Watching the gentle rise and fall of Kinley's chest, her body jerks and her brows furrow as the dawn of a new day breaks. I've been watching her sleep for hours, tossing and turning as if she keeps dreaming about drowning in a river of blood. She's been relatively still for the past half hour, just small tics and twitches here and there.

I forgot how much sleep humans require. It is no wonder they all lust for immortality. They sleep half their lives away.

Kinley has been asleep for over fourteen hours. I'm getting stiff lying here waiting for her to wake up.

After another half-hour passes, I've had all I can take. I lean in and expel an icy-cold current of air directly into Kinley's face. Her brows knit tighter together, so I do it again, this time with a little more force. All this results in is her pulling the covers over her face as an unintelligible groan filters from her lips.

About three-dozen things I could do to wake her enter my mind. I choose the one that causes my mouth to curve into a sadistic grin. With my mouth, I take hold of the ear of hers exposed to me and plunge my tongue into her ear canal—cold and wet meets warm and dry.

"Morning," I say as Kinley gazes at me through sleep hazed eyes that appear to be having a hard time making the transition from her dream-state to the reality I have forced her to come back to.

If she only knew my cold tongue in her ear was the force that woke her. She probably would try to pay me back with one of her pencils. Or that offense may earn me one of her higher caliber weapons.

Kinley's sea-green eyes widen. The thump-thump of her pulse skyrockets as she matches my voice to the blur becoming clearer the more alert her brain becomes during its waking process.

"Did you sleep well?" I ask simply to mess with her because the expression on her face right now is utterly priceless.

Kinley bolts up in bed, her hands flying to her neck to see if there are pieces of flesh missing. She's lucky there aren't because it was tempting, very fang-achingly tempting.

Once she feels satisfied her neck is still intact, she looks down at the arm she cut. There is no evidence of the sacrifice she tried to make in order to save one of her own kind, not even a scar thanks to my diligence.

I slip my hand under the covers that separate us and skim my fingertips along her thigh suggestively. "I don't think I slept at all. There were a lot of other things on my mind that kept me awake."

That does it. Kinley falls out of bed in her attempt to escape my unwelcome touch.

If I were to allow myself to breathe in the atmosphere that surrounds us, I bet I would be drowning in the scent of her fear as it mixes with her sweet, cinnamon blood.

Gritting my teeth, I shut down that thought before it has a chance to reach my loins.

Ground rules. You have a purpose for being here, I remind myself.

This would be so much easier if this human's blood crafted only one type of hunger in me. I met Kinley less than two weeks ago, and I already long for the days when all I felt toward humans was bloodlust.

It's hard to keep my thoughts focused when Kinley has just turned as pale as the linens she is tangled in.

I can't help it.

I involuntary breathe in to catch a whiff of the sheer panic that is so plainly written all over her features.

Her clothes were covered in blood so I stripped her down to the bare necessities. Based on the way all the color has drained from her complexion, I think she would have preferred if I had kept her in her scarlet-stained clothes.

I rather enjoy the way being before me in her lavender lace undergarments makes her feel exposed and vulnerable. That is how prey should feel when they are in the presence of a far superior predator.

Propping myself up on my elbow, I observe Kinley's frantic scramble backward until her back hits the glass of the sliding door that leads to the balcony. Her gaze darts from the open door that leads out into the living room to the nightstand. I can see the wheels in her head spinning as she weighs her options of which location she can make it to first.

The correct answer is neither.

She tries for the nightstand since it is closest to her. I catch her wrist as she grabs hold of a silver-tipped stake. "Let's go ahead and get this out of the way, shall we?" I bring her hand up and help her drive the stake directly into my stilled heart.

Blood drips down her forearm and onto the tiled floor that mimics the look of gray hardwood as I hold her hand in place. It hurts like nothing else, but it is a pain I'm willing to endure to teach this human a lesson. I don't want to deal with her always trying to stake me with whatever wooden objects she can find.

Somehow her eyes manage to get bigger as she stares at the stake embedded into my chest. The tremble that started in her legs moves into the rest of her. She begins to shake so violently my grip is the only thing keeping her hand on the stake. When her gaze moves up to mine, it's as if she is speaking to me. I am no longer a spawn of Satan. I am the Devil herself.

The moment I release Kinley's hand, she makes a run for it. Her body tenses as she comes face to face with a closed door. She knows I am behind her and that my hand is keeping the door from opening, yet that doesn't stop her desperate efforts of trying to open it. She's coming apart, her fright making her muscles weaker with each passing second. Tears begin to stream down her face as she keeps saying, this isn't happening. This isn't happening again.

