A Cage for Hungry Hearts [COMPLETE]

33. Domare

When evening comes, Winston is out training, so I seek out my confidante in all things emotional. When I open Grandmère's door without knocking, I'm greeted by her stoniest frown. She stands halfway across the room, a watering can in hand.

"Mon cher," she says frostily.

"Grandmère," I reply sweetly, fingers pressed together in front of my face as if in prayer. "Dearest grandmother to my heart, I seek your advice."

She rolls her eyes and waves me in. I sprawl on the largest of the two ottomans while she putters over her plants. They stand cheerfully under a heat lamp, green and healthy. When the silence grows so thick its nearly palpable, I finally break it.

"How do I save him?" I ask. I don't have to specify who.

She slams her watering can onto the table. "You don't."

"Grandmère, please."

She starts pruning her small garden, dismembering dead stems and browning leaves with quick swipes of her fingernails. When she gives in, its with considerable reluctance. "You'd need to find a suicidal nosfa."

I consider this answer. "I can't tell if you're being serious."

"To be saved, Winston DeBrock will have to be turned by a vampire who's willing to die." She turns and points a skeletal twig at me "Not you."

"Yes, I'd prefer we both stay alive, thank you. Now explain the suicidal part. Assume I'm stupid."

"You are stupid," she mutters. When I don't refute her claim, she seems to realize how desperate I am. "To make a human into a nosfa, the nosfa doing the turning must be sacrificed. Their life force is essentially transferred into the human. It is the reason why most nosfa are born and not made. To change a human is to kill a nosfa."

How the hell am I going to find one of my kind willing to trade their life for Winston's?

"That aside, I'm not sure it will even work," she adds. "It would take the blood of a particularly powerful nosfa to negate all the degradation in his body."

"Who would be strong enough?"

I know she's properly angry when she lashes out and knocks one of her plants onto the floor. The side-eye she gives me is scorching. "You would sacrifice one of your own for him?"

"Depends on the nosfa," I say, only a little tremulous in the face of her wrath.

"He's a helpless cause. Give up on him."

"No," I say, utterly resolute. "I told you. I won't. I'd offer myself to turn him if I knew he could survive this life without me."

And I am also, admittedly, quite selfish.

I want him to live so I can keep him. I can't do that if I'm dead.

"He's got hooks in you, and you don't seem to want them out. This will not end well, Domare."

Picking at the ottoman, I mentally start building a list of nosfa I'm not particularly fond of. Maybe two donors will do the trick, so no nosfa will have to die. Grandmère gives me a dark look, like she knows exactly what I'm thinking.

"It won't work with two. Many have tried and failed. That said, I refuse to let you sacrifice one of us for one of them."

"I won't let him die," I say fiercely. "He's mine."

"I will not help you save him, and if you try to harm one of our own, I will stand in your way. It is our duty to protect our own."

"Our own don't like me on the best of days. They would be rid of me in a heartbeat, if the opportunity presented itself."

"You know that's untrue."

"Do I?" I roll to my feet, feeling hollowed out. "If you won't let me save him, then I will go to someone who will."

Panic bleaches her features.

Coming toward me, she lifts her hands so she can place them on my shoulders. "Anna makes you worse. Can't you see?"

"Of course I do." I pry her hands from my shoulder. "But it'll be worth the price."

"She won't help you, you fool! She never does! She only hurts you!"

"I have to try."

"You'll regret it." There are tears in her eyes again. Blood trails down her cheeks. I wipe it away with the pads of my fingers, smearing red across her flawless skin. It strikes me that I've never seen her cry more than she has in the past few months. It's not like her.

"Is he worth your agony?" she whispers. "This human you barely know?"

"Grandmère," I say softly, "I love him. He's worth my life."

She closes her eyes. "Give him your blood for now. It will give you more time."

"Thank you," I say, meaning it with all my being. "Thank you."

Now, I must find a way for Winston to let me.