“What are you doing here?” he finally asks.
“I don’t know,” I spit out. “What are you doing here? Don’t you belong in an attic sealed in a coffin during this time of day?”
He lets out a nervous chuckle, much higher in pitch than those sexy ones in the dark corners of the night. His fingers pull at the neck of his T-shirt as if he’s a nervous boy with a girl in his room, and he’s trying to remember how to be cool. Every move he makes shatters another piece of the illusion I’ve been feeding on. He shifts on his bed, smoothing back his hair so the sun catches the little bits of red in it. I hate that he’s still so attractive—someone I would definitely say hi to in a coffee shop—but without the night surrounding him, it strips away an air of mystery. Who was the creature I kissed last night in the graveyard? Because it is not this boy.
“You’re joking, right?” he asks. He runs his hand through his curls, and the gesture reminds me of Henry. Nicholas never touched his hair before—he never made a single move that wasn’t silky with confidence. He’d be an excellent actor. He is an actor.
I don’t know him at all, and that thought brings a fresh hurt, like getting a paper cut on your finger when your arm’s already broken.
It still stings. I blink slowly. He seems to be waiting for a response, but I don’t give one.
“Of course I’m not a vampire. I thought we were just having fun. Pretending.” He doesn’t meet my eyes as he says it. He knows it was his game and not mine. He’s trying to fool himself now—probably trying to get rid of the guilt of fooling me.
Still, his words rip through me. Just having fun. That last drop of burning green hope gets swallowed by other, hot and angry colors. My limbs shake. My fingers clench as the rage crashes through my system.
I failed. Dad is fading. I felt it in my gut when I talked to him on the phone, but I ignored it because I convinced myself I was so close to saving him when really I was just playing games with a boy I liked kissing. I bend at the waist and try not to hurl.
Sorrow tries to flood its dark blue through my veins to blend with the violent red, but I fight it. I’m afraid of turning into a pulsing purple thundercloud that rains without ceasing, and I can’t do that yet. I need to face Dad. I’ll still need to be strong and hold his hand at the end without adding my pain to his.
I try to embrace my hate and ignore everything else fighting to surface, but perhaps the worst part is that I’m not just angry at him. I did have fun. There was hard evidence in those photos I left behind in the bookshop. Those smiles were never 100 percent fake even when I told myself they were.
I had fun while my dad is dying.
And suddenly I want Nicholas to feel that kind of pain. I pull myself up to face him and all the mistakes I made.
“You’re a liar. You knew this was more than fun to me.” I choke on the words and look away. Henry’s silent, but I feel him right behind me, close enough for me to turn and crash into his chest if I need to.
“What else could it have been about?” He still refuses to look at me—still insists on playing.
“Everything.” I push the word from my mouth like it will mean something to him. Even now, I can’t bring myself to tell him the truth. If he laughs or looks at me with pity or simply doesn’t care at all, I might turn to dust like a vampire staked through the heart, and then Dad will never see me again because I won’t resemble his daughter. I’ll be a pile of ash—the leftovers of a girl who felt more than she could handle.
Nicholas shakes his head, finally looking at me and facing my pain, but he seems confused, like he can’t quite understand it, and why would he?
“Immortality isn’t everything. There’s a difference between living and existing,” he says.
“But you can’t live if you don’t exist.” How much longer does Dad have to exist? He’s already beyond the point of living—that’s what drove me here.
“But you do exist. You’re standing right here.” He reaches toward me, and I back into Henry’s chest. Henry’s heart beats hard against my back, as if he’s ready to lunge forward at any moment.
Nicholas drops his hand without touching me.
“I’m sorry, but do you know how many silly people come out here looking for vampires, wasting their time trying to find immortality when they should be living their own life to the fullest? Nobody’s seen a real one since they went back into hiding. I believe they exist, but they don’t want to be found. It’s such a waste, wanting to leave behind family and friends and real connections, and for what? To live forever? People who want to live forever usually don’t deserve to. I took one look at you and thought, ‘There’s a girl who doesn’t know how to live. Maybe I can help her before it’s too late.’ You should be thanking me. I did you a favor. Don’t you feel more alive?”
I do. I’m painfully, excruciatingly alive, and I will be long after my dad’s dead.
I finally look back at him. He slid off the bed during his little speech to stand in front of me. He waits, mouth pressed in a thin line as if he doesn’t know how this will go—will I hug him and thank him for our fun game or slap him in the face? I lean toward the second option, but my limbs are too heavy for the movement.
“It wasn’t for me,” I whisper. “I swear this wasn’t for me.”
“What?” His voice sounds far off and confused.
I realize I’ve sunk to the ground at Henry’s feet. My hands touch dark-blue carpet, which matches my dominant emotion. Oh God, the grief. It washes away everything else until I’m drowning in it.
“Her dad’s dying, you asshat.” Henry’s voice lashes out above me. “Cancer. They ran out of treatment options. She thought you could save him.”
The silence in the room is unbearably heavy. It settles on me, squeezing a few more tears from my eyes.
