“People are more dangerous than cats,” Jay reminds him quietly. “I’m no kitten.”
“But you have ridiculously big eyes, my dear, and are unarguably waifish.” Blake’s hand leaves Jay’s eyes and moves down to the dip below his Adam’s apple, where Jay’s skin falls and rises with each inhale and exhale. “Your pulse is speeding up.”
“Yes,” Jay agrees, and sits up so he can kiss Blake’s mouth. Blake’s pale cheeks are flushed, just a little. It wouldn’t be noticeable on a person, but the usual eerie whiteness of Blake’s skin is touched with faint pink. It doesn’t make him look human, but it makes him look alive.
“I haven’t been out yet this evening,” Blake says, and after a second Jay works out what he means. Hunting. Feeding. Right. “Alexander and Timothy went out together as soon as the sun set.”
Jay doesn’t know if Blake can get enough blood for a whole night by just taking a bit from him, and he doesn’t think he’s got enough spare at the moment to offer more than a bit. Still, he tilts his head to the side obligingly. Blake runs the tips of his fingers over Jay’s skin lightly, but shakes his head.
“No, I was thinking… you would come with me.” The intonation isn’t that of a question, and Blake doesn’t meet Jay’s eyes as he says the words. Jay feels his breath catch.
“Oh. Um. Okay,” he manages to say. He isn’t sure how he feels. For all he’s lived through and experienced, this is another part of the vampire world he’s never seen for himself. He nods. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
Jay expects they’ll wind up at an upmarket bar somewhere unfamiliar, full of muted conversation and sophisticated opinions, but the club is just the same as any of the ones he and Tommy and Michelle go to when they go out. He should have realized that, really: if Blake’s interested in Jay, Blake is probably interested in other people very like Jay. For some reason, that knowledge feels a bit like a disappointment.
They stand together against one wall, where the light isn’t especially good and they’re made indistinct by the shadows. Blake watches the mingling, dancing, laughing groups of people with an avid hunger on his face. Jay scowls.
“That one, there,” Blake says, leaning closer to Jay as he speaks quietly and nods in the direction of a kid Jay vaguely recognizes from school. “I’ve seen him prowling around on occasion. He likes to steal neighborhood pets and cut them apart with a knife. He’s got it tucked into his belt right now, at the back. See? His shirt bunches.”
Jay stares at Blake, feeling nauseated. “How come you didn’t kill him when you saw him do that?”
Blake shrugs. “I wasn’t hungry. Would you like me to kill him now?”
Jay crosses his arms over his chest and fixes his gaze on their feet. “I guess,” he mumbles. “Better than if you killed someone who didn’t deserve it, isn’t it?”
Surprisingly, Blake laughs delightedly, kissing Jay on the cheek. “You are so terribly young, my darling boy. Or perhaps I mean youthfully terrible. Nobody manages instinctive righteousness quite so well as a teenager.”
Before Jay can snipe back with a catty reply, Blake is gone, slipping smoothly into the throngs of living people and approaching the boy. Jay looks away, trying to damp down the churning feeling in his stomach.
He goes back to the townhouse alone, not sure what else to do, and plays eight rounds of Guitar Hero and five of classic Street Fighter against Timothy. Jay is pretty sure that Timothy’s letting him win, maybe out of pity, but he’s feeling too weird to be especially offended by that.
Alexander watches them for a little while, standing quietly to the side so as not to interrupt the very serious business of video game martial arts. After one of the battles ends, he comes over and rests a hand on Jay’s shoulder for a moment.
“He did the same thing to Timothy,” Alexander tells Jay. Jay glances over at Timothy for confirmation of the words, but Timothy is studiously ignoring them both, eyes fixed on the screen.
“It’s one of his games,” Alexander goes on. “Don’t think anything more about it.” He leaves the room before Jay can reply, and Timothy begins another match.
When Jay gets too exhausted to play any longer, he goes into Blake’s room and lies down on the bed. The pillow smells faintly like Blake. Jay closes his eyes, and lets himself drift into sleep.
