Page 6 of Unholy Gambit: Checkmate in Blood (A Paranormal Halloween #5)

Aury pulled out first, since she knew where they were going, and she considered everything she’d learned.

He wasn’t a normal human, he could change her memories, he could turn her pain sensors off, and he hadn’t aged.

Since he could fuck with her mind, that last part wasn’t a sure thing, so she scratched it off the things she was positive of.

She was also certain that, if she was in danger, getting into his car wasn’t putting her in more danger. If he intended to kidnap her or enslave her or whatever, he could likely do that whether she got into his car of her own free will or not.

Also, there wasn’t anyone she could go to for help. If she started talking about some kind of superman who’d saved her life when she was five, and who’d come back into her life without aging a day, her family would have Dr. Woods deal with it, and it might involve locking her up and drugging her.

And that led her to another train of thought. If Dr. Woods had recognized her memories had been fucked with, and known who to contact to ask who’d done so, what did that make him?

She’d be seeing him in two days. She’d ask him.

Ruby had two parking spaces assigned to her, and Aury parked in one of them, slid her key fob into her pocket, and slipped into the sleek Genesis.

“It’s a rental car,” he told her when she complimented it. “I haven’t been in town long, and I’m here as a tourist. If I decide to stay, I’ll have to return home to apply for a work visa, but it shouldn’t be a problem to attain one.”

“Do you have a job? You just dropped everything and came because… why?”

He pulled into a half-full restaurant parking lot and angled into a shadowed corner at the back. “There’s something we have to do before I can legally tell you what I am. If we can do that now, here, then I can explain everything over our meal.”

No way was she agreeing to anything without understanding the process. “Explain what we have to do, please.”

“It’s a blood oath,” he said calmly. “I’m a vampire. A few drops of my blood won’t change you, and won’t harm you in any way. I have a cooler with small bottles of Stella Rosa, which I understand you like. I’ll put a few drops of my blood in.

He paused to listen in on her thoughts when her pulse rate spiked, a proportional blend of relief and shock he’d seen before in others, but never cared about. She believed him, when he told her what he is. Not an ounce of doubt.

Most people reacted like startled livestock: panic first, then thoughts of escape. But not his Aurélie, she sat still, ignoring her biological response while she turned it over in that sharp mind of hers, measuring risk, cataloging it, realizing truths in rapid-fire order.

He wanted to touch her, anchor her, but the moment felt too precarious. One wrong move and he could tip her from measured logic into fight-or-flight. Better to keep his hands to himself and keep moving forward.

“I’ll need a few drops of your blood, which can go into the water bottle. Before we drink, you’ll say you promise to keep my secrets, and then think of what you’re agreeing to hold secret while you drink the wine.”

* * * *

Aury took a moment to consider his explanation and her options.

It was about moving forward. Risk versus reward.

If he was lying, a few drops of his blood might change her into whatever he was, but vampire lore said you needed a lot of the creature’s blood.

But she didn’t see Axel as a creature . Was that his doing? Had he messed with her mind?

Obviously, he had when she was a child, but the irony was that what had broken through made him a good guy. He’d tried to hide from her the fact he’d saved her life.

Back to lore, she wasn’t aware of any about drinking a few drops of a demon’s blood. Or an angel’s. Or any of the pantheon deities.

But she hadn’t thought any of those things about him when she was five. Nothing religious. The bad monster and the good one.

The terror of her nightmares came back to her. Her heart thudded low in her chest, her body reacting to the pull of whatever this moment was becoming. Her palms went damp, her throat tight, breath coming faster no matter how she tried to control it.

If she said no , he’d stop talking. She’d lose the chance of finding out the actual truth of what she’d seen in her dreams. She’d always known the memories were bullshit, despite what the psychiatrists had said.

She needed to know whatever he could tell her. Not wanted, not hoped for. Needed. A necessity rooted so deep it felt like part of her bones, seeded the night she was five years old, and had only grown sharper, hungrier, exponentially more relentless with every year since.

She didn’t trust her voice, so she looked straight ahead, out the windshield, and nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “I need to tell you a few secrets beforehand, so you’ll know what you’re oathing, what you’re promising. There are different kinds of vampires. The one who attacked your mother was evil. Anyone turned by them, even a good person, will become evil.

