“August?”
The blur snaps into focus, a handsome boy with glowing eyes, dark curls, and a British accent suddenly taking shape. Jude Marlowe smiles curiously, his touch gentle on my elbow, and a rush of mixed emotions eddies through me. The shirt he wears is sleeveless, and high on his shoulder is a crescent-shaped scar—one I recognize from the vision I had in the school parking lot. No matter what happens, tonight is about us.
I still have no idea what that premonition means. I’m not sure I trust Gunnar anymore, but I trust Jude even less—and a month ago, I would have laughed at the idea of getting naked with a vampire. But sparks are zipping through me, surging where his skin contacts mine, and the memory of a night that hasn’t happened yet makes my body react.
“Fancy meeting you here.” My voice is thick and dreamy.
“Are you…” Jude scrunches up his nose, and it’s very cute. “Are you on something?”
“Nope.” Someone brushes past us, a vampire, and he winks when I catch his eye. Another shiver, one that has nothing to do with the supernatural, runs up my spine.
Jude notices with a knowing smirk. “Just boys?”
Trying not to blush, I shrug. There are plenty of guys dancing together here, more than I’ve ever seen in the same place. I feel like I’m somewhere I don’t stand out—where I belong—and it’s amazing.
Jude takes hold of my shirt, giving it a gentle tug, and I let him draw me closer. The sparks turn into fireworks when his fingers graze my cheek, when he fits his hips to mine, moving with me. My thoughts fly into a million pieces, like the tiny lights spraying off the mirror-ball above the DJ’s platform. Something inside of me is starting to make noise I can’t ignore, and Jude’s touch is a magnet, pulling it to the surface.
“Auggie? There you are!” Gunnar’s voice breaks through the static in my thoughts, and my chin snaps up, our eyes meeting as he takes in the sight of me and Jude—together. I freeze, guilt heating my blood. Regardless of my motives tonight, no matter what I suspect about Gunnar, this was supposed to be a date.
“I—this isn’t…” But I don’t finish, because I don’t know what I’m doing—why I’ve let either vampire get this close.
The frosty look that hardens Gunnar’s face, however, isn’t directed at me. “Long time no see, Jude.”
Jude turns, his smirk blooming into a feline grin, bicep flexing as he pushes a hand through his hair. “Gunnar. I was wondering how long it would take for our paths to cross.”
“No, you weren’t.” Gunnar’s face darkens, mouth pulling down. “If I know you at all, you’ve been planning this moment for days. Possibly longer.”
The tension in the air is even thicker than the artificial smoke, but it’s somehow clearing my head. A bad feeling creeping over me, I step back. “You know each other?”
Jude’s grin widens even further, the sharp ends of his teeth radiant with black light. “Of course. Gunnar is my ex-boyfriend.”
Simultaneously, his scowl deepening, Gunnar snarls, “Jude is the one who Turned me.”
17
The side of the factory that faces the moonlight is lonely and deserted, people and vampires reluctant to congregate where they might be seen and recognized—but this is exactly where the three of us wind up to hash out this extremely awkward situation.
I came to an undead rave, hoping my date would reveal something about a cult that worships the monster I’m slowly turning into, and now I’m caught in the middle of vampire ex-boyfriend drama. I miss when I thought this town was boring.
“Wow, what a coincidence that you both ended up in Fulton Heights, trying to seduce me at the exact same time,” I remark flatly, hugging my arms across my chest. It’s fucking freezing out here.
“I have not been trying to seduce you!” Jude tosses his hands out, exasperated.
“Don’t listen to him,” Gunnar interrupts. “Of course he’s been trying to seduce you—that’s what he does. It’s his whole MO.”
Jude grunts loudly. “Are we really going to have this conversation again? For the millionth time?” He turns to me like I’m going to play referee. “Gunnar and I were together for nearly twenty years. Does that sound like a seduction to you?”
