“I know, I know.” Jay frowns again. Then he grabs his knapsack from where he’d let it fall beside his sneakers, and pulls out a bottle of aspirin, swallowing four of the pills dry and wincing as they go down.
“You don’t have to do that for him,” Timothy points out. “You don’t like him getting in the fights; why help him stave the aches off?”
Jay shrugs. “It’s not like I’m good for anything else,” he replies.
~
Bette’s usually the first of the household to wakefulness in the evenings, but this time Timothy’s awake before anyone else. There’s a dull throb beating in his head, because he and Alexander reconciled from their argument before going to sleep and Timothy ended up giving away more blood than he should have in the process. If he wasn’t feeling so out of sorts, he’d take a moment to be amused by the fact that their disagreements never result in violence, but their apologies quite regularly do.
He has a glass of water with two fizzing vitamin B tablets dissolved in it, and then a glass of rather gluggy microwave-warmed blood. Timothy has learned from experience not to try combining these two necessary hangover cures into one step. Then he dresses as sedately as the ostentatious wardrobes of his family allows for, and sets off towards the home of Lily and Will.
He doesn’t go up to the door of the warehouse and claim to be dropping by to say hi or to borrow a cup of sugar. That sort of theatrics is way more Blake’s style than it is Timothy’s. Timothy prefers to find a spot a couple of blocks away and intersect them as they’re on the move. No reason to give his opponents a home advantage, after all.
There are poorly-photocopied Missing Person posters stapled to the telegraph poles and bulletin boards along the route from Timothy’s home to the warehouse district. A boy in his mid-teens, photographed in his school blazer and tie, teeth orthodontics-straight and hair neatly combed. Timothy pulls one free from its home on a streetlight pole and folds it small, storing it in the pocket of his slacks.
When Will and Lily arrive at the spot where Timothy has decided to wait for them, they have Rose in tow: two corpse-pale knights and their scruffy squire. Timothy wonders if Blake and Alexander and himself should feel offended that their arch nemeses are so ragtag. Lily’s lip still shows the lingering traces of having been split and swollen the night before; without regular human blood, she doesn’t heal at the same quick rate that Blake does.
“I heard you had another run-in with Blake last night,” Timothy says instead of ‘hi’, because even if he secretly thinks that Lily and Will both seem like pretty excellent people who would be fun to hang out with, they’re still technically his dire enemies for the time being, and he’s fairly sure that dire enemies aren’t meant to say ‘hi’.
Will and Lily look pissed off. Rose looks afraid, which makes Timothy a little sad, because he likes Rose a lot. She’s the only person he’s met in years who has a genuine interest in the shoebox of old photocopied zines he still has from the late eighties and early nineties. She’s clever, and sweet, and he really, really likes her. The first time he’d met her, back before Bette died, he’d thought maybe…
But the past’s the past, and Timothy knows better than most people that there’s no point in trying to recapture what’s been and finished.
“She left your brother alone in a skate park so she could go scuffle with Blake, you know,” he says to her now, throwing the folded-up photocopy at her. Rose catches it automatically, and unfolds it. “Dangerous time to be leaving kids alone in the dark, really.”
He thinks about goading them some more, but from the look on Rose’s face he suspects he’s stirred up ample trouble already, so with a parting wave he climbs up a fire escape and over the edge of a nearby roof, watching them from high above and listening to their terse voices.
“You promised you wouldn’t face him again on your own,” Will snaps at Lily, but she doesn’t answer back, her attention fixed on Rose.
“I know this guy,” Rose says, gesturing to the picture of the boy. “He’s a student at my school. Was, anyway. I guess he’s dead now. He used to give Bette a hard time a lot. Steal her books, shove her in lockers. Stupid shit like that. Oh god, you don’t think she…”
“I know she was your friend,” Will says gently, taking the paper out of Rose’s trembling hands and moving it out of sight. “But you have to -“
“Is. Not… not was, okay? It’s not like she’s dea… it’s not like she isn’t still my friend,” Rose says, sounding on the verge of tears. “She is my friend and I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s just go find some fucking vampires already. We’re wasting the night.”
