Blood Ties

8. Facts of (Vampire) Life

“I know this is difficult to understand, sweetheart, but I swear, it’s the God’s honest truth.” Adam was trying—along with the rest of the family—to convince her they were vampires.

It was going swimmingly, of course.

“Okay, so which one of you turns into a bat and which one sleeps in a coffin?” Her eyes were bright, amused. It was the first hint of enjoyment they had seen in Quinn, even though she was poking fun at a mythical creature who supposedly drank blood and lived in estates in Beverly Hills with a pool out back and a hot tub connected.

Logical.

“For f**k’s sake,” Charlie muttered as Cassie smiled understandingly at Quinn.

“Here… Maybe this will help.” Cass got up from the couch and sauntered over to the wall before shifting a canvas up so it was facing the ceiling. Behind it, there was a safe that looked too high-tech to belong anywhere but at a secure government agency like the CIA or FBI. In a house in L.A. and some other neighboring cities, it was a little out of place, even if the house itself was modernized regularly.

Quinn watched as Cassie meticulously opened the tiny vault, taking out a single piece of paper that was encased in a plastic sleeve. She walked over, handed the sealed document to the young girl, who looked it over carefully before her gaze wandered back up. She blinked.

“I did the math. This says you should be almost 60 years old,” she said.

Cassie nodded. “Yes, I’m 57, going on 58 in a few months.”

Quinn peered at her as if studying every inch of her face looking for a tell. “You don’t look it. You don’t even look like you’ve gotten plastic surgery. I bet your doc makes a f*****g mint.”

She was a little more verbal because she’d been given tea spiked with whiskey. It had been offered, and she was eager to agree to a spiked drink.

Cassie smiled understandingly back at her. “I’ve never gone under the knife, my dear. I was born human and then was found by my mate, Elijah, when I was in my early 20s. We had some difficult times, but we bonded and he turned me vampire. I swear it.”

“Wait—what? What do you mean you were found by your mate? Is this like a euphemism for something?” Quinn did look confused, gazing between everyone gathered in the room. It was the entire immediate family with the exception of Nia, who was still working in New York City. “Please explain this in a gathering of words that makes some form of sense.”

Adam was trying desperately to be a patient man. Desperate being the operative word. For some reason, where his father had the patience of a saint, he was severely lacking. Maybe it was on account of Eli’s centuries-long wait, or maybe it was just the way he was deep, deep down. No one could tell, for scientists had never studied the vampire condition, just the human one, and it was always a precarious and unsure path of medicine. Times had changed over the last 35 years, but science was always progressing, even if it felt like it was at a snail’s pace.

The human mind, though, was still almost a complete mystery.

As was a vampire’s.

“Sweetheart—love,” Adam crooned. “We are a race that finds one person—a soulmate, if you will—for our lifetime.”

“We believe that because humans are more fragile and their bond to their vampire mate is so intense, it forms slowly, sometimes over months or even years,” Eli interjected wisely.

Adam once again picked up on the topic to expound upon it. “A mate is a once in a lifetime thing, and there are no second chances. A vampire’s mate is always human, and always open to the supernatural. Yes, your first instinct will be to think this is some sort of joke or a prank for viewership, but in this case it is not. It is factual and the reason you dreamt of me before meeting.” He paused and took in her stunned expression. “You did, didn’t you? You said something about it when you woke up on the plane earlier.”

She took a breath and slowly nodded her head. The tense set of Adam’s shoulders relaxed, and he breathed a little easier. If she didn’t remember asking about it, that was fine, so long as she remembered the dream itself.

“I-I did, but it wasn’t on the plane I dreamt it, but before that. That last night before you took me, I had a dream, I remember your eyes because how bright green they are. I was so startled when I saw them after you tied me up, I thought I was going insane. I couldn’t have seen you before I even met you, right? Am I nuts?”

Adam moved closer quickly, wary of startling her but craving that closeness. The bond, he felt, was working far too slow for him, even if he’d only been in her presence for a couple of days. His was fine, as far as he was concerned, because the need to be with her blossomed in every cell of his body. Because she was human, it worked as slowly as it always did.

“That should tell you something about us then,” Adam explained. “This is destiny, something that was bound to happen by fate. Most vampires find the other half of their souls somewhere between 25 and 50 years of age, though my father waited much longer.” He looked over at Eli, who nodded back.

“I waited for 450 years until I found Adam’s mother. It’s nearly unheard of, and no one I’ve ever known has waited longer than 45 to 50 years. I thought mine had died long ago and I just stopped looking. I…I gained quite a reputation in Hollywood. If you look up my name on the internet, you will see that I haven’t aged at all. In fact, that’s a damned good idea—just to prove to you that I am a vampire after all.”

He slipped his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it. Scrolling through it, his eyes locked onto a likely article that was a few decades old before handing it over to his son, who showed the date and photo of Eli, arm and arm with Cassie at a film premier for Redemption, her second movie script to be produced for the masses.

Quinn stared at the photo for a moment and then looked up at Eli. There was no change, not in facial structure like there would be with plastic surgery, and with the exception of his hair being a tiny bit longer now, nothing else had changed.

