Blood and Chrysanthemums by Nancy Baker

can concoct some suitable story for your maidenly retreat. There’s no great harm done.”
    “No harm . . . ? You mean, you don’t care that I almost drank from him?”
    “Not as long as you were careful.”
    “I wouldn’t have just drunk. I would have made love with him.”
    Rozokov looked back out at the silent street. “As long as you were careful,” he repeated. Ardeth stared at him in bewilderment. It had never been said, true, but she knew one of the reasons they had restricted their feeding to elk was to be faithful to one another, to share the love they could give only with each other. And he had always warned against impersonal feeding on mortals, because it made it so easy to slip into the cruel, predatory monster that legends made vampires out to be. She couldn’t believe he would change his mind so suddenly. Unless . . . 
    She was out of her chair in a moment, crossing the floor on feet that no longer felt any pain. She caught his arm. “You did it, didn’t you?”
    “You were right, after all. We need more than elk blood,” he answered softly, sparing no more than a glance at her before resuming his study of the street.
    Something hot and black blossomed inside her, springing from the sleeping seeds of the rage that had sustained her through her first lonely months as a vampire. It swept relentlessly over her other tangled emotions; guilt, pain, a shameful, secret relief. She clung to its diverting heat as she dragged him around to face her, her hands clenched in the fabric of his shirt. “You did it. I left a man who wanted me, who would have done anything for me, and all the time you were drinking someone’s blood. Why did you do it?”
    “I wanted to.”
    “That’s it? You wanted to?”
    “What would you have me say? I wanted to do it. I did it.”
    “Who was she?”
    “It doesn’t matter. She meant nothing.”
    “Yeah, that’s what men all say, isn’t it? Even vampires.”
    “Yes, even vampires. That is what we are, after all. Maybe that is what has been wrong between us. We have been trying to live like something we are not.”
    “Well, you’re the one who wanted to. You’re the one who made all the fine speeches about trying to find a way to live that did not make us into monsters. You’re the one who said you wanted me to love what you really are.” She kept her fingers clenched in his shirt, afraid of what she might do if she let go, afraid that she would either strike blindly at him or fall weeping into his arms or both. “You’re the one who said we could choose what we wanted to be.”
    “Then I was wrong. I can be wrong, as you delighted in pointing out to me the other night,” he snarled back, reaching out to close his fingers over hers and pull her hands from him. “Perhaps the only lie I did not tell the both of us is when I said that we are solitary creatures.”
    Something inside her twisted. Ardeth remembered him saying those words then walking away from her, abandoning her to the night and her new hunger. For her own good, he had said. No matter what the reasons were, he had left her to find her own way to survive, and, when she had found it in a new persona of seduction and mystery that prowled the Queen Street bars, he came back and took it all away from her again, reawakening the conscience and intellect that she had drowned in wild, reckless darkness.
    Not this time, she swore to herself. You won’t walk away from
me
this time.
    She let go of him, pulled her hands from his. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe that is the only truth you ever told. And now you can find out for sure.”
    She stalked into the bedroom, found her bag and began to jam her meagre belongings into it. “What are you doing?” he asked from the doorway.
    “Leaving.”
    “Where do you think you can go?”
    “Does it matter? You forget, I managed just fine without you back in Toronto.” Her hunt through the drawers revealed their cache of money; she left him half, just as she