“If I want to.” He smiled. “And to answer your first question, yes, you’re special.”

“But I was an accident,” I said as I fixed him with a piercing stare. “I remember that night, or at least, most of it. You never fed me your blood. It got into me when I stabbed you, but you didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Sighing heavily, he leaned back in his chair. He studied me for a long moment before speaking again. “You have my blood, Carrie. Even if I didn’t intend to share it with you, it still flows through your veins. It makes you precious to me.”

I glared at him. “You attacked me and left me for dead. I wasn’t so precious to you then.”

He raised his hand to stop me. “Please, excuse me. These damned eyes, they dry out so quickly.”

He lifted a small knife and plunged it into his borrowed eye. The organ fell to the table with a soft, squishy sound and flattened. A gruesome image of the dead morgue attendant flashed through my mind.

Cyrus leaned over the face of the dead girl and carved out one of her eyes. When he’d inserted his replacement, he freed the second eye from the corpse and dropped it into his glass. It sank to the bottom like an olive in a martini.

“I had two perfectly good eyes before I returned to this city. Fresh ones are hard to come by, and they wear out before you’ve gotten much use from them.”

My physician’s curiosity took over then, distracting me from our earlier line of conversation. “How does it work?”

“I don’t know.” He blinked a few times, as though he’d just put in new contact lenses. A thin line of blood ran like a tear down his cheek. “I’m assuming it has something to do with the regenerative humors in human blood.”

“There’s no such thing as humors. Does it work with other body parts? Limbs?” I scooted forward in my chair. “What about teeth?”

“How do I know? Carrie, I understand your thirst for knowledge, but there are questions even the blasted Sanguinarius can’t answer.” He sipped from his glass. The eye inside rolled around to stare at me.

I was going to barf.

Cyrus either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “I’ll have the servants prepare your room, but I fear it won’t be ready before dawn. You can stay with me today. I’m sure we can find some engaging activity to fill the boring daylight hours.”

“Whoa, whoa.” I waved my hands in front of me as though I were signaling a plane. “I’m not staying.”

Not that I wasn’t tempted. The blood tie was an incredible aphrodisiac, despite the fact I’d just watched him pick over a dead body as if it were a rotisserie chicken. But I had only come here in need of information, not an unfathomably dirty one-night stand.

Cyrus’s expression darkened. “I thought you said your apartment burned down. Surely you need a place to stay.”