“This is…it’s you?” It came out as a question, and Eli nodded smiled back down at her. “Decades ago, yes. That was at Cassie’s second movie premier. The first one…well, there were problems that occurred, and the photos are probably all over the internet if you dare look, but many were taken down due to a resulting crime investigation. A long and sordid story, and not one that we have time to go into right now. Besides, Michael or Delia could tell it better. I’m sure you will meet them as soon as you get acclimated to our way of life. They don’t live too far, and Michael is one of my closest and dearest friends. Delia, his mate, was also human and knew Cass from even before I met her. They worked together at a…a gentlemen’s club in downtown L.A. Christ, I don’t even know if it still exists anymore.”

“It does, though under new management,” Cassie supplied offhandedly.

“So…so this is you from ages ago, and yet you looked like you haven’t aged at all. How is that possible?” Quinn looked thunderstruck, and she gazed between each person in the crowd surrounding her.

Adam spoke again. “We age normally until about 30-35 years of old. After that, we don’t appear to age at all. Thousands of years can go by, but we’d look the same. The only thing that can kill us is silver, and usually that would take a lot…in the form of liquid and enough to overcome what blood we have in our veins.”

Quinn swallowed loudly. “So, you do drink blood? Is it like that old TV show with the vampires and werewolves and fairies?”

Even Charlie scoffed at that. “No way. No emo bitches here, honey. Just a few silver screen afficionados and a screenwriter.”

“In a few years I’ll have to pretend I died and start all over again,” Cassie muttered.

Quinn was still trying to swallow the bitter pill of a possible immortal lifetime and could only blink. “So you would have to turn me into a vampire and I’d live forever?”

“Well, vampires can always die, but we can only procreate with our soulmates. Yes, indeed we are not completely impenetrable, but it’s hard to kill us. In order to make you one of us, we would share our essence. You would sleep for approximately 12 hours and wake up yearning for human blood. We do no feed often from humans, but we can and will in a bind. In the beginning—when you are a newly-born vampire, the bloodthirst is strong, and we try not to integrate with humans much for at least the first year until we have our bloodlust under control.” Adam moved slightly closer. “Babies are the same. They learn within a year of life what to do and what not to do, and they are far smarter than human children.”

“And you can only have children with your mate—that’s what you’re alluding to before, right?” Quinn’s throat started to close up. There was too much information to take in, and she was starting to panic.

“Yes, love,” Adam asserted. “The same goes with the human mate. He or she can try and try to have babies with another man or woman, but it will never happen. Their womb or seed is made only for one person to process properly, and will not work with any DNA. With all that is known about the human form, it seems impossible, but it’s true.”

Cassie leaned forward and spoke. “I was involved with a man before Eli. He was awful. Dead now, but that’s another story. He was a sadist and rapist. A cheat and liar as well. Anyway, he never used condoms when we had s*x, and yet I got pregnant with Adam and Charlotte right away after becoming bonded to Eli. I knew even before that what this was because I’d seen Eli feed off someone before—again another long story—but it made me think that he’d been completely truthful. I couldn’t get pregnant by Tanner no matter how often he refused to use a condom and how frequently we had sex.”

Quinn was starting to become uncomfortable with the topic, especially with people who were supposedly old enough to be her parents. “Do I have to be made like…like you in order to become pregnant, or is like that one movie with the sparkly vampires?”

“You need to be made vampire before any of that happens, and it usually takes years for a turned-vampire to become fertile enough to reproduce. Cassie may have had Adam and Charlie straightaway, but most mates don’t have children for 20-30 years after bonding. It’s something having to do with the slow maturation, though no one knows what. There aren’t exactly vampires who need doctoring out there. We don’t get colds or suffer from cancers, and we never run a fever. We are pretty indestructible unless you are clever and can trap us. Hasn’t happened that I’m aware of, but we aren’t loved by all other supernatural creatures.”

“Again, a story for another time,” Cassie stated firmly.

“Other supernaturals…” It was murmured as Quinn blinked rapidly. She was just trying to get used to the idea of vampires, which was difficult at best. “I still don’t know if I believe you all. You look so…so normal.”

Adam smiled while the rest of them chuckled softly. “We can eat real food but need a steady diet of blood to survive. We live forever and never age past what you see today. It’s difficult keeping a low profile doing what we do, but we have ways of aging ourselves so we can be seen in public for much longer.”

“Plus, we have money, and people just assume we’ve had work done.” Cassie shrugged her shoulders. “A little annoying, but it works as a cover for long enough that we can be seen until we can’t be seen.”

“And when you have this much money, the skies the limit,” Eli added.

Quinn blew out a breath, thinking. She wished there was a way that she could be certain they weren’t f*****g with her, but she had no idea how that could be accomplished. After a minute, she looked over at Adam, and blinked. “Vampires? Really?”

Adam nodded, looking a little uncertain. “We can prove it to you, if you like. We’ve made… We’ve taken necessary steps to ensure you will believe us.” He paused. “Want to see?”

Quinn took in a light breath before nodding her head slowly.