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wanted
to be honest with you up front.”
    “If you were to bite me, would I turn into a vampire?”
    “No. You’d need to be bitten on many consecutive days, and
then have your blood drained to the point just before death.”
    “Then bite me and make me orgasm. Then I’ll believe
you’re a vampire.”
    Kendra was shocked, this was the last thing she’d expected.
    “I’ll step outside for a moment,” Abbott said from across
the room.
    Eric looked over at Abbott. “But you have super hearing,
right? So you’ll hear us from outside, too.”
    “Yes, but sometimes the illusion of privacy is better than
nothing.”
    Kendra needed to talk to Eric about binding him. She’d
figured he’d need some convincing for her to bite him in order to bind him, but
with him asking for it, she needed to get permission now so she wouldn’t need
to bite him twice.
    “Eric, we need to talk about something before I bite you.
It’s part of the reason Abbott is here. Vampire society has a lot of rules
designed to keep our secret and thus keep us safe. The only way we’re allowed
to share the information with humans is if we perform a little ritual, so we’ll
be alerted the moment a human even thinks about telling our secret. I won’t do
it, though, without your permission.”
    “But, now that you’ve told me you kind of have to do it,
right? So it doesn’t matter if I give permission or not.”
    “No, we have two options. I can make you forget I told you,
or I can bind you so you can’t tell our secret.”
    He was trying hard to appear calm, but his scent gave away
his anxiety, fear, and shock as he asked, “You can make me forget?”
    Kendra nodded. “Yes. Before blood banks, when we fed on
someone who wasn’t a companion, we had to make them forget it happened. It’s an
evolutionary thing, I guess, but the point is that you don’t have to go through
the binding ritual if you don’t want.”
    “You have to drink my blood to do the binding thing. What do
you have to do to make me forget?”
    “Just look into your eyes.”
    “And you’re telling me because you want to have a
relationship with me.” His voice was incredulous, disbelieving… and yet he was
being forced to believe, as there were no other logical explanations.
    “Yes.”
    “Would this relationship involve the regular taking of my
blood?” He was a rich businessman, after all, so he jumped straight to what she
might want from him, how he might be taken advantage of.
    “Only if you want me to,” she tried to assure him. “As I
told you, now that there are blood banks, I’m no longer dependent on finding
human sources for blood. There’s something called a human companion, someone a
vampire keeps around as an intimate source of food, and that’s probably how the
vampire community will see you — at least at first. However, I’m
interested in you , I want to get to know you, spend time with you, and
if you don’t want the sharing of blood to be part of our relationship, it
doesn’t have to be. It’s a very intimate act, almost more so than sex
sometimes, but if you aren’t comfortable with it then it wouldn’t be
pleasurable, so I wouldn’t want to do it.”
    “After you’ve bitten me and bound me, if I wanted you to
make me forget, could you still do it?”
    “Yes.”
    He took a breath and blew it out. “Okay, then. Abbott, go
ahead and do your little illusion of privacy thing. Kendra, how do we do this?”
    “When I first bite you, I’ll need you to say, ‘I will tell
no one of the existence of vampires or the supernatural world. I will keep your
secrets.’ Once you’ve said the necessary words, I’ll inject the feel-good
stuff. I’m sorry, but I can’t make it pleasant from the very beginning this
time. I can keep it from hurting more than a few microseconds, but I have to
wait until the ritual completes before I can put the feel-good stuff in. Now,
repeat back to me what you need to say.”
    “I will tell no one of the