Lenore shakes her head at this question, a little puzzled by it as a concept. "No, it's like ... meat. You don't have to eat it directly off the animal. It keeps for hours without difficulty, and for days if it's chilled." The metaphor doesn't totally hold, since Lenore does prefer her meat cooked but there are very few vampires who would ever consider doing any kind of culinary treatment on blood, aside from blood wine. "Plenty of us do prefer the vein, but usually that's a matter of ..." Lenore hesitates for a moment, considering whether she should refrain from honesty, whether it's better for her own purposes to pretend that she comes from a more pleasant world, a more pleasant species, to avoid the topic altogether. "Power or intimacy," she confesses at last.