She strides ahead, not looking back to see if Lily and Will are following her. After exchanging a worried glance between the two of them, they do.
~
At the behest of a phone message from Bette, Timothy meets her outside her club. She’s chattering excitedly with a couple of human girls of about the same age as her, while Tommy stands nearby and ignores them. His thumbs fly over the keypad of his own phone, his attention fixed on some silent conversation.
“You’ve met Michelle,” Bette says, gesturing to the girl beside her, who smiles at Timothy by way of greeting.
“You had your hair in cornrows then,” he says to her, remembering. Timothy enjoys cataloguing the small changes of the world. They serve as reminders to him that time is passing, that he is making a new history for himself.
“Yeah.” Michelle smooths a hand over the chemically straightened fall of her hair. “I’m in this dumbass school musical and the drama teacher is a psycho who thinks there’s something exotic about me, so I’m trying to look as un-ethnic as possible for it, just to make life harder for her.”
Timothy can’t help but grin at that. “I wish you the best of luck.”
“And this is Ash. She and Michelle are in a band. They’re gonna play at my new club when it opens,” Bette says, an excitedly high pitch creeping into her voice on the last words.
Ash is what Jay would probably call a hot mess. Timothy’s never been sure exactly what that term means before, but he thinks he gets it now. Ash is model-skinny and pretty, but her long red hair hasn’t seen a brush or shampoo in some time, and her wide eyes have the glazed, distracted look that comes from drugs, and her dark clothes smell of smoke and unaired rooms.
She’s a beautiful disaster, and reminds him of the riot grrrl singers he’d loved so much once upon a time. Ash was born to dress up in kinderwhore; it’s just a shame she was born a decade late, after the style got commodified into ‘gothic lolita’ and sold back to teenagers at twice the price and half the meaning. Timothy has often wondered whether the girls in their frilly babydoll dresses would keep using ‘lolita’ if they’d read the original Nabokov novel. Probably. Lolita has become a figure akin to Little Red Riding Hood: she means whatever the era needs her to mean.
“Hey,” Ash says, nodding at Timothy before turning back to Bette. “So this is for real, right? You’re not being an asshole and lying or anything?”
“This is all mine, for real,” Bette assures her. “C’mon, Timothy, let’s show ‘em around.”
They go inside, the small group fanning out across the empty space of the dancefloor, each of them captivated by some particular feature of the darkened club. Timothy walks with Bette, reaching into his pocket and pulling out another of the Missing Person fliers of the boy from her school. He’d procured it on the walk over, not feeling the least bit guilty about pulling down the second one of the night. The boy is almost without a doubt already dead; the campaign of constant public reminders of his absence will do no good whatsoever.
“I hear he used to give you trouble at school,” Timothy says conversationally. Bette looks down at the picture and smirks.
“Yeah, he sure as hell did. Good old Jeremy.” She gives a mean little laugh. “Guess he finally pissed off the wrong person, huh?”
Timothy blinks in surprise. “It wasn’t you?”
“
Nah.” Bette shakes her head, shrugging and handing back the picture. Then she turns, and goes over to join Michelle and Tommy and Ash on the barren stage, the four of them miming to imaginary music that only they can hear.
Timothy looks down at the paper face of the dead boy, and frowns.
~
When Timothy tracks Blake down, Blake’s in his study, but Timothy’s got a sixth sense about when somebody is actually working and when somebody is randomly browsing Wikipedia and pretending to work. It’s not even an especially mysterious sixth sense, really; Blake is engrossed in an article about the liquid crystal display technology used in handheld computer games of the 1980s when Timothy knocks against his open doorframe.
“Hard at work?” Timothy asks. Blake smiles.
“Evidently. Come in. Distract me from my hard work.”
