Most of their belongings were going to be donated, but Alec kept a few things. When he asked if Emery wanted anything for himself, he requested one of Mrs. Leonard’s paintings. Cloak and Dagger looked badass behind Emery’s computer desk.
Possible ambush by hunters, or a crazed homicidal vampire hiding around town, barely registered when they attended class and play practice like normal. Once the weekend rolled around, Connor’s pulse thrummed at the thought of Emery feeding from him again. Every time they were alone, a little thrill shot up from his gut, and he waited for Emery to ask permission, and then entrance him as he leaned down toward his neck.
Only it didn’t happen. It was Monday now, the lack of blood leaving Emery scowly and short-tempered.
Connor had Advanced Placement Literature and Composition after Jazz Band, one of the few classes he had with Emery, and also with Jules. Jules spent most of the period working on creative writing projects instead of class work since the college she was aiming for only accepted one AP English credit and she’d already gotten that by acing their AP Language and Composition test last year.
As the three of them left the music alcove together, Connor noticed that Emery wore a frown and kept scratching the back of his neck as if his skin felt too tight. Part of it had to be the need to feed, but it had also been almost a week since they first met Wendy—when she’d told them that they had about a week before the vampire she believed to actually be causing trouble killed again and drew the hunters back out. They hadn’t learned anything new from Wendy.
Connor opened his mouth to say something to Emery, but after glancing at Jules, he merely knocked elbows with his friend and shot him an encouraging smile as they traipsed down the hallway.
“I am so twitterpated lately. Why am I not dating anyone?” Jules said to no one in particular. “Why are none of us dating right now?”
Connor’s stomach lurched. He tore his gaze away from Emery, but couldn’t help saying, “You mean each other? Coz sorry, Jules, you’re not really my type.”
She smirked at him.
“And wait, did you say twitterpated?” Connor said with a scrunch of his brow. “Like Bambi? Is that some girl way of saying you’re horny?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “Haven’t you learned girl code by now?”
Connor knew a few things—he had way too many girl friends to not know a few things—but this one was new. “Nice. I am so stealing that.”
They entered the Lit and Comp room to catch Mr. Krall already starting his aged cassette player for their morning ritual of listening to five to ten minutes of an episode of A Prairie Home Companion, and took their usual seats: Jules in front of Connor, while Emery sat at Connor’s left by the window, two rows from the front. The early morning sun streamed in perfectly, almost fully bathing Emery in its rays, and his face pinched in annoyance. One glance at Mr. Krall, who never failed to remind them that he’d been their age in the 60s and could care less about something as benign as a baseball cap or sunglasses in the classroom, Emery slid the aviators from his pocket to place over his eyes.
“Em,” Connor whispered, receiving a mild head tilt in reply like his friend could barely keep his chin up, “you okay? I was thinking we should probably, um…take Alec’s suggestion sometime soon, you know? Like tonight.”
Emery’s grimace spread to his eyebrows. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, well, you look half dead.”
“Maybe because I’m undead.”
Wow. If vampires could be hypoglycemic, that was definitely a sign, no matter how quiet Emery was keeping his voice. “Dude…” Connor started, but was cut off as Mr. Krall turned up the volume on A Prairie Home Companion to get everyone to quiet down, clashing with the beeping intercom that signaled classes had begun.
The News from Lake Wobegon began, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average,” and Connor sat back with a huff.
He should have brought up Emery’s resistance to picking a set feeding time to Alec. Asking his best friend to suck on his neck was one of the harder things to request off the cuff when they got home from play practice.
Connor snuck his cell phone out of his pocket, one of the things Mr. Krall was not groovy about, and was about to shoot off a text to Alec when he noticed a recent missed message from Wendy. She finally had a viable lead on the other vampire one town over, and might be able to take care of their problem tonight before anyone else died.
Hoping the good news would ease Emery enough that Connor could convince his friend to finally feed later tonight, he glanced over only to notice a tense crinkle of Emery’s brow, eyes closed beneath the aviators, and a white-knuckled grip on the edges of his desk. The long sleeves of Emery’s shirt were tugged up from his forearms, revealing tan skin that looked strangely pink, and irritated, and…smoking!
Connor jolted in his seat.
As the truth of what was happening caught up with Emery as well, he pulled his arms under the desk and covered them quickly, but his seat meant that the sun still struck the side of his face and neck.
He met Connor’s gaze, and despite the dark shades, Connor could see Emery’s eyes faintly glowing a brighter green behind the glass, with the edges of his fangs peeking out over his lips, and an expression of silent pleading on his face as the skin currently in the path of the sun started to sizzle.
Chapter 13
I couldn’t move. The pain was intense, like grabbing a pan right out of the oven without protection and hanging on tight, only this was as if someone had pressed a piece of scalding glass to my face. I was going to scream. I was going to bolt out of the classroom at super speed and give myself away. The panic built in my chest as fight or flight vied for control, and there was no way to fight without burning.
“Mr. Krall!” Connor shot his hand into the air, then turned and grabbed my hand, yanking me up out of the chair and away from the beams of sunlight.
