"Laura Anne Gilman - His Essential Nature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilman Laura Anne)

His Essential Nature
LAURA ANNE GILMAN
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Rumor and Hollywood have it that vampires are born from a bite, drink blood to survive, and live
hundreds of years until someone puts a stake through their heart. Or exposes them to sunlight.

Truth is, your average vampire is born to a mommy and a daddy, requires one square, if small,
meal a day to supplement the hemoglobin, and generally lives to about 110, assuming that we
don’t get hit by a truck or taken out in a drive-by shooting. As for the stake through the heart—
hell yes that’ll kill a vampire. Kill most anything, you do it right.

You see, when we’re kids we can bear the daylight, make friends, play by the daylight rules. Be
“normal.” It’s only when we hit puberty that things begin to change. And by then, most of us have
made our peace with the way things are.

==========

Westin looked at the words glowing on the screen and rubbed one eye wearily. He’d made his peace,
but it hadn’t been easy. And now he was going to put someone else through that. Maybe.

Looking across the home office to where Dani sat at the old-fashioned rolltop desk, test papers and
grade book laid out with frightening precision, he felt a rush of adrenaline run through his veins that had
nothing to do with the blood he had consumed not half an hour before. His wife. And, god help him, his
child. Because they were really going to do this. They were going to have a kid. In about six months, give
or take miscalculations.

Looking back at the words he had typed, his contribution to his child’s education, Westin saved the file
and stood abruptly, gliding out of the room without a word of excuse or explanation. He knew, without
looking back, that Dani watched him go. He could see that smile on her face, the amused glint in her
eyes. She knew him entirely too well, dammit. Couldn’t a man keep some privacy?

Grabbing his camera from the hook where it always hung ready, Westin dragged his “working” jacket
over his arms, let himself out the back door, and stood a moment on the yellow-lit porch, breathing in the
cold night air. It was time to work. He’d been home for almost two weeks, trying to choose the negatives
for the book project his agent wanted to put together, when Dani had dropped the baby bombshell on
him. That, he admitted wryly, had stopped him cold for a few days. But worrying wasn’t going to get the
bills paid, and while it was satisfying to compose the things he was going to have to tell his unborn child,
words weren’t the same as images. They didn’t have the same power, the same corporeal dimensionality.

He snorted, shaking his head in disgust. Fatherhood was making his brain soften already. Corporeal
dimensionality. Jesus.

Stepping off the porch, he strode into the darkness, sensitive eyes adjusting automatically to the play of
shadows and starlight. The adaptations of a night creature. Following the needle-sharp tracks of deer, he
moved into the spaces between trees, letting his breath float like mist. There, over to his left. Stopping, he
raised the camera slowly, forcing himself to take the time needed. A buck lifted his head, slowly chewing,
a strip of tree bark hanging from his mouth. His sides were scarred, and his shoulders strong. A survivor.
But the buck was thinner than he should be for what had so far been a mild winter. He might not last the
season, leaving a space for a younger buck to get himself into the gene pool.