Chapter 6

This has to be a hallucination. A drug-induced delirium that's causing me to see and hear things that aren't there. Why else would there be a crow in here watching TV? None of this is real, and Naomi has no idea what I truly am.

The beat of my heart is loud and chaotic as I look down at Naomi. There is such intense fear in her eyes. Fear that I created. I hate myself for that. As my grip around her long, delicate neck loosens, Naomi brings her arm over mine and drives her elbow into my forearm, causing me to let go completely. Her movements are much faster than I anticipated, and her shape becomes a blur as she breaks free. I stumble backward, but not before Naomi sends her fist into my crotch.

Searing pain shoots through my body as I double over and fall to my knees. This is a greater pain than I have ever experienced, and on more than one occasion, my scales were slowly burned off my body during battles on Sufoi. I would trade this pain for that in an instant if I could.

How did that tiny vampire best me? It doesn't make sense.

"N-not a hallu…hallucination," I groan as I press my forehead against the cool linoleum floor. I wait for Naomi and her mystical undead strength to land another blow, but instead, she places an ice pack on the floor next to my head.

"For your balls," she says, "or the tip. I don't know which part took the brunt of my punch."

I whimper as I take the ice pack in hand and slowly inch backward and wiggle myself into a seated position against the wall next to the couch. Pressing the ice against my cock instantly provides relief, and I sit there with my eyes half-open as I wait for the pain to fade. Naomi takes a seat at the small round table beside the fridge and places her chin in her hands as she watches me. There's no malice in her gaze, however. If anything, there's remorse, which I find odd.

"Sorry about that," she says, confirming my suspicions. "It's crazy because I'm not even that strong of a vampire yet, since I'm so young. But the elbow thing is a self-defense move I learned before I was turned, and the superhuman speed certainly helped."

"Tell me," I mutter through gritted teeth. There's an endless list of questions I wish to ask, but those two words are all I can get out at the moment.

"About what?" she replies. "How I know you're not human?"

I nod.

"Easy. You don't smell human, and I have no desire to kill you or suck your blood. I've only felt that way around other vampires, and I knew you weren't one of us. But it was also obvious you weren't one of them."

"Obvious?" How the fuck was it obvious? I'm insulted. My brothers and I have spent more than a decade trying to blend in among the pale, flannel-covered beings of central New Hampshire, and Naomi could detect my otherness the moment we met?

"Yeah," she says with a chuckle. "Well, obvious to me."

I grunt in discomfort as I adjust the ice pack and shift my position against the wall. "Explain."

"Just little things," she begins. "Your stillness, for one. Humans are always scratching or stretching or shifting their bodies. They can't remain still for more than a handful of seconds, but you can. I've seen it. And whenever I notice you being unnaturally still, it's a reminder that I need to move more so that I don't stand out. It's a skill I'm still working on."

I suppose stillness is not such a drastic tell. Luckily, humans are such self-absorbed creatures that I doubt any of them would notice me being still for too long. They are far more concerned with how they are perceived by others than they are with what others are doing.

"What else?"

"Um, lemme think." She drums her fingers against her cheek as she takes a sip from her bottle. I've never seen her without that bottle in hand, come to think of it. She brings it into meetings, she drinks from it on video calls, and it's always on her desk. A bottle that surely has blood in it, I now realize. "Oh! You don't sneeze in the sunlight. That's how I knew you weren't a vampire."

"What?" It's such a bizarre observation, I'm not sure where to begin. "You sneeze in the sunlight?"

"Yeah. It's a mild allergy. Some of us have it worse than others, but none have died from exposure to sunlight in over a century. That's one of the many aspects of our lifestyle that fiction authors continuously get wrong. Haven't you noticed that I wear that big hat into the office on sunny days?"

"I've seen your hat, yes, but I thought nothing of you wearing it into work." Why would that be something I would notice or care about? It's a hat, not a shield of armor, although, I suppose that's what it is for her. Now that she mentions it, I have seen people sneeze in the daylight upon looking at the sun. I thought it was an innocent human quirk. "You're telling me that everyone who sneezes because of the sun is a vampire?"

"Yep." She laughs, then lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, "We're everywhere."