Timothy sits down in the second leather chair at the desk, letting himself settle back for a moment and enjoy the muted beauty of the room. Blake doesn’t manage to be consistent about many things, but one thing he can always be relied upon to be is tasteful, and his study is a particularly lovely space, with richly golden-brown wooden shelves lining every inch of wall from floor to ceiling, filled with books, several arm chairs upholstered in pale green placed underneath the large window, and a desk decorated with a state-of-the-art computer, scanner, and printer setup.
“It’s not particularly common for vampires to prey on teenagers, is it?” he asks. “Not in this city, at any rate. The connection we have to Jason and Bette and their friends is an exception more than a rule?”
Blake considers the question, steepling his long fingers and remaining quiet for a long moment before answering. “I suppose so, yes. I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms, but you’re right. It makes sense, if you think about it. Gangs with a taste for adolescents are often a liability to the vampire population at large, and Alexander and I have worked hard to eradicate as many liabilities as possible from our lives in this city.”
“Mm.” Timothy nods. “I ask because a boy’s gone missing. Bette knew him when he was alive, but she says she had no role in his disappearance. If there’s a new gang in the city, or even just a lone vampire, we might have a situation that needs to have an eye kept on it.”
Blake smiles delightedly at Timothy. “Thank you for bringing that to my attention.”
Timothy gets a feeling that he’s long ago grown used to, a sort of reverse deja-vu where he knows something should be familiar but isn’t. He guesses that it was a common occurrence, once upon a time, for him to bring observations like that to Blake about whatever city they lived in.
He wonders if Blake misses the old him as much as Alexander does. Blake’s emotions are much harder to read; he’s a better liar than Alexander is.
“Tell me about Cora,” Timothy says suddenly. Blake’s eyebrows go up in surprise.
“I highly doubt that this is the work of Cora. Last we heard of her, she was rather firmly enmeshed in Denver high society.”
“No, I know that.” Timothy waves a hand, as if dismissing the idea. “I just… I know so little about her. Alexander’s told me only the barest minimum. And if it is Cora—unlikely as that may be—I want to know more about her.”
“All right.” Blake nods, settling back in his chair. “Cora. She’s an extremely skilled tactician. Probably the most formidable I’ve known, or at the very least tied with Alexander. She and Alexander absolutely hated each other from first sight, you know. It’s never thawed between them, either. They still absolutely hate each other. I think it began because they were so alike, though neither of them ever would have agreed with that perception.
“Alexander was utterly in love with you, you see, and love makes sentimentality appear in the most rational of brains. The two of you had only just met. You were quite insufferable to be around.
“Cora, on the other hand, wasn’t in love, and so she was hard and cool and without compunction. And because they believed they were opposites in every way that mattered, Alexander and Cora never realised that their loathing was based on how similar they are. They see the worst of themselves in each other.
“Cora was the eldest child in her family, with a sister and brother. They were still at home, in the last years of their schooling, but she was a full-grown adult. She’d recently married, in fact—a wealthy landowner twice her age. Perhaps older. She didn’t like him, but he was what she wanted in a husband, and she was what he wanted in a wife, and so they pleased each other.
“Still, even if she tolerated his role in her life, she thought fate was doing her a favour when I killed him. His death meant that she inherited his estate. He had no other family in America. Fate had given her a wonderfully lucky hand.
“Then I killed her mother. Then her brother and her father, then her sister.” Blake smiles at his memories of the long-age deaths. “It was an experiment. I wanted to see who she’d become with the loss of each of them. I found her interesting, and I wanted to see if she’d become even more interesting once she’d been shaped by disaster.
“I never was in love with her, though. Perhaps she might have forgiven me some of what I did if I had been.”
Blake pauses, uncrossing and recrossing his legs before continuing his story.
“She did well, alone. She let her naturally sharp nature rise unfettered, because there was nobody left whom she might inadvertently horrify. Her wealth grew. She got the best of me in several local business opportunities, which I found enchanting. Eventually I offered her the opportunity to become a vampire, and for us to consolidate our wealth. She declined, horrified, as I was sure she would. I killed her anyway.
