Eve woke up early. She always did.
She was out in the woods again.
Those familiar, green-filtered light patterns rolled across her face, and a second later she was blinded by the sun, then the high-blowing wind receded, and the patterns slid back, followed by the deep green darkness that she was so used to.
Eve grit her teeth. Panic thrummed in her heart, driving it to beat hard and fast. Had he done it, finally? Had Luke rejected her?
She had expected it. She had been waiting for it. But now that it was here, she wasn't sure she could continue.
A hand dipped down in front of her.
Evelyn latched into it with a heady breath of relief, her teeth piercing through the flesh and drawing blood.
So he hadn't abandoned her after all. He was still here, caring for her, being with her.
As she sucked on the outer side of the hand, she looked up, hoping to see Luke's warm expression. He was only warm in the mornings, and due to some idiotic policy or the way other people would view it, she didn't live with him, so she didn't see it anymore.
She had seen it every day when they had been traveling between homes. Then they had been moving in the wastelands, and maybe that was where they were again.
The romanticized vision of walking through the raider-infested Deadlands was violently broken when she saw a different face above her.
Who was this? She didn't remember. Her memory was still blurry. It often was in the mornings.
Michael.
Michael was his name. Luke had told her not to hurt him.
What would Luke do if he knew that she had done this? That she was drinking his blood?
She had even forgotten to be careful, so she would have to clean up the wound. Luckily, Luke had taught her that relatively early.
In the first few days, she had hidden her strange obsession from him. That was what other people called it, and it sounded bad, so Eve generally didn't share it with new people.
But Luke had had to teach her that random people on the street counted as "new people" just as well as a new master. She hadn't realized before that that to most people, a human was a human as much as any others. They all had the same rights and generally the same ideals.
There was also a system, apparently, where each human used roughly the same principles to address and interact with each other. Luke said it was called "basic decency".
Evelyn wasn't good with that. In her opinion, if someone didn't have authority over her, why should she care?
But there were bad humans, so she had gotten a few samples of blood aside from Luke's and her own. The raiders were a primary example of this. They had attacked almost every other day in the Deadlands. It was practically heaven next to her extended isolation when Lord Quirk had been her master.
He hadn't given her any blood at all. In fact, practically the second he had heard about her licking one of her own wounds, he had immediately put a muzzle on her.
Eve had always wondered why he had a muzzle on hand, and was willing to use it at a very public event among the associated families.
That was when she had killed her second significant human.
It was still hard for her to remember how many lives she had taken in the depths of the Lenox estate. She had been told that her compatability had been next to nothing, but apparently pumping bots into someone changed something about them.
She had hated her entire existence before that. But being told that she had had no chance of being anything like she was without the will of a specific doctor had given that hatred a direction.
That had been the first significant human she had killed.
And then the guards came.
That was when Evelyn had first bathed herself in blood.
Michael didn't pull back in disgust or horror, though he had seemed slightly surprised at first.
It took her another second to process that, and realize that she should be utterly shocked. Most insignificant -no, she should call them normal- humans screamed and/or ran when they encountered her obsession.
But he hadn't run, or even screamed.
He had seen it last night, too. He hadn't run then either.
Michael... was safe.
She had never met another human like that, aside from Luke.