I suck in a breath as a nagging thought pops into my head. "Wait, is that why you have no scent?"

She nods. "We don't sweat. Our hearts don't beat. Physically, we're frozen in time and will forever look the way we did when we were turned. My hair will never grow longer than this, and I'll never get my period again, or form wrinkles. We're technically dead, but still alive. It's weird."

"Your lack of scent did baffle me."

"Does it bother you?"

"Not at all. I appreciate it, actually."

"I get that. Humans are so foul, aren't they?"

"Yes!" I shout in agreement, relieved that someone finally understands. "Why do they have such strong odors? And why do they add even more artificial scents to cover their natural ones? It doesn't work. It just creates multiple layers of rank."

"Oh my god, I know. Like Beverly from accounting? How awful is her perfume?"

Beverly is precisely who I was picturing when I mentioned artificial scents. No one smells worse than Beverly. "I'd prefer a decaying corpse beneath the hot sun to her perfume. Does she have a faulty nasal passage? How can she not know how offensive it is?"

Naomi throws back her head and laughs. "It's so bad. Or what about Jeremy, Thea's assistant? There's the pine-scented deodorant that he must put all over his body, and the beachy cologne he clearly pours on himself every morning."

"He has worked for Thea for six years, and not once has she mentioned it to me. I don't understand it. I wouldn't be able to breathe."

"I appreciate the effort in trying to smell good," Naomi adds. "But, bro, that is too much. This is an office, not a club in Miami."

"Then there are the rare good-smelling humans like Clyde, the maintenance supervisor. He always smells like apple cider. I believe he makes it himself."

"Really?" Her eyes light up at that. "I haven't met Clyde yet. I'll have to track him down just to get a whiff."

She offers me the last mango cupcake, and it's then that I realize my high is gone. I'm not looking to return to the state of awe that held me firmly in its grasp before, though it was quite fun, but my stomach is reminding me that I haven't had dinner, and nothing sounds more appetizing than another one of her cupcakes.

"Mm," I groan in pleasure upon my first bite. The burst of tangy fruit on my tongue is a welcome distraction from the throbbing pain of my bruised cock, and I have to urge myself to take smaller bites to make it last.

I now realize this is why I've never seen her eat. Because she doesn't.

"So what are you, boss?" Naomi asks, a sly expression on her face. "I showed you mine…" She opens her mouth, and I watch as her teeth lengthen into sharp points. Then, not even a heartbeat later, she retracts her fangs and offers me a shy smile.

Should I tell her? She already knows I'm not human, but she isn't either, and if she were to reveal the truth of my kind, I'd have the same leverage over her. "I come from a planet called Sufoi. Quite far from here and well beyond your galaxy."

"Ooh, an alien?" Her eyes sparkle with excitement as she chews on the inside of her cheek. "I was kind of hoping I'd get to see the first female president before the discovery of aliens, but, eh, I'll take it."

"Yes, I am what you would call an alien, but I'm also able to shift forms."

She smacks her palm on the table. "A shifter? No fucking way! That's so cool. What can you shift into?"

This is not the reaction any of my brothers' mates had. With Naomi, there's not even a hint of fear. She seems curious and excited to learn more about my other form. Not that I see Naomi as a potential mate, of course. That kind of bond with another is not meant for me. Though I suppose she is the closest woman in my life. It used to be Thea, but in just a week's time, I've grown to like Naomi more than I thought possible. I…trust her, somewhat. Not entirely, as that would be foolish, and I am no fool.

I think she's becoming my friend. There's no one else I can speak to like this. Not even my brothers.

"Where I'm from, we are called draxilios," I tell her, "but you'd call me a dragon."

Her mouth falls open in a silent shriek. "A dragon? As in a flying, fireball-spitting, nemesis-destroying dragon?"

I don't know why she added that third term, but my draxilio purrs happily upon hearing it. "Indeed."

"That's so handy. You must fly everywhere. Why do you even own a car when you can fly?"

"Because I don't fly everywhere. In draxilio form, we have the ability to cloak ourselves as soon as our feet leave the ground, to ensure no one can see us from below, but in order to cloak, we first need to shift, and it's hard to do that without someone seeing us."

"Us? So your brothers are dragon shifters too?"

