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already away at college when Linda died, and I was introduced to Bhumika on my next trip home after the funeral.
    “Are you sure you want to stay?” I asked. I could feel the little shaking and tremoring in Bhumika’s hand, and how cool it was in a room that was just on the uncomfortable side of warm.
    “Bhumika has made her decision,” Chivalry said from the doorway. I’d felt him in the house when I walked into the foyer, but I’ve never been very good about tracking either of my siblings’ specific locations unless I’m concentrating very hard, and I jumped a little. He was dressed for dinner in an elegant black suit, with a black shirt and a silk black tie. All that unrelieved black should’ve made him look like a lounge lizard’s undertaker, but instead he looked like he’d just come from a red carpet. He walked over to us and smoothly took Bhumika’s hand from me, bringing it up to his mouth to drop a small kiss on her palm. I shuddered at the way her face lit up at the sight of him, for a moment almost erasing the marks of illness and wear, returning her for just a second to the beautiful and lively woman she used to be.
    “If she’s tired, then she should go rest,” I said stubbornly. “What does her doctor say?”
    Chivalry’s face stayed immobile, even as his eyes started to gleam with temper. His pupils expanded slowly and the hazel of his irises disappeared. When a true vampire is really pissed off, his eyes can’t pass forhuman anymore. Chivalry wasn’t near that point, but he was getting there. “Bhumika has made her decision,” he repeated, his lips barely moving. His eyes never left mine, and eventually I had to drop my gaze.
    Bhumika lifted her other hand to pat my shoulder. “It’s okay, Fort,” she said, her tone urgent. “I’m doing just fine.”
    “Okay,” I said. “It’s all okay.” I pasted on a fake smile for her. I wanted to scream in her face that it wasn’t okay, and that it was obvious that she was dying, but I had no desire to either rub it in her face or get my own punched by Chivalry. Besides, she’d been dying since I met her.
    Popular fiction suggests that vampires seek out innocent victims every night, accost them in the dark, and with one easy tap of an artery can drink them down in mere seconds, with just a few artistically placed drops of blood at the corner of their mouths to look sexy and dangerous. That’s fairly far from the reality. After the final transition into adulthood, vampires require human blood on a regular basis to stay healthy, but nowhere near enough to kill a person. Chivalry and Prudence only fed on humans once a week or so, and never took more than a pint or two at a sitting. But while I wasn’t entirely certain who Prudence chose to drink from, knowing only that she rarely repeated donors, Chivalry preferred monogamy. A few feedings here and there were no more damaging than a trip down to the Red Cross, but all of Chivalry’s wives invariably suffered from anemia, and despite iron supplements and regular transfusions, at our heart vampires aren’t as benign as a surgical needle. Something happens during a feeding that’smore than just losing a pint of blood, and apparently that something is corrosive and cumulative. There were two, maybe three, years of good, almost enhanced, health and vitality, and then a long and steady decline that always ended in death.
    If he’d simply fed off his wives, it would’ve been easy to dismiss Chivalry as a fashionable modern Bluebeard, but he didn’t. For Carmela, Linda, and now Bhumika, Chivalry was the model spouse: devoted, supportive, and loyal. Of course, I think in the ideal marriage your husband shouldn’t suck your blood. Or remarry the day after you die.
    But I’m still mostly human, and apparently a bit of an idealist. Watching Bhumika cling to the hand of her killer, seeing Chivalry lean down and tenderly adjust her lap blanket and retrieve her book from where it had fallen, I felt