We walk down an alleyway near Baz’s flat. We won’t have to go far, he says; London has rats everywhere, some of them the size of cats.
“Does it have to be rats?” I ask. “They’re so gross.”
Baz is pulling on a pair of tan leather gloves. “What else does the city provide for me? House pets? Pigeons?”
“You could breed mice. Clean ones, like in a laboratory.”
“Oh, that’s good, Snow. I’ll have a flat full of pink-eyed mice in glass enclosures. That won’t be creepy.” He leans over and snatches a rat by its tail, then brains it against a brick wall.
“Christ,” I say. “It’s already well creepy.”
Baz sneers at me. “You’re the one who wanted to come. I told you it was disgusting.”
I grin at him. “I’m happy you let me come. We could do this together. On the regular. I could help you hunt.”
“I don’t need your help.” He starts walking again.
“Aren’t you gonna drink that one?”
“I wait and drink them all at once. It’s neater.” He frowns at me. “You don’t get to watch me drink.”
“You already said that.” Back at the flat, when he agreed to this.
“I can hear you getting ideas.” Baz crouches, darting his hand into the gutter to grab another rat.
“Merlin, you’re good at this.” He catches another one while I’m saying it.
“Practice,” he says.
“Must have been nice in the country. Proper hunting. Deer.”
He kills the rats and moves on. “It did feel more wholesome.”
I trail after him. “Will you live in the country after uni?”
“Will you?”
“I don’t know why you haven’t given up on animals altogether.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the American vampires just drink people, don’t they?”
He scowls at me over his shoulder. “I’m not a murderer, Snow.”
“Lamb said you don’t have to murder people. You can just drink.”
“Well, I’m not a parasite either.” Baz stops, crouches. “Or a thief.”
“You wouldn’t have to steal it.”
“Good idea, I’ll find a blood bank and open an account.”
“Come on, don’t be thick—you know I’d give it to you.”
He stands up abruptly, facing me. “Don’t say that, Simon.”
I shrug. “But I would.” I would.
Baz looks fierce. “Don’t be idiotic! We don’t even know how it works—I might drink too much.”
“You wouldn’t.” He wouldn’t.
“I could accidentally Turn you.”
“We’ll do research,” I say. “I’ll get Penny on it.”
“Don’t you dare mention this to Bunce. Just stop, all right? I don’t even want to think about this.”
“You’d rather drink London rats than me?”
Baz’s eyes are wide. He’s shaking his head. “Fuck you, Snow.”
“Someday, perhaps. I’ve been told there’s hope.” I see something scurrying past me, and stomp on it. “Hey, look—I got one!”
BAZ
Simon Snow is grinning at me, holding out a live rat like a single-stemmed rose.
I stare at him.
He shakes the screeching rat. “Finish him off,” he says, “before he starts to grow on me.”
I take the rat and put it out of its misery.
Who will put me out of mine? I used to think it would be this fool. “You’re not even wearing gloves,” I say, still dumbfounded.
“Just ‘Clean as a whistle’ me.”
“That’ll only get you—”
“Clean as a whistle, I know. But right now, I’m clean as a rat.”
I wave my wand over his hands, casting the spell, then start walking again.
He’s unbelievable! He wants me to drink his blood? As if not drinking his blood hasn’t been my primary concern since my fangs grew in!
He’d actually let me drink him …
Never mind the pain. Or the scars. Or the blood loss.
Or the risk of becoming a monster.
I thought maybe Snow didn’t want to share a bed with me because he was afraid I’d bite him in my sleep. But apparently that’s fine! Bloodletting is fine—intimacy is the real taboo!
“Don’t people notice you?” he asks, still unbothered. “Strolling around with a bunch of dead rats?”
“Not usually. I cast a spell if they do.”
“How many rats do you need to get full?”
“Depends on the size. Four to six.”
Simon giggles. “Four to six.”
I shake my head. “I still can’t believe you’re doing this with me.”
“I’ve kind of already done it with you. I used to follow you around the Catacombs every night.”
I laugh. “Those weren’t dates, Snow.”
He grins. “Is this a date, then?”
I go back to scanning the alley for rats. “You really were obsessed with me, weren’t you? I can’t believe you didn’t know you were gay.”
“I’m not gay,” Simon says. Immediately.
I stop and turn back to him. “Oh. I’m sorry. I suppose, I mean—” We’ve never really talked about this. I’ve just assumed … I don’t know what I’ve assumed. “Are you bi, then?”
“What?” He looks put off. “No.”
“Well…” I look around the alley, like I might find something helpful there. I hold up my hands. I forget I’m carrying rats. “What does that leave, Simon? Do you still think you’re straight?”
“Christ, Baz, I never thought I was straight. I never thought about it at all.” He’s walking down the alley, away from me.
I follow after him. “Haven’t you thought about it a little? Since us?”
“What’s there to think about? I’m with you. And you’re a…” He trails off.
“Man,” I say flatly.
Simon shrugs. “I was going to say ‘boy.’”
“I’m twenty years old. I could go to war.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“So, you do know you’re dating a man. That’s a start.”