“I don’t care what it sounds like!” Gunnar’s voice is rising. “Twenty years or twenty minutes, it makes no difference with you. You sweep in with your cool British accent, all flirty eyes and ‘I’m bad, but I can be better,’ when all you actually care about is what you can get away with! As soon as you’re bored, it’s all ‘see you later’!”
“That’s such a load of one-sided horseshit,” Jude retorts, glaring at him. “And do I really need to point out that you were the one who dumped me?”
“Because you were already done! You just made me be the—”
“Here we go. ‘I have no agency! None of my mistakes are my fault! All my bad choices are because somebody else did a mean thing one time!’”
“Fuck you, Jude Marlowe!” Gunnar snaps, eyes aflame. “You were over me long before we broke up, but you didn’t want the guilt of ending things after Turning me, so you just pushed and pushed and acted like an ass until I couldn’t take it anymore. So fuck you!”
Jude just nods, a sarcastic smile on his face. “Like clockwork. Every time we see each other, it’s the same old story: I ruined your life, and you’ll never forgive me for Turning you. Fine. But for once, just this one time, admit that you asked me to Turn you. You hated your life in that rancid pit toilet of a town, dying by degrees while you waited to inherit the family dirt farm or get murdered by homophobes when you couldn’t hide your secret anymore. You said you’d rather I just kill you than leave you behind. You cried when you asked me to take you—you fucking begged.”
Gunnar struggles to answer, and when he speaks, his voice is rough and thin. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it would mean to be … like this. Forever.” He rubs his eyes, and when he opens them again the golden light has gone out. Wounded and vulnerable, he says, “You didn’t tell me the truth. You told me you loved me. You said we’d be together forever. Those were lies and I believed you.”
“I never intended for things to turn out the way they did,” Jude says quietly, after a long moment. “I don’t regret the choices we made, and I’m still grateful for what we had. You won’t believe me, but I did love you. And you’ll always matter to me.”
There’s another thick silence as their words settle—interrupted only by the chattering of my teeth, because it is cold out here. “Not that it isn’t heartwarming how you two are working through your boring emotional baggage after all this time, but there’s an actual demon trying to claim squatter’s rights in my actual body, and I’d like some fucking answers right now.”
Jude faces me, the humor gone out of his expression. “Everything I’ve told you is the truth, August.”
“Are you really the only representative the Syndicate sent here?” I demand. “Humans want me dead, two cults led by murdery sorcerers are hanging around town tearing shit up, and you’re really the only guy they sent to check things out?”
Jude hesitates just long enough for me not to trust his answer. “Yes.”
“That means for now,” Gunnar interprets. “He’s the only one for now. The Syndicate is a bureaucracy, and they love nothing more than sending in a mid-level functionary to do some scouting before they decide how many resources to expend on a problem.”
“Excuse me, I am not a ‘mid-level functionary’!” Jude is even more outraged at this slight than when Gunnar accused him of rigging their breakup. “I am Hecuba’s man-at-arms, with the full trust of the board of Syndics, and they sent me alone because they knew I was capable of assessing the situation!”
“Pro tip,” Gunnar says to me in a mock aside, “if you ever want to royally piss Marlowe off, just criticize the Syndicate or question their right to rule over every single vampire on the face of the Earth.”
“Someone has to maintain order.” Jude crosses his arms over
his chest, the sinew in his shoulders rippling. Both of them are dressed for a day at the beach, and appear just as comfortable, but in about two minutes I’m going to look like one of those dead bodies floating in the ocean at the end of Titanic with frost on its eyeballs.
“And it might as well be you?” Gunnar retorts.
“Yes,” Jude answers just as bluntly. “It might as well be us. You know better than most what kind of chaos there’d be if we weren’t out there ‘ruling over every vampire on the face of the Earth.’ You’ve seen the kind of uprisings we’ve had to quell.” With grim satisfaction, he adds, “It wasn’t even that long ago that you agreed with the Syndicate’s mission.”
Gunnar casts his eyes down, uncomfortable. “I was linked to you then.”