Instant relief washed over me, but it didn’t last; the burns were already bad and not healing, I could feel it. I ducked my head, trying to keep the side of my face from being too visible to the rest of the class, who were all staring at us as Connor dragged me toward the door.
“Em’s going to be sick, I need to get him to the bathroom!” Connor said in explanation, not even waiting for permission as we raced from the room.
“O-Okay, but don’t dawdle out there!” Mr. Krall called after us.
Our school didn’t use hall passes, and Mr. Krall always told us to just ask and go if we needed to use the bathroom, no need to suffer if we hadn’t had time between classes. And this was an emergency. It didn’t matter if the type of emergency was a lie.
I sucked air through my teeth like a hiss, the pain steadily increasing. I’d never burned myself like this before, but I’d watched my mother go through a second degree burn once on her forearm. The pain lingered long into the next day, the worst she’d ever experienced, she said. She wasn’t wrong.
How much I needed to feed struck like a gong in my head, a throbbing between my ears, making my vision and thoughts equally blurry. I barely noticed anyone we might have passed as Connor hauled me into the nearest bathroom and closed us inside the handicap stall. No one else was in here. I registered how Connor intended to help me and lurched away from him, going for the lock on the door.
“Em!” Connor grabbed my shoulder. My vision was too tunneled to put up a fight, my body shifting from burning in the sun to chills rippling through me, my face still stinging. “Dude, I get that you’ve been avoiding feeding. I can understand it’s weird and maybe freaking you out, but it’s been over a week and you are burning in the sun from stalling. You won’t heal if you don’t get some blood in you. You won’t be able to pass any windows or leave school at the end of the day either. We have to do this.”
I shivered and grabbed my arms, running my hands over the fabric covering the fainter burns beneath. At least they weren’t as bad as my face, but Connor was right—none of it was healing. I’d waited too long. But I couldn’t help it. Everything had seemed better, brighter, entirely doable, even if I was a monster—until I imagined sinking my fangs into Connor’s throat.
“I thought I could get over it, but it’s the one thing…” I said, voice low as I stared at the stall door, keeping Connor behind me, his hand still gripping my shoulder. “I know it scares you. You shouldn’t have to do this.”
“What?” Connor said, tightening his hold on me. “Em…”
“I saw the way you were with Alec last week. The glamouring makes you think it’s not so bad, but then after…the look on your face.” I shook my head. “And sometimes the way you look at me now…I know you’re thinking about it. You shouldn’t have to do this,” I said again.
Connor’s hand dropped away. My shoulders tensed as pain pulsed through me, a haze entering my vision as though it was going red with hunger and the need to heal. I envisioned myself turning on Connor and tearing into his throat, not gently, not something I could fix later, and then throwing up all of the blood into the toilet once I stopped and realized I’d killed him. The irony was that the only way to prevent that from happening was to do as Connor asked.
“Look at me, Em,” he said. His voice rarely sounded that soft, and slow—patient. He had an energy in everything he did, the way he moved, and talked, and animatedly gestured. Soft and slow were rarely part of that vocabulary.
I turned, keeping my eyes closed, still shivering. If I could quiet my pulse for a moment, maybe I would regain some of the control I’d lost. When I opened my eyes, his smile was too understanding, his eyebrows downturned like I was the biggest idiot in the world but he put up with me anyway, every day. He reached up and pulled the sunglasses from my face, tucking them into the pocket of the dark flannel over his T-shirt.
“I’m not afraid. Believe me, Em, it’s not fear. I could never be afraid of you. Honestly, the reason I got a little weirded out with Alec was because…well,” he shoved his hands into his pockets, “it feels kind of…good, in the glamour, and even after it heals, and…it was creepy coming from him, because I don’t really trust him, you know?
“Here I was, thinking you’d get some weird idea about me having the hots for the guy, and instead you thought I was scared? Of you? If I’m scared of anything it’s of you thinking I’m some kind of a masochist for kinda looking forward to this.” He shrugged, eyes darting away from me, his smile twisted in distaste—at himself. Then his eyes flicked back to me, open and honest.
Why do we always put our insecurities on other people? If I’d just told him why I kept putting off feeding, if he’d just told me how it actually made him feel, we could have avoided this. I was more at fault though. As long as I’m honest, Connor is always honest back to me.
A fresh wave of pain overtook the burns on my face and I cringed, stumbling forward a step like I might face plant right into the tiled floor. Connor caught me, both hands braced on my shoulders.
“You have better control now than when you first bit me,” he said. “It doesn’t matter that you’re hurt this time, and need it more. If you were able to be cautious about things and stop yourself before, you can again. So have some faith in yourself, Em. I do. Just remember what Alec taught you. The guy’s nuts, but he’s at least good for that.”
I lifted my head, my blurred vision focusing on Connor’s renewed smirk. I couldn’t laugh, couldn’t smile in kind, but I nodded. “Okay.”
If I’d gotten over my reservations sooner, we could have done this in my bedroom again, somewhere safer and more comfortable, instead of me backing Connor up against the wall of a dirty bathroom stall in school, the toilet two feet to our left, and the chance of someone coming in and wondering why two sets of feet were in one stall.
