I mean, what kind of person would take into their home and then raise a werewolf vampire?

No other answer to that except a really good one.

“Was she Jian-Li?” I asked.

Something profoundly sad moved over his features as he looked back down to the bacon saying, “No.”

Okay, it was not the time to dig deeper with that.

“Learned to do what you needed to do?” I prompted as he flipped bacon.

He looked to me. “Teeth are sharp, Lilah. Fuck you up. Pain, and that pain is bad. But I got it in me to protect against that. Figured it out on a fluke. Somethin’ happens if I lick the skin before I bite. Means no pain to who I’m drawin’ from.”

“Well, that’s good,” I muttered.

“Yeah.” He grinned. “And I hesitate to wake the wildcat in you that tells her tale through your green eyes, but it’s also bad. Somethin’ happens in my mouth when I feed, so if I’m doin’ something else at the same time, means I can numb things.”

I was confused. “Numb things?”

“Numb…” He paused and leaned slightly into me. “Things. Things you don’t want numbed say I take a break from drawing to do other shit with my mouth.”

I felt my eyes get big as I whispered, “Oh.”

“Yeah.” His eyes went to my mouth. “Oh.”

I swallowed.

He lifted his gaze to mine.

“I eat real food,” he stated, kindly taking the conversation out of the hot zone. “I do not fly. Nothing like that. Don’t turn into a bat, just a wolf. But as you know, I’m a fuckuva lot faster and stronger than your average man. I hear better, see better, smell better, all that shit.”

“That’s cool, you know,” I told him softly, mostly because, it not being fresh and flipping me out, it absolutely was.

He was back to the bacon. “It’s a burden and a boon.”

I was again confused. “How is it a burden?”

He looked back to me and I held my breath at what was in his eyes.

“You live your whole life being different from everyone, Lilah, things can get shitty. They can also get ugly. People are assholes. The good ones are hard to find. There’s no one who knows what I am except Jian-Li, Xun, Wei, Chen, and now you.”

“But…what about the women you…well, used to feed from?”

His lips quirked at my emphasis on “used to” before he turned away and lifted a hand to grab a plate off the shelf. I lifted my own to grab the roll of paper towels and pulled some off to line the plate.

All this was done while he spoke.

He just didn’t say enough.

“I take care of that.”

I finished lining the plate and looked to him. “How?”

He flipped the bacon again, he just didn’t speak.

Uh-oh.