Disappointment crashed down on her. Phoebe’s throat tightened.
“What is it?” Freyja asked, concerned. “Is the light too bright? Fran?oise, close those drapes immediately.”
“It’s not the sunshine. It’s just I’ve grown only an inch.” Phoebe had been marking her progress every ten minutes or so on the frame of the door that led into the bathroom. The mark hadn’t risen for the past eight hours. Phoebe had scratched so many lines into that single location with her fingernail that the paint was ruined.
“If height was what you were after, you should have had Freyja sire you,” Miriam said tartly, moving into the room past the nearly six-foot-tall Dane. With one sweeping glance she studied the mess Phoebe had made, confirmed that the window glass was indeed cracked, and fixed dark eyes on her daughter. “Well?”
There was no mistaking the demand for an explanation in her maker’s tone.
“I’m bored.” Phoebe said it quietly, embarrassed by the puerile confession.
“Excellent. Well done.” Freyja nodded approvingly. “That is a tremendous achievement, Phoebe.”
Miriam’s eyes narrowed.
“And,” Phoebe continued, her voice increasingly plaintive, “hungry.”
“This is why no one should be made a vampire until they are thirty,” Miriam told Freyja. “Insufficient inner resources.”
“You were twenty-five!” Phoebe said hotly, her defenses rising at the insult.
“Back then, twenty-five was practically old age.” Miriam shook her head. “We can’t come running every time you feel restless, Phoebe. You’re going to have to figure out how to fill your time.”
“Do you play chess? Embroider? Like to cook? Make perfume?” Freyja began to rattle off the activities of a medieval Danish princess. “Write poetry?”
“Cook?” Phoebe was bewildered at the prospect—and the mere thought made her empty stomach rise up in rebellion. She hadn’t enjoyed cooking when she was human. Now that she was a vampire it was out of the question.
“It can be a very rewarding hobby. I knew a vampire who spent a decade perfecting the soufflé. She said it was very soothing,” Freyja replied. “Veronique did have a human husband at the time, of course. He was quite happy with her efforts, though in the end they killed him. His heart was so blocked with sugar and eggs that he died at fifty-three.”
“Do you mean Marcus’s Veronique, who works in London?” Phoebe didn’t know that Freyja and Marcus’s former lover were acquainted.
Marcus.
The thought of him was electrifying.
When Phoebe was a warmblood, Marcus’s touches had made her veins turn to fire and her fragile human limbs to liquid. Now that she was a vampire . . . Phoebe’s restless mind dwelt on the possibilities. Her lips turned up into a slow, seductive smile.
“Oh, dear,” Freyja said, a bit of alarm in her tone as she detected the direction that Phoebe’s wandering attention had taken. “What about a musical instrument? Do you play something? Can you sing?”
“No music.” Miriam’s lilting soprano turned thunderous, something only a vampire could manage. “When Jason discovered the drum, it nearly drove his father and me around the bend.”
Phoebe had not yet met Jason, the only surviving child of Miriam’s long-dead mate.
She began to thrum her fingers on the tabletop in anticipation. Phoebe had never had a brother, only Stella. Sisters were different—younger sisters, especially. What might she do with an older brother? Phoebe wondered.
Miriam’s hand closed on hers, bone-crushing and painful. “No. Drumming.”
Bored, hungry, and restless, held captive by Freyja and Miriam—how was Phoebe supposed to endure it? She wanted to run outside and breathe fresh air.
Phoebe wanted to chase something that wasn’t a thought, run it into the ground and then—
“I want to hunt.” Phoebe was amazed by the realization. She’d worried about hunting for weeks before she became a vampire, and for the past six hours she’d been pushing the idea resolutely from her mind. Because after the hunting came the feeding from a live human, and Phoebe wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
Yet.
Phoebe instinctively understood that hunting would push her restless thoughts to the background. Hunting would feed some part of her that was hollow and yearning. Hunting would bring peace.
“Of course you do,” Freyja said. “Isn’t Phoebe progressing marvelously, Miriam?”