He turns to wink at me. “A-ha, this is a date.”
“Simon, I’m being serious.” I’ve stopped walking.
He stops, too. “Yeah, but why are you being serious? Is this important? Is this, like, our second-biggest problem? Me not knowing what colour flag to hold at the Pride Parade?”
“I didn’t think it was a problem,” I say. “But you’re being a real twat about it. So maybe it is.”
Simon sighs and rubs his forehead. I’m glad I spelled his hands clean. “I just … don’t know. All right? I know I’m not straight. And obviously I was whatever I am now back when I was going to all your football matches and hiding outside your violin lessons.”
“I thought you were trying to figure out whether I was a vampire,” I say. I really did.
He’s exasperated: “I already knew you were a vampire!”
I want to put my hands on my hips, but I’m still holding four dead rats. “Are you saying you liked me? In fifth year?”
“Baz, I was obsessed with you.”
“I knew that. But you liked me?”
Simon sighs again. Really put out now. “I didn’t like you. I still don’t really like you…” That’s a lie, and he knows it.
“But you wanted to kiss me?”
“I wanted to jump on you. I didn’t really think past that.”
“Plus ça change…”
“Fuuuck you,” he says, extravagantly. “I know that’s French for something smug.”
I laugh. Snow makes me laugh. He makes me lose track of why I’m irritated with him. I see a rat scuttling past us in my peripheral vision and crouch, catching its neck in my fist. It’s small enough to kill with one hand. “I liked you,” I say.
“You hated me,” Snow says, above me.
I stand. “That, too.”<
br />
I’m nearly done hunting. I should probably grab one more, so that I don’t have to do this again later. Snow walks beside me. I clear my throat. “But you liked Agatha then, right? In fifth year?”
“Yeah. I suppose.”
I get ahead of him a bit. “You were attracted to Agatha,” I say over my shoulder, like it’s nothing to me, “right?”
“You’ve seen Agatha,” he says. “Inanimate objects are attracted to her. Trees bend her way.”
“Yes, but did you—” I ask. I try to ask. “I mean, you’ve—”
Simon double-steps to catch up with me. “I’ve what?”
“You and Agatha. You, um…”
“Dated? Yes. Though she never took me midnight rat hunting. She wouldn’t even go to the cinema with me. She said—”
I interrupt him. “You had sex, right?”
Simon stops. “Jesus, Baz, what a question.”
He’s right. I can’t believe I asked it. “It’s a normal question,” I say.
“Is it?” He sounds genuinely surprised.
“Yes. People talk about previous partners.”
“You’ve never mentioned any.”
I lash out: “I don’t have any, you halfwit! Don’t you think you’d have uncovered them when you stalked me for three years?”
“I don’t know how you spent your summers!”
“Reading!” I say. “Violin! Playing Mario Kart with my sister!”
We’ve both stopped walking. Simon wrinkles his nose. “Were you never actually plotting against me?”
“I plotted a bit. I was over it by sixth year.” I sound flustered. Because I am. And it’s all my own fault. Give me a little bit of honest communication, and I open the floodgates. Next I’ll be asking him if he wants children. “Look, I’m just going to drink these now.”
Simon seems confused. “Right,” he says. “What do you need me to do?”
“Turn away.”
He does.
I would like to pinch the bridge of my nose and sulk. Instead I get out my knife.
“Do you actually put your fangs in them?” Simon asks, facing a brick wall. His wings are bunched up under his jumper.
“Not if can help it. I slit their throats.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“You’re a pervert.”
“I just appreciate a job well done.”
I untangle one of the rats. “Does Wellbelove?”
“Hey—” Simon turns around. He looks angry. Finally.
I decide to be angry, too. “I knew you couldn’t keep your word!”
“What?”
“You promised you wouldn’t watch.”
“I—” Simon’s face is red. He whips around, facing the wall again.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” I say tightly. “I’m sorry. I won’t mention Agatha again.”
“It’s all right,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck, unexpectedly subdued.
“Don’t turn around,” I say. “I really am going to do this. I can’t let them get cold.”
I slit the first rat’s throat and hold it to my mouth. This truly is disgusting. What sort of diseases would I have if I were a person?
I drop the empty rat on the street and open the next one.
Simon kicks the wall. “We had sex,” he says. “We dated a really long time.”
I startle, splashing blood on my white shirt. I throw the rat to the ground. “That’s good,” I say, strained.
Simon sounds frustrated. “Is it?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“It was fine, it was sex. Are you done?”
“No. I have three more.”
“Right,” he says, kicking the wall again.
I start drinking another rat.
“I don’t know if I was attracted to her…” Simon says.
“You had sex,” I gurgle.
“Yeah, but what does that mean?”
I make a disbelieving noise in my throat. I’m trying to swallow.
“It was just going through the motions,” he says.
I drop the rat; it isn’t even half empty. “But surely that means you were attracted to her.”