“You still are. Just because you severed from me, that doesn’t change. No matter what, you’ll always be mine.” Their eyes meet, and something meaningful passes between them.
“Can you two hug this out later? I am literally about to freeze to death!” I wrap my arms as tightly around myself as I can, and, wordlessly, both vampires bite into the flesh of their wrists, offering me their blood. I take a step back, instinctively repulsed—but I catch myself before I can say no.
That afternoon in the parking lot, when Jude cut open his finger and urged me to drink, I became aware of my surroundings on a level I hadn’t known possible, and when I looked into his eyes, I saw something I still can’t explain. I don’t know if it was a power that came from the Corrupter, or if it had to do with vampire blood, or if maybe it was both. What I do know is that if this clairvoyance thing is legit, it’s one of the few advantages I might have in this situation.
Plus, I’m cold as fuck out here.
I choose Gunnar, because he’s the greatest mystery right now, and because I want to see if whatever magic that keeps me from sensing him will break when I know what he tastes like. Gingerly, I take hold of his arm and bring the wound to my lips. He can control his pulse, push out as much as he wants to; when I close my mouth on his wrist, his blood oozes freely over my tongue.
My scalp prickles, and that caffeinated feeling crashes through me, nerve endings I’d forgotten about waking up one by one. Everything jolts into focus, shadows fading as my eyes tune to the darkness. Closing them, I listen, and I hear where Gunnar and Jude are standing—the wind whispering as it passes around them. I listen harder and pick up voices from the crowd on the opposite side of the building, people and vampires waiting to enter.
“… think she’ll be here tonight? She told me…”
“… not a fucking blood orgy, you prejudiced asshole…”
“… weird if I’m only into boys when they’re undead? Is that a thing?”
The wind shifts again, and a scent catches my attention—something distant, but familiar: unwashed flesh, old blood, soiled clothes. I see him in my mind: wide, golden eyes, wild hair, and then—
“Auggie?” Gunnar’s voice brings me back, and my lids snap open. He’s watching me, his brows furrowed, as he gently withdraws his arm. “Did that help?”
“I’m not cold anymore,” I murmur, although it might be more accurate to say that the cold doesn’t bother me. But my attention is focused on him, on the darkness at the center of his eyes—on the resistance I feel there. But after only a few heartbeats, I break through, falling into a maelstrom of images that flicker and unfurl.
Two boys on the beach at night, one human and one undead, their fingers touching discreetly in the sand as fireworks explode against the stars; a dark stone on a stretch of rugged coastline, the fragment shaped like a shark’s tooth; a tablet computer showing the image of a guy with glasses and screwed up hair, and a pang of deep regret—he’s cute, but doomed; incense casting a ribbon of smoke into candlelit air, a needle kissing a fingertip, and blood dropping into a bowl held by the same guy.
Held by me.
I fall back out of the vision, gasping for air, the night sharpening around me. Both vampires regard me with curiosity, and once again I have no idea how much of what I just experienced was shared. My thoughts are hyper but occluded, something heavy pulling them in a direction they don’t want to go.
I wish I could just forget that night on the beach.
The voice isn’t mine, but it rings in my head, and I gasp again as I struggle free of it. I feel him; I feel Gunnar’s memories like soot coating my hands, like I’ve been touching something forbidden and the evidence is all over me. I blink up at him, startled and afraid I’m going to fall right back in again, but the thread tying us together finally breaks.
“Auggie, are you okay?” Whether he knows I’ve been prowling around in his head or not, he sounds concerned for my well-being. And, if anything, it only serves to piss me off.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you? The Corrupter worshippers?” That picture of me flashes bright in my thoughts, his sense that I was cute, but doomed. Was that the past or the future? I haven’t held a bowl of blood yet, so the visions were at least a mix of the two. “I’m going to guess the League, because you don’t exactly look like a Rasputin groupie.”
Gunnar is dumbstruck, those dramatic eyebrows jumping halfway up his forehead, leaving Jude to grin with sly satisfaction. “Ding ding ding—a correct guess on the first try! Looks like I’m not the only one who has a problem telling the whole truth.”
