Free Monsters Within by Victoria Knight

Lester Dobbs had the potential to cause a lot of trouble. If I had killed him—even without killing him the traditional ways vampires usually do—I could have caused a lot of trouble for my sister and me.”
    Nikki sat up, as if she’d had a sudden moment of clarity. She looked earnestly at him and a slow dawning slowly crept into her face. It was the closest thing to fear Saul had seen on her face since she had arrived.
    “So do you have yourself sort of trained to not attack humans? Is me being here, sitting on your couch, hard for you to resist? Do you want to attack me by nature?”
    “A hundred years or so ago, it would have been hard for me. But after a while, I got used to it. And when I d o feel the need to draw blood, I can sort of make myself go into a hibernation where I sleep for several weeks. When I come awake, the urge is gone.”
    He obviously didn’t tell her about the other urges that were rampaging through him. These urges had nothing to do with his vampire instincts, only the purely male ones. It didn’t matter that her body was hidden beneath those baggy clothes or that she was shy and awkward like Kara Humphrey had been. Nikki’s face was enough for him. It was the way she chewed thoughtfully on her bottom lip when he spoke to her. It was the steel in her eyes that basically told him that no matter what he might be, she wasn’t afraid of him.
    It was the last one that was baffling to him. He drained the last bit of his glass of wine.
    “So the movies got that wrong, too?” Nikki asked. “You won’t die if you go without blood?”
    “No. Not at all. Although, when I’m…well , transformed , I have to have it within a few hours or I become ill.”
    She considered this for a moment and sipped from her wine. Saul’s’ male urges rose up in him again as he watched her lips part to take the glass.
    “So let me as k yo u something,” Saul said.
    “Sure.”
    “You had a pretty good idea of who I am, yet you came here to confront me face –to-face. Why are you not afraid?”
    “You already asked me that.”
    “I did. But you dodged the question,” he said, getting up to refill his glass. Nikki followed him into the kitchen and he saw that she was keeping a slight distance between them.
    “I don’t know,” she said, giving the same answer as before.  “I guess I’ve led the sort of life where even if I thought yo u woul d hurt me, I wouldn’t care. It sounds clichéd and troubled, I know…but that’s all I’ve got. I mean, I don’t have a death wish or anything, but things of a darker nature have always fascinated me. To know you were out here and t o sort o f know what you might be…it was just too much to pass up. I had to know.”
    Saul held out the bottle of wine. Nikki eyed it for a moment and he could tell that she wasn’t quite ready to leave. Saul himself was torn; part of him wanted to her to leave and a larger part of him wanted her to stay. But he could tell that this girl could be trouble. He had sensed some degree of possible danger when he had let Kara into his house to question him earlier in the day, but what he felt stirring between himself and Nikki was something different. He wasn’t sure he had ever experienced anything quite like it before.
    After a moment, Nikki shook her head. “No. I better not. I think I’ve had enough crazy for one day. I’m really not interested in going insane.”
    “Fair enough,” Saul said.
    Nikki gave him a faint smile and then started walking towards the door. Saul followed her, careful to not walk too closely behind her. He didn’t want to alarm her in any way.
    “So we’re good?” he asked. “Is my secret safe with you?”
    “Yes,” she said. “And…I don’t know. Is it weird of me to ask if I can come over again sometime? You have to think of this from a human’s perspective. This is pretty cool, you know? And I’m not the most popular chick in Red Creek, so it’s not like I have a ton of friends or