Bloodchild Page 5

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hunger

  Bradan couldn’t remember ever having so much trouble focusing on any one thing—especially not when Vivien was in front of him. The hunger was part of it, ever present at the back of his mind like Aedan had warned him, but there was more to his discomfort than the need for blood.

  He’d awakened mere moments earlier, pulled from a dreamless sleep by the sudden flood of emotions surging through the bond. For a wild, crazy moment, he had almost believed that Aedan had been acting on his attraction to their dame. As Bradan threw on some clothes and hurriedly followed the bond down to the library, he’d told himself that of course that wasn’t what was happening. Of course Aedan wouldn’t reveal his feelings to Vivien. Of course she wouldn’t return them if he did.

  Of course.

  And yet, when he’d found Aedan kneeling at her feet and Vivien looking at him so intently, he’d felt no surprise. Instead, the feeling that had started to rise inside him, the feeling he’d tried to squash as soon as he’d become aware of it, was betrayal.

  Whatever they were doing, whatever they were talking about or planning, Bradan should have been there with them. The fact that Aedan had not woken him up, that he’d gone to Vivien alone, talked to her alone should not have been so uncomfortable… but there was no denying that it was. And the fact that Aedan had now pulled back from the conversation, leaving Bradan to answer Vivien’s questions, did not change that.

  “No, I’ve never heard of anyone using the Quickening like that.” He was tempted to ask Aedan if he had, but felt somewhat reluctant to draw him back into the conversation and continued instead. “I’m pretty sure you can trust that it’s accurate, but I don’t know how much you’ll be able to use that trick. If it takes that much of a toll on you, it might not be worth it.”

  He couldn’t remember Vivien’s expression ever being so grave before, not even when she’d lost Anabel. He couldn’t remember ever wanting her more, either.

  “Oh, yes, it is worth it,” she protested. “If it stops another spy or murderer from setting foot in our home, it’ll be more than worth it.”

  Bradan didn’t know what touched him the most: the way she said ‘our’ home, or the fire in her eyes as she looked at him. Either way, it only made him want her more. If Aedan hadn’t been there, Bradan would have claimed her mouth already. He’d have drawn her into his arms and held her close, as close as he dared, until the pain she’d felt when she thought she’d lost him was gone, its memory burned to cinders.

  “Bradan. Are you hungry?”

  The question startled Bradan enough that his head jerked as though Aedan had slapped him. He stared at his brother, forgetting to answer. Aedan had warned him he’d ask the question, and ask it often, but he hadn’t said he’d ask in front of Vivien. It made him feel like a child to be asked that now.

  “Are you hungry?” Aedan repeated in the same blank tone. His expression revealed nothing of what he thought.

  “I’m fine,” Bradan said, turning back to Vivien.

  She was glancing back and forth between Bradan and Aedan, a small frown furrowing her brow, a question obviously on her mind although her next words weren’t about their exchange. The pulse point on her neck seemed to beat to the sound of her voice.

  “I want to question Elver, too. I’m sure he’s loyal to me but—”

  “I apologize, Dame Vivien,” Aedan cut in. He’d stepped closer and gave her a small bow as he interrupted her, but quickly returned his full attention to Bradan. “I didn’t ask you if you’re fine. I asked if you are hungry. You will answer me.”

  “Aedan!” Vivien exclaimed before Bradan could formulate an answer even in his own mind. She stood, crossing her arms over her chest. “Don’t you think this can wait?”

  Aedan’s eyes did not lift from Bradan.

  “I apologize,” he said again. “But, no, it can’t wait. If Bradan doesn’t learn to recognize his own hunger, then I can’t allow him to be in your presence.”

  She let out a snort.

  “You can’t allow him? This is ludicrous. You just don’t want us—”

  “Vivien, he’s right.” Speaking those words or thinking about leaving the room shouldn’t have been so hard, and yet Bradan struggled with both. “I am hungry, yes.”

