I couldn’t move after she’d left me there in that black haze between consciousness and sleep. I felt the cold move into my skin, seep into my bones, but I was helpless to do anything about it. This wasn’t the first time I’d fed her. It wasn’t the first time that I’d placed myself willingly upon her dinner plate. I felt her place the blanket over me, but couldn’t acknowledge her. I hated the weakness that found me after she was done, but not enough to keep me away from her.

My mind raced within my incapacitated body. It felt as if my eyelids were glued shut. I should have wanted to open them, resisted the tug into oblivion. There were other things I wanted to do, wanted to say, but I was useless, trapped within the too-large prison that was my body, trapped by the silken whisper of sleep.

I don’t know how long I lay there, awkwardly laying against her sofa, mindful of the ache my body would later contain. Eventually, time bled into more time, and the blackness that weighted down my eyelids, won. I fell asleep with the alarm sounding outside, signaling the next round of predators.

*** *** *** ***

I jerked awake. It was as if my mind, tired of waiting, had jolted me awake. Tension eased out of my muscles a second later, and I, unmoving as I was, started to drift off again. I spent more time sleeping with her than sleeping with her. It was a shame, really, and a shot to my already unimpressive ego.

I yawned widely, and forced myself up, handling the wave of dizziness that hit me as well as I could. The first time I’d been sick, but, in all reality, I had been dealing with more than just a little blood loss. I’d had to handle the fact that I was on my date’s food chain. Did her screwing me then constitute bestiality?

Questions like that always popped into my head. I found it funny to be as large as I was and still subject to the appetite of a much smaller female. She should have, if life was fair, been afraid of me. I blinked, scanning the room for Lily, but didn’t see her. She would be close by, I knew.

I reached for the glass of sugar water she’d left on the table, and had to stop and focus on steadying my hand. I drank it and lay back against the sofa, shoving the blanket down into my lap, allowing the sugar to seep into my blood and give me enough energy to go and find her.

Outside the room I could hear the claws of some unknown beast walking past. The entire center was a large coven for those of her kind. I always shied away from the term vampire, but that was what she was. Lily drank blood, but there were others there that fed off of different things. It was those things I wished I could unlearn when she’d told me, things I’d wish I’d never heard. They were certainly people I counted myself lucky to have not encountered.

It was also the reason for the security, and my escort through the center. While each of the sections were allowed to leave their rooms at any time, except the brief times when visitors were allowed in and out, it was only safe to do so when the hand pad showed green. Right now, with the click of the claws outside on the tile, I didn’t have to check to see that it glowed deep red. Lily, she could handle her own against whatever it was on the other side of the doors. I would likely find myself made into a meal.

I groaned softly in the back of my throat, and I felt her hand settle against my forehead. I opened my eyes and smiled lazily into her face. She was flushed. My hand reached up and smoothed over her cheek, following her down as she kissed my mouth lightly.

‘How do you feel?’ She mumbled it against my lips as she settled into my lap, her thighs on either side of mine. I slid both of my hands into her dark hair and I felt my heart shudder in my chest. Her fingers were immediately on my chest. ‘David?’ She pulled back enough to search my face. Her cool fingers were on my face, her thumbs ran over my closed lids.

‘I’m fine, Lily.’ I pulled her hands down with my own and laced them together. ‘Stop worrying.’ I studied her face, as I had done a thousand times before. She tried to pull her hands from mine and I held her, leaning forward until our lips touched again.

The alarm sounded outside and there was a click as the locks shifted back to green, and the extra bolts retreated into the wells within the door frame.

I glanced over Lily’s shoulder and sighed deeply. ‘I’ve got to get going. I don’t want to get stuck when they let the dogs out.’ I said it with a slight twist to my mouth.

Lily smiled, but it was a shadow of her former one. She wanted me to stay. Hell, Lily would have converted me if I’d allow it, but it was against the law to covert someone, willingly or not. In most cases, it was difficult to determine who the culprit was, but Lily would easily be identified by the print of her teeth. She had double incisors, a rarity even for vampires who prided themselves on being unique.

That, and we’d been an item long enough for there to be a slew of people pointing the finger back at her in the event I was converted. Investigation was followed by execution and rarely did the vampire or shifter come out on the winning side. Lily shifted and sat off to one side. ‘I’ll go by your place later.’

‘I’ve got dinner with Serene and Elsa,’ I said, speaking of my sister and her lover, ‘but I’ll be home afterwards.’ I turned and cupped her face, running my thumbs over her mouth. ‘I want to see you.’

She smiled and stood with me as I moved to the door. The dizziness had receded, but I was still careful with my movements. I placed my palm on the scanner and waited for the door to click open. She rested her hand over mine. ‘Thank you for coming to see me.’

‘I knew you’d be hungry.’ I looked out in the hallway with no small amount of tension. A moment later a guard appeared. He nodded at Lily and then started to walk back down the path from which he’d come. I kissed her quickly and followed him, looking back only long enough to watch the door shut behind me.

I didn’t relax until the center’s main entrance was behind me.  It wasn’t the daylight that kept them pinned inside their center, it was the curfew established by the government which restricted their movements.  Daytime was ours, night, theirs.  There were few times it overlapped.  Full moons, days or nights, were always given to the Weres, because containing them had proven dangerous and ultimately impossible.  Vampires had rallied for the equivalent treatment and were given that same time.  Full moons were dangerous times, and inevitably, someone was nearly always hunted afterward.

I sank into the driver’s seat of my car, and cranked on the air.  I closed my eyes briefly and then reached into the glove compartment for my cell.  They were forbidden inside the center, but only for the guests.  I flipped it open and played the messages as I pulled out of lot onto the long driveway leading to the gate where the ‘half-breed’ guards waited.