“So what kind are we talking about here?” Ray asked, surveying a neatly stacked display.
“I don’t know. Just pick one.”
“Well, there’s a lot of choice. I mean, you got your flavored, your ridged, your pre-lubed, your thin, your super-ultra-thin, your super-ultra-thin-pre-lubed, your…Huh.”
“Huh what?”
“Would you look at this?” he asked, examining a small box. “It says it glows in the dark.”
“So?”
“So what use is that to anybody? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Write her name in the air with it?”
“I’d rather not think of you doing anything with it,” I said honestly.
“Besides, the fey already glow, so you gotta think it’s a waste of—”
“Ray!” I glanced around, but there was nobody within earshot.
“Well, excuse me if I’m not used to buying condoms for aliens,” he said more softly.
“They’re not aliens.”
“Well, they’re not human. I mean, they could have anything under those tunics, you know?”
“Like what?”
“Like…I don’t know. It could be barbed or something.”
“Barbed?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He slanted me a glance. “Do you?”
I just looked at him.
“No, of course not. You’re too uptight.”
“I am not uptight.”
“You’re the definition of uptight. I bet you and Mr. Muscle Bound haven’t even done it yet.”
“Okay, enough with the personal—”
“Nailed it.” He nodded. “You wouldn’t have freaked out on him this afternoon otherwise. ‘Oh, no, somebody’s in my head for five seconds, even if it did save my life—’”
I scowled. “You don’t get it. He’s not supposed to be able to do that.”
“He’s a senior master. They got skills.” Ray shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t know what you’re complaining about. As soon as a baby vamp wakes up, he’s got all kinds of people in his head.”
“I’m not a vampire,” I said, but Ray wasn’t listening.
“There’s his master, poking around, telling him what’s what and that he better toe the line. There’s the senior vamps in the family, checking out the new talent, just in case they want to recruit him for one of their cliques later on. There’s the slightly older babies, trying to dig up some dirt to make sure he stays on the bottom of the heap, and so on. And they never shut up. Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak. It drove me crazy for years.”
“Is that what happened?”
“But I got used to it. So will you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to get used to it,” I muttered, examining a box that promised to vibrate. I thought that was my job. I put it back.
“Oh, you want it, all right,” Ray said. “The two of you practically melt the walls every time you get within three feet of—”
“That’s not the same thing,” I told him irritably. It wasn’t the sex that worried me. I’d had sex; I’d never had a relationship with a vampire unless you counted Mircea, and look how well that had turned out. If I couldn’t even manage the usual father-daughter stuff, how was I supposed to handle something much more complex with someone I didn’t know half as well?
Relationships weren’t my best thing. They never had been. Even the easy ones. And nothing about Louis-Cesare was easy.
“It is when you’re dating a master. You gotta take the whole package, you know?” Ray said. And then he stopped, and turned to look at me. “Hey, that’s it, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“You never dated a master before.”
“I’ve been with vampires.”
“Yeah, sure. Any regular old vamp—I can see that. I mean, you’re stronger than him; you’re the one calling the shots; you’re the one who says when you’ve had enough and it’s time to head out.”
“Shut up and pick something.”
“But it’s not the same with a senior master, is it? Somebody who might be stronger than you. Somebody who might want to take the lead sometimes, too. Somebody you can’t just dump whenever you—”
I tipped the whole display into the basket he’d picked up by the door. He blinked. “Well, that oughta do it.”
I grabbed the basket o’ condoms and went to wait in line, ignoring the looks from a couple people ahead of me, who were apparently not used to seeing someone buying twenty boxes at once. Ray went to lean on the counter, supposedly enthralled by an awesome display of toenail clippers, but in fact snacking on the salesclerk.
And, predictably, my stomach curled into a knot.