“No.” Nicholas repeats the word over and over again like he’s the broken one. A hand touches my shoulder, and then it’s gone. When I lift my head, Henry’s pushed Nicholas away, and Nicholas leans around Henry trying to get to me. “Please let me,” he says as they grapple. “Please.” And then he says the only words that could make me listen. “My mom died. A year ago. A car crash.”
The room freezes. Henry stops trying to shove him farther away from me, but he doesn’t let go of his arms.
I push myself to my feet. Everything hurts.
Everything in this whole room hurts, and maybe everything in the whole world, and it is too much for any one person to bear.
I walk over to Nicholas, and Henry lets go of him and steps away, looking between Nicholas and me like he can’t quite decide what will happen or what he wants to happen.
Nicholas’s head drops to his chest so I can’t see his face. I don’t need to. I know the kind of grief I’ll see there—I’m not sure how I didn’t see it before.
I slide my arms under his, hanging by his side, and hug him. His chest heaves, and then his arms wrap around me, and we stand there—two twin pools of grief finally understanding each other. His tears wet my shoulder, and somehow it’s easier to handle my own grief when faced with someone else’s. In this moment, grief is perhaps the only thing that could bring us together.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I never would have done it if I’d known,” he says. “I knew you were sad. I tried to turn you away because I thought you might drag me into my own sadness again, but when you came back, you had this spark in your eyes like all you needed was a little purpose to pull you out of it. I could relate. I thought I could help you.” His arms tighten around me as if he still wants to save me. “I thought you’d lost someone too. I never imagined…”
He clings to me until I release him and his pain and step behind him, to the photo of the woman and child that caught my eye before. His cross necklace sits beside it. I run a finger along the frame, warm from the morning sun catching it. Above it, taped to the mirror, is my drawing—a shrine to our shared grief.
Nicholas moves to stand beside me—our arms touch, and
I don’t pull away even though his closeness makes my chest hurt. “My mom was so outgoing, so alive, always pushing me to get out of my comfort zone and really live.” A deep, aching kind of love warms his voice and makes my own throat burn for his loss. “When she died, I knew she’d want me to keep living. I just didn’t know how. I used to work in one of those vampire-themed souvenir shops, and people would come in asking questions, wasting their lives looking for something that might kill them if they found it, so I decided to give them something else—a game to turn their focus on actually experiencing the city.” His arm shifts against mine as he shrugs. “I thought it would help them. I thought it might help me, too.”
“Did it?” My voice is so soft that for a second I’m not sure he heard.
He shifts to face me, and I look up into his dark-brown eyes and the deep grief there I could have seen if I weren’t so focused on pushing away my own. He hinted that first night in the club of its existence, but I was only seeing what I wanted to see—in more ways than one.
“Not at first, but you were different. You made me feel again, so much that I almost ended things sooner because I was so afraid I’d need you to keep living, and you’d be gone, and I’d be worse off than before. But I don’t deserve happiness.” His throat constricts, and I can almost feel the pain he’s swallowing.
I reach out and squeeze his hand, still as cold as ever, but some people just have cold hands. “You deserve to live,” I say. And living means joy and pain and everything in between. He showed me that. “Everyone should get to live.”
But everyone doesn’t get the chance.
And then I let go of him and step back. I can’t heal his grief. Nobody can. And I can’t use it as a distraction for my own.
“Goodbye, Nicholas.”
He lifts his chin, blinking red eyes.
I turn and walk from the room and out of the house without looking back. I don’t stop until I’m off the porch, past the broken animals in the yard, and out on the cracked and wounded sidewalk, and there I finally lose it.
I slip to my knees, fingers grasping at the cracks, and I cry. My grief has flooded me, and there’s no place for it to go but out. Henry kneels beside me and folds his arms around me, and it makes me cry harder. When someone outside of your grief holds you, everything comes loose. Strength isn’t necessary, and your tears won’t soak into them—they can handle them. Henry’s always been able to handle my emotions, and that’s exactly why I’ve been afraid to be close to him this whole time. I knew he could deal with them and keep going like he did when we were kids. I knew he would break those emotions free again and again. Because he’s known all this time that I needed to let them out.
I cry until I’m empty, and then, before I can refill again, I stand, and Henry does too, facing me, keeping his hands lightly on my shoulders in case he needs to pull me back to him again.
I always thought of him as the kind and sweet one—I was the brave one, always jumping in headfirst. But maybe it’s braver to be kind time and time again, even when people push you away.
“Kiss me,” I say. I used Nicholas’s kiss to try to drown out my grief, and now that I’m cried out, I want to refill with something real, something brighter, if only for a moment.
His eyes widen, and his mouth frowns. His fingers twitch on my shoulders like he wants to pull me in but doesn’t.
“Not like this,” he says.
“Like what?”
“You’re sad. I don’t want to kiss you just because you’re sad. I don’t want to do that to you.”
