He sounded so briskly matter-of-fact that I felt my shoulders finally relax. I hadn’t realized how tightly wound I’d been. Eric bit into his wrist and put it in front of my mouth. “Here,” he said, as if there was no question I’d take it.

He slid his free arm under my neck to raise my head. This was not going to be fun or erotic, like a nip during sex. And for a moment I wondered at my own unquestioning acquiescence. But he’d said we didn’t have time. On one level I knew what that meant, but on another I was too weak to do more than consider the time factor as a fleeting and nearly irrelevant fact.

I opened my mouth and swallowed. I was in so much pain and I was so appalled by the damage done to my body that I didn’t think more than once about the wisdom of what I was doing. I knew how quick the effects of ingesting vampire blood would be. His wrist healed once, and he reopened it.

“Are you sure you should do this?” I asked as he bit himself for the second time. My throat rippled with pain, and I regretted trying a whole sentence.

“Yes,” he said. “I know how much is too much. And I fed well before I came here. You need to be able to move.” He was behaving in such a practical way that I began to feel a little better. I couldn’t have stood pity.

“Move?” The idea filled me with anxiety.

“Yes. At any moment, Breandan’s followers may—will—find this place. They’ll be tracking you by scent now. You smell of the fairies who hurt you, and they know now Niall loves you enough to kill his own kind for you. Hunting you down would make them very, very happy.”

At the thought of any more trouble, I stopped drinking and began crying. Eric’s hand stroked my face gently, but he said, “Stop that now. You must be strong. I’m very proud of you, you hear me?”

“Why?” I put my mouth on his wrist and drank again.

“You are still together; you are still a person. Lochlan and Neave have left vampires and fairies in rags—literally, rags . . . but you survived and your personality and soul are intact.”

“I got rescued.” I took a deep breath and bent back to his wrist.

“You would have survived much more.” Eric leaned over to get the bottle of TrueBlood, and he drank it down quickly.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to.” I took another deep breath, aware that my throat was aching still but not as sharply. “I hardly wanted to live after . . .”

He kissed my forehead. “But you did live. And they died. And you are mine, and you will be mine. They will not get you.”

“You really think they’re coming?”