He cradled her hands in his. “No, that won’t help. I need your love, and your trust. I didn’t know how cruel I was. You’re right, I haven’t been regarding you as a person. I’ve been making decisions for you with information I kept from you. Trust me now, and I’ll give you that information.”

“You’re shaking.”

He closed his eyes, the bright light in the apartment making him see blood red. “Waiting for you is very hard.” God! What happens if I break? What happens if I go for her throat? Oh, please, no! Petrified by that vision, he hardly noticed when her hardness dissolved and tendrils of ectoplasm grew toward the blood between her hands.

“Waiting for you is very hard, too, Darrell, Titus, and whoever else you may become. Drink before it gets cold.”

She pressed the mug against his lips and he felt the warmth that was more than temperature. Stooping, he accepted the gift, leashing back the clumsy greed that drove him.

Draining the mug, he enfolded her in his arms and kissed her. She didn’t even complain about the blood on his lips.

At last, dizzy with the enticing promise of repletion, but still hungering as never before, he drew back, aware to his very bone marrow how precious she was to him. “We can’t stay here. Come to your apartment with me.”

She glanced at the Thermos still more than half full. “If you were all that hungry, you must need more.”

“I do. I got the Thermos to take it to your place. We have time now. God knows what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

She pulled a tissue out of the wall dispenser and scrubbed her lips, looking at the discarded tablets on the table. “Go brush your teeth.”

She herded him toward the bathroom, but he saw the package he’d ordered delivered sitting on the table beside the refill of his prescription. Inea had opened the refill, not the old empty bottle. He took his package. “Got you something.” With ritual protests, she accepted the lingerie and toiletries as the apology he meant it to be. Handing her the toothbrush, he said, “Here, join me.”

“All right. But-oh-Carol left you a message.”

Over the sink, he mumbled, “Message?”

She garbled back, “Listen. Just before I got Carol’s message, I saw that those pills of yours are labeled wrong. I know. My dad used to take those.”

Spitting, Titus charged back into the other room and picked up the bottle. She called around the door frame, “See? They don’t have the little lines quartering them. If you’ve been taking them, you could be very sick.”

“I don’t take them! The prescription is just to get me exempted from the solarium. I can’t stand sun, remember?” But if someone was trying to poison him, they’d be wondering why he wasn’t dead. And if they found out why. Inea came out asking how he’d fooled the medics, and he answered, “I told you, we have some people who are clever with computer records.”

She jiggled a handful of tablets. “Well, your first refill wasn’t right, either. Carol said they’d checked the pharmacy and found your pills were still there, and an equal amount of something innocuous was missing. So they and the assassin think you’d been off your medication for weeks before going into that centrifuge. They wonder why you’re not dead. They’re rushing your medication to my room.”

He threw the bottle down. “We’d better get going.” He grabbed another kiss as he closed the Thermos.

She pulled him up short. “Carol told me both attendants died, but they said the assassin was very slender and dressed in a ninja costume. If there’s a real ninja out there.”

It gave him pause. He had minimal training in the use of his luren abilities in combat with humans. “Costumes are cheap. If the attendants interrupted a real ninja, they wouldn’t have survived five seconds. Besides, a real ninja wouldn’t have been discovered. In fact, I doubt if a real ninja would have plotted to poison me and then stage an ”accident.“ That’s gangland stuff, not serious martial art.”

“I hope you’re right.”

He handed her the Thermos. “Here, it’ll help if you carry this.” The gold plastic and foam insulation of the Thermos was as permeable to ectoplasm as its plastic mug.

Watching all around them, Titus led her into a lift and directed it to the level where they could cross to her dome.

Alone with him in the lift, Inea asked, “It’s that Abbot Nandoha, isn’t it? He’s the one you’re so scared of. Every time he’s around, you do something peculiar. He’s certainly thin. Could he have been the ninja?”

In his shock, he laughed out loud.

“I thought you said you’d level with me.”

Titus sucked in his laughter, realizing it had more than a tinge of hysteria to it. But the image of Abbot dressed up as a ninja was just too much. “Abbot’s part of what I have to fill you in on,” he confessed. “But not here.”

His legs were still weak he noticed as the lift pulled to a halt. She led the way into an adjacent car bound for her level. It was full, so they couldn’t talk.

At her door, she had to remind him, “You have the key.”

He fumbled it out of his pocket, and triggered the mechanism. The strong feel of her permeated the space like a song. On her bed was a pharmacy package. As she closed the door, a sudden thought forced him to ask, “Did you ever invite Abbot here?”

“No, of course not-why. ?” She stopped in her tracks. “He’s a vampire? That’s why you’re so afraid of him? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Think hard-have you ever said anything he might construe as an invitation?”

“No. He’s a genius in his field, but I loathe the man.”

He shut his eyes over the draining relief.

“Here-sit down.” She shoved the pharmacy package onto the floor. “You should be in the infirmary.” He sat on the end of the bed, and she settled beside him, unscrewed the mug from the Thermos and filled it. Putting the Thermos on the floor, she held the mug and breathed on it. “So tell me about Abbot.”

He ran a finger around the cup, outlining her hands, enjoying the feel of her. He could still detect a tremor though, an inward flinching. He had all but conditioned her to expect a verbal blow every time she let her defenses down to him. “I’m so sorry for how I’ve treated you.”

“You’re evading again. Abbot. Tell me.”

He hovered over the mug. “Blackmail? Ransom for my dinner? Yes, he’s. a vampire, though he wouldn’t put it that way. It’s complicated.”

“Not now then. Here. Take it.”

Instead, he kissed her delicately on the eyelids, the nose, then the lips. He worked down to the mug, his lips on her fingers bespeaking his love. “Abbot, then. After dinner. The whole story.” He drank from between her hands.

“I don’t know what it is when you do that,” she whispered, “but I feel it, all over my body.”

“Me, too.” He drank steadily, pausing only to refill the mug and grab a moistened towelette from the dispenser near the head of the bed. He wiped his lips each time he drank, and then resumed experimenting with his lips on her skin. As he finished the blood, the scintillating arousal dancing between them intensified. “What do you feel?”

“Wonderful. Do that some more.”

He set the mug on the floor and laid her back on the bed. Like this?“ He trailed kisses around her neck.

“Vampire.”

And he knew what the difference was. She believed him at completely-and trusted him not to hurt her again. There was a wholeness in her gift to him that he could never have evoked with Influence. Even humans he took by consent never knew enough to truly consent, as she had.

He began undressing her. Slowly, hardly disturbing the rhythm, he discarded their clothing and moved them up to lie full length on the bed. Using all his senses, he strove to gift her with as much of value as she had given him.

He made it last a very long time. Together, they finally surrendered to the inevitable.