Page 69 of Love Bites
Zenon had been furious.
Up until the moment his sire unleashed his fury on him, he hadn't even known that his skin could scar.
And as soon as he was operational again, Zenon had put him on the kill squad.A chance to prove your loyalty, he'd said.
Talon hadn't had a choice.
He raised his wine glass to his lips, trying to let the past go. Twenty years between then and now, and nothing much had changed. Except that he was now rebelling again. For much the same reason he had the first time. He smiled to himself.
How did Collinalwaysmanage to get him in trouble?
Aldrich balanced his wine glass between two fingers, causing the liquid inside to swirl around. "So whatcha gonna do?" he asked. "End game, I mean. You already dragged me into this, so you might as well tell me your whole plan. I hope it doesn't end with us dying. If it does, I'm out. I've already died once, not a fan."
"Lay low for a little while I work out how to kill Zenon."
"Kill Zenon?" Aldrich nearly dropped the glass. "Are you serious?"
"Can you see another way to freedom?"
"But you can't just..." Aldrich shook his head. "He could stop you with aword, buddy. Aword.And then you're dead and I have to put up with a new partner who might not find me as adorable as you do."
"I don't find you adorable."
"Sure you don't." Aldrich grinned, but then his expression turned serious. "For real, how do you think you're going to do this? If you have an actual plan, I might be interested."
"I learned some interesting things from that witch you introduced me to."
"Puck? He seemed sketch, but I figured you were looking for something out of the box when you shot the first three down."
"You were right. He was a bit unconventional but he had most of the information I needed."
"So what did you learn?"
"That we can break free from Zenon's control if we get back in touch with our humanity."
Aldrich raised a disbelieving eyebrow at him. Talon couldn't blame him. The whole thing sounded kind of out there. "How are you going to do that?" Aldrich asked.
Talon sighed. "I suppose the first step is going to be finding out who I even was as a human."
"You really think that's a good idea?"
"It's the only idea I have right now, and no, I don't like it." He was going to look into other options first. Options that wouldn't require him to relive his entire past life, but if it was necessary...
"Maybe we just need to do what humans do for a while," Aldrich suggested.
"And what would that be?"
"I don't know. On TV they're always gossiping and making out."
"Vampires do that," Talon pointed out.
"But you don't."
"That's what you think." While it was true that Talon wasn't one to gossip, he'd done his fair share of 'making out' in the recent past, and it hadn't made him feel any more human. What did make him feel more human were the moments in between, when he was sharing his down time with Collin and they sat together, talking about nothing, Collin's head resting on his shoulder, Collin smiling at him as if he wasn't a vampire at all.
He would doanythingto protect that smile.
Even if that meant becoming as human as possible.
