“Electrician,” I said, as if everyone didn’t already know. “It’s weird. He was all sorts of cocky when I met him, but maybe it was just for show.”
“Or maybe he’s just like you,” Asher said. “Adjusting his approach as the situation calls for it. The cockiness could have been for show, but it’s just as likely that the dopiness is all an act.”
“Interesting theory.” I looked at the gap in the trees where Roth had disappeared off to. “Maybe.”
We waited around for a couple of minutes, making sure we didn’t hear Roth screaming for help before we made our way back to the cabin. A little strange trusting him not to get himself killed out there, but I had the oddest feeling that he was going to be fine. He did have an inordinate familiarity with the supernatural, even if some of it was just picked up through rumor, hearsay, or stupid assumptions.
I kicked up a pile of leaves as we walked the path up to the Everett House, letting Gil unlock the door and waiting for Asher to enter. I scraped my boots off on the doormat, chuckling to myself.
“Hah. Ninja witch.”
“Hmm?” Asher said, turning around. “Did you say something?”
“It’s nothing.”
The boys had a horribly imbalanced late, late dinner of potato chips, soda, and fresh fruit. No one really spoke. We were all talked out for the night. The feeding frenzy felt like Gil and Asher were just going through the motions, trying their best to ingest some fuel before they turned in for the night. I had to push Asher into the bathroom, remind him that brushing his teeth was crucial, no matter how tired he complained he was. Gil didn’t need reminding. Vampires and werewolves, we knew a lot about the importance of dental hygiene.
The boys took their respective places around the living room, each of them spread out along their own couch. The Everett House was cleaner and certainly more livable since we’d moved in and done some sprucing up, but for whatever reason, the three of us had gotten used to passing out in the same big room. It felt like one long sleepover, the endpoint of a road trip to someplace new and dark and exciting. The lights go out and you whisper “Are you asleep yet?” You hope for someone to answer, and someone does, and you giggle and gossip until sleep claims you both.
I realize it’s childish, for someone who is decades and decades and decades old, but as much as I enjoyed being brash and cantankerous, I did like being around people, too. And I suppose it’s like osmosis, in a way. Asher was probably the youngest friend I’d ever made, and his exuberance, his cheerfulness? It was hard not to catch some of it.
The lights did go out, Gil and Asher slipping under their respective covers and snoring within minutes. And that left me alone again, sitting by one of the windows, nursing my last crystal phial of preserved blood.
I took a tentative sip, smiling as I tipped back a few drops, humming with pleasure. This last phial, this blood, it had come from a wealthy man. He must have been in his mid-sixties, a self-made entrepreneur, three children, seven grandchildren. And some things, including a vampire’s kiss, money couldn’t really buy, and so he came to me, bargaining, then begging for the chance to have my fangs pierce his skin.
Things like that didn’t come so easily for him, he explained, his family very traditional in its values. The thought of submitting to a vampire must have been such a thrill for him. It was like paying for a prostitute, maybe, though in reverse. Apart from the bites themselves, we kept our relationship strictly transactional, even when he told me about his various sexual proclivities, the things he had always been so afraid to try. More than once I told him to ask his wife, to perhaps discover that she could be open to new and different things. More than once, he laughed me off bitterly.
There were traces of that in his blood, for sure. I sipped slowly, the thick surge of fluid brusque and dark against my tongue. His blood was the world’s strongest cup of coffee, angry and aggressive, a jolt to the system. My head swam with images of him pounding a table in a boardroom, the gelled and grayed flecks of hair at his temples coming undone as he yelled. And yet, beneath it all, I could still taste the undercurrent, the hints of a man who longed to be treated with tenderness, who loved his wife and his children and their children more than anything.
I looked out the window, stared at the infinite trees, and sighed. My last meal. If I asked real nice – if they knew that they were truly my only recourse – Gil and Asher would gladly give up portions of their blood. No question. But they were my friends, not my thralls. And I had other reasons. I didn’t want to risk becoming too attached. It was bad enough having memories and photographs of everyone I loved, things I could never have back. As a vampire, taste was another precious way for me to remember. I loved how it could bring old stories surfacing up on the back of my tongue. But I hated it, too, because of how much remembrance could hurt.
