Free Dates From Hell by Kelley Armstrong Page A

and unhurried, Ivy rose and shut the door. The hum of a copier cut off, and Ivy returned to her desk in the new silence, trying to maintain her blank expression. She watched the woman, reading nothing in her calm. Silently she waited for an explanation.
    “We are not a well-liked group of people,” Mia said bluntly. “Jacqueline had become careless, falling back on old traditions of murdering people to absorb their death energy instead of taking the paltry ambient emotions that Inderland law grants us.”
    “So you killed her.” Ivy allowed herself a deep breath. This woman was scaring the shit out of her with her casual admission of so heinous an act.
    Mia nodded, the hem of her dress seeming to shift by itself in the still air. “We police ourselves so the rest of Inderland won’t.” She smiled. “You understand.”
    Thinking of Piscary, Ivy dropped her eyes.
    “We aren’t substantially different from each other,” the woman said lightly. “Vampires steal psychic energy, too. You’re just clumsy about it, having to take blood with it as a carrier.”
    Head moving slowly in acceptance, Ivy quashed her feelings of guilt. Generally only vampires knew that a portion of a person’s aura went with the blood, but a banshee would, seeing as that’s what they took themselves. A more pure form of predation that stripped the soul and made it easy to break it from the body. A person could replace a substantial amount, but take too much aura too quickly, and the body dies. Ivy had always thought banshees were higher on the evolutionary ladder, but perhaps not, seeing as vampires used the visible signs of blood loss to gauge when to stop. “It’s not the same,” Ivy protested. “No one dies when we feed.”
    “They do if you feed too heavily.”
    Ivy’s thoughts lighted on the body in Piscary’s refrigerator. “Yes, but when a vampire feeds, they give as much emotion as they get.”
    And though Mia didn’t move, Ivy stiffened when the slight woman seemed to gather the shadows in the room, wrapping them about herself. “Only living vampires with a soul give as well as take,” she said. “And that’s why you suffer, Ivy.”
    Her voice, low and mocking, shocked Ivy at the use of her given name.
    “You could still find beauty amid the ugliness, if you were strong enough,” Mia continued. “But you’re afraid.”
    Ivy’s stomach clenched and her skin went cold. It was too close to what she had been searching for, even as she denied it existed. “You can’t find love in taking blood,” she asserted, determined to not get upset and unwittingly feed this…woman. “Love is beautiful, and blood is savagely satisfying an ugly need.”
    “And you don’t need love?”
    “That’s not what I’m saying.” Ivy felt unreal, and she gripped the edge of her desk. “Blood isn’t a way to show you love.” Ivy’s voice was soft, but inside she was screaming. She was so screwed up that she couldn’t comfort a friend without tainting it with her lust for blood. To mix her need for love and her need for blood corrupted love and made it vile. Her desire to keep the two separate was so close to her, so vulnerable, that she almost choked when Mia shook her head.
    “That’s not who you want to be,” she taunted. “I see it. It pours from you like tears. You lie to yourself, saying that blood and love are separate. You lie saying sanity exists in calling them two things instead of one. Only by accepting that can you rise above what your body demands of you, to live true to who you want to be…with someone you love, and who is strong enough to survive loving you back.”
    Shocked, Ivy froze. This slight woman sitting before her was pulling from Ivy her most desperate, hidden desires, throwing them out for everyone to see. She wanted to control the bloodlust…but it felt so damn good to let it control her. And if she called it love, then she had been whoring herself half her life.
    As she stared at Mia’s knowing