  But it was more than that. Hunger didn’t cover the depth of his need. It wasn’t just blood he wanted—craved. It was all of Vivien. The silkiness of her skin under his fingertips. The warmth of her under his body, around it. The passion that burned him with every kiss, every caress, and—

  “Get up.”

  Aedan’s hand had closed over Bradan’s bicep, and he tugged as he gave the order. Bradan stumbled to his feet and let himself be dragged out of the room. If he didn’t go, he didn’t know what he’d do to Vivien.

  “What’s going on?” he heard Vivien call after them. “Where are you going?”

  Neither of them answered, and if she’d been thinking of following them, Aedan closing the door behind them was a clear warning not to.

  “The armory,” Aedan said curtly, releasing Bradan’s arm. “Now.”

  Bradan walked ahead of him, his hands fisted at his sides, his mind throbbing with hunger. He was hyperaware that his brother walked behind him—remaining between him and Vivien as he had before. If he was honest with himself, he was glad, even relieved. Sad that Aedan didn’t trust him fully, but relieved because he didn’t quite trust himself. Even now that he wasn’t in her presence anymore, his need for Vivien, her blood or her body, still pulsed through him with every step.

  Once they reached the armory, Bradan sat down on one of the benches, expecting Aedan to berate him and warn him again of the danger he was placing Vivien in. Aedan, however, did no such thing. He closed the door behind him, and, turning to Bradan, rolled up his shirt sleeve. He didn’t say a word as he approached Bradan and held out his arm.

  The bite wounds on his skin were healed, and only red marks remained; they’d be gone in a few more hours—unless Bradan continuously broke them open again.

  “I can’t,” he murmured, looking up from Aedan’s wrist to meet his eyes. “I can’t keep taking blood from you all the time. You need it, too. I’ve got to control it, control myself until I can go out and hunt.”

  Aedan’s expression didn’t change, remaining cool, almost blank, but the bond said something different. He was angry. Terribly angry. Bradan dropped his gaze to the floor. There were two things he hated to do: hurt Vivien, and disappoint his brother. He’d done the latter already, how long until he did the former, too?

  * * * *

  Even knowing she was safe in the castle, Aedan hated to leave Dame Vivien alone. It went against every instinct he had as a bodyguard. However, allowing Bradan to remain near her when his hunger roared as loudly as it did now seemed like an even worse idea.

  With every step they took toward the armory, Aedan could feel how hard it was for Bradan to leave her, and he realized that he had underestimated the problem. It was one thing for Bradan to hunger for human blood. Aedan had gone through the same process, and he felt he could help Bradan to learn control. But that wasn’t the whole of it.

  Bradan wanted more than her blood. And while Aedan had thought it had been a bad idea for them to be intimate before, now the implications were more than political. If they shared a bed when Bradan could hardly distinguish his hunger for her body and his need for her blood, how would he manage to take one without claiming the other?

  Feeling troubled and, if he was honest with himself, a little lost, Aedan could only be glad that Bradan was too preoccupied by what was going on in his own mind to pick up on what had to be filtering through the bond. The last thing they needed now was for Bradan to doubt that Aedan knew what was best—the way he did when Aedan offered him his wrist to feed from and he looked away.

  “I can’t. I can’t keep taking blood from you all the time. You need it, too. I’ve got to control it, control myself until I can go out and hunt.”<
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  He’d said the same thing the previous night, and while Aedan could understand his need to gain ground on his hunger, he also knew denying it was not the solution.

  Sitting next to his brother on the bench, Aedan clasped his hands in front of him to hold them steady.

  “You keep forgetting I know what it’s like. I know how you feel. I know how it starts slowly, how you can ignore it at first, like a whisper at the back of your mind. I know it’s easy to tell yourself you can keep ignoring it. I know that ignoring it feels like control. And I also know what it feels like when the hunger strikes back, when it uncoils all at once and hits you so hard that blood is all you can think of, and when that happens, there is nothing, nothing at all you can do to gain back that control you thought you had. If you never trust me about anything else, you need to trust me at least on this one thing. You will learn control, I will show you how, but it will take time, and trying to rush things will only put our dame at risk. I know you don’t want that.”