“Fuck off, Marlowe!” Gunnar snaps.
“Everything he said about the Syndicate is straight from Duclos’s pitch to new members,” Jude continues. “She’s got him completely brainwashed. In fact, I’ve always wondered if she was the one who pushed Gunnar into severing with me.”
“Shut the hell up!” Gunnar shouts loud enough to be heard from the road—on the other side of the building. “You don’t know the first thing about Viviane or the League. You’ve never even met her!”
“I know you used to think that vampires who pursued the Corrupter were fools, and now here you are, spying and doing Viviane Duclos’s dirty work.” Jude gestures at me, and I just about boil over.
“You’re both spying on me! You’re both doing someone else’s dirty work, so stop acting like only one of you is the bad guy!” I’m vibrating with fury, vampire blood like rocket fuel in my veins. “I’m the bone you’re playing tug-of-war over, telling me whatever you think will make me trust you—but no matter who wins, I lose. Neither one of you actually cares what happens to me so long as I die.”
Tears sting my eyes, the pressure too great to resist, and both vampires freeze in place. They exchange a mortified glance, and Jude begins, “August, that’s not—”
“I’m dying. I’m being … occupied by some thing I don’t understand, that I can’t begin to fight—I mean, does that sound familiar to you, Jude fucking Marlowe?” When I glare at him, the sadness in his eyes is a quicksand trap that almost pulls me in. “Tell me how it felt to be seventeen years old and dying of bubonic plague.”
“August…” But that seems to be all he’s got. His mouth opens and shuts a couple of times. “I … Okay, I understand what you’re going through, but—”
“No, you don’t,” I counter immediately, “because when you were dying, you weren’t surrounded by people rooting for the fucking plague!” With a gesture at Gunnar, I continue, “You didn’t have people preying on your loneliness, trying to make sure it was their arms you’d die in, just so they could have control over what you left behind!”
“Now, wait!” Gunnar puts his hands up, his expression horrified. “That’s not—”
Jude doesn’t let him finish. “Gunnar? What did you do?”
“Nothing! We just … we went on a date.”
“And he kissed me,” I add, sounding petulant.
“Of course I kissed him—he’s cute!” Gunnar is exasperated. “And I told him I was a vampire before it happened, by the way. I didn’t trick him, or hypnot—”
“Yes, you did! You never told me who you really were—you never said that the only reason you asked me out was so you
could get closer to me!”
“That isn’t why I asked you out, Auggie. Fuck!” Gunnar’s voice is rough, and he drags his fingers through his hair. “All I was supposed to do here was observe you, okay? To protect you from threats, and see if you showed signs that the Corrupter was starting to Rise. That was it. I wasn’t supposed to involve myself in your life, and I don’t think you have any idea how much shit I’m going to be in when Viviane finds out I kissed you.”
I look to Jude, wondering if he’ll call bullshit or not, but he’s just staring at Gunnar in confusion. Unsure how to react, I default to sarcasm. “Oh, sure. Well, obviously, I buy your story without any questions. Sorry I ever doubted you.”
“It’s not that simple. None of this is simple! I asked you out because I was lonely, all right?” Grimacing, he shoots a humiliated glance at Jude. “I’ve spent months watching you hang out with your friends, and flirt with me, and do funny things when you didn’t know anyone was looking. And I was sad, because everything sucks—and then … then you left your book at the café.” He tosses his arms out and lets them slap down at his sides. “It was a bad idea. I know that now. But I wanted one night to pretend everything was different, and I thought … I thought I could give you that, too. Just in case everything is about to end.”
These final words linger like the chill in the air, and it’s Jude who musters an embittered retort. “How selfless of you.”
Irritation brings my voice back with a quickness. “You’re one to talk—you’ve been using my fears against me since you got here. ‘Come into my secret laboratory, August! The Syndicate’s bloodthirsty, undead scientists will definitely work on a cure for you!’”
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