I let Kinley continue to exhaust herself as she tries to open the door she knows I'm not going to allow her to open. Humans are such ugly criers: snot runs from their nose, saliva spills from their mouths, and their faces flush tomato red. Kinley is no different.

"This is where you say, Thank you, Tristan, for saving my life the other night. I behaved foolishly, and it won't happen again." I speak directly into her ear, letting my words slither past her eardrum and down into her core until they cause raised bumps to cover her skin.

Her forehead hits the door. She shakes her head as she presses it firmly against the door. I grab a fist full of her hair and wrench her head back, disrupting the under-the-breath mumbling and sobs that have gripped her.

Her body contorts to alleviate the pain I'm causing. "I don't think you understand me. That wasn't a suggestion."

One way or another, this human will learn to obey me. She can learn it the easy way, or she can go about it the hard way. Either is fine with me.

"I won't do it again." She rushes her words as she feels me begin to twist the hand I have fisted in her hair.

She cries out, turning her body toward me as I continue to tighten my grip. She did not say everything I asked her to say, not even close.

"I was foolish and it won't happen again." Her second attempt to appease me is better but still not good enough.

"And?" I prompt, relaxing my grip slightly.

"I'm sorry."

A smile graces my features when it is clear to me she can't get herself to thank a demon for anything, especially one who wouldn't let her die when that is all she wants.

"That's okay, Kinley. There are other ways in which you can thank me." I slide the hand of mine that is in her hair to the front of her throat and graze the pulsing in her neck with my thumb.

A chuckle rumbles deep in my chest at her horrified expression and the way her shoulders automatically rise to protect the thing I am indirectly threatening.

"Tell me, human, why can't you be compelled?" I get right to it. I don't expect her to know the answer, but it doesn't hurt to ask. If anything, it will open a dialogue between us, something that has yet to happen as she is usually too frightened to speak or too busy telling me to do my worse and to go to hell.

"Compelled?" she squeaks out, uncomfortable with the way I am holding her against my body.

"Yes, compulsion. Don't pretend you don't understand. I'm sure compulsion is discussed in one of the many books you have read about my kind."

"It was but...but so were all the other things." Her gaze drops to the hole in my shirt and the deep red splattering my exposed chest underneath. "You...you can compel people?" The tremble of her body comes through in her words.

The way her fear is climbing, I'm starting to think her mind glossed right over the fact that I stated that she couldn't be compelled. If she is failing to comprehend what I am saying, there is no way she knows the answer.

I pull her to me with such force and speed she sucks in a sharp intake of air. "Yes, I can compel humans, but I can not compel you."

Her eyes waver back and forth between mine like she still doesn't understand or believe what I am saying.

"Trust me, human. If I could compel you, I would because it would save me a lot of time and grief."

Her crumpled-in-confusion expression plummets into complete desolation. The waterworks I had managed to shut off spring back to life, her eyes filling so rapidly with fresh tears they start to fall as she blinks against the surplus of gathering water.

"Is that why they died? He said he was waiting for me. That if I had been home, they wouldn't have died. Did my parents die because something is wrong with me? I didn't even know demons existed till that night. Why would he need to kill them if I didn't know? I didn't know and he killed them. Your kind killed my parents!" Kinley pushes against me, trying to gain distance from me as she comes apart again.

I have no desire to suffer through another obnoxiously loud sobfest so I put her into the wall and bar my arm across her chest. The stun of my strike suspends everything: her breathing, the tears, even her heart momentarily.

"I don't know the answers. All I know is you shouldn't know my kind exists, yet you do. Until I can figure out why you can't be compelled and how you survived a bite that should have killed you, you will remain by my side. As for your parents' deaths, I couldn't care less the reason. All I care about is what happened to you inside that ambulance. Whatever happened, it is the reason you are still alive and the reason you are walking around with the knowledge of my kinds' existence.

"I am only going to ask this once, human. Did the vampire who killed your parents force you to drink their blood?" I slide my forearm up to her throat and apply pressure so she knows this isn't an answer when you feel like it situation. It's a, you will answer me, and you will answer me now.

"He tore them apart before I got home. Their bodies, their throats, their hearts...He desecrated them and he enjoyed doing it just as he enjoyed making me look at what he had done." Kinley finds the courage to answer me. Because if she didn't, she fears I will crush her windpipe.