“You’re not doing anything to me. I’m tired of people trying to tell me how to respond to my emotions.” I start to pull away from him. “If you don’t want to kiss me, fine, but if you do want to kiss me and you think you know what I need better than I do, you’re no better than him.”
I jerk out of his touch and spin, catching my toe on a root breaking through the sidewalk and stumbling onto my hands and knees. Henry’s there in a second, pulling me to my feet, but instead of letting me go, he cups my face in both hands and holds me there, eyes wandering over every inch of my face as if he’s the artist, sketching this moment for eternity, and then he kisses me.
Kissing Henry’s like setting memories on fire and burning them into something new. His kiss is the same red lust as Nicholas, but an undercurrent of sweet golden honey runs with it, turning it into something more alive, more whole. Something that can exist with my sadness instead of drowning it out and bringing back the guilt. I press into his kiss, hungry for it. His hands slip into my hair, cradling my head as our connection deepens. When he pulls back, we both stand there with aching grins on our faces.
He grabs my hand and links our fingers together.
“Let’s go home,” he says. “Forget about vampires.”
I take one step with him before I freeze, forcing him to stop too because our hands are still linked.
Vampires. Plural. Nicholas was never the only option, and I still have hours before my early flight. I twist back toward the house. “I need to go back.”
Henry’s face falls. “Why?”
“I just need to. I need to say one more thing to him.”
“Fine,” he says, taking a step to follow me, but I place a hand against his chest.
“I need to do this part alone.”
His fingers tighten around mine for a long moment, but then he lets go, nodding like he doesn’t quite trust himself to speak.
I turn and run back. This time I don’t bother knocking. I take the back steps and dart up the stairs, pulling open Nicholas’s door. He’s standing in front of his dresser, staring at my drawing. He wipes at his eyes when he sees me and cringes, like maybe I came to my senses and rushed back here to scream at him after all.
I don’t have time for yelling. “The others. Your vampire coven or whatever. Are any of them real?”
He jerks back at my question, shaking his head. “Daniella’s a friend from high school, and Marcus is her cousin. Carter is… I don’t know. He showed up with Daniella one day and wanted to play?”
Carter.
I remember the fear that quivered through me the first time I met him. Instinctual. Primal. Different from what I felt with Nicholas. Carter has been on the edges of this the whole time. He smelled my blood from five feet away.
Plus, he’s the one with the name linking him to a legend.
Nicholas steps toward me. “I wish I knew one for you.”
“Maybe you do,” I whisper.
“What?”
“What were you drinking in the club the first night I met you? It looked like blood.”
He grins a little, like he’s happy to give up his secrets. “Diluted corn syrup we dyed red. We pour it into old wine bottles. Kind of gross, but we don’t have to sip much, and it fools everyone.”
I shake my head. “I smelled blood. But it was Carter’s cup I picked up that night.”
Nicholas goes still. “It’s not possible,” he says, but his eyes narrow, and his lips bend into a frown. “He always brought his own bottle—said something about being allergic to the dye. I think he used some type of tomato juice instead….” He trails off.
“Nicholas. Where do I find him?”
He’s shaking his head. I have to reach out and touch his arm to get him to stop.
His eyes focus and meet mine. “Don’t, Victoria. It’s not worth the risk. What if…?” He swallows. “I don’t know anything about him. I’ve never even seen where he lives.”
I let go of him and take a step away. I’m not surprised, but I know where to look without his help.
“Victoria,” Nicholas says as I turn away from him. There’s fear in his voice, but I don’t turn back, and he doesn’t come after me.
Only those prepared to die will find eternal life.
—Byzantium
Twenty-One
I tell Henry I need some time alone in the city before we leave. Time to mourn. He doesn’t like it, of course, but he understands g
rieving better than most.
But I’m not dressing in black just yet.
The convent is unchanged—still dimly lit and glowing softly in the dark, still simple and unassuming. It hasn’t suddenly revealed itself as a secret den of vampires, but that’s okay. I’m not here for the convent. I don’t need the vampires in their attic, if they’re there at all. I need the one who’s been watching this game from the beginning. I’m banking on the fact that he’s still watching.
I wrap my hands around the metal bars of the closed door. The chipping paint chafes my skin in a way I didn’t notice the first time I stood here. Every part of me feels a thousand times more sensitive, more alive at the possibility of dying. My grip tightens as I fight the urge to look over my shoulder every few seconds. He likes sneaking up on me, so I’ll let him believe he is.
My heart throbs with anticipation. I try taking deep breaths to calm it, but eventually I give up and let it race unchecked.
I don’t have to wait long this time. He’s expecting me.
A shoe scrapes faintly against the sidewalk behind me, and my muscles tense, but I don’t turn yet. I’m still playing a game, just not the one I thought.
“You figured it out,” he says. The exhale of his breath brushes the back of my neck. As I jerk in surprise, a rough piece of metal on the bars pricks my finger. I didn’t expect him to be so close. Not yet. I’m not ready. I wish I had called my dad one more time—in case this doesn’t end the way I want it to. Too late now.
Vampires, Hearts & Other Dead Things Page 24