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Silence stretched. She waited. Finally, he flexed his arms, and, maintaining the pose, lifted into a handstand. She stopped breathing.

“Hunger,” he said, sounding distracted as he floated his feet to the ground behind him, forming an arch. From there, he stood up as if gravity didn’t apply to him. He came to sit beside her again. “There is always the hunger.”

“I see.” She turned to reach for her shawl. “I suppose you could equate that with drawing breath, which is a hunger for—”

The vampire was gone.

She looked around, bewildered. “What did I say?”

A faint sound caught her ear. A woman wailing? She couldn’t be sure. But there was no mistaking the hysterical shriek that followed.

“Get away from me!”

10

A Matter of Trust

Dominique found Cassidy slumped on the front porch of their cottage, gut-wrenching sobs and keening shaking her body. Clutched in her arms was…

“Mon Dieu.”

The smell of fresh blood obscured the creature’s familiar scent, but the shaggy, black fur was unmistakable. He rushed forward, reaching for her. “What happened?”

She jerked upright, unaware of him until that moment. Her eyes brimmed with grief—and flashed with rage. “Get away from me!”

Disoriented, he froze where he was.

“I said, don’t touch me, you fucking bastard!” she shrieked, possessed by grief, spittle flying from her snarling lips.

Dominique couldn’t even begin to fathom what was happening, or why she would attack him like this. It was as if he had fallen into a twisted alternate reality where confusion swirled in the night as thick as the scent of blood.

“Get away from me!” she screamed again, startling him into stumbling backwards as though slapped.

Serge appeared beside him, Samantha in his arms. He unceremoniously deposited her on her feet.

“Whoa, what happened?” she said, staggering a little as she pushed wind-blown hair out of her face and eyes. When she spotted Cassidy, she rushed to her friend’s side. “Oh, sweetie, what’s going on?”

“Sam, look! Look what he did,” Cassidy wailed and placed the bundle of fur in a shaft of light falling from the open door.

Eddie’s body wasn’t quite limp anymore. His death wasn’t immediately recent, but it was clearly violent. His clouding eyes were frozen in a sightless stare, his jaw agape. She pushed the huge, unresisting paws apart to reveal his belly…and a raw, gaping hole.

Samantha gasped. “Oh, noooo.”

Cassidy more than sobbed; she howled. Anguish contorted her face and curled her body into a fetal ball. Dominique closed his eyes, fighting to regain his balance between wanting to comfort her, knowing she wouldn’t permit it, and his own ache at seeing the mutilated carcass of a creature he thought of as his little predator brother.

“Dominique, how could you?” Samantha hissed.

His eyes snapped open. “What?”

Serge muttered under his breath in a language Dominique didn’t know.

“Look at this damage! Who but a vampire would do such a thing? And it sure as hell wasn’t Serge!”

The fog finally lifted from his brain, revealing a whole new level of horror. “Moi, non. I did not do this. Eddie is…was dear to me.”

Cassidy looked up, her swollen face wet and splotchy. “Which is why you purposely scared the shit out of him last week and haven’t looked at him since.”

“No, I—”