Page 2 of Sanguine
“I’ve heard it before, priest,” I say, a tad crankily. (But I really have heard it before. Usually before the stake and mallet come out.)
For the first time since I opened the door, he looks surprised. “I’m not a priest.”
I don’t even have enough scoffs to scoff properly at that. “Please. I could sense you all the way from the gate.”
His lips part. They are wonderful lips, as firm and sculpted as the rest of him, with two well-defined peaks and the shallowest possible curve to the bottom lip. All grim geometry, this priest’s face. It’s very hard not to want to lick it.
“You could …senseme?” he asks, sounding unnerved.
I decide he’s probably not going to kill me immediately, and also that a holy man in my house at this bright hour calls for something to drink, so I turn on my heel and stride into the kitchen. “You know what I am, and yet you’re asking me this question?”
He follows me to the kitchen—first closing the front door, which I find a rather touching commitment to manners, all things considered—and then stands across the glistening expanse of kitchen island from me as I start chopping fruit for a nice sangria. He looks around before answering me, and while his face stays unreadable, there’s no disguising the quick, saccadic movements of his eyes as they log every detail of this paradisiacal nest.
The house is a lovely, open-plan type thing, with one central kitchen-cum-dining-room-cum-living-room, and it spills out onto a shaded terrace, which then extends out to the infinity pool. As I have since I first came here, I have all the windows and folding glass doors open, letting in the breeze and ceaseless spill of the ocean outside. Dent Island is rucked up around the horizon, like a dark green quilt kicked to the bottom of a bed, and cottony clouds waft above like overfluffed pillows. The pool is a rippling, Impressionist painting of it all, a painting set right into the lush, emerald-green lawn.
Everything inside the house is gleaming wood and generous furniture; it’s tailor-made for a billionaire and their paramour, or maybe a celebrity and their entourage, but of course I’m knocking about in it alone, wasteful rake that I am. And the priest doesn’t hide the moment this registers with him. “You’re by yourself,” he says.
“And you never answered my question.” I finish chopping the lemons and oranges and move to the apples. “You know I’m a vampire, and yet you don’t know we can sense priests? How have you survived this long?”
I’m genuinely curious. He’s not surprised to see me moving through sunlight or popping the occasional apple chunk into my mouth, which means he knows more about vampires than most people. He knows we’re mammals, not magic, and that our eyes are better suited to hunting at night, so while we skew nocturnal, the sunlight doesn’t hurt us any more than it hurts a cat or an owl. He knows the combination of electrolytes, glucose, lipids and iron in human blood is the only complete meal for us—but we still eat and drink other things too.
“I’m not a priest,” the man repeats. And then pauses. “Anymore.”
“Aha!” I say through a bite of apple, pointing my knife at him. “J’accuse!”
Those eyes flash again. A thrill runs right down my spine, as if a lion had just locked stares with me. I’m not the only predator in this room, and I’d put my not inconsiderable money on him having been a vampire hunter in his time. Some self-destructive part of me idly wonders what it would be like to see those eyes flashing up at me as I pinned him to my bed … or as he crawled over me, so big he blocked out all the light except whatever was reflected from his gaze…
“That chapter of my life is closed,” the man says. “It was a long time ago.”
“I bet it won’t seem like a long time to me, and also, I don’t care what Rome thinks, you’re still a priest.”
A growl rumbles in his chest as he takes a step forward. I think I feel that growl from the nape of my neck to the lazily stirring length in my drawstring pants.
“I’m.Not.”
I set the knife down and find a glass pitcher. “Do you know how vampires suspect a priest is near?” I grab an opened bottle of red wine and pour it in. An obnoxiousglug glug glugnoise fills the kitchen. “We have superior senses in almost every way. Truly superhuman. I can smell fear, for example, and I can hear lust—and in your case, I can perceive in every single possible way your clarity, your faith, and your devotion. It brightens the air around you, and it makes the space near you hum. I can taste your faith, and it tastes like”—I close my eyes and savor him on my tongue for a moment—“ironically, it tastes like communion. The wafers, I mean. It’s the serotonin in your body. The dopamine too. It’s so close to being sweet, but the moment you apprehend the sweetness, it dissolves. Beckoning you back, urging you to take more. Begging to be chased. Much like God Himself, if I may say so.”
I open my eyes and get back to the sangria, adding the orange juice.
The man stares at me, lips parted again.
“None of that has gone away,” I tell him, adding the fruit to the wine and then hunting for some brandy. “Maybe you no longer wear a collar, but inside, you’re still a man of God. I’m not sure why you left the Church—or why you were kicked out—but lack of faith wasn’t the reason.” I find a cinnamon stick, swirl it in the pitcher with some flair. “Ta-da! Do you want some? Of course you do, you’re Catholic and there’re only golf buggies on this island, so who cares about drinking—here’s a glass now, stop being so shy.”
The ex-priest sniffs at the glass, then raises those wonderful eyes to mine. “It’s only wine? Nothing … else?”
I roll my eyes. “This isn’t Gilded Age Paris, mon ami; I’m not stocking my cellar with casks of human blood in between visits to the opera. It’s just wine.”
“Hmm.”
“You have to admit a priest who’s worried about blood in his wine isdeeply ironic.”
“Hmm.”
“Also can I just point out the Latin root of ‘sangria’? From ‘sanguis,’ meaning blood. So in a linguistic sense, we are drinking blood, am I right?”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as serious as the man in front of me, even after being exposed to the full force of my linguistic wit.
But he does take a tentative sip, then licks his lips after, which sends my already interested cock intovery obviouslyinterested territory.