“When she woke from her death, I told her of the history between us; the bonds that she’d never known about: the family I’d killed to leave her free, the husband whose death she thought was some secret dark blessing. She seemed to take the news rather well. No crying or raging. Just simple silence. She broke though the chains I had her in during the next day, while I slept, and escaped. She had to run through the sun to get away, and it burned her back. As far as I know, she still has the scars. She was still young enough to scar.
“I think she perhaps hated me on that day even more than Lily or Will do now. But she returned the next night, and stayed for the next two years. I knew she would. She had nowhere else to go.
“I’ve often wondered if there was ever a moment of second-guessing or softening in that time, or if she hated me all the while. She certainly claimed to despise me always, even as we combined our skills and made our fortunes grow, and hunted side by side, and shared a bed, and saw the world.
“Eventually we parted ways, in circumstances which I can’t clearly remember but which I recall were not remarkably acrimonious, not by the standards of our volatile affair. Since then, she’s been a minor annoyance from time to time, making my existence difficult when an opportunity for her to do so presents itself, such as this recent business with Nicole’s ranch.
“Alexander makes it out to be a far more dramatic state of affairs than it really is. Cora is a pitiless adversary to face off against—from what I hear of the events in Denver, Will learned that firsthand—but it’s been a long time since she was our adversary in particular.”
Timothy makes a noise of agreement, and allows Blake to steer the conversation into lighter topics, but doesn’t feel wholly convinced by Blake’s version of events. If Cora really is as much like Alexander as Blake says, then she is capable of holding in her heart a rage as hot and constant as a blue-white flame, burning steadily for decades before choosing the perfect moment to flare, huge and devastating.
BETTE
She can hear the music from three blocks away. It’s a playlist she’d made for Rose last summer, back before they knew about vampires or any of the fucked up stuff had happened to them. It seems completely not possible to Bette that it’s only been half a year since then.
“You’re really quiet tonight,” Tommy observes, which is pretty rich comin
g from a dude who tends to contribute the barest minimum of conversation to any social context. “Since we left the girls, anyway.”
“I was listening to music,” Bette explains. “Rose has her stereo on. She’s home early.”
Tommy’s quiet for a little while after that, as they scuff their way down the icy sidewalk. Bette’s mom lives so close that Bette could probably smell her cooking if she tried. Bette doesn’t feel homesick, exactly. She feels a phantom pain in her chest, like there was a limb she used to have that’s been amputated now. She doesn’t feel homesick. She feels the ghost of what it was to be well, and knows she isn’t anymore. That’s all.
“You’re pretty different now,” Tommy says in the silence. “I forget sometimes. With Lily, when she became a vampire, she changed a lot. I mean, she was still her, but a really different her. But with you, I don’t know. It’s strange. There are obvious things, like how it’s cold as shit right now but I’m the only one breathing out steam, because you only breathe when you talk. So I guess I know and accept on some level that you’re a vampire now too, but you’re still so normal otherwise.”
“Not really.” Bette replies. “Being around you just reminds me. It’s like we’re two chemical compounds, and the me-compound is different now. It oxidized or evaporated or something, but it still reacts the same way when it comes into contact with the you-compound. Since the you-compound only sees the fizz and the sparks, same as always, you don’t know that the me-compound is just a gas now, when it used to be a solid.”
“Hm.” Tommy looks thoughtful. “You’re still a pretty massive science nerd. And you can probably still kick my ass at Mario Kart.”
Despite herself, Bette laughs. The sound seems sharp, shattering, in the brittle cold and the late-night dark of suburbia. “Yeah, probably.”
Tommy gets a call from Michelle as they clamber through his bedroom window, though, so they don’t get a chance to check if Bette still has the power to make him cower in defeat. Bette figures that Tommy and Michelle must be back on as a couple, since it’s only been about an hour since they last saw each other and now they’re already talking again, having the most monosyllabic phone conversation Bette’s ever heard.
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