She wouldn't be wrong. I'll crush whatever I have to, as many times as I must, to get the answers I need.

If I can pull her from the brink of death, I can certainly manage to heal the bones I break.

"Did he force you to drink his blood?" The tension mounting in me causes all my muscles to flex instantaneously, resulting in me cutting off Kinley's airway. I relax my arm immediately before her lungs can miss one intake of air.

This is the only viable option I have been able to come up with. If the vampire that killed her parents forced her to drink his blood before he bit her, it's possible his blood would have counteracted the venom. But I don't understand why a vampire would do that. What would he have been trying to achieve?

If this is something he often does, is it possible there are more humans out there like Kinley who know what we are because he is feeding them his blood?

Can vampire blood also be the reason Kinley can't be compelled? I've never tested the theory as I have never offered a human my blood before, until last night anyway. Even if that were possible, to feed a human enough blood to suspend our ability to compel them temporarily, Kinley wouldn't have had vampire blood in her system in the bookstore. It would have been long gone by then.

"Did he force you to drink his blood?" I ask again, my tenor favoring possession of the evil entity she believes me to be.

It wouldn't necessarily explain Kinley's ability to defy compulsion, but it would explain the reason she survived the bite.

It's gone.

I sweep Kinley's hair away from her shoulder and stretch her neck so that I can see the full length of it.

When flashes of me feeding on her in the bookstore come to mind, I know instantly why the bite mark is no longer visible. I bit her in the same place and then healed her with my saliva.

Good going, Tristan.

"The only thing I was forced to do is see what he took away from me. So if that is all you came here for then I beg you to finish what he started. It won't matter if I can't be compelled if I am dead."

This human's preference for death is unnerving. Quite honestly, it is going to be problematic as it is hard to get a creature to behave if the only threat you can make against them doesn't matter.

"You aren't remembering correctly. Maybe he came to you the night before and made you drink his blood, in a dream, nightmare, whatever you want to call it, but at some point, he must have made you drink his blood."

"I never saw him before that night."

"Stop being resistant and think back." I slam my fist into the wall next to her head. "Whatever happened to you in that ambulance, you should have stayed dead. You didn't. I'm trying to establish how that's possible and if it's connected to why compulsion doesn't work on you, yet you're making it difficult."

I'm grasping at anything that might explain what this human's existence cannot. Hell, I'd even buy into one of my own dabbling in the dark arts and putting a spell on her. Only it would have to be a protection spell and that means she has been influenced by white magic. I have never met, seen, or heard of an actual human being capable of harnessing magic. One of my kind, yes, as it takes a degree of "magic", if you will, to create offspring.

A human? No. It is impossible.

Nowhere in the history of humanity, even past the written history of today, is there evidence besides folklore that there has been a human who could practice magic, real magic. White magic can no longer exist outside of the humans' creator's kingdom. Everything that is here is tainted by some degree of darkness, even those that profess to be holy.

Heck, maybe a human can be compelled to defy compulsion from another vampire. If that were the case, the vampire would have been an ancient. I can't fathom why an ancient would compel this human to disregard all other vampires' orders and only obey his.

I'm not getting anywhere but more frustrated, and a frustrated vampire leads to a hungry vampire. I don't need to be hungry around this human. I need to be calm, collected, and in control of myself.

Just as Kinley starts to open her mouth, a knock on the front door sounds. She stops breathing as she listens. I can tell she wasn't expecting anyone and that a part of her is terrified of what I might do to the person who is interrupting our conversation.

"Yo, open up! I didn't come all the way from Colorado to be treated like some sales person you're trying to avoid. All I peddle is love. Now, open this door before I kick it in."

"Maya." The name rolls off Kinley's lips in a whisper so soft it sounds more like a rasped exhale of air.

Kinley's pupils dilate at the same time I assume the alarm bells sound in her head. Her gaze snaps to me, and I think it is safe to say she understands precisely what the twisted grin on my face means for her friend.

The same door Kinley was minutes ago trying to escape she plasters herself in front of. "Please don't." Her voice strains so hard against the tremors welling in her body it almost goes out.

This leverage is exactly what I need to control this human. She doesn't care if she dies, but she cares if others do.

With lightning speed, I retrieve the bathrobe hanging in the bathroom and toss it at Kinley. "Careful what you say, human. We wouldn't want Maya to end up with her heart on the floor now, would we?"