Chapter 31: Forged in Blood: Chapter 29

Despite her hooded sweatshirt, Ophelia shivers and tries to curl into a ball on the porch bench. I resist the urge to wrap my arms around her and share my body heat. I know how this night will end, and there’s no sense making it any more painful for her than it’s already going to be. Not even I am that cruel. At least not to her. Not anymore.

“You want my sweater, sweet girl?” Malachi asks.

I shoot him a warning look over the top of her head. Don’t be acting like a fucking sap.

Fuck off, he fires back.

If she didn’t wear those tiny little skirts, she wouldn’t be cold.

I love her tiny skirts.

Ophelia shakes her head and pulls at the sleeve of her own sweater, completely unaware of our alternate conversation. “No thanks. I’m okay.”

I glance down at her bare legs, and my cock twitches. Yeah, I love her tiny skirts too.

“Why did he get so mad?” she asks, her lip quivering.

I stuff my hands into my pockets because her scent is still on my fingers and it’s driving me wild with the desire to touch her again. Not just touch. Taste too. But Alexandros’s rage was enough to convince my libido to let my brain take over for a bit. The only reason we haven’t taken her back to her dorm is because Malachi and I agreed that it wasn’t worth the risk of doing anything else to incur his wrath.

“He forbade us from biting you,” Malachi says. “And when Axl tasted your blood, we all felt it. The professor too. I guess he thought Axl disobeyed him.”

I snort a laugh. “If he thought that, Axl would have no head.”

“What?” Ophelia blinks at us.

Malachi takes her hand and squeezes it. “Decapitation is the only way to kill a vampire.”

I punch him on the arm. Like she needs to know how to kill us. “Way to go, jackass.”

Malachi scowls at me. “What? It’s not like she could do it. Have you ever tried to deprive a vampire of his head?”

“Have you?” Ophelia asks.

He shrugs. “No. But it would be tough.” He rolls his neck. “We have very strong spinal cords. It’s an evolutionary thing.”

Ophelia scrunches her tiny nose. “The professor would never hurt any of you though. You’re like his … sons.”

Fuck, she’s so damn naive and sweet. My yearning to corrupt her makes every part of me ache.

“He wouldn’t have much choice if one of us broke an oath to him,” Malachi explains. “He’d be bound by vampire law.”

Her eyes go wide, the expanse of her pupils shadowing the electric blue of her irises. “So you have to obey everything he says or you get your head chopped off?”

I roll my eyes. She makes it sound like puppets. “It’s not like that. He doesn’t go around making us take oaths for the hell of it. We have very few rules we’re not allowed to break.” Which makes me wonder even more why we’re forbidden from biting Ophelia. I felt only an echo of the power and the euphoria Axl felt when he tasted her virgin blood, and it was one of the most intense experiences of my life. It has to be something to do with that. And Alexandros knows what she is, so why the fuck won’t he let us in on the secret?

Malachi interrupts my train of thought. “It doesn’t make sense for bloodborne vampires to go around tearing off the heads of the vamps they sire.”

She chews on her lip. “But why?”

I scrub my face with my hands. “Why do you have so many fucking questions?”

“Excuse me for being curious about the world of supernatural beings that I didn’t know existed until a few weeks ago,” she snaps.

Malachi shoots me a smug smile. “Yeah. It’s natural to be curious.”

She tilts her head and bats her eyelashes at him—he’s such a dick—before returning her attention to me. “So why can’t they go around tearing heads off?”

We’re stuck until the professor tells us what to do with her, so I might as well humor her. “Because sired vampires can’t survive if their master is dead, which means turned vampires protect their sires at all costs. Survival instinct 101.”

Her expression takes on that excited quality she gets when she’s learning something new, and I struggle to keep myself from getting caught up in her enchanting web of enthusiasm. “So what happens? If he dies, you’d just drop dead too?”

Malachi takes this one. “Not immediately. We’d grow weaker over time. Older, more powerful turned vampires can survive for up to two years without their master. With younger vampires, it can be a matter of days.”

“So it’s like the master vampires like Alexandros have their own personal armies?”

Malachi grins at her, and I roll my eyes at his eagerness to please her. “Exactly. And so the oldest and most powerful vampires have generations at their disposal. Back then, each of the turned vampires would turn their own armies. All those vampires are bound to their own sire, who in turn is still bound to the bloodline vampire. To survive, they all must protect that single bloodborne sire.”

“Wow! So vampires can be turned or born. And you can turn vampires of your own?”

