"I'd rather not."
"Just take a swig out of the bag!" Bones demanded.
Making a face, I put my mouth around the torn edge and took a tentative sip.
Yuck! Like a mouthful of old pennies. I spat it out. "What were you giving me before? That stuff was excellent, but this is crap."
Spade actually whitened. Bones took the bag back and drained it in with a few powerful swallows.
"Not a thing wrong with it," he pronounced. Then he took a knife from his pants and sliced open my arm without warning.
"Ouch! What was that for?"
I clutched my injured arm, but almost at once, the pain turned into only an itching tingle. Bones pulled my hand back, revealing red-stained but unbroken skin underneath. There wasn't a wound anymore. My forearm had healed completely.
In spite of everything, I began to grin. "That'll save me a world of grief in a fight."
"Are you aware that you're not breathing?" Bones asked.
He was right. I wasn't - and I hadn't even noticed! How can you miss that you're no longer sucking in air? When you don't need to anymore, that's when!
"Her heartbeat," Mencheres said, speaking the first time since I'd opened my eyes. "Is slowing down."
I looked at my chest, as if that could tell me anything. Sure enough, what had started out as an even pace of buh-bump, buh-bumps was winding down to a sluggish buh...buh-bump......buh with longer intervals in between. It felt...well, it felt goddamned weird, is what it did. Like listening to it, I should be panicked or something.
"That's a good thing, right? Maybe it just needed a minute to realize its services were no longer needed."
Bones put an arm around me. "Kitten, how do you feel?"
"Fine. Good, actually. You know, you smell great. Really, really, nnnghghh."
When I came to, it was with more of that wonderful taste in my mouth. This time, however, I was being restrained, with one arm around my waist and the other under my neck. Since I could still see Bones and Spade, it had to be Mencheres who held me.
"What happened?" I asked.
"You bit me," Bones said.
"Huh?"
Spade nodded in confirmation. I was aghast. "I'm sorry, I don't even remember doing that..." Then I trailed off, inhaling near Mencheres's arm. That smell. Mmmm.
The next thing I knew, Mencheres's wrist was in my mouth and I was shaking it from side to side like a shark. When I realized what I was doing, I spat it out.
"Will somebody tell me what the hell is wrong with me?"
Even as I shouted it, I couldn't quit licking my lips. That taste. It was so perfect. God, nothing had ever tasted half this good before!
"You feed on undead blood."
Mencheres made the pronouncement with his usual impenetrable aplomb. Bones arched a brow. Then he came closer, drawing blood from his wrist with a fang and waving it under my nose.
"You want this?"
I lunged forward with a compulsion that I didn't even have time to think about. Mencheres flicked his free hand, and an invisible wall suddenly smacked me in the face.
"Stay still."
I didn't have a choice - I was frozen in midcrouch, with my knees bent, my hands extended, and my mouth open in a rapacious snarl. What was worse was that I didn't care.
"Give me that."
I knew it was my voice, but I didn't recognize the savage sound of it. That pain began to return, the awful one that felt like I was burning from the inside out.
"Give it to me!"
Mencheres let me go. I noticed that only when I saw him standing next to Bones, who retrieved another red-filled bag from a cooler and ripped the end open again. This time, Bones smeared the blood directly on my lips.
"Do you want this?" he asked, holding the bag under my mouth.
I licked the blood from my lips. "No." An angry growl.
The three men exchanged a glance. Then Bones let out a sigh. "Right, then. We'll try it another way."
He swallowed the contents of the bag. I watched the muscles in his throat work the whole time, mesmerized. When he finally came closer, that pain had reached a boiling point, and I had tears running down my face.
"Please. It burns, it burns!"
Bones laid his wrist against my mouth. Later I'd know I tore savagely at it, but at that moment, all I was aware of was the cooling relief from the pain. That wonderful taste running down my throat. How my entire body seemed to sigh with a bliss that felt very close to orgasm.
"You know this is unheard of," Spade was saying. His voice sounded far away. I was still shuddering in delicious rapture from sucking the last few trickles out of Bones's wrist.
"First time for everything," Bones replied. "Just goes to show that when you think you know everything, you don't. Listen. Her heart's stopped now."
That caught my attention. Well, that and his wrist ran dry, which maybe contributed to my noticing my surroundings again.
"Do you think it'll stay stopped?"
They all looked at each other. Finally, with a shrug, Bones removed another blood bag from the cooler and answered me before he drank it.
"Reckon we'll find out."
The small, reinforced basement room was essentially a prison. No windows, only one door, which was locked from the outside. A twin bed against the far wall. Several books, both new and well used. Pen and paper. And, of course, the cooler.
It was filled with blood bags and, to my surprise, bottles of water. Bones explained those would help keep me hydrated while my metabolism went haywire, burning through all the sustenance it received from the blood without sparing any to prevent me from looking, well, dry. I had to drink water for the first week or so. Then, I was told, I only needed to drink a glass a day of any kind of liquid. Gin and tonic topped my list.
The scent of blood was thick in the air. The room was also rich with the scents of Spade, Bones, Mencheres, and others who had been here before us. I was trying to identify all the different smells, but it was hard, considering my limited frame of reference.
Three more times, that overwhelming hunger hit me, and I'd black out only to find myself latched onto Bones like a rampaging leech. Mencheres had let me out of his invisible cement suit after Bones stated that as long as he kept refilling, it didn't matter how many times I drained him. And since I went flat crazy whenever that need took me, there was no reason for anyone else to get chewed on. I also got the distinct impression that they wanted to keep my unusual diet a secret.
"It figures I couldn't even do this the normal way," I said, after licking the last drops from his wrist yet again. A small part of me wondered why I wasn't embarrassed by my behavior. Helplessly sucking on someone's vein was the height of dependence, yet I didn't care. Maybe because I was still riding the euphoria another bellyful of Bones's blood gave me.