Lucien exhaled, feeling his heart break for Jean. To have lived so long and been so isolated. She'd have to be, what with her…

God, was he really considering this!? Vampires weren't real. That was an old European legend. The stuff of Dracula and horror films. All just silly stories. Lucien Blake wasn't a man who put much stock in belief of anything that he couldn't see himself. He was not a man of any sort of faith unless it had cold hard evidence for him to point to. Vampires were not real.

Only there was evidence. Lucien had seen fangs and he had a bite mark on his arm. That was very real. Very, very real. He didn't make that up. Did he?

He looked from the bandage on his arm and back to her. She was sitting there at the kitchen table looking small and delicate and frightened. He'd never seen her vulnerable like that before, not even when his father died.

"It's real, isn't it?" he asked quietly. "Everything you're telling me."

She nodded.

"Could…could I see?" He pointed vaguely at her face.

Her brow furrowed slightly. Even in their current state of discomfort and awkwardness at these revelations, Jean still found the question just the slightest bit impertinent. But she opened her mouth. All her teeth looked perfectly normal. But then she let out a little puff of air with a "Hah!" just as she'd done while barely conscious in her arms. And out popped a pair of fangs. As though they retracted into her proper teeth.

"How do they work?" he asked curiously.

Jean gave a little jerk of her head and the fangs disappeared. "Just like that. They come out when I need them, and then I put them away. I don't get them out unless I'm feeding."

"And how exactly does that work? I've seen you eat food. You cook and eat three meals a day here," he pointed out.

"I can eat, but I don't need to. I'd survive perfectly fine without ever eating food again. And I have sometimes. Before Doctor Blake hired me, I was having trouble finding work, so to save money I just stopped eating. So long as I can feed on blood, my body heals and stays permanently young," she explained.

That gave Lucien pause. "But you're…well, you look middle-aged."

She nodded. "I can change my appearance at will. People would notice if I never aged. So I make sure I do. Just a little bit, every year or so. Until I have to leave."

"Leave?"

Jean hesitated slightly, as though realizing she was divulging all her secrets to him. She'd never told anyone before, he was rather certain. He was rather certain that talking so much about all of this was strange yet—hopefully—rather relieving. But she did keep answering his questions. "I won't die of old age. And if I keep away from wooden stakes, I likely won't die at all. I can only distract people so much, so I move around. I've lived about four lifetimes, I think. Keeping usually to the smaller towns instead of Melbourne. There's not as much space there anymore."

"Why do you need space?"

"The moon," she said simply.

Lucien recalled very well her nighttime sojourns to the garden to stand in the moonlight.

Jean went on, "I need blood to survive, but all the rest of my powers need to be renewed by the moonlight. I need to be able to stand under the moon at least once or twice each month to keep up. I can't really do that in the city. Having the privacy in the garden is the best I can hope for."

"I saw you," he confessed.

"When?"

"My first night here. I was in that back bedroom, and I was up late and I saw something moving, and I stood by the window and I watched you. I've seen you do that quite a lot. I never found the right time to ask," he admitted.

Jean looked rather put off by that.

But he did not want to linger on that, the fact that he'd been watching her these past months without her knowing. "What powers do you do with the…moon?" The words felt so strange coming from his mouth. And if he wasn't sitting there talking to her, if it wasn't Jean explaining these things, he would have just laughed and insisted it was all nonsense. But Jean was not a woman who would allow nonsense.

"My appearance," she said, repeating what she'd explained before. "Here…" She held up her hand so the back of it was facing Lucien. With furrowed brow, she set her jaw and seemed trying to do something.

What that something was became immediately clear. Jean's hand with its thin pale skin and few little age spots began to change. The age spots cleared before his eyes. The skin grew firm and supple. It looked like the hand of a teenager. But it did not stop there. Jean's hand then grew age spots back, darker than before, and the veins and tendons became prominent as the skin lost its youthful strength and thickness. That was the hand of an ancient old crone.

She put her hand down flat on the table beside her unchanged hand and she looked at them both and did whatever she was doing in order for them to match again. When she was satisfied with that, she picked up her tea and took a sip.

Lucien was gobsmacked. He'd never seen anything like that. He'd never imagined anything like that in his wildest dreams. "You…" he stammered.

