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He pulls back from me, still keeping me in his arms, our faces close enough to kiss. He huffs out a little laugh, and I can feel the puff of air on my face.

“You know what I am, Andi,” He says, tone amused. “One would merely have had to read a book or watch a movie in the last century.”

I shake my head, my mind still catching up to what’s happening. “Vampires aren’t real,” I tell him.

This makes him let out a bark of laughter that is strangely both warm and mocking. “I could show you again if you missed it the first time.”

I shake my head again, more violently this time. “No! I mean, no thank you.”

One of his hands comes up and gently strokes the side of my face, pushing some hair behind my ear. Is he still trying to calm me down? “So polite, ma souris. That will serve you well in the Other World.”

I shudder. “So there’s a whole world of people like you?”

“Oh, yes. Vampires and witches and lycans of every variety. Some other creatures, too, so rare that you would have never heard of them. All wrapped up in an unseen world of magic.”

Panic starts up again, my muscles tensing, but the Commandant starts ever-so-softly stroking up and down my back. The fabric of my dress is thin, and it’s almost like he’s touching bare skin, but he stays in the safe, platonic zone north of the equator. The physical touch is working because I relax again, even if I’m still alarmed at the thought of every creature of Halloween being real and, if they are anything like the Commandant, dangerous.

Only, is he dangerous? My every instinct seems to think so, but he’s only been kind. Sudden, frightening transformation aside. Even his choice of snapping me out of my panic was gentle. My foster mom, the fundamentalist Christian one before Granny Jean, used to slap me to get me to stop crying. It was why I was eventually taken away from her. But here’s a big, powerful man like the Commandant, holding me and softly reassuring me that he means me no harm. I almost believe him, but then I think of him slamming that other guy’s head into the table, and I’m not so sure.

Despite my confusion and conflicting emotions, I can't help but blurt out the next question on my mind. “What’s your name?”

“My name, ma souris?”

A snarky response rears up in my mind, but I squash it. I still don’t know how he’ll react to being teased. I just nod. “I only know you as the Commandant. I can’t keep calling you that.”

“Why?” he asks, amused, his hand still teasing up and down my spine. “It is what my people call me.”

“I’m not one of your people,” I point out.

“Yet,” he counters. “We still have a contract to discuss.”

That brings me up short, and I tense again. The Commandant sighs. “Julian,” he tells me. “My name is Julian. Is that enough for you to stop acting like I'm going to strike you?”

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “Are you going to strike me, Julian?”

His hands stop stroking me, and I immediately miss the comforting sensation. It’s been a while since anyone touched me just to soothe me. Not since before I was with Colton, actually.

“That’s not a very clever question, ma souris,” he tells me. “If I wanted to strike you, kill you, take what I want from you by force, there’s nothing you could do to stop me. That I haven’t means that I don’t want to.”

“But what about later?” I challenge. “What if you want to later? You don’t want to hurt me now, but people change. I learned that the hard way.”

He shakes his head, tsking in disappointment. “Do not compare me to your ex. I have never struck a woman, no matter how annoying, and I don’t plan to. My vow, Andi, is that you are safe as long as you are in my presence.”

He says this in such a solemn way that I get the feeling that his “vow” means something. Because he’s a vampire or it’s just who he is, I don’t know. But it convinces me, though I’m definitely still feeling out of my depth.

“Ok, Julian,” I say quietly. “Tell me what the price of your protection is. The one that you couldn’t tell me until I knew you were a vampire.”

The Commandant, Julian, lets go of me, and I practically collapse back onto my chair. Because he was holding me up, I didn’t realize that I was standing on jelly-legs. He returns to his seat and turns to look at me, his gaze intense.

I feel that he’s going to make me endure another long silence, and I just want to scream, “Get on with it!” But I don’t. I just keep his gaze, trying not to think of his eyes glowing and red. Finally, he says, “Much of what you know about vampires is probably useless pop culture or old wives’ tales. But one thing is true: we need blood to survive.”

I am still in my seat. That’s not what I expected him to say. Not that I really know what I expected him to say.

He continues, “We don’t need to kill a living creature to feed. Far from it. We are less like the parasites of myth and more like symbiotes. We take what we need from a host and, in return, give them pleasure, along with other gifts. And our saliva even has a healing agent that helps close wounds. It is no hardship to be fed on by a vampire. And humans are our favorite hosts. But the Other World is vulnerable. There are more humans than there are of us, and if we are found out, then there is no knowing who would survive the ensuing conflict. So, we must be quiet and secretive about our feeds. Many times, we can feed from a partner and then compel them to forget, none the wiser, but some humans are like you, with powerful wills, and compulsion, especially done by a young vampire, doesn’t always work. So, we have made a system of blood contracts.”

“Blood contracts?” I dumbly repeat back to him.

Julian nods. “Yes. In exchange for services or money, a human who has been initiated into our world becomes a willing host. There are general contracts for a certain number of feeds, under which any vampire in my club can feed on the human. And there are specific contracts for special cases, when a general one won't do.”