Blood And Budgets |16+

Chapter 8: The Predators Start Calling

---

The first sign came on Wednesday, in the form of a bouquet delivered to my apartment door.

Not roses. Not lilies. Something that looked like dried blood pressed into petal shapes, tied with a ribbon the color of old bruises. The card read: "To the bright one. Dinner?" No name. No number. Just a scent that made my throat close and my pulse hammer loud enough to wake the neighbors.

I called Vex.

"Don't touch it," he said, and his voice was tight in a way I hadn't heard since the cemetery. "Don't smell it. Don't—" He stopped. Exhaled. "I'm coming. Lock your door. Don't answer for anyone. Not even me. I'll use the key."

"You have a key to my apartment?"

"I made one. After the first week. In case you died at your desk and I needed to hide the body." He tried to laugh. It didn't land. "Eleanor, please. Just. Lock the door."

I locked the door. I sat on my kitchen floor, back against the cabinet, Keith the cactus staring at me with his usual judgment. The bouquet sat on the counter, and I could smell it from here, something sweet and wrong, like perfume over rot.

Vex arrived in seven minutes. He must have run. Not driven—run, through streets that were still daylight-bright, through the sun that turned his skin pink and painful and didn't stop him.

He burst through the door, and his eyes were black, his fangs fully extended, and he looked at the bouquet like it had personally offended him.

"Fae," he said, and the word was a curse. "The ribbon. The petal texture. The—" He picked up the card, sniffed it, recoiled. "Seelie court. Old money. Old hunger. They don't eat blood. They eat..." He looked at me, and his expression was horrified. "They eat attention. Admiration. The feeling of being wanted. And a beacon—" He stopped. Swallowed. "A beacon gives off enough life force to feed a dozen of them for a year. They're drawn to brightness the way moths are drawn to flame. Except the moths survive."

"So what do I do?"

"We move you. Tonight. Now. My place. The wards are—" He stopped again. Looked at the window. "Bethany. She would have warded the Covenhouse. I never asked her to ward my apartment. I never thought I'd need to."

"Because you never had a beacon before."

"Because I never had anyone worth warding for."

He said it simply. No theater. No jokes. Just the truth, raw and exhausted and absolutely terrifying.

I stood up from the kitchen floor. My legs were numb. "Okay. We move. But Vex—"

"Yeah?"

"Your skin. You're burning."

He looked at his hands, at the pink flush that was deepening to red, at the blisters forming on his knuckles. He'd run through sunlight to get to me. He'd done it without thinking.

"I'll heal," he said. "I always heal. It's just... slower, for the hybrid thing. More painful. More human." He smiled, small and broken. "See? I'm paying for my choices already. This is good. This is practice."

I packed a bag in five minutes. Toothbrush. Charger. The granola bar I'd been saving for emergencies. Keith, because I wasn't leaving him to face the fae alone.

Vex drove us to his apartment with the windows down, the evening air cooling his skin, his hands tight on the wheel and his eyes checking every mirror, every shadow, every car that followed too long.

"They'll keep coming," he said, not looking at me. "The fae. The vampires. The things that don't have names. Bethany warned them, or they smelled you on their own, or—" He stopped. Hit the steering wheel. The car swerved. "I should have hidden you. I should have sent you away. I should have been strong enough to—"

"To what? To not want me? To not kiss me? To sit in your office for another two centuries with your feelings journal and your deer farm and your Post-it about my neck?" I reached over, took his hand off the wheel, held it in both of mine. "Vex. I chose this. I chose you. I chose the weird bouquet and the fae and the witch who weaponizes cookies. I'm not running. And if you try to send me away, I'll just follow you. I'm very stubborn. It's my only skill."

He laughed, wet and broken and real, and pulled into his building's underground garage, where the fluorescent lights hummed and the shadows were just shadows and for one second, one breath, we were safe.

