Eternal Kiss of Darkness

"You need not fear that everything from your former life is lost to you," he went on, almost causing Kira to laugh. "In a few months, you should have enough strength after dawn in order to return to your employment. And in as little as a week or two, you should have control of your hunger and abilities around humans enough to resume seeing your family again - "

"You just don't get it, do you?" she interrupted him, recklessness rising up in her. "All of this - this suddenly being something else is bad enough, but to know the only reason I'm not in a grave isn't because my life meant anything to you but because you thought it would balance some imaginary set of justice scales . . . well, that sucks. And yes, I realize the irony of that statement."

Something wet slipped down Kira's cheek. She swiped at it, surprised to see pink liquid on her fingers. Were those tears? Could she still cry, even though she was a vampire now?

Before she could ponder that, a pain that was becoming all too familiar ripped through Kira. She bent over, holding her stomach as if she could somehow stuff her need for blood back down inside her.

The breeze lifting her hair was the only indicator she had that Mencheres left and returned in a flash of movement. He held two of those damn red bags in his hand, and the inner leap Kira felt when she saw them left her twisted with dueling urges. She wanted to throw the bags out of the window in repugnance. She wanted to tear them from Mencheres's hands and devour them with rabid gulps.

He held one of the bags out to her, but Kira looked away. She didn't want to drink more blood. It was wrong, gross . . .

Twin stings of pain in her lower lip told Kira her fangs had burst out of her upper teeth, resulting in a tease of that rich, coppery taste flavoring her mouth. More pain erupted through her body, that hated feeling of being burned from the inside out increasing to a ferocious pitch.

Mencheres had her in his arms in the next instant, holding the slickness of the bag to her mouth. "You must."

She only knew she'd torn into it when incredible relief filled up the previous torment inside her. Kira felt herself beginning to float away, her mind numbing from the rush of exhilaration and hunger, but before she lost herself to the blackness, something nagged at her subconscious. Something she'd been too distracted to pick up on when Mencheres first told her why he'd mesmerized her boss into giving her the car and the raise. You were working late into the night . . .

There was only one way Mencheres could know what sort of hours Kira had been working that week. He'd been following her.

Mencheres walked beside Kira in the woods. The air was pleasantly cool in the predawn hours, but Kira wore a thick sweater and pants as if it were much colder. She seemed preoccupied with the ground as she walked, her eyes flickering every so often to the sides only when nocturnal animals startled at their presence.

He said nothing, letting her become acclimated to the deluge on her senses from her surroundings. She'd woken a few hours before dusk on her second day as a vampire, insisting on showering by herself after she sated her hunger on the fresh bags Gorgon came back with. As Mencheres warned her, that did not bring positive results. Kira ripped the shower door off when she attempted to open it, then tore the faucet out of the wall when she tried to turn the water off after completing her doorless shower. Then her frustration at her inability to control her strength resulted in another attack of hunger, which was also no surprise. Anger and the urge to feed were tightly tied together for new vampires, and with all of Kira's emotions heightened to previously unexplored levels, she would be a swarm of volatility for the next few days.

"It doesn't seem right not to see the darkness," Kira said, finally breaking her silence. "I know it's night, but it looks like a sharper, overcast afternoon with a sun that doesn't hurt my eyes instead. There are no shadows anymore. Only spots of shade. How long did it take for you to get used to there being no darkness?"

Mencheres tried to recall his first days as a vampire. It was so long ago, it felt like the transformation had happened to someone else. He remembered the hunger when he first awoke; no vampire forgot that. But he couldn't remember what true night had looked like when he was human, so he could not recall how long it had taken him to stop missing it.

"Much of those early days, I've forgotten," he admitted.

"Because you're older than dirt, right?" Kira cast a slanted look at him. "So tell me, does it sound like a demolition site out here to you, too? Or did you learn to tune out background noise over the years?"

He briefly focused on the sounds that filled the forest. No, he had not bothered to pay them any heed, aside from discerning whether they were natural or a threat that needed to be eliminated. Had he simply learned to tune them out, as Kira described? Or was he so jaded that he no longer cared if the crickets sang, the leaves danced, the branches rubbed together while reaching out for one another, or the animals hunting for sustenance or companionship found their quarry?

"You learn to choose what you focus your attention on," he replied.

That was true. He might not have paid any notice to the sounds in the forest, but he could tell Kira every nuance of how her scent had changed as she walked alongside him.

Or how many times her eyes had flared with emerald when she'd caught a glimpse of something with a beating heart in her vicinity.

Kira stopped walking, turning her face up toward the trees. "Fireflies. I haven't seen them since I was a kid. Tina and I used to go into the woods by our old house to try and catch them . . ."

Mencheres stopped as well, following her gaze to the lighted insects interspersed throughout the air. Her voice held another wistful note of remembrance he could not relate to. Even if he could remember his childhood, he'd had no siblings close to his age, and his homeland had been bare of such creatures as these.

But these memories held value to Kira, tying her to something lost from her youth. He glanced at her profile. Her head was tilted back, full lips parted slightly, pale line of her neck in stark, tempting relief against the backdrop of the forest. She looked so beautiful.

Almost ethereal. Despite knowing better, he could not force himself to glance away.

He might not be able to share her memory of chasing fireflies as a child, but he could give her a new memory of the woods. One that no one else could replicate.

Mencheres sent wisps of his power along the ground, curling them around the blooms from several nearby patches of wildflowers. One by one, he plucked those blooms, until he had hundreds of pale purple, blue, yellow, and white flowers floating above the brush.