Blood Born: Cora's Choice #2 Read Free

than we were at the start,” Dorian Thorne said. “But we do know this: The saliva of a vampire is fatal when introduced into the bloodstream of most humans, but those it does not kill, it heals. And changes. Forever.”

     

Chapter Two
    C hanges. My heart hammered in my chest. I didn’t want to be changed. I wanted my life back, the one the leukemia threatened to steal from me.
    “I ’m not a vampire now, am I?” I demanded.
    “ Vampires are born, not made,” Dorian Thorne said. “You are something else. No longer fully human, but not a vampire, either.”
    I didn’t like that answer, and I wanted to pursue it, but another question, more troubling though less personal, was pressing upon me. “Why bite people at all, then, if it means they’ll usually die?”
    “ Because I die, if I do not. And it is not an easy death or a swift one,” he said.
    His eyes tightened briefly. He opened a drawer and pulled out a large syringe, like the kind used for giving oral medications. At my expression, he said, “For the catheter. You want it out, don’t you?”
    I nodded curtly. “So you’re not actually...you know, undead,” I said, feeling foolish.
    He reached down beside the bed and came up with a loop of tubing. He put the syringe to a port on the tube and pulled out the plunger, sucking a clear liquid into it. My eyes jerked to the ceiling because at the same moment, I felt a pressure inside my bladder release.
    “ No, not undead.” He sounded weary. “I am as alive and sensible, in the old meaning of the word, as any human. And you can remove the catheter now,” he added. “Unless you require assistance.”
    “ No,” I said quickly. “Not at all.”
    I reached under the blanket and slid the catheter free with a tug. I tore through the wrap that secured the tube to my leg and pushed it all off the side of the bed, adjusting my gown back down again.
    I was free. Or as free as I could be while trapped in a room with a vampire.
    “ So why don’t you just drink animal blood? A really rare steak?” I challenged. “Do people just taste better?”
    He snorted. “Animal blood does no more for us than it does for you.”
    “ Blood donations?”
    “ Cora, we have tried. Over years, centuries, millennia, we have tried. If I could drink blood removed from its host or take the life of a mouse or cow instead of a human, I would. Many of us would.” A frown crossed his face, creasing his forehead for a moment before it relaxed again, leaving no mark. “But it is the interaction between a living, human host and the vampiric enzymes that produce a change in the cells themselves that we need to live.”
    “ So you eat people.”
    The disgust of it should have been greater. I was horrified, but it was a muted, intellectual reaction. I knew he very well could have killed me—killed me to save himself, perhaps, and I would have gone eagerly enough to my grave, but I would still be just as dead. And I knew with certainty that he’d killed before, people just like me, people who had given themselves to him, heart and soul, only to be devoured in the end.
    “ Not like food,” he said. “More like a vitamin, without which we develop something like scurvy or rickets. I don’t sit down to dine on living victims every night. Not every week or even every month.”
    I shuddered. “That’s really no different from...from buying organs from stolen living donors on the black market.”
    His eyes, pale and icy, seemed to open to another world, drawing me in. “There is a difference, Cora. When a human kills a human, it is murder, and there is no consent asked or given. When a human kills a creature that is not human, or vice versa....”
    And he wasn’t human. He was a too-perfect facsimile of one, too beautiful to bear. I knew how a deep-sea fish felt, enticed into the gaping mouth of an abysmal monster with the glowing lure on the end of its tongue.
    “ We aren’t animals,” I breathed.
    “ You aren’t. But what