“I’m a different kind of vampire. We can choose whether to be good or bad. I won’t tell you I’m good, because I haven’t always been, but I’m doing my best to not be evil at this stage of my long, long life.”

“How old are you?”

* * * *

Axel had been hoping to guide her to easy questions, and that one had worked. He understood how her complicated mind strategized though, so he didn’t expect the plan to sustain.

“Seven hundred years old. A baby compared to the most powerful of us, but I have enough strength to hold my own.”

He shook his head when she’d have asked another question, and told her.

“I didn’t know my heritage when I was human.

I knew I wasn’t like the others, that I didn’t possess the emotions they did, or what we thought of at the time as sympathy, though now I understand to be better described as empathy. ”

He paused. This wasn’t something he was used to sharing, but she needed to know everything up front. Her martial mind would accept nothing less.

“Even now, I don’t experience either as an emotion, only as a thought process. Concepts. My maker turned me because of my ruthlessness, and vampirism only made me a better monster, in those first centuries.”

Her brow furrowed. “What kind of heritage would make you ruthless?”

“As a human, I was…” He exhaled, struggling to explain what he’d never spoken aloud. “I’m now aware my grandfather on my mother’s side was a full-demon, and my great-great-grandfather on my father’s side was one, too.”

He double-checked their surroundings. No brains in the parking lot or the woods. None in the restaurant with the power to pick up on what he was saying. When he was certain Aury had processed the math, if not the implications, he continued.

“This explains why my maker’s master had to control me, as my maker wasn’t able to, which is unheard of. They nearly destroyed me in those early months. No one understood the reasons for my unusual reaction to vampirism, at the time.”

He gave her a few seconds to absorb that, listening in on her thoughts. She catalogued the information with clinical precision — unemotional, without judgment.

But she assumed he was in her head, so she kept her conclusions neutral on purpose. Smart girl.

Frustrating, but smart.

He kept going. “There are rules against turning demons into vampires, and for good reason. When testing became available a few decades ago, my numbers came in at thirty-two-and-a-half percent demon, just under a third.”

He held her gaze. This was his truth. Not many people knew, but he wasn’t going to look away out of shame. She’d have to accept him for what he is, and she couldn’t do that unless he told her.

He tuned into her thoughts, catching the initial rush, relief tangled with defiance, accepting his explanation while rejecting the idea he was evil. In her eyes, he’d saved the innocent child from the truly evil predator in the room, and it took a monster to defeat the monster.

The adult Aury understood this was the view of the five-year-old Aurélie, but it slotted neatly into her martial logic.

War is hell. The good guys have to turn hard to defeat the bad guys.

Chess is a strategy game. Real life needs strategy to survive, but it isn’t a game.

You can’t walk away from the board when the game is over if your legs are shattered.

And damn, but that last thought threatened to wreck him. He wanted to hold her, protect her, but she needed to stay in her head for this, to logic through it instead of feeling her way through it.

She drew in steady, measured breaths, letting her pulse settle while her mind reordered the chaos, focusing on the order of things even with the supernatural truths layered in. He caught the change in her scent as the fear thinned, the warm spice of her skin edging back toward calm.

Her adrenaline levels dropped, and he continued.

“Legally, it meant I could live. Barely. If I hadn’t already been alive for centuries, hadn’t already proven my control, I doubt I’d have been allowed to remain a free vampire, living in society.”

In her thoughts, he saw her mind doing the math. This made him a hybrid monster from nightmares and horror films, and yet, she was completely calm. Logical.

“You saved me. That means you aren’t a monster. You’re a good guy.”

“You tried to defend your mother from an evil vampire. You threw yourself at the fucker and beat your little fists on…”

He shook his head, looked into her eyes and took the biggest risk of his long, violent life.

“I think I fell in love with you in that moment, when I’ve never felt love for anyone .

Not even my parents and siblings. My family was necessary to my survival, so they were important, but it was transactional.

I conformed to the family’s rules because I needed food, shelter, clothes. ”

And didn’t that sum up the centuries he’d lived. Fuck .