I took a few deep, controlled breaths, staring at Connor’s neck, but not yet descending. The smell of Connor so close to me overpowered anything coming from the bathroom. The mint, the sawdust, and something rich and earthy that I knew must be the blood in his veins calling to me more directly with how much I needed it now, wanted it.
I recalled what Alec had taught me about glamouring someone effectively, and pulled back, my hands on Connor’s shoulders now as his dropped to his sides. I looked deep into Connor’s honey eyes, focusing on the way the colors intensified and sharpened, until I could make out all of the brown and bronze and gold flecks that individually came together to create his unique color.
There was a thread between us now, Alec had explained, and I could feel it. I pictured it as an actual, visible thread unwinding from my hands on his shoulders and coiling up around his neck, ears, and forehead like a patchwork crown. I willed a message into the thread that he feel nothing but peace, pleasure, joy. I saw the moment when he sagged back into the wall behind him, his expression blank, mesmerized by the power in the thread connecting us.
Only then did I bend toward his neck, pushing the pain of my burns away from the forefront of my mind, thinking only of Connor enjoying this as much as he said he did, and for me to only take the amount I needed. I didn’t have to will my fangs to appear, that happened naturally, and they were already mostly unleashed just from instinct when I’d started to burn.
The salt of Connor’s skin. The way my fangs sank smooth and easy into the veins there, drawing blood at a slow pace, as Alec had taught me. Going slow made it gentler for Connor and easier for me to keep control. My hands slid down until I pressed lightly on his collarbone and chest to steady him against the wall—to steady myself.
Any sense of time drifted, any sounds from the bathroom faded out, just me and Connor and the taste I couldn’t describe as his blood filled me. There was nothing coppery about blood now. It touched every taste bud—salty, sour, bitter, and sweet—but mostly savory. Alec said it tasted like life. I’d thought he was being overly poetic, but I saw now how right he was.
A tingling sensation crawled across my skin, everywhere the sun had burned, as the damage knit itself back together and the pain subsided.
Connor whimpered, his hands moving to my waist, both skin and plastic cool to the touch as his fingers found the line of skin where my jeans and shirt met. He couldn’t help himself while enthralled, especially with the emotions I forced on him, to feel like this was something he wanted and enjoyed. But if he really did enjoy it, did it matter if part of the pleasure came from swindling him? Was it still swindling if he was aware of it?
The taste of him, the subtle feel of his fingers on my skin, being so close to him and that intoxicating smell that was his alone, filled me with more than nourishment. I wanted to press closer, sink my teeth deeper, feel his hands slide up my back underneath my shirt and cool my overheated skin—
I broke away, a shaky breath leaving me as I stared at the puncture marks left behind. Connor might not be afraid, but I still feared myself and what I might do. That had to have been something like bloodlust I’d just felt, and part of me wanted to sprint the other direction. I might have given in and hurt him. Why would I feel something like that if I didn’t want to hurt him?
I waited for my pulse to still before biting down on my tongue to draw a small trace of blood, and licked along Connor’s wound to heal the marks. The taste didn’t leave me feeling like I wanted to bite him again, as the power from feeding filled my veins, healing my burns fully and leaving me satisfied and more alert than I’d been in days. But the nerves in my stomach felt alive with fierce fluttering I didn’t understand—didn’t trust.
Once Connor’s wounds were gone, the blood lapped away, and I felt like myself again, I pulled back, looked into his eyes—I didn’t need to keep contact to hold a glamour, or to break one, but it made it easier—and released Connor. He sighed, leaning more heavi
ly into the wall and tightening his grip along my waist, until he realized what he was doing and jerked his hands away.
“Okay…I just need to down that power bar in my backpack when we get back to class, and I’ll be fine,” he said, huffing a few times to catch his breath.
Only a few minutes had passed since we left class. I could tell everyone something just hadn’t agreed with me from breakfast, if anyone asked, no harm done, no additional questions. Mr. Krall would continue his lessons undeterred. It was almost too easy.
I stared at Connor and pressed a hand to my own neck, feeling how warm the skin was, hotter than my hand, like I was burning up, but like it was something nice instead of a fever.
“I’m so warm now,” I said. A pleasant surge of Connor’s blood raced through me. It felt so good—too good. I wanted to claw it out from under my skin. If it increased each time, this want, and the enjoyment of it, would I become something Wendy needed to hunt? I hadn’t asked Alec what reasons vampires had for killing people. I’d just assumed it was the same reasons humans did.
Because they could. Because sometimes people did bad things just because they wanted to. Because not everything had an answer. I wanted an answer to this though. There had to be an answer…
“Dude, are you having hot flashes?” Connor said, a chuckle in his voice as he pushed from the wall. He didn’t look overly pale, or unsteady on his feet, though as soon as we moved to leave the bathroom, he leaned heavily into my side.
“Feeding makes me warm,” I said, keeping a hand at his back so it wouldn’t be too obvious that I was ready to catch him if he stumbled. We headed back to class without running into anyone. “Sunlight makes me hot. Lack of either and I’m freezing. So…yeah, I guess I am having hot flashes.”
Life as a Teenage Vampire Page 11