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am I here?”
    “Listen, I want you to go away a lot more
than you want to go away. So all we’re waiting on is for me to
figure out how to do it.” She was so very mortal.
    “Why do you fidget so much?”
    She stopped shifting from leg to leg and
gripped her thighs to still her hands. “I’m not. And, even if I
was, it would be totally natural.”
    “Extraneous movement is just that—extraneous.
Why would one spend a portion of what is a very short time on the
planet doing something extraneous?”
    “Weren’t you human at some point?”
    “Of course. Thankfully it did not last.”
    “Right, I’m sure it felt great to get over
that pesky mortality thing. And the morality thing too, I
guess.”
    “It makes you happy to believe I lack a sense
of morality.” Even if he cared what a seer thought of him, he knew
nothing he said would change her mind.
    “I haven’t been happy for about…” She checked
her watch. “Six years.”
    “Not even a blink of time to me.”
    She sat down and studied him for a moment.
“It was just horrible, wasn’t it? Being human?”
    “Constantly living in fear of pain,
starvation, and death? Yes, those things are horrible.” Rhyse
didn’t know why he spoke to her—he had no interest in lower beings.
Perhaps it was because it had been centuries since someone had
dared speak to him as if he were a peer. Not that this seer was
even close to being mistaken for his peer. She was either
incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. Or both.
    “So feeling nothing is better?”
    “I still feel hunger, and you have seen me at
my weakest. However, being without fear is priceless.”
    “There’s always a price. You just aren’t the
one to pay it.”
    “You are referring to those we feed from.” He
continued after she nodded. “It has been centuries since I drank
from a human who did not desire it.”
    “Because you compel them and then alter their
memory so they don’t remember how awful it was.”
    “It is not awful, and they offer themselves
willingly, knowing exactly what will happen. We alter their
memories for no other reason than to protect the Highworld. You
claim to be human, yet you know very little about their race. How
are we depicted in their world? Not solely as demons as we once
were. Now vampires are powerful, erotic, often bonded to one human
by an emotion that, in reality, we cannot feel. It is not our fault
they prefer fantasy over reality.”
    “And the reality is you’re just death in a
pretty package.”
    “We do not have to kill to feed. It happens
on occasion, but the system prevents countless human deaths.”
    “Tell that to the free-range kills.”
    “The—?” Ah-ha. The sanctioned kills.
“One per human generation versus one every few days. Do you really
desire to return to that?”
    “What I’d really like is for you to keep your
fangs in your pants and stop killing any of us.”
    “Impossible. Neither prohibition nor
abstinence work.” The system was not perfect but, in three hundred
years, no one had come up with anything better, and no one had the
strength and will to break the Treaty.
    She scoffed. “Well, thank the powers
everybody’s free to slaughter their own kind.”
    “The system you detest stopped the constant
wars between the races,” he said, not knowing why he desired to
convince her of something she could never comprehend. “Wars that
cost many, many lives—both supernatural and human. As long as the
Treaty itself is not defied, the races can do as they like among
their own. Each time we war against each other, beings who are
uninvolved die, and the Highworld’s secrecy is threatened.”
    “There has to be a way that doesn’t include
using seers as servants or snacks.”
    He couldn’t expect a seer to understand
something as complicated as Highworld politics; therefore, he would
not discuss it, or anything else, with the seer. “When you think of
something better, please let me know.”
    “I will.” She spoke without