Cold As Ice

Chapter 9

"So, you're a..."

"A vampire," Carlisle offered, finishing Allie's sentence.

"And the man that bit me? He's a vampire, too?"

"Technically, not a man, but yes, he is," Carlisle confirmed. Allie let out a long exhale, trying to square all the details and information Carlisle had given to her over the last hour or two. Her tea - a lovely jasmine blend with hints of bergamot - had gone cold on the coffee table, long neglected in favor of soaking in Carlisle's almost unbelievable explanation of events.

"So, if he bit me, does that make me...?" Allie's voice trailed off.

Carlisle shook his head.

"Somehow, no," he replied with a skeptical shake of his head. "I've never seen anything like it before. Usually, when one of our kind bites a mortal, the poison takes over within a matter of minutes. It's been over 24 hours for you, and you're definitely still human." Allie made a mental note that it was a full day later than her last memory.

"How do you know I'm still human?" she asked. It felt like a fairly odd question to have to ask - shouldn't she of all people know if she somehow wasn't human anymore? - but she was well past the point of thinking any question was stupid at this point.

"I can hear your heartbeat, for one," Carlisle replied, his lips twitching up into a gentle smile. Allie couldn't help but preen a little bit at the idea of Carlisle listening to her heartbeat. It felt intimate and tender in an unexpected way. She found herself toying with the lovely idea that maybe he even liked the sound of her heartbeat.

"And I can smell you," he continued.

Allie recoiled, flustered and embarrassed. So I do smell, she reprimanded herself.

"Oh, goodness, no no no, I didn't mean that," Carlisle offered, correctly interrupting Allie's guilty blush. "Your blood. I can smell your blood."

Allie wasn't sure if that was any better, although it was definitely weirder. She knotted her eyebrows at him in question.

"My kind, we can smell human blood very easily," he explained. "Our senses are a lot sharper than humans. And we're designed to smell blood. Makes hunting easier."

An involuntary shiver ran down Allie's spine at his casual use of the word hunting. She inhaled shakily as she mustered up the courage to ask the obvious question.

"So you... your family, and you... you all eat... you hunt people?"

Carlisle waited patiently for her to stammer out her question before reacting with an emphatic shake of his head.

"No, we don't," he said. Allie felt her shoulders relax down away from her ears. "We used to, all of us did. It was the only way we knew, when we were first turned." Allie listened intently to Carlisle's explanation. She saw his eyes grow dark with a haunted look, and she detected real pain behind his answers. "But we've chosen a different way of life now." He looked up at her, and she had the distinct impression that he was embarrassed to be talking to her on this topic, which felt supremely ironic but also endearingly vulnerable. "We like to think of ourselves as vegetarians," Carlisle joked, laughing at his own quip.

"And what exactly does a vegetarian vampire eat?" Allie asked, happy to match his own joking tone.

"Animals," he replied simply. "Mostly big ones. Deer, mountain lions, bears. I personally have a preference for wolves." He smiled haltingly at Allie, waiting for her reaction. She tried to imagine Carlisle eating a wolf. It felt strange, and she still wasn't 100% clear on the mechanics of the whole thing, but she found it didn't feel that bad to think about. She smiled back at him, and he let a laugh escape his lips. She shared his laugh, a part of her feeling starstruck and amazed by the fantastical turn of events in the last 24 hours.