He doesn’t know how much later it is when he wakes up, but Blake is there beside him, reading despite the almost total lack of light. Jay sighs and cuddles in closer to him.
“Did you kill him?”
“Yes.”
Jay is quiet for a while. He doesn’t care what Blake thinks of that. Eventually, his thoughts are ordered enough that he can voice them.
“I remember him, a couple of months ago at school. It’s a weird thing to remember, but… I remember that he had this amazing new camera that his dad had brought him back from a business trip. It was way too good for a kid to have, really, and absolutely too good for anyone to bring to school. But there he is, showing it off, bragging about what a hotshot his dad is.”
Jay pauses, arching a little into the light touch of Blake’s hand against his hair.
“Then as he’s walking to class,” Jay goes on. “The strap around his wrist, the camera strap, it broke and the camera fell onto the ground. I could see that the lens cracked and the card-slot snapped up along one side. The camera was ruined and the look on his face… it was just one of those shitty disappointments that happen in life, you know? Not a huge deal, not ruining anyone’s life, just… a bummer. He didn’t have something he’d liked having anymore and that disappointed him. And it’s weird but I think about it and I still feel worse for him in that moment than for the one you killed him in, how crazy is that?”
“Hm,” Blake says, his soft, amused noise sounding especially fond. “It’s extremely… teenaged of you. And that’s indistinguishable from crazy most of the time, in my experience.
“A cruel universe is less frightening to think about than an uncaring one, for somebody your age. At least cruelty has a kind of malicious meaning to it. Melodrama and theatricality can be great comforts—I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your judgmental eye that I like to exist with all the metaphorical volumes turned up as loudly as they will go. Tragedy wants to be beautiful in ways depression never dreamed of.
A boy breaks his cherished camera: that is depressing and it becomes a story which makes the listener depressed. But a boy plucked from a dance floor by a beautiful monster —”
“Not that you’ve got an ego or anything,” Jay cuts in, grinning in the dark.
“Hush.” Blake stops stroking Jay’s hair for a moment, then begins again. “A death like that’s a tragedy made for the stage or a dime-store novel, isn’t it? It has a dark romanticism; the listener thrills. The mundane heartbreaks of an ordinary life, those small disappointments, are devoid of that terrible beauty. People can more easily convince themselves that an inexplicable horror has some kind of greater meaning than they can when it comes to an everyday woe.”
Jay thinks and breathes quietly for a while. “Let it never be said that you used five words when you had an opportunity to use fifty,” he says finally, deadpan. “Does it scare you? How unhappy all endings are?”
Blake seems to think about this, as if he isn’t sure. “I suppose. I’ve always been more afraid that I’m somehow wrong, and there really is a grand design. The thought of going to Hell is both dull and moralistic. I would be bored to tears by an eternity of being punished for things I thoroughly enjoyed doing. Better a conscious-less abyss.”
Jay gives Blake’s thigh a chastising pinch. “Quit the quipping for a second, okay? I’m asking a serious question and I want a serious answer, not some low-rent Oscar Wilde impersonation.”
“Oscar Wilde couldn’t hold a candle to me in his wildest dreams,” Blake says loftily, giving Jay’s hair a sharp pull in punishment for the pinch. “But since you asked… yes. The thought of a cold and dark universe frightens even creatures as sharp and fearless as vampires,
and we cope with it in much the same way as humans: art, love, warm skin. Usually these are enough to stave off the little demons that attend musings on broken cameras.”
“You are so incredibly lame,” Jay says, voice soft and smiling, and he widens the smile to a grin as Blake tugs his hair a second time in warning.
BETTE
“Weather like this makes me wish we were in the van,” says Anna, tilting her face up toward the sun. With her long blonde hair down loose against the straps of her singlet and her sunglasses perched on her nose she looks as polished and austere as a fashion model. Bette feels grimy and young and stupid, and scowls behind her own sunglasses. Rose, as always, doesn’t notice. Bette wishes she could be as at home inside herself as Rose always seems to be.
