It was half past three.  She’d got home too late and up too early; but banking hours are banking hours, and it was the start of the month.  Natalie headed for her car with a clear conscience, bills paid, and drove to Gateway Lane. Nick should be up by now.
She parked her car, careful not to block the door of the garage.  She didn’t bother to buzz:  Nick had long since given her the code, and she simply punched it in.  The elevator took her up, always too slowly; but she knew the sound of the motor would, in itself, be enough for his vampire senses to alert him to her arrival.
Except that, when she slid open the door, there was no sign of him in the loft.
At first, she assumed he was still in the bathroom.  She couldn’t hear the shower; but she knew he shaved.  (It was all too obvious when he didn’t.)  Expecting him out any moment in his swish satin dressing gown, she simply filled the kettle, put it on the stove, and fetched the coffee out from under the sink.  There was, she found, no cream in the fridge again; and she returned to the cupboard under the sink for the jar of Coffeemate.
It was as she spooned a generous helping into the mug that she heard the sound.  It seemed right overhead—which meant the bedroom.  Surely ol’ slug-a-bed couldn’t really still be sleeping?  But the sound was repeated; and it definitely sounded like the creak of the springs.  She waited, spoon poised, for feet to slap the floor; but, after a pause, the creak came again.  He must have only rolled over.
With a little wicked smile, she put down the spoon and headed for the stairs, patting up carefully so her shoes would not awaken him.  That pleasure she intended to have herself.  If she could get up too damned early, so could he—even if it was still light out.
Her hand quickly turned the knob, and she threw open the door, crying, “Wakey-wakey, rise and shine!  Last one up’s a—”
The pair of eyes that froze her words did not belong to Nick.
For too long she stared, then bolted down...down...down and round...and then across the long, long floor of the loft heading for the door, wondering if she'd make it...make it...make it, before the owner of those eyes got his fangs from Nick's shoulder and flew out of the room and down from the balcony to—
She skidded to a halt, her way barred, her nose nearly slammed into a bare chest.
Her eyes rose.  He looked as pale as she felt.
“Natalie.”
“Nick.”
Beyond that, they were dumb.
“How nice that you know each other’s names,” drawled an ironic voice from above.  “And do I get an introduction?”
Nick looked up.  Natalie belatedly turned round, backed a step or two towards the corner, and craned her head to look up at the balding fair-haired man who leaned over the balcony outside the bedroom, hands on the rail.
There was a smile on his face—a smile with no reflection below.
“I believe...you’re LaCroix, aren’t you?” Natalie stammered.
“Ah, Nick has spoken of me,” was the gently taunting response.  “And what has he said?”
“That...he’s known you a long time.”
There was a blur that she couldn’t follow, and suddenly the man was no more than a few feet away, by the kitchen sink.  There was a sharp whistle as the kettle boiled.  He stepped over to the stove, turned off the gas, and lifted the kettle.  “You were about to make yourself coffee,” he observed, in a tone so normal that she couldn’t quite associate it with Nick’s tales.  “Let me.”  She watched bemused as he poured the boiling water into the mug, stirred well, and put the kettle back on the stove.

He came over, and held out the mug for her to take.  Automatically, she did.
“That’s better,” he said.
Natalie cast a helpless glance round at Nick, to find him watching LaCroix as closely as a mesmerized mouse does a snake.
“Shall we sit down?” LaCroix said pleasantly, gesturing towards the table.  He pulled out a chair.  Natalie, perforce, had to walk closer and sit down, though she never took her eyes off him.  The mug clunked too hard on the table; hot coffee splashed.  Never shifting her eyes, she raised her hand to suck the scald.
Tutting a little, LaCroix fetched a damp cloth from the sink and mopped the table.  “Mustn’t mar the wood,” he said, with a reproof that had to be mocking, though it didn’t sound so.
He returned from dropping the cloth in the sink, and pulled out the chair kitty-corner from hers and sat down.  “So...you and Nick would seem to be on very good terms,” he said to Natalie.  “You appear to have right of entry.”
“Yes,” she stammered, “I should maybe have buzzed, I guess.  That's what you mean, isn’t it?  I didn’t know—”  She looked at Nick.  “I didn’t know you had company, Nick.  I didn’t—”  She broke off.
LaCroix gave her an avuncular smile.  “Do please drink your coffee before it gets cold,” he said, “Natalie, if I may call you that.  Or would you prefer me to be more formal?  Dr. Lambert?”
“Nick speaks of me, too, I gather,” she said bravely.  “You know my name...my full name, I mean.”
“Oh, yes.”  He smiled again.
She took refuge in the mug.
By the elevator, Nick finally stirred.  “Should I offer you hospitality, too?” he asked LaCroix.  “I’ve a bottle in the refrigerator, but I know it won’t be to your liking.”
His master gave him a thoughtful look.  “It’s kind of you to offer, Nicholas, but...no.  I have no wish to wash away the flavour now in my mouth.  Too...delicious.”  He smiled; and, if there was a tease behind the smile, it was also genuine.