And could I ever truly control myself? I was mortally injured, the night that Asher offered himself to me. Prior to that I’d joked about getting to sample a bit of his blood, but getting a taste had ruined me. Necromancers were so rare in the arcane world, and one that would let a vampire feed was rarer still. It was part of the appeal of enthrallment, after all, gathering rare and exotic sources of blood, every thrall another beautiful bottle of fine vintage to store on your shelf, to keep in your cellar.
But Asher and Gil, they weren’t bottles to me. They were family. It’s easy to ask why I didn’t simply consider turning them, so that I’d have them at my side forever. Vampirism had its perks, but I didn’t want to pass on the blood curse. Then they would have to watch their own loved ones die as well. And then what? Would they have to turn their beloved, too, a chain of misery? And so the curse would go on, and on, folding more vampires and v
ictims into the flock, spreading the plague. I didn’t exactly hate being a vampire, but I didn’t want to inflict them with the same blood hunger, either, or the same pain of remembering.
I wiped at the back of my mouth, chuckling to myself. As the story goes, they practically had to pry me off of Asher with a crowbar, he was so delicious. His blood was so unique, flowing dark and rich with all the curses and gifts of necromancy, and yet oddly bright and delightful, as sweet as the boy himself, a white summer wine.
Roth, I imagined, would taste strong, heady, a bold red, acrid and thick with tannins, with odd playful traces of vanilla, pepper, spice. Olivia was easy to conjure in my mind. A refreshing nectar, not cloyingly sweet, but warm as a perfect afternoon. Her blood was a teasing reminder of the wonders of the sun, of flowers, of fields of grass.
But I would never take blood for granted. My mind whizzed through the possibilities of what I could have if I enthralled this person or that, but I returned myself to the moment. There was still one last bottle to savor.
I took one last swig of my phial, then replaced the stopper, saving half of it for later. Life certainly gets a little more stressful when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. It was how I knew that vampires were never truly so different from animals. You had to hunt, and you had to hunt forever, never overfeeding, because where would you be if your best source of food went totally extinct?
Starving. You wonder why I see everyone as food? It all came down to living to see another moonrise. Survival. Whether it was finding the Filigreed Masque or stopping the Silveropolis murders, it would always be about self-preservation at the end of the day. Because when time drags everything mortal through its cruel march, and everyone has turned to dust, where does that leave me?
Right. Alone, sitting in the dark, waiting for the long night to end. I gazed over at my friends, blankets and bodies heaving as they breathed, lived, and slept. I placed the phial by the window sill, another bottle on the shelf. I waited for daybreak.
25
When I opened my eyes, the first slivers of moonlight were just piercing through the gaps among the curtains. I’d fallen asleep just by the sill, and someone, probably Asher, had drawn the curtains for me. He and I joked a lot about murdering each other, but that was all it was.
Besides, indirect exposure to sunlight wasn’t the instant death sentence that the legends made it out to be, anyway. A vampire needed more than a couple of sunbeams to even risk meeting a second death. That squarish puddle of light on the floorboards that appears in the afternoon, the one your cat likes to nap in so much? It’d probably be enough to deliver second-degree burns with enough prolonged exposure.
A day on the beach, however, or a tinted convertible suddenly drawing back its roof on a hot day? Yeah. That was way more dangerous. Fatal, even. I looked around the room blearily, smacking my lips, comfortable under the oversized afghan throw someone, again, probably Asher, had draped over me. My eyes fluttered shut again. Just a couple of minutes more. It was nice and warm, like a gentle afternoon in the sun.
My eyes flew open. Shit. The sun. The Filigreed Masque, and the blood moon. This wasn’t any time to be relaxing. I threw the throw off my body, heading to the bathroom to get myself ready for the night, when I noticed Asher on the same couch he used as his bed, frowning against the blue light of his laptop.