It was one of the things—one of the very, very many things—about dating a master that wasn’t going to work. Ray made it sound so easy, like this was just some kind of tug-of-war, some weird power play, that I needed to get past and I’d be fine. Like all the other humans who eagerly lined up to attach themselves to the great houses. Mircea probably turned away fifty a month, and those were just the ones arrogant enough to try. Louis-Cesare, as the longtime darling of the European Senate, could hardly have attracted any fewer.
Ray probably thought I should feel honored to have caught his eye. That I should feel grateful. That I should feel…whatever those other humans felt.
He forgot one thing.
I wasn’t human.
There had always been a love/hate—okay, mostly hate—thing going on with me and the vampire community. I’d tried to stay away; I’d spent years trying. Like Claire said, there were other things to hunt and most of them were much less likely to hunt me back. But there was nothing that made my blood sing, my senses reel, my heart pound quite like chasing my natural prey.
Except maybe fucking it.
It was crude, but it was the truth. Vampires weren’t just prey to me; they never had been. There was this weird kind of yearning underneath it all, and resentment and jealousy and a bone-deep ache that I didn’t understand. Not completely. I just knew that, every once in a while, the craving got too deep and it was either fight or fuck, and mostly it was the former but sometimes…sometimes it had been the latter. Just long enough to get it out of my system, to keep myself from going crazier than I already was.
And then, yeah, I moved on. Why the hell wouldn’t I? If I stayed around, it always ended the same way, and crazy or not, I didn’t particularly like the idea of staking a former lover. No matter how much a few of them had deserved it.
But this wasn’t a one-night stand. This was…well, I didn’t really know what this was, since I’d been avoiding discussing it. Talking about it meant facing the fact that this weird little interlude or experiment or whatever the hell I thought I’d been doing had run its course. Because how could you care about someone when his very means of existence made your stomach hurt?
Not that Louis-Cesare needed to snack on random clerks when he probably had a whole stable lined up and eager to be used. I knew that. But still. It was what he was.
And I killed what he was.
“What size you think they take?” Ray asked.
I looked up, blinking, to see that it was my turn. “Does it matter? We have plenty.”
“Well, yeah. But they’re all different sizes,” he said, piling boxes on the counter. “And what if the—what if they need something like extra small? You got enough extra smalls?”
“They’re not extra small,” I told him irritably. “They don’t need extra smalls.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know.”
“They’re seven feet tall!”
“Don’t matter,” he argued. “Plenty of big guys got a Tiny Tim. Sometimes I think they all do. I mean, why else spend all that time in the gym? Why get all those muscles? If you got it where it counts, the ladies know. You don’t gotta advertise.”
The mocha-skinned clerk, who could easily have made two of Ray, snorted.
“Well, there’s no way to know,” I told him, “so we’re just going to have to chance it.”
“You could call her and ask.”
“Call—” I stopped. “You mean Claire?”
“Well, it was her idea.”
I had a sudden flash of Claire’s face if I called to ask what size condom her fiancé took. It was kind of breathtaking.
“You want me to ring these up or not?” the cashier asked.
“If they don’t fit, can we bring them back?”
“No refunds on condoms.”
“Just call her,” Ray said.
“I am not calling Claire and asking…I’m not calling Claire.”
“Okay by me. I mean, I don’t care. But you get ’em too small and they pop off, and you get ’em too big and they slide off, and either way, it’s pointy-eared babies all ar—”
“Ray!”
“I mean, I guess they’d go over pretty well at a Star Trek convention, but the rest of the time—”
“All right! Stop it! All right!”
“It’s not just Claire who’s a little tense,” he said, as I dug around for a cell phone I didn’t have, and then commandeered his. I didn’t waste time trying to figure out how to phrase this because some things are better just winged.
“If you’re not buying anything, you gotta get out of line,” the cashier told me.
“There’s nobody else in the store.”
“Don’t matter—there’s rules. Somebody could come in, and I’m the only one on.”
“Start ringing things up, then. This won’t take long.”
“Which ones?”
“I don’t care.” I pushed some at her. “These.”
“These?” She looked dubious.