Fuck. I shouldn't have said us. The focus needs to be on me. Only me.

"That's a dumb question," she says, shaking her head. "They're your brothers, so obviously they're the same species."

I decide to ignore her comment and hope a change of subject helps her forget she ever brought it up. "Tell me more about your life as a vampire. How long has it been since you were turned? What else do authors get wrong about your kind?"

She proceeds to tell me about her previous life in Seattle as a doctor who guided babies on their journey from womb to world and how much she loved that responsibility; no matter how heavy it hung on her shoulders. She was proud to deliver critical care to people during such a precious, life-changing moment. Her face lights up as she recalls a night when a woman in labor was driven to the hospital by her husband, and the birth was so quick that, with the help of Naomi and her team, she delivered a set of healthy twins on the sidewalk just outside the hospital doors.

Her mood turns somber, however, when she tells me about her maker, Xavier, and how he tore her away from a life she loved and used violence and psychological torture to break her spirit. But her spirit could not be broken. Despite what she had become, she still felt a deep sense of duty to protect humans from harm. It meant denying her new instincts, but she did so in order to keep those around her safe. And to this day, eight years later, she still refuses to feed the way her peers do.

Her willpower is impressive. The only source of sustenance vampires have is blood, so knowing she rejects the primary method of securing it in order to find a more humane alternative leaves me speechless, especially when she tells me how much stronger a newly changed vampire's thirst for blood is. I've never encountered a more selfless act than what Naomi has done and continues to do each day she walks this Earth.

"I was so lucky to find Quincy and others like us. Before that, I felt so alone. Like such a freak. The Sippers, as we like to call ourselves."

She tells me about Quincy's secret meetings, held in the back of the Dunkin" Donuts location he owns, and the other Sippers she's met there.

"Without them, I'd probably turn into the monster Xavier wanted me to become," she says, her voice shaking a bit when she says his name. "It would take time, but that would be my fate."

I crack my knuckles instinctively as she continues sharing memories of her maker. He is a vile creature that I would be honored to personally destroy. Perhaps, if we are friends long enough, she'll tell me where he is. "Why you?" I ask. "Why did he choose you?"

"There were a few doctors in the area that went missing around that time," she says, her voice growing hoarse with emotion. "Xavier never explicitly told me he did it, and I was too afraid to ask, but I heard him talking on the phone one day, and he said something about needing more medical staff to secure our immortality."

"You are immortal? Why would he need to turn more doctors if nothing can kill you?"

"Well, we're mostly immortal," she corrects. "A stake through the heart is the only thing that can kill us, but the Sippers movement is growing. I didn't know it at the time, but that trend was already a thing, and old-school vampires like Xavier like to spout off about Sippers creating a generation of weaker vampires who won't live as long because they don't know how to suck and who are destined to become slaves to the humans, yada, yada, yada."

"Mm. You disagree with this."

"Yeah," she exclaims, loudly enough to wake Felix from his peanut-induced stupor to caw at us. "Vampires like Xavier see the world as Darwinian, so if our main method of survival is hunting humans for blood, then those of us who refuse to do so won't survive. We were easy to ignore when there were only a few of us. Sippers back in the day would be mocked or ostracized from their cells, and nobody paid much attention. But now they see that our numbers are growing, probably because we don't need to hunt the way we used to and because of the Internet. There are other ways to access blood without hypnotizing humans into a non-consensual act, or worse, murder. And if we keep killing off our main food source, how the fuck do any of them expect us to remain immortal? Their argument makes no sense."

I haven't seen Naomi this worked up except when she spilled the water on me in the middle of this morning's meeting. It's an intoxicating sight to behold. Her cheeks pinken, and she gestures with her hands more frequently to make her point. It must be a habit from her human days, as she explained earlier that stillness is more instinctual for vampires.

She's no ordinary vampire though. Naomi sparkles like the rarest of gems, and I find myself humbled to catch even a flicker of her light.

I don't know how or why she came into my life, but I like that she's here. Though that doesn't explain why such a brilliant woman would settle for a job as my assistant. When I ask her about it, she shrugs, gazing off in the distance, and says, "I needed something to occupy my time, and it's not like I can go back into practicing medicine."