It’s Saturday morning and glorious and warm, and not at all the time of the week Bette expected to get a phone call from Will. She’d dragged herself out of the glorious sleeping-in which Saturdays usually entailed, and after some violent prodding had managed to get Rose to come as well.
Five absolutely disgusting glasses of different herbal blends later, Bette isn’t quite as enthusiastic about being a test subject as she was. Still, she doesn’t feel like drinking anyone’s blood, so that’s a plus. Her eyesight feels clearer, if more light-sensitive, and her hearing’s strong too. Will said there might be side effects like that, but it’s still a neat surprise. Maybe being an almost-victim of the bloodthirsty undead isn’t all bad after all. Now they’re all sitting on the ground in the concrete-floored loading dock out the back of the warehouse, where a scattering of potted plants are drinking up the sunshine greedily.
“Yeah,” Will agrees with Anna. “Pulling into a new town and checking out the venue for the show, dumping our stuff in the motel room… man, I miss all that dumb travel stuff so bad. Time of my life.”
“I wondered why you guys stopped touring. You were, like, on the verge,” Rose enthuses. “Everyone thought you were gonna blow up huge, and then you went back to playing tiny local places.”
“More vampires in town. We couldn’t afford the time away from hunting,” Russ answers, sounding philosophical.
“So that’s it?” Bette’s question is incredulous. “What about the dreams you had for yourselves?”
“What’s that line in Lord of the Rings, about how sometimes to keep something important protected, some people have to give up the things that are important to them? It’s like that,” says Lily.
Rose snorts.
“My brother and I are named after characters from that. I’m after a hobbit, the one who has a million kids with Sam at the end. Tommy’s named after the dude who sings the evil willow tree to sleep when it captures Merry and Pippin.”
“That’s badass,” Lily says. Rose shakes her head. “No, dude, seriously. You’re a hobbit! That rocks.”
“Whatever,” Rose says, but there’s a small pleased blush on her cheeks.
“When I was a kid,” says Lily. “I was always trying to convince my mom to let me change my name to Lara, like Superman’s mother. I was totally obsessed with Superman’s origin story. I don’t know why. I read every variation and retelling of it I could.”
“Origin stories are crap,” Rose says decisively. Bette rolls her eyes. She’s heard this line of argument more than once from Rose in the past. “They’re boring. I don’t get why they’re retold so often.”
“Okay, two reasons,” Lily counters, holding her hand up with two fingers extended. “One, origin stories are, arguably—and note that I said arguably, because I don’t actually agree with this reason personally, but it’s still worth saying—the most important story that you can tell about a character. How they became who they are. I mean, think about it. When you’re getting to know someone, what’s the thing the two of you are gonna reveal to each other as you get more comfortable with each other? You’re gonna talk about your childhood, and the experiences that are most important for them to know about you in order for them to get you, aren’t you? So that’s one reason. Reason two is because the origin story is like, I don’t know, the overture in a musical score. It introduces you to the themes that are going to show up later in variations, right? Like, okay, when you’re reading a Batman comic, and Batman’s at the circus and he sees two acrobats die, and the only survivor is the acrobats’ son, and Batman adopts that kid… that story means, like, way more if you know that Batman was the only survivor when his own parents died, doesn’t it?”
Rose makes a face. “I guess. Maybe.”
“That’s why you get actors all saying that they only auditioned for some part because their friend was trying out. Because that’s a killer origin story. Origin stories can make or break a myth, Rose.”
Bette catches Will’s eye and shares a smile with him. It’s nice to know that even people in excellent bands are sometimes total weirdo geeks, too.
~
In the afternoon, Bette helps Will record their findings from that morning—the mixtures that didn’t work, and the one that seems to have held off the crappy hungry feeling Bette’s had ever since she got bitten, the one that notices every scratch and scrape on the skin of the people around her all the time and wants to taste.
“If getting bitten doesn’t make someone a vampire, what does?” she asks as they work.