Malachi nods. “Physically we are capable, but it’s been forbidden for hundreds of years. Any vampire who breaks that law would be executed.”

“Who forbids it? Is there like some sort of vampire police?”

Vampire history has never interested me. I know my life before I was turned—a miserable pit of despair—and I know my life after. Whatever his reason for doing so, Alexandros rescued me from hell when he turned me, and that was all I ever cared about.

Until now. For once I’m paying attention because now our sire is keeping secrets. I suspect at least some of those secrets have something to do with Ophelia Hart, and perhaps there’s something to be gleaned about who she is from our history.

“All vampire lines can be traced back to four houses—Drakos, Chó̱ma, Elira, and Thalassa,” Malachi says, the register of his voice lowering into his teaching tone. Of all of us, he’s the most likely to follow in Alexandros’s professor footsteps, and I’m not entirely sure why he hasn’t already. “Each of those houses has a corresponding society, and each is bound by ancient laws and is responsible for their own governance. To not enforce the ancient laws could result in the destruction of the entire bloodline.”

“By who?”

Malachi shrugs. “There are higher powers that most of us younger generations know nothing about. And despite my best efforts, it’s a question I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of.”

She’s unusually silent for a moment, like she’s digesting everything he said. “It all sounds very elitist to me.”

I snort a laugh. “Then it’s no different to humans, is it?”

She gives me a wry smile. “I guess not.” She’s quiet again for all of two seconds before she’s back with more questions. “Okay, so how are vampires born? Can you all have kids?”

“I don’t know how they’re born.” Malachi frowns, and I stifle a snicker. The smart fucker isn’t used to not having all the answers, and he hates it. “But turned vampires can’t have kids, and a bloodline vampire hasn’t been born in over half a millennium.”

She gasps again. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow, this is all so fascinating, can you tell me how …”

The rest of her question is drowned out by Alexandros’s voice in my head. Escort her to her dorm and break off whatever this thing is that you’ve started with her.

Yes sir, I answer.

Malachi protests, but the professor cuts him off. She is not to set foot in this house again. You are not to see her again.

Malachi tries again. But⁠—

She is not to come seeking you out either. She’s already too fixated on all three of you. So make it brutal. Make her hate you.

Malachi’s pain washes over me, and the professor sighs. Let Xavier handle it.

I give him my assurance that I will take care of it, and Malachi offers no further resistance. He knows better than to argue a lost cause.

Ophelia chatters the whole way to her dorm, and I notice how Malachi slows his pace so he can spend more time with her before we break her heart, but I allow it. I think I’m going to miss our little pink-haired question monster too, although I’m not nearly as attached as he is.

We get to her building, and Malachi looks at the ground instead of at her face.

She glances between us, nervous energy radiating from her. Tonight probably meant something to her, even though we didn’t fuck her.

Pity.

“So …” She wrings her hands.

“So what, Cupcake? We had our fun, and now it’s time for you to go back to your sad, lonely life.”

She blinks. “W-what?”

“You heard me. It’s over. We wanted to fuck you, and well …” I shrug. “Virgins are too much bother for us. Too messy.”

She looks to Malachi, but he continues to avoid her gaze. “Malachi?” she asks, her voice shaking.

He finally looks up at her, his eyes empty like he’s completely shut down. “Like he said. Too messy.”

That’s my boy, I tell him.

His heart breaks. He’s such a fucking sap.

Tears fill her eyes. “But I thought …”

“You thought what, Cupcake? That the three of us could be interested in a nobody like you? Come on.” I toss my head back and laugh, but Malachi’s anguish is making me feel guilty. Or perhaps this isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Because I want to taste her again. I want her to ask me a thousand ridiculous questions just so I can roll my eyes at her.

Her lip wobbles, and I hear Alexandros’s voice ringing in my head. Eviscerate her and get back here.

“It was all just a joke, Ophelia. We were fucking with you.”

Tears run freely down her cheeks, and it starts to rain. She scrubs at her face. “You’re a pair of assholes anyway.”

After she runs into the building, Malachi doubles over, hands resting on his knees as he blows out a breath. “That was fucking brutal,” he rasps. Standing, he looks at me with tears in his eyes.

I wrap an arm around his neck. “It had to be done, little brother.”

He swallows. “I know, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. Why do you think he’s so against us tasting her blood?”

“Did you feel what it did to Axl? That was some heavy shit. And he had what, a few drops?”

Malachi glances back at her building. “There’s something really fucking different about her, isn’t there? Like special different?”

I can’t disagree. As much as I’d like it to not be true, I know better. Ophelia Hart is fucking special.