"Why not?"

The look she gives me indicates the answer should be obvious. "Too risky. I'd worry that my true nature would take over the moment I saw fresh blood, and I'd be a danger to everyone around me."

"But you seem so composed in the presence of humans at the office, and that was a job you worked so hard to get."

"Compared to most vampires my age, I have exceptional control over my thirst. I was turned just eight years ago, and technically, it's illegal to let vampires have consistent access to humans before they turn twenty. Most can't be trusted."

"Illegal?" I ask, confused. "According to what laws?"

"Vampires have their own legal system," she tells me. "There were too many rogue vampires making their own vampire armies, and it became a huge, bloody mess. A lot of people died, and it took a lot of hypnotizing to make the surviving humans forget it ever happened. The oldest vampires from across the globe came together and founded the International Vampire Administration, the IVA, and drew up the first set of laws our kind was expected to follow."

How fascinating. An entire species that the people of Earth are certain does not exist, has existed for centuries, and they even live by their own justice system.

"That's why every vampire has to be registered with the IVA within thirty days of being turned. There are monthly dues that makers are responsible for paying. It's a whole thing."

I prop my head up on the back of the couch with a pillow as I let out a yawn.

"Oh, Lillith, I'm boring the boss," she says with a lilting giggle. "How embarrassing. Go ahead and fire me. No hard feelings."

"You think I'm going to fire the best baby doctor the city of Seattle has ever seen?" I reply, chuckling along with her. Her smile is infectious, and I don't feel compelled to smile very often. "Do you think I'm an idiot?"

Her hand finds my forearm, and she gives me a soft squeeze as the sweet sound of her laughter fills the trailer. My skin prickles with awareness at her touch. Her skin is cold, which I never noticed before learning of her vampiric state, but my arm feels like it's on fire beneath her hand. If she feels the same, she doesn't let it show, and I have to stifle a groan the moment she pulls her hand away.

"You are not boring me, Naomi," I promise her. The couch is surprisingly comfortable, and I feel like it's sucking me deep into the cushions. "It's been a long week, but I'm eager to learn more. Tell me more."

"I feel like you know me better than I know myself at this point."

"Nonsense. Tell me about the other lies the fiction authors perpetuate about your kind."

"Well, let's see," she says, scrunching her nose as she tallies them up in her head. "Garlic reeks but can't hurt us. Some vampires have the power of hypnosis but not all. Elaine can do it. Oh, we do have to be invited in, unless it's a location we frequent. Then it's just the initial invitation that's required. Um, the sun can't kill us, nor does it make our skin sparkle like diamonds."

Why does that sound familiar? "Is that from…"

"Twilight. Yeah. We can run super fast like they can, but we can't climb trees like spider monkeys or whatever."

My eyelids grow heavy as she continues, and I curse myself for this overwhelming exhaustion. I don't want to miss any of what Naomi is willing to share with me.

"If you tear my head off and set me on fire, I'll survive," she adds with a smirk. "We don't turn into bats, and we can't fly. Holy water and silver can't hurt us, but we do tend to stay away from churches. Even when I just walk by one, I get this eerie feeling. It's like a wave of darkness trying to push me away."

The sound of her voice lulls me into the most restful slumber I've had in ages, and I don't realize I've fallen asleep until my eyes flutter open, and I find myself stretched out on her flimsy couch with my shoes off and a blanket covering me. She must've done that.

I'm relieved to discover my dick free of pain, and my high has faded entirely. The curtains that separate Naomi's bedroom from the rest of the trailer are closed, and I strain to listen for a snore or even deep breathing. It's faint, but I do hear a soft snore coming from her. The clock on my phone reads three thirty-two, and as quietly as possible, I shove my feet into my shoes and tiptoe out of the trailer toward my car.

My smile doesn't fade on my drive home. It lingers, just like the sound of her laughter in my head. I still hear it, and an unfamiliar warmth spreads through my chest as I recall our conversation and the way she made sure I was comfortable when I slept. As delightful as the evening was, however, I doubt it would have remained so when she discovered her boss on her couch in the light of day. It's best to end on a high note and make sure this smile fades before the weekend is over. Otherwise, my employees will suspect there's something wrong with me.