Nathan chuckled. "Figures. Nightblood.com?"

I coughed deliberately to hide my answer. "Yes."

He shook his head. "Rule number one, don't go public."

"Rule number what? What are you talking about?"

As if he had all the time in the world to explain himself, he turned away. He stepped behind the counter and pressed a button on the CD player, cutting off the annoyingly soothing New Age droning.

"What are you talking about?" I demanded, tagging after him as he walked through the shop and snuffed the candles. "Would you stop and talk to me?"

He sighed and dropped his head, bracing his arms on a table that looked far too dainty to support his weight.

"The rules you have to follow. The rules every vampire has to follow."

My hand was on the door before I realized I'd intended to run.

"Wait!" he called after me. He caught my arm and gently turned me around to face him just as my hand found the lock. "If you run out of here, this will only end badly."

His grip on the sleeve of my coat unnerved me, as did the tension in his voice. My words sounded thick and strange as I spoke.

"Is that a threat?"

"Listen," he began, some of the urgency of his tone gone now. "I know you have some questions. Otherwise you wouldn't have run into Ziggy."

"Yeah, I have questions." I spat the words in my anger. "Who the hell are you? Why did I get attacked when I walked through that door? And what the hell makes you think I'm a vampire?"

I yanked open the shop door and stepped into the pitiless cold, fishing in my pocket for my half-empty pack of cigarettes.

He followed me to the threshold and let me get halfway up the steps before he spoke again. I was struggling with my lighter when he called after me.

"What makes you think you're a vampire? That's why you were trolling the vampire message boards, right? That's where Ziggy found you. It's his M.O." He moved up the stairs with a grace I'd thought reserved for animals and put his hand over mine. His skin was ice cold. "No matter how many you smoke, you'll never feel satisfied. The food you eat no longer fills you up, and you can't understand why."

The cigarette suddenly looked ridiculous where it rested between my fingers. I trembled, and not entirely due to the cold.

Nathan spoke again, but he sounded disconnected and far away.

"Come upstairs," he said. "I'll try to explain."

I took a few more steps and tried to convince myself to keep walking, to get in my car and never come back, to avoid this side of town altogether. If I never saw this place again, I could pretend none of this had ever happened. There was always the hope that I'd never actually woken from surgery, and that I lingered in a coma in the ICU. As much as I wanted that to be true, I knew it wasn't. I dropped the cigarette and watched it roll to the next step. "No chance I'm dreaming here, huh?" "No," he said quietly. "We can, uh, tell our own kind."

I looked up sharply. The blood drained from my face, and I could tell by the way his expression softened that my fear was visible.

"You're a-"

"Vampire, yes," he finished for me when my voice trailed off.

"Well, that settles it," I said, feeling oddly relieved despite the fact I stood in a dark stairwell with a guy who claimed to be a vampire. "I'm crazy."

"You're not crazy. We all go through this, when we change." He looked up nervously as a pair of feet shuffled across the snowy sidewalk above us. "But this really isn't the place to discuss this. Why don't you come up to my apartment and we can talk."

"No-thanks though," I said, unable to help my laughter. "It was really nice meeting you, Mr. Vampire, but I've got to go. I have to work tonight, and I just might be able to get a call in to my psychologist first. With any luck, he'll give me a nice, fat prescription for some antipsychotics so I can get back to my normal life."

I turned away, but Nathan caught my arm. Faster than I could think to scream, I was pinned between his hard body and the harder brick wall. His hand clamped firmly over my mouth, muffling my terrified cry.

"I didn't want to have to do this," he said through gritted teeth. Then he dipped his head, and his body went rigid against mine.

When he moved his head back up, my heart stopped. The chiseled, handsome planes of his face were twisted, the skin stretched tight over a sharp, bony snout. Long fangs glinted in the dim light. He looked the way John Doe had, just before he'd ripped my throat open like a birthday present.

Only his eyes held a glimmer of control. Until the day I die, I will remember Nathan's eyes, so clear and gray and heartbreakingly honest behind that horrific mask.

"Now do you see?" he asked.

