. Even powerful vampires are terrified of the people who enforce the rules aroundThe Secret.”
“Okay. For now, that can work, but long term, we’ll need to figure something out. Ruby knows everything about me, and how am I going to explain why you can never join us during the day? Or not eating with us?”
“That’s a conversation for another day. We have ways to work around all that.”
She shook her head. “You don’t get to parse information out. Tell me now.”
He sat back and considered the best way to show her. She wasn’t going to like it, no matter what.
He pulled his phone out, opened the camera, aimed it at her, and hit record.
“So there are no doubts as to what I’ve done, and so you’ll know I’m not trying to hide what I can do from you, I shall video this so you can watch it when we finish. Tell me your concerns again, around Ruby not knowing what I am.”
She looked at him a few seconds, working through what he was doing, and finally did as he asked when she realized she had no idea where he was going with this.
“How will I explain you never being around during the day, or never eating around us?”
He put a strong suggestion into her head that she was no longer worried about these things, but she crossed her arms and glared at him. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but get out of my head.”
“Are you still worried about Ruby’s response to me regarding food and daylight hours?”
“Yes, I just told you I was!”
He stopped the recording, deleted the file, and put his phone back in his pocket.
“Turns out, you aren’t susceptible to our suggestions. If it’d worked, I’d have put the suggestion into your head that it’s not a concern, asked you if you had concerns about Ruby noticing I never eat, and you’d have looked at me like I was crazy.”
She stared at him, and he added, “Whatever allowed you to see what I did to stop your pain at five years old also protects you from vampiric suggestions.”
“So, you’re saying you cansuggestthat Ruby won’t notice you’re never around during the day, or that you never eat with us, and she won’t?”
“Yes. I did that as an exercise to show you how it can be handled, though I don’t believe it will be necessary to do so with Ruby.”
She shook her head. “I need you to promise you won’t fuck with my friends’ minds. My parents’ minds, either.”
“I will only do so enough to keep them from wondering about my non-human attributes, to keep them safe from asking questions humans shouldn’t be asking.”
“I want to say not even that, but realistically, I can see it might be necessary. Will you promise to tell me everysuggestionyou put into their heads?”
“Some are just habit, but I promise to try to keep you updated. Also, I promise to never give them a detrimental suggestion. Nothing that will affect their life in a negative way.”
He paid the bill, and she meant for him to hear her fuming at him in her head, that it wasn’t fair for him to grab the bill when he hadn’t even eaten.
“Let me take care of you,” he told her softly. “I know you have money, but as it turns out, so do I. Anyone smart enough to stay alive seven hundred years should damned well have amassed a sizable fortune.” He’d been rich as a human. As a vampire, his net worth was greater than that of some countries.
As he’d hoped, that set her mind to considering how one would deal with wealth for more than a handful of decades.
“The trick would be in how to store it over the centuries. Precious metals, obviously, but real estate, you’d need to buy and sell based on the stability of the government, right? The dollar would’ve worked when it was backed by gold, but it’s just a fiat store now, so not something to keep your funds in long-term.”
“I love your mind. Even at five, I was impressed, and now…” He opened the door and offered his arm for her to step down, and then pushed a tiny bit of levitation under her, to take maybe twenty pounds of weight off her legs while she walked.
“I asked you not to do that without warning me.”
