Page 7 of Mortal Blood
“Why areyouback here early, eating bad food and not loved up with your mate?”
“We are not—Well, I guess we are. But basically, the council.”
“Do you plan to elaborate on that statement at all?”
I slumped down in the seat next to hers, and tossed my half-eaten roll on the table, narrowly missing one of the books.
“Come on, out with it,” she said, but her tone was gentle. I still ducked her eye as I spoke, staring intently at the small streak of runny egg trying its best to drip from one side of the roll.
“I’m…” Fuck. How did I even say it? Tell her I wasn’t everything she’d spent our entirely friendship thinking?
“You’re you,” she said firmly. “And whatever you’re about to tell me isn’t going to change that.”
“Even if I’m half vampire?”
Silence. And then, “You’re a dhampir? Dammit.”
I twisted round to look at her, then lost my nerve and dropped my eyes back to my unappealing food.
“I don’t think you should tell Jax,” she said.
“That’s…oddly specific.” At leastshewas still talking to me, I guess?
“Yeah. I bet him last semester that you were part shifter, and I don’t much fancy doing his cultural studies homework for a month.”
I jerked my eyes back up at that, and caught the smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
“What? Come on, don’t tell me you thought it was going to bother me that you’re half vampire?” she said.
“Well…yeah.”
She snorted, and all at once I felt ridiculous for worrying.
“Look, I told you, you’re you. We’re friends. Nothing’s going to change that.”
“Unless I tell Jax and you have to do his homework for a month?”
“Unless that.”
I gave her a shoulder nudge and then sagged back in my chair. Great as it was that I wasn’t about to lose my best friend, it didn’t change the fact that I had this whole part of me that I knew nothing about. How did I even begin to wrap my head around discovering I was half vampire? And what that would mean for me.
Ling looked me up and down as if reading my mind, then nodded.
“Research?”
I exhaled slowly.
“Research.”
Chapter Three
The library waspacked wall to wall with some of the most arcane knowledge in the supernatural world. And yet, for all that, it seemed like information on dhampirs was surprisingly hard to come by. An hour in, and we hadn’t turned up a single reference. On the positive, we’d barely even made a dent in the number of books that might have something of use. On the negative, there were only two of us, and thousands of books, which left us somewhat outnumbered, and utterly undermanned.
“Hey, this one says…No, wait, that’s tulpas. Sorry, Cali.”
She closed the book and shoved it aside, and I slammed my own book shut before slumping over it.
“Ugh,” I groaned into my arms. “This is hopeless. You think with all this magic floating around the place they’d have mastered a simple database.” I lifted my head long enough to stare at her blearily. “They haven’t, right?”