My heart pounding, I nodded. He pulled away and covered his face with his hands. When he looked up again, his normal features had returned into an expression of kindness and compassion. It disturbed me more than when he'd been a monster.

"Come on. Let's go inside and I'll tell you anything you want to know."

Numb with cold and fear and hopelessness, I let him guide me up the steps to the sidewalk. "Anything?"

"Sure," he promised, pulling a set of keys from his pocket.

"Okay." I swallowed the lump in my throat. "Why me?"

Three

The Movement

Nathan's apartment was small, with too much furniture. The walls were lined with bracketed shelves, the kind you'd buy in a home-improvement store and put up on a weekend. Some were so laden with books that they bowed in the middle. Notebooks and legal pads, all scribbled on in barely legible handwriting, littered the coffee table. It was cluttered but not dirty.

"Excuse our mess," he said with an apologetic smile. His gaze flitted to the hall. A Marilyn Manson song blasted at full volume behind one of the closed doors. "Turn it down, Ziggy!"

The music dropped a few decibels. Nathan and I stood awkwardly by the door for a moment. I suspected he was as uncomfortable as I was.

"Kids," I said with a shrug, looking in the direction of what I assumed was Ziggy's room.

"Let me take your coat."

I watched Nathan's face as he helped me out of the garment. He looked awfully young, in my opinion, to have a son Ziggy's age.

But then, for all I knew, Nathan could be hundreds of years old.

After he'd hung my coat on a hook by the door, he seemed to suddenly animate. "Have you fed?" He started for the kitchen and motioned for me to follow. "I've got some A pos."

I lingered in the doorway and watched as he retrieved a plastic collection bag of blood from his refrigerator. Then he lifted a teakettle from the dish rack next to the sink and ripped the top of the bag with his teeth as though he were opening a bag of chips.

Snapping on the burner of the gas stove, he emptied the blood into the teakettle and set it over the flame.

The process seemed so natural that I had to remind myself normal men didn't keep blood in their refrigerators. Of course, most normal men didn't own teakettles, either.

"You're not going to drink that, are you?" Med school warnings of blood-borne pathogens flashed through my mind.

Though he didn't look at me, I saw amusement on his face. "Yeah, you want some?"

"No!" My stomach constricted. "Do you know how dangerous that is?"

"Do you know how dangerous I am if I don't drink it?" He leaned against the counter and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel.

For the first time, I noticed how truly tall he was.

According to my driver's license, I stood five foot eight, and though my hospital stay had stripped some pounds from my frame, I was no wilting flower of a woman. Still, Nathan looked like he could easily rip me into pieces with his bare hands if he got the inclination.

But his voice held a note of sadness. His eyes met mine briefly, but before I could understand the pained look in them, he turned away.

"I'm sorry. You haven't had anyone explain all this to you. Blood-drinking is just one of the realities of being a vampire. You've got to do it sometime, and there's no time like the present." His voice was hoarse. "Besides, if you hold out too long, you'll snap and do something...regrettable."

"I'll take my chances." The kettle had begun to give off a warm, metallic smell. To my horror, my stomach actually rumbled. "So, am I going to live forever?"

"Why is that the first thing everyone asks?" he mused. "No, you probably won't live forever."

"Probably? That doesn't sound reassuring."

"Wasn't meant to." He tossed the towel over his shoulder. "We're not susceptible to the ravages of time or disease, and we have a healing ability that increases with age. But the list of things that can kill us is a mile long. Sunlight, holy water, hell, even a bad- enough car accident can take us out."

He poured some blood into a chipped ceramic mug and motioned toward the dinette table. "If you don't want this, can I get you something else?"

"No, thanks." I sat in the chair he pulled out for me. "Do you keep human food in here?" "Yeah," he said as he sat across from me. "I like it every now and then. I just can't live off it. And Ziggy needs to eat."

I frowned. Ziggy had clearly lured me to the shop in order to kill me. It didn't make a lot of sense, considering he lived with a vampire himself.

"Um...does your son know you're a vampire?"

"My son?" Nathan looked confused for a moment, then he laughed, a deep, rich sound that warmed me. "Ziggy's not my son. But I can see where you'd get that impression. He's a...he's a friend."

