I heard the resolve in his voice and knew I wasn’t going to win.

“Don’t look at me,” I whispered.

“Okay.” He moved to the farthest corner of the room and turned his back.

The blood was warm, as Dahlia’s had been, but thicker, as though it had already begun to clot. It coated my tongue and left a faint taste of copper in my mouth. It was like drinking penny-flavored Jell-O that hadn’t set. This repulsed me, but instead of gagging, I gulped half of it down. I felt gluttonous. If I were drinking straight from someone’s neck I probably wouldn’t have thought of manners, but it was much different sitting in Nathan’s living room, drinking from a mug like a civilized vampire.

I sipped the blood self-consciously and studied him. It was my experience that people weren’t nice to strangers. In med school it’s every student for his- or herself. In fact, most of us went out of our way to intimidate the “competition.” The eat-or-be-eaten attitude had become so ingrained in my psyche, that I’d come to expect such behavior from everyone. But Nathan had been nothing but helpful from the start, which was surprising considering he was a week away from killing me if I didn’t join his vampire cult.

It didn’t seem right that a man so attractive would be such a complete stickler for the rules. He must have worked for the IRS in a past life.

Of course, I didn’t know much about Nathan’s current life. In the brief phone conversations we’d had during the past week, he’d revealed only generic information about himself and hadn’t given me much room to ask questions. If I was going to trust anything he told me, I needed some answers.

There was no time like the present.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirty-two.”

“I meant including…” I didn’t know how to phrase the rest.

“Oh, that,” he said, and it sounded as if he didn’t care to dispense that information. “I’ve been a vampire since 1937.”

I tried to conceal my disappointment. I had expected to hear he was hundreds of years old, that he’d walked the battlefield with Napoléon and discussed the mysteries of the cosmos with Nostradamus, like the vampires in the movies. “That was the year ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became the national anthem, you know.”

“I didn’t know that. I wasn’t an American at the time.” He glanced over his shoulder, and I immediately covered my face.

“It’s okay,” he assured me. “You’re back to normal.”

I leaned over a clear patch of the glass-topped coffee table to check my reflection.

“It’s the hunger,” he said as he straightened up the room. “The worse it is, the worse you look. The same goes for anger, pain and fear. It’s very animalistic.”

How anyone could be blasé about his entire head morphing into a Harryhausen-esque special effect was beyond me.

“The scary part is that it gets worse with age. Some of the real old vampires even get horns when they change, or cloven feet. But you can control it, with practice. You just have to calm yourself, find your center, all that New Age crap. It’s very Zen.” He took the empty cup from my hands and headed to the kitchen sink.