  “I don’t, but…”

  Bradan’s feeble protest faded when Aedan extended his arm toward him again. He took hold of Aedan’s wrist and brought it up to his mouth. His eyes gleamed, then closed. The bite was smoother than the previous night; this, at least, he was learning quickly. He drank long, deep gulps, and Aedan watched his throat work and listened to the hunger filtering through the bond. Little by little, with each mouthful of blood, it faded until it was no louder than the wind whistling past the castle’s walls.

  When Bradan finally lifted his mouth off Aedan’s wrist, he blinked several times, as though awakening from a doze. He licked his lips clean, then frowned as he watched Aedan roll his sleeve back down, covering the marks.

  “You didn’t stop me,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Why did you let me take so much?”

  “Because you needed it,” Aedan said evenly as he stood. “Because you need to instruct Dame Vivien on preparing for the duel, and you can’t do that if all you can think about is your need for her.”

  Bradan looked up at him, his lips pinched in a thin line. Aedan could feel uncertainty coming through the bond.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Looking away, Bradan whispered, “It’s not just her blood I crave. I mean… I desired her before, but not like this, not like I’ll die if I don’t get to touch her. Is it always like this?”

  At a loss as to what to answer, Aedan remained silent for a few seconds. It wasn’t that he was too young to be a Maker; he knew of other vampires who had made Bloodchildren when they were younger than he was now. It was simply that things had been different, for him. The woman he’d loved when he had awakened with this new hunger had been too far out of his reach for it to ever be a problem, and besides his own Maker had given him distractions.

  “I don’t know,” he said, choking on the words, when Bradan turned a questioning look toward him. “There was no one I wanted the way you want her when I was first remade.”

  “What about now?” Bradan insisted, his eyes glinting like the edge of a sword. “When you are hungry for blood, do you get hungry for Vivien, too?”

  Aedan shook his head.

  “I don’t think of her that way.”

  Bradan’s expression made it clear he didn’t believe him.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t want her earlier. I could feel you even while I was asleep.”

  Irritation—and maybe even shame—turned Aedan’s back stiff.

  “She was channeling at me. You can’t expect me to—”

  Raising a placating hand, Bradan stood as well.

  “I know,” he said. “I know what it’s like to have her channel at you. But I also know how you feel about her. I was just asking… You know what, it doesn’t matter. I know you’d never touch her.”

  But if he truly knew, why did a note of challenge echo in his words as he finished?

  “No,” Aedan said. “I wouldn’t. And it might be best if you don’t either, or at least not until you learn the difference between wanting to lie with her and wanting to feed from her.”

  He started for the door, but paused with his hand on the handle and looked back at Bradan.

  “Please don’t make me order you,” he murmured, and left the room before Bradan could reply.

  * * * *

  In front of Vivien, colored ribbons of air wove into an intricate braid.

  The ribbons came to life out of nowhere about a foot above her head, and they splintered into a myriad of colors before disappearing into nothing a foot above the floor.

  It was one of the channeling exercises Brad had taught her to help her develop her visualization skills. She always started with two ribbons of different colors entwining together, then added more ribbons, more colors, creating increasingly more complicated patterns while trying to keep the colors straight in her mind.

  The channeling didn’t take much strength from her, certainly not as much as her lie-detector trick demanded, but it required her mind to remain focused on what she was doing. At that moment, the distraction was welcome. If she hadn’t kept her mind on what she was doing, she’d have run out of the room and gone to find Brad and Aedan long ago.