A friend? I was hip. I could read between the lines. It figured that the first decent guy I'd met in this city was gay. "He's a little young for you, don't you think?"

An embarrassed smile curved Nathan's lips. "I'm not a homosexual, Carrie. Ziggy's my blood donor. I watch out for him, that's all."

That was the first time he'd used my name instead of addressing me as Doctor or Miss Ames. In his thick accent-I was fairly certain he was Scottish-my generic, first-pick-from-the-baby-name-book moniker sounded exotic and almost sensual. I wondered if he could sense the attraction I felt, the heat coursing through my blood.

If he did, he had the courtesy not to comment on it. I was grateful for that. "So why did he try to kill me? I mean, if you're a vampire, and he knows it and gives you his blood and everything, what's his beef with me?"

Nathan sipped from his mug. "It's complicated."

I glanced at the clock on the wall. "I've got a few hours."

He seemed to consider his response for a moment. Setting his cup aside, he braced his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands. "Listen, you seem like a real nice girl, but there's something I have to ask you, and it's a little personal."

Despite the ominous tone of the question, I nodded. At this point, I wanted answers. I'd fill out a complete medical history if he asked. "Shoot."

"I followed your story in the papers very closely and I have some concerns. Namely, why you were in the morgue that night."

When his eyes met mine, I saw the real question there.

"You think I did this on purpose?"

He shrugged, all compassion and friendliness gone from his face. "You tell me."

I had spent the past month in a haze of depression, deprived of normal life by a mysterious illness I couldn't shake. My bones ached twenty-four hours a day. My head throbbed at the faintest glimmer of light. If I was indeed a vampire, I certainly wasn't living out the posh existence of a Count Dracula or a Lestat de Lioncourt. I was in a living hell, certainly not by choice.

"Please," he said quietly. "I need to know."

I could have slapped him. "No! What kind of freak do you think I am?"

He shrugged. "There are some people out there, sick people, who want to escape their lives. Maybe they've had some sort of trauma, an illness, the loss of a loved one." He looked me dead in the eyes. "The loss of your parents."

"How do you know about my parents?" I asked through tightly clenched teeth. I hadn't spoken about them since the car accident that had killed them. They'd been on their way to visit me at college. Guilt had kept me from opening up about them. No one, save my distant, remaining relatives in Oregon-many of whom I'd met for the first time at the funeral-knew anything about them or the circumstances of their death."I have connections," he said, as if we were discussing how he'd obtained courtside Lakers' tickets instead of how he'd invaded my privacy. He actually had the nerve to reach across the table and take my hand. "I know what it's like to lose someone. Believe me. I can see why you'd want-"

"I didn't want this!"

I hadn't meant to scream, but it felt good. I wanted to do it again. The ugliness and horror of the past month seemed to swell inside me, pushing me beyond the limits of my self-control.

"Carrie, please-" he tried again, but I ignored him.

My knees bumped the table as I stood, and Nathan's mug toppled over, splashing warm blood across the tabletop. The sight held a sick fascination for me, and in a flash I saw a clear image of myself leaning over and licking it up. I shook my head to destroy the vision. "I didn't want this!"

Jerking the collar of my sweatshirt aside, I jabbed a finger at the barely healed scar on my neck. "Do you think someone would ask for this? Do you think I went down to that morgue and said 'Hey, John Doe, why don't you rip my fucking neck open? Why don't you turn my life to absolute shit?'"

The volume of the music from Ziggy's room drastically lowered. Good. Let him hear.

"Do you think I wanted to sit here and watch some guy I've never met fucking drink blood? I just want my life back!"

No, what I wanted was to scream until my throat was raw. I wanted to stamp my feet and throw things. I wanted to be empty of these feelings of despair and frustration.

Instead, I cried. My legs buckled and I slid to the floor. When Nathan knelt beside me and put his arms out to comfort me, I pushed him away. When he tried again, I didn't fight him.

I couldn't control my sobs as I cried into his firm chest. His wool sweater pricked my cheek. He smelled good, distinctly male and slightly soapy, as if he'd just gotten out of the shower. So what if he was a complete stranger? I'd never been able to cry and let someone comfort me like this before.