"Yes, so I can do that, and I can read people," she said, brushing past the magnificent feat she'd just performed.

It took him a moment to catch up to what she was saying now. Though he couldn't seem to find the words, he just stared at her rather stupidly.

"I think you would know if there was a vampire running around Ballarat biting people and drinking their blood to survive, wouldn't you? But I've been here for almost twenty years. I can read people's thoughts and when I concentrate, I can control them. I can walk up and say hello to someone walking along and then make them freeze and I take what I need and keep them from feeling any pain, and then I make them forget they've seen me and they have a memory of hitting a rosebush or something to explain the wound. And it used to work much better when I could tell if someone noticed me and then take the memory away or distract their attention to keep from asking questions about me."

"Used to?" Funny that those were the words that struck him from her explanation. She could read people's minds! Control them! Change their memories! Christ, it was a terrifying prospect. One Lucien did not fully want to contemplate. What had she done with his mind? Why was she bothering to tell him anything if she could just make him forget he'd ever seen her fangs or gotten bit by her or whatever else?

Jean chewed her lips, searching for words. "I still have the power. I use it on Mattie sometimes. Not to bite her," she added quickly. "I would never do that in the house. But just if she asks me where I'm going or where I've been. I did the same with your father when I needed to, though his schedule was very regular, so it was not too difficult for me to slip out every other day or so."

"So why did you say 'it used to work better'?" he pressed.

"It doesn't work on you."

Lucien was startled by that. "It doesn't?"

Jean shook her head. "That first day you arrived, I tried to look in your mind and learn about you. But it was like trying to look through a window and only seeing a brick wall. I have tried and I can't get through. It's like trying to read a wall, actually. I can't read you or control you at all."

"And is that…common?"

She shook her head again. "I've never had that happen before."

"Could you read Christopher?"

"Yes. And he could read me. I thought that was just part of how it all worked."

To Lucien's mind, being able to read the thoughts of your lover would present quite a lot of problems. Well, reading thoughts might be good, but controlling them? Changing memories? It all felt very invasive to him. The only private thing anyone truly had was their own mind. He was quite glad Jean could not read his.

"That's why I'm telling you all this. I don't have any choice, Lucien," Jean said quietly.

Well he supposed that was true. And if she'd not bitten him, she probably would have never told him. She'd only bitten him because she was unconscious. Or had she? "You were passed out when I found you," he recalled aloud.

"Yes, I…I wasn't able to leave without being noticed. I haven't fed since before my birthday."

His eyes went wide. "That was a week ago!"

She nodded. "I went ten days without feeding. I usually try to feel about four times each week if I can. Less often since you've been here. I've never gone so long before. I was weak and delirious, and I smelled the blood in your study. I…well, I stumbled and at one point probably crawled across the floor. I didn't get to that vial before I fainted."

"And that's why you bit me. You weren't really in your right mind."

"No, I wasn't. I'm terribly sorry. I've never done anything like that before, lost control and not realized what I was doing. And I nearly took too much."

He recalled feeling a little lightheaded. That must have been why. He'd thought it was the somewhat out of body experience of being bitten and…well, it had actually felt rather nice. He wondered how she did that, not otherwise being able to read or control him.

"Now that you know what I'm up to, I won't have to hide as much. As…as long as you don't tell anyone," she added nervously.

"Jean, not a soul in the is world would believe me. I'm supposed to be a doctor and the police surgeon. I'd like to keep those jobs," he answered darkly.

"Thank you," Jean said quietly.

He paused for a moment, an idea striking him. "Though if you do need…you don't need to go out if you don't want to."

She looked at him with confusion.

"I mean, if you need to…have a bite…" He lifted his right arm with its bandage, indicating where she'd bit him.

Her eyes went wide as she realized what he was offering. But why shouldn't he offer? He was in shock right now, he was sure, but once he thought about it, surely this all would lead to a hundred more questions. It was fascinating, surely. A real vampire! And getting the opportunity to observe her feeding and to keep her protected from discovery, it only made sense that she should feed off him when she needed to.

"You don't have to, but I thought since I'm here and I know what I'm doing, it might be easier to feed from me," he explained.

Jean swallowed hard. "Th-thank you."