“I thought I was!” He’s got a hand fisted in the hair at his crown. “I thought I was going to marry her. But everything with Agatha was just going through the motions, wasn’t it? I didn’t have to think. I didn’t have to sort out my feelings—or what did my therapist used to call it, ‘process.’” He kicks the wall hard. “There was no processing with Agatha. That’s what I liked about her! She felt like the opposite of dealing with my shit. I never looked at Agatha and thought, How will I ever be big enough to hold my feelings for this person? I felt plenty big enough! My feelings felt extremely manageable. I’m not sure I even had any!”
I wipe my hands on my jeans. “Turn around, Snow.”
“Are you done?”
“No.” It comes out soft. “Turn around.”
He does. His hand drops from his hair. “Hell and horrors—you look like a butcher. Are you always this messy?”
“Only with you.”
“I had sex with Agatha,” he says. Like it’s an apology. “I thought you knew.”
“I did know. Mostly.”
He shakes his head. “I still don’t know if that makes me bi.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He knots his hand in his hair again. “Well, it makes me feel like a bloody idiot! Like, I was with a girl for three years, and I still don’t know if I like girls! What the fuck?”
“You don’t have to know.”
“But it seems like I should, right? It seems like I should have a large enough sample size. You didn’t need to sample anything to sort yourself out!”
“Please, Simon. I’m sorry I brought this up.”
He drops his hand. “All I really know is that nothing I’ve experienced so far compares to you. Maybe that makes me gay.” He swallows. “Or maybe that just makes me yours.”
We’re standing a foot away from each other. I’m covered in blood, and I’m holding two medium-sized dead rats and a very sharp knife. “I want to kiss you,” I say.
“I always want to kiss you, Baz.” He steps closer. “I always have.”
“Don’t.”
“I don’t care if I get the plague. You can Turn me into a vampire to cure me.”
“Don’t test me, Snow.”
He takes another step towards me. I take a step back.
“I’m going to finish these rats,” I say. “And then we’re going back to the flat, and I’m going to brush my teeth.”
Simon looks down at the rats, then back at my mouth. “Can I watch you finish ’em?”
I close my eyes. “Fine.”
“Ha! I knew you’d say yes in the end.”
As if I could ever deny him.
20
SIMON
I can’t believe I’m sitting in Baz’s bed.
I can’t believe he let me hunt with him.
I can’t believe I’m still here.
I’ve said at least a dozen things in the last ten hours that I thought would kill me—that I would have rather died than try to put into words. Yet here I am. And there he is. Well, he’s in the shower again. But he’s coming out. He gave me clean clothes to sleep in. He told me to make myself another sandwich.
I found Bourbon biscuits in the kitchen. I’m dipping them directly into a bottle of milk.
“My aunt really is going to kill you now,” Baz says.
I look up. He’s standing in the bathroom door, wearing cotton pyjama bottoms and a fresh T-shirt. His hair is wet, he must have washed it again. I’d never seen him as bloody as he was tonight; his gloves were still sticky, even after he cast a cleaning spell on them. He said he isn’t going to take me hunting anymore, but I know he was just saying it. I want to go with him every night. Maybe I like hunting. I’ve always wanted my own longbow. “Should I not be eating these biscuits?” I ask. There are two in my mouth.
&
nbsp; “Too late now. I’ll buy more tomorrow.” He arches an eyebrow at me. “Do you want my help with the shirt?” Baz gave me a clean T-shirt, but I left it on the dresser.
“If it’s all the same to you”—I shrug one shoulder and twitch my wing—“it’s easier to sleep without one.”
Baz nods and licks his bottom lip. “Yeah, it’s … all the same to me.”
He shuts the bathroom door and comes to the bed, getting in next to me. I make room for him. His skin has pinkened up again. Still pale and grey—but a pinker grey. Rat blood looks good on him.
“Are you getting crumbs in my bed, Snow?”
“I’m the worst,” I say. “I don’t even notice them. You don’t mind sleeping some more?”
“No,” Baz says, reaching for the milk bottle. “I’m knackered.” He takes a drink. I watch him swallow. I like it. I like him. His everything.
I dig out the last biscuit, then hold it out to him. He smiles softly, taking it.
I put my arm around him. “This okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Pretty much always.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, Snow. There’s no use denying it.”
“That’s…” I tighten my arm around him. I get my wing around him, too. I like having four arms to hold him. “It’s good. It’s better already, isn’t it?”
“Better than what?” he asks. (I think he knows the answers to half the questions he asks me. He just likes to make me talk.)
“Yesterday,” I say.
“Everything is better than yesterday,” he says. “Yesterday was the nadir.”
“It feels so long ago.”
Baz sets down the milk. He brushes some crumbs off the duvet. I slink back in his bed, leaving my arm and wing open. His pillows are so fluffy. They probably cost a fortune. He glances at me, then away. I bring my other wing around to herd him in—he lets me. I pull him down to me, and he lays his head on my shoulder. I like this. It makes him seem shorter than me.
Baz sets his hand on my chest. I don’t think he’s ever touched me here, bare, when we weren’t fooling around, or trying to. Maybe he’s trying to …
“I like your chest,” he says.
“That’s because you remember what I looked like before I got fat.”
“Nonsense, Snow. You’re not fat.”
I bloody well am. But, as Baz would say, it’s not my biggest problem.
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