Skin Trade(171)

He leaned his back against the building, as if he were tired, hugging me closer the way you would a child.

“You can put me down, Truth,” I said.

He opened his eyes and blinked at me, as if he’d been far away in his head. He put me down and let me slide out of his hands. He leaned against the building, his chest rising and falling as if he’d been running. Vampires didn’t always breathe, or have to, so the fact that he was breathing heavily meant either he was tired or something else.

I touched his bare arm with my fingertips. His skin was warm to the touch. “You’re warm.”

“Touch me where I wasn’t holding you against me,” he said, voice breathy.

I reached up and touched the side of his face. His skin was cool. “So it was just my body heat warming you up?”

He nodded.

“Why are you breathing like that? How much energy did this use up for you?”

He swallowed hard enough for me to watch his throat work. “Enough.”

“Shit, you should have let Wicked bring me.”

He shook his head, still leaning shoulders and arms against the building. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You fed more deeply than I thought, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked at me with those gray eyes that almost never looked as blue as his brother’s. “Just as we can take less blood, or more, in a feeding, so with the ardeur. You were like a vampire that had not fed in too long. You needed more.”

“But a vampire can only drink as much blood as his stomach can hold,” I said. “The ardeur doesn’t work like that, does it?”

He just looked at me.

Shit. “How hurt are you?”

“Not hurt, just tired.”

“Fine, how tired are you?”

“You need to go to your police friends,” he said.

“I can’t leave you on the street this weak. You can’t even stand up. If Vittorio’s people found you now, you’d just be a victim for them.”

His eyes went all vampire on me, gray light shining in his gaze. “I am no one’s victim,” and he was angry when he said it, and then his eyes went back to normal and he began to slide down the wall. I caught him, steadied him. He put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt his body fight to stay upright.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“No, it’s me that’s sorry.”

“Flying takes a great deal of energy, and carrying someone takes more. I had forgotten how much more.”

“So it’s not that I fed, but that you did something strenuous afterward,” I said.

“Yes, it would have been good to simply sleep afterward, or feed myself.”

“Would feeding help?” I asked.

He nodded, while his body trembled in an effort to stay leaning against the wall. Even with my hands to steady him, he was still in trouble.

“I can’t leave you like this, Truth. Either you have to come with me, and let the cops keep you safe, or…” I did not want to open a vein for him. I’d done it once before to save his life when he’d been stabbed with a silver blade trying to help me and the police catch a very bad vampire, but I didn’t like playing walking blood bank. But there was no way that Grimes and his men would want a vampire inside their place. How would I explain him to the other cops, and how did I explain what was wrong with him? When opening a vein is the lesser evil, you need to rethink your priorities.

“Take blood from me,” I said.

“You don’t donate to anyone.” His voice was rough, and his legs began to give. I helped ease him to a sitting position, with his back solid against the building.

“Not usually, but this is an emergency, just like me needing to feed the ardeur on you.”

He gave me fluttery eyes.

I held his face between my hands. “Damn it, Truth, don’t you dare pass out on me!”

His eyes opened wide, and I watched him fight to do what I’d ordered. I did the only thing I could think of; I offered him my left wrist. It would hurt more than the neck, but it would be easier to hide from the other policemen.

“I am not vampire enough to cloud your mind. I can only hurt you.”

“Feed, damn it,” I said.

He raised shaky hands and wrapped one of them around my wrist at the hand, and used the other to scoot the sleeve of his jacket away from the wrist. The sleeves were big enough on me that he had no problem pushing the leather out of the way and baring my lower arm.

I braced for the bite, then blew out a breath and tried to relax into it. If I tensed up it would hurt more, just like a shot.

Truth opened his mouth wide, so I had a glimpse of fangs before he struck. I tensed at the last minute; I just couldn’t help it. I was caught between the sharp immediacy of the pain and the sensation of his mouth locked around my wrist, forming a tight seal, while the fangs dug in deeper. The deeper part hurt, but his mouth on my wrist, and the sucking, felt good. I’d been feeding Jean-Claude and Asher more often in the last few months, and apparently my body had started translating feeding into pleasure. I’d started associating it with sex, because with Jean-Claude and Asher, we’d made the blood part of our foreplay, and sometimes part of our intercourse. I hadn’t realized until this moment how much that had colored how I felt about this whole thing.