His apartment was the same as the guest room: dark wood, heavy curtains, books in languages I didn't know. But now I saw the details. The locks on the windows. The salt lines I hadn't noticed before, faint and swept under the rug. The small altar in the corner, candles and herbs and a photograph of a woman who looked like Vex but wasn't Beatrice—someone softer, someone human, someone gone.

"My grandmother," Vex said, seeing me look. "The human one. She raised me, after my mother got bored. She died in 1954. I still light the candle." He moved to the window, checked the locks, pulled the curtains. "She was the one who taught me to bake. Who taught me that hunger was just... wanting, and wanting was just being alive, and being alive was the point. She never knew what I was. Not really. She thought I was anemic. She thought the sun allergy was a skin condition. She died believing I was a good boy who needed more iron."

"Was she wrong?"

Vex turned. Looked at me. His skin was still pink, still healing, still marked by the sun he'd run through to reach me.

"She was half right," he said. "I am anemic. Just not for iron."

The knock came at midnight.

Not the door. The window. Three taps, polite, rhythmic, like a dinner guest arriving early.

Vex moved. Not fast, not wrong, just... ready. He pulled me behind him, and I let him, because the window was third-floor and nothing human knocked on third-floor windows at midnight.

"Fae," he breathed. "They found you. They found us."

The taps stopped. Then, from outside, a voice like wind chimes in a hurricane: "Bright one. We smelled your fear. It smells like dessert. May we come in?"

Vex's hand found mine. Cold. Shaking. Choosing.

"No," he said, and his voice was the grave-voice, the coffin-voice, the voice that had faced down gods and mothers and his own hunger. "You may not come in. She is not for you. She is not for anyone. She is—" He stopped. Looked at me. Looked back at the window. "She is mine. And I am hers. And that is a boundary older than your court, older than your hunger, older than the rules you think you know."

Silence. Then laughter, musical and cold and absolutely not human.

"Interesting," the voice said. "A hybrid, claiming a beacon. A starving thing, guarding a feast. We will watch, little vampire. We will wait. And when you break—and you will break, they all break—we will be here to sweep up the pieces."

The presence withdrew. Not gone. Just... waiting. Watching. Patient in the way only immortal things could be patient.

Vex didn't move. His hand stayed in mine, cold and careful and absolutely present.

"Eleanor," he whispered.

"Vex."

"They're right. I will break. Eventually. I'm two hundred years old and I've never been tested like this. Never wanted something this much. Never had to choose, every minute, every second, not to take." He turned to me, and his eyes were amber and exhausted and absolutely, terrifyingly human. "But I'm choosing now. I'm choosing tonight. I'm choosing tomorrow. And if I break—" He stopped. Swallowed. "If I break, I'll break away from you. I'll run. I'll hide. I'll lock myself in a basement in Romania before I hurt you. That's my promise. That's my boundary."

I looked at him. At the fangs. At the hunger. At the man who had run through sunlight and was still burning and had not once complained.

"And if I don't let you run?" I asked. "If I follow you to Romania? If I sit outside your basement with granola bars and bad jokes until you remember that you're not just a monster?"

He stared at me. Then he laughed, startled and genuine, the same laugh from the interview, the one that made his fangs seem almost friendly.

"That's the least romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."

"Good. Your life was too romantic anyway."

He kissed me. In the locked apartment, with the fae waiting outside and the candles burning for his grandmother and the salt lines under the rug. He kissed me like a choice, like a prayer, like a man who had finally found something worth the hunger.

And I kissed him back. Because I was a beacon, apparently. Because I was stubborn, definitely. Because I had chosen him, and he had chosen me, and the world was full of things that wanted to eat us, and we were still here, still choosing, still alive.

The fae would come again. The vampires. The things without names. Beatrice. Bethany. The whole hungry world.

But tonight, in the locked apartment with the salt lines and the candles, we were safe.

Tonight was enough.

---

[End of Chapter 8]

---