It was met with annoyance.  Nick headed for the fridge, and a bottle of cow’s blood which he uncorked with his teeth, spitting out the cork and draining half the contents in a single draught.
“Don’t flounce,” said LaCroix mildly.  “Just because your lady doctor interrupted our...tryst...does not belie that fact that you invited me to stay.”
Nick drowned any answer in the other half of the bottle.
“Stay...,” mur­mur­ed Nat­a­lie.  “Stay the...the day, you mean?  Like ‘stay the night’?  What I saw...?  It was what I thought I saw?”  She paused.  Both men’s eyes were on her; and she could feel their attention, and she shivered.  “Oh, this is not something Nick told me about,” she said softly.  To herself more than them, but vampire hearing is keen.
They waited to hear what might come next.
“You bite,” she said, still very quiet.  More sharply, with a side glance at LaCroix but her principal attention to Nick, “You bite, yes?  You m-m-m-make love—that’s what I saw, right?—you make love by biting?”
“And drinking blood,” affirmed Nick.  He was looking at her very closely.
“I see.”
“Nicholas has not told you this before?” asked LaCroix.
“Hinted,” she said to him.  “Hinted around it, I suppose.  He’s told me that a vampire cannot love a mortal, that it’s too dangerous.  Precisely how dangerous...well that he sort of never got around to.”  By the time that little speech had ended, her tone was sharp; and LaCroix looked a little amused.
“Well, well, Nicholas,” he said to his son.   “There is much about our kind that you have not yet betrayed to your doctor friend.  I commend you, I think—though I'm not sure that she does.”
“You're Nick’s master,” Natalie said.  “At least, that’s the term he uses—and a damned nasty term it is, too.”  She glanced round at Nick, but returned her attention to LaCroix.  “You made him,” she went on, “and sometimes he talks about you as if you’re the devil, and sometimes more like his father—”
“Families,” put in LaCroix.  “You know what they’re like.”
She ignored this.  “And now you’re...what?  His lover?”  There was a note of incredulity.  “Do you know the tales he’s told me about you?  How much he says he hates you?”
“Families,” LaCroix re­peated.
“I thought...Janette,” Nat­alie said.  A note of mourning crept into her voice—mourning for the sim­plic­ity of feeling jealous of a dark beauty who had known her Nick for so many years.  “I thought....”
“Oh, yes,” said LaCroix agreeably.  “Janette, too.”
She blinked at him.
“Janette and I were...married, so to speak.”
Nick’s voice started Natalie.  She twisted round.  Behind her, unseen, LaCroix's smile broadened.
“It was a few centuries ago.  We split up after a while.”
“A long while.”  The voice came from behind Natalie.  She ignored it.
“Yes,” Nick said.  He looked past Natalie.  His voice was level.  “A long while, in mortal terms.  Almost a century. Not long for a vampire.”
“And...him?”  Natalie looked pointedly over her shoulder, then back at Nick.  “What about him?”
“Oh, we’ve known each other far, far longer than that,” said the voice behind her.  “Known biblically, if you understand me.  Not quite from the day we met—that medieval Christian inhibition, you know; I’m afraid it meant that I had to persuade him into pleasure.”
Her eyes were on Nick:  she did not miss the flash of fury, quickly stifled.
“Pleasure.”  Her voice seemed strangely distant in her ears.  “Your biting each other, upstairs in your bed, that was ‘pleasure’, then, was it?”
Nick was stricken, chewing his lip:  she wanted an answer from him, dear God; and all he could do was stare.
“Answer her, Nicholas.”
“I was driving,” Nick managed to say, “and the radio was on, and he was...talking about the past.  Not so that anyone else would understand what he was saying, of course; but he...he...reminded—”  He broke off.
“I see.”
Natalie looked down, thoughtfully, and then turned back to drain her mug.  She got up, and set it by the sink.
“I think I’ll be going now,” she said, in that clear, still, distant voice.  “I’ll see you at work tonight, perhaps, Nick.”  She looked hard at LaCroix.  “You, I’d prefer not to see, if you don’t mind.”
She walked over to the steps to the door, wondering if she’d be let leave; but neither man moved to stop her.  In the doorway, she turned back for a moment.  “All this...I’ll need to think about it.  You too, Nick—you need to think.  About you, and me, and this cure I'm working on, and your ‘master’—”  she almost spat out the word “—and what he wants from you, and what I want from you, and—”  She paused.  “—what you want, Nick.”
She looked down the length of the room, past the cold, quiet, pale man to the silent eyes of her...friend.  “What do you want?” she asked him.  “That’s the question.  A cure or this?  A cure or...him?  One thing’s certain:  you can’t have both.”
She was through the door, into the safety of the stairwell and its windows.  Behind her, she could hear Nick’s voice crying, “Nat!”, but she ignored it.  She was not going back.
Going forward?  Perhaps.   Forward where, though?  Well, that was the next question, wasn’t it?