"Were you going to say that you vant to suck my blahd?"

"Well, since you're not fond of the smell and I drink the stuff, there does seem to be an obvious efficient way to get rid of the excess. It does no one any good dribbling off you like that."

"You're not like unto a shark in any relevant way, are you?" Bella asks consideringly. "But I can't think of a way to make the transfer that doesn't involve you licking me."

"That would be the flirty part."

"Yes, I suppose so. I do not wish to be licked at this time except in the metaphorical, educational sense, and even in that sense I'm done for the night. Oh, I suppose I could dab at the cuts with a teabag? Is it Tea Sacrilege to combine with blood?" Bella asks speculatively. "...And please answer the thing about the shark characteristics, I am not actually sure."

"It really isn't doing anyone any good, as you point out, and my objections to licking have approximately nothing to do with the resulting ingestion. Besides, for some reason I didn't think to bring, like, gauze or cottonballs. Let's have a teabag, if you want a bloody teabag." She holds out a hand.

"I'm flirting with you, not awkwardly traversing the baseball metaphor with you," she says. She catches the bag and applies it to the scrape on her forehead.

"Fair enough," he says. "In that case, should I mention that it is widely rumored in the vampire community that Slayer blood is an aphrodisiac?"

"I do hope you aren't a shark in that respect either," she says, rolling her eyes. "Besides, I suspect that for the typical case in which a vampire gets to drink Slayer blood, they're hopped up on every hormone necessary to make them quote Shakespeare; maybe they attribute that to the blood." She dabs the teabag on her elbow and her ankle and her arm and hands it over.

Bella giggles. (She is pretty sure this is Shakespeare for "take off your clothes", at least on one level of interpretation. Her clothes stay where they are. But she does laugh.)

"Is there a lot of flavor variation from person to person?" Bella inquires.

"Some," he says as he puts the kettle on. "Enough that I can tell individuals apart if I'm paying attention, which I always am. You are unusually tasty, but I'm not sure whether that's the Slayer thing or a personal quirk."

"How odd," laughs Bella. "Why would that be a Slayer thing - wouldn't they have to do it on purpose? - I guess it could be a side effect of the mechanism behind the superpowers, depending on how those work. Or they could've just factored it in along with the deathwish to induce regular turnover, maybe. Pity I have no prior samples to compare against."

"And we are unlikely to find another Slayer to compare you with in future, given the conditions for activation. Although I suppose death is not such a binary proposition as people like to think."

"Do you know if any Slayers have been turned into vampires before?"

"I do not."

"It seems likely, just based on the disproportionate vampire attention we get," she muses. "But I feel like an ex-Slayer who was still walking around would be pretty well-known such that you'd have heard of her."

"I begin to suspect that we may have stumbled on one of the lesser-known duties of the Watcher's Council," he says. "Just because I think that if any such thing occurred, none of them would rest a moment until she had been set on fire."

"Oof. So you think - or you think they think - she'd retain the power boost even after redeeming her soul for valuable prizes?"

"I think they wouldn't take the chance. I think even if she didn't they'd get after her."

"Do Slayers tend to be privy to fascinating secrets - or just lots of training, which they'd hang onto regardless of the superpowers - or is it just terrible PR?"