“It’s a combination of factors,” Will replies, packing away ingredients and extracts methodically as he speaks. “When someone’s bitten, they’re infected with… I’m not sure infected’s really the right word, but it’s the one I first heard for it and it’s the one I’ve always used. Right now there’s something in your body, from that bite, that wants blood. If you don’t give it enough—or an alternative, like we’re trying to make with these blends—then it’ll drive you close to crazy with thirst, and you’ll snap and attack someone or, if you don’t even have an opportunity to do that, you’ll be in a near-psychotic state until the condition passes. That takes about a week.
“If you give the infection, the something, the whatever, just enough blood to keep it calm—just a small amount each day—then, again, it passes in a week. That’s what we’re doing with you. It’s what we try to do with everyone. It’s not very common for people to survive an encounter with a vampire, so it took a long, long time before people learned enough about the infection to know how to treat it. We’re still learning, as you can obviously see.” He gestures to the equipment spread out in front of them. “If you give the infection too much, more than roughly the minimum, it gets stronger. And stronger. You need to keep it weak before it’ll start to fade.
“Even having a strong case of it isn’t enough to make someone a vampire. Some hunters have recorded details of cases they’ve seen where a bite victim was drinking several pints a day, and with careful detox they wound up perfectly healthy in the end.
“But if you’ve got a strong infection—one that’s been fed enough blood to make it really tenacious—and you die, it… reanimates you, I guess. We don’t know how long that takes, but records indicate it’s an hour or two at most. Nothing like the three days most lore suggests.
“We don’t know how much blood is enough to make it happen, or how long prior to death it needs to be ingested. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s human blood or vampire blood—the two are surprisingly similar on a cellular level.”
Bette absorbs the new information. “So if I—and there’s no way I’m gonna go this, so don’t worry or anything—if I ate a bunch of blood sausage for lunch and then I got hit by a car in the afternoon, I’d… come back?”
Will nods. “Maybe. Not if you were on the very last day of your infection being present, I think. But the day after you were bitten, probably. That’s why it’s so important that you have the barest, barest minimum of blood product in your food while you’re recovering from the attack. Anything more, and the chance increases that you’ll come back a vampire.”
Bette shudders. “So I guess we’ll have to wait and see if these gross-out smoothies make my condi
tion better or worse, huh?”
Will nods. “Yes. Keep an eye on your metabolism.”
“The vampires have fangs, right?” Bette asks. “I mean, I didn’t get a good look, but it looked like they had little fangs. But people don’t have fangs. What happens?”
“Yep.” Will nods. “They have fangs. When people have become vampires, the hunters who checked over the scene later found eye teeth. It appears that your two upper canine incisors fall out as the infection begins to reanimate you. The new ones grow in before you wake up.”
“Ugh,” Bette says, trying to suppress a shudder. “As if I didn’t have enough nightmares about my teeth falling out already. That’s gross.”
“I agree,” Will says, with a slightly sickened-looking smile. “So don’t drink any blood, and do your best not to die, either.”
JAY
“More cogs and mechanicals to unpuzzle tonight, then?” Jay asks as he steps into the living room and sees Alexander laying out his cloth and his tools. Alexander nods.
“Yes. Quite a lucky find, really. The girl I took it from wasn’t especially remarkable otherwise.”
The new trinket, waiting for dissection and reassembly, is a tiny gold locket set with diamonds and a miniature watch. Jay looks at it for a beat, trying to work out why something so random would look so familiar. Then he recognizes it.
“You killed Jenna,” Jay says, and his voice sounds hollow and hard in his ears. Alexander doesn’t shrug, doesn’t nod, doesn’t give any kind of response cue that Jay can react to.
Words start tumbling out of Jay, then, as if anything he says will matter.
“She… she was funny. And mean. And she wanted to be a famous singer but her voice was pretty average but she wanted it so much and she didn’t give up easily, so maybe she would have got it anyway. She knew exactly how pretty she was and how much she could get away with because of it. She had a little sister. She was allergic to shellfish and hated carrots but ate them anyway. I liked her.”
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