“Mine, too,” he said too quickly. “We can just—”

“You drank my blood.”

“A taste, to regain enough strength to move.”

“It felt different.”

“It would.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I want to know.”

He touched his chest. “I need what you have, the way you need air. For most suckers that settles the question. Blood’s a resource, like water or oil, and like water or oil, the people who need it do whatever they need to get it. That attitude ignores the why of the condition.”

“Okay,” she said, meaning, go on.

He did, with arms crossed. “I only know so much theory, but here it is. When you take the curse, it seals your soul and self. The curse stops change. That’s why my hair grows back if it’s burned off, why my muscles don’t tire. But the seal makes it hard to take soulstuff in. Humans, you get paid or eat a good meal or meditate and you draw the world into yourself. We don’t. This is how we refill.” He pointed to his mouth. “The curse is thousands of years older than Craftwork, but the idea’s the same. Imagine if the only way you could connect with the world was to steal it from someone else.”

“But you don’t.”

“I use tricks. The Bounty has its own soul, and we share. There are other ways, which boil down to knowing the other person well, so you can accept and trade, rather than just taking. That’s why it felt different.” He stopped. “Feeding makes a connection between us. The curse wants it to be one-way. I can force it back. At Andrej’s, when you—surprised me, it felt so good, and I wasn’t ready. The curse took over. I freaked out.”

“Then you blamed me for it.”

“That was an asshole move on my part.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Why fight what you are?”

“Because the curse isn’t me. I’m what I was before, only the curse tries to make me something else. It’s old, and it’s had a lot of time to learn how to make people see other people as food. Most suckers don’t last fifty years. They go mad, or get killed, or sleep their lives away. Or they walk out into the ocean and never come back.”

“I haven’t heard that one before.”

“We don’t talk about it much,” he said. “I don’t like any of those options. I’ve walked the line for decades, but I still slip.”

“And last night.”

“Last night, you’d saved my life three times, and I’d saved yours at least once. I trusted you. I was ready.”

“Are you still?”

They were closer than before. She’d pushed herself off the counter and approached him, step by tender step. His mouth was open.

There was a knock on the door.