  She still wasn’t sure what had happened, why Aedan had interrupted her conversation with Brad before leading him away, but she suspected it had to do with Brad being a vampire. Yesterday Aedan’s focus had been on Brad eating—feeding, he called it—before anything else, and again today he’d asked about his hunger. She still knew next to nothing about vampires, and now that Brad was one, she needed to know more.

  As soon as they returned, she’d ask questions, so she wouldn’t feel so wildly out of her depth on that topic, too. There was so much she didn’t know about the Quickening, the court, and Foh’Ran; she wanted to have one thing she understood completely. If that thing was related to her boyfriend…

  Well, she was supposed to be in charge, wasn’t she? She could decide her priorities. And since not understanding distracted her to the point that she couldn’t focus on a simple channeling task for more than five minutes, it definitely was a priority.

  With an annoyed grunt, she let the tangled ribbons of color dissipate. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and tried to calm her thoughts before she started again, but before she felt ready, a quick knock on the door caused her to open her eyes again. Her heart did a little dance in her chest as she watched Aedan walk in, followed by Brad.

  Aedan came to a stop a couple of yards in front of her chair and gave her that small bow that was so familiar by now.

  “Dame Vivien. You have my apologies for the abruptness of my words and actions before we left the room.”

  “I don’t need an apology,” she said, her gaze flicking back and forth between Aedan and Brad, now standing next to each other. “But an explanation would be nice. What do I need to know about Brad being a vampire? That’s what it was about, wasn’t it?”

  They exchanged a long look before turning to her again.

  “Vampires feed on blood,” Aedan started, sounding hesitant.

  Vivien would have rolled her eyes and said she knew that much if she hadn’t realized he was giving himself time to pick his words. She waited, although she glanced at Brad, wondering why he was letting Aedan explain. Until now, Brad had been the one who taught her most of what she needed to know to live on Foh’Ran. Only for matters that touched the court had Brad let Aedan take over, clearly because Aedan knew more about the subject. Was this the same thing? Aedan had been a vampire longer, but Brad was one now, too.

  “Our instinct is to feed from humans,” Aedan continued. “It is not forbidden to us as such, but it can only happen with the consent of the human being bitten, and even so it is dangerous enough that most vampires don’t care to risk it. However, knowing we shouldn’t do something doesn’t always stop us when the hunger becomes too powerful. For a newly-made vampire, that hunger is near constant. Bradan needs to learn control, and until he does I cannot allow him to be alone with you, or eve
n to be anywhere near you when he is hungry.”

  For a few seconds, Vivien let herself absorb the words. They sounded awfully convenient, given how Aedan had disapproved of Brad and Vivien becoming close. It seemed that he now had what he considered a good reason to object. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t, and had never been, up to him to object to whom Vivien chose to love.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” she said calmly. “But you need to understand it’s not your role to allow me to do anything. Besides, Brad would never hurt me.”

  Aedan’s face was already twisting into disapproval. Having no interest in being lectured, Vivien turned her attention to Brad, who’d been both silent and still until now. She couldn’t help but smile as their eyes met.

  “Tell him,” she said. “Tell him you won’t hurt me.”

  After a quick glance at his brother, Brad looked at Vivien again.

  “I wish I could,” he said softly. “I don’t want to hurt you. But it’s not even been a full day yet, and I’m starting to understand that hunger. We have to trust that Aedan knows best for this.” After a brief pause, he added, quieter still, “And while he can’t make you do anything, the same is not true where I am concerned.”

  Aedan flinched at those last words, compounding Vivien’s confusion. Aedan was all but unflappable. Why would he react in such a manner at Brad’s words?

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “It means,” Aedan said after clearing his throat, “that vampires are inclined to obey their Maker, the same way we’re inclined to seek human blood. We can resist that urge, but like resisting the hunger, it is very hard to do for newly-turned vampires.”

  Vivien found herself with a dozen more questions, but before she could voice any of them, Brad sat in the chair across her, leaning forward with his arms resting on his thighs so that he bridged a little the distance between them.