Three Sides of a Heart

by Natalie C. Parker

  O my children, the children of my children, O my people from the center of this city to the farthest reaches of my Sahenate: if you are to thrive, you need more than one heart.

  —from Seven Hundred Declarations of Safiya the Bloody

  Unus, Duo, Tres

  BETHANY HAGEN

  At St. Marcellus Boarding School and Elaborate Prison for Misbehaving Rich Kids, Wednesdays mean Mass, composition, and rugby later out on the field.

  Mass is mandatory, rugby is not.

  The chapel attached to St. Marcellus is even older than the century-old school building, having been part of the monastery that once stood on the grounds. And, like silent ghosts from the monastery’s past, statues of saints watch from the shadows, their faces pinched and narrow and sad—save for St. Martin de Porres in the far front corner. He’s the one black saint in the chapel for a mostly black school in the heart of Savannah, Georgia, and there’s something in his face, a weight of watchfulness and concern, like he’s carrying the brunt of the prayers from the students here.

  Of course, I imagine he’d be rather reluctant to ferry my prayers up to heaven if he knew the solemn black boy in front of him was actually a member of the undead.

  Mass is far from fatal for me as a vampire, if you were wondering. In fact, I rather enjoy it. Not the religious aspect necessarily, but the quiet dignity of ritual space, the soothing repetition of chants and hymns, the pantomime of drinking blood.

  Mostly I enjoy it because Casimir enjoys it.

  He kneels in the row before me, and I can see a spot of blood seeping through the snowy white of his collar. A human might heal from a vampire bite within a few hours, but for another vampire, it takes longer. And I’ll bite him again before it’s healed anyway.

  Above the haze of incense, I smell the blood. Other blood smells of salt and silver, but Cas’s blood smells deep and sweet. Three years ago, when I was fifteen and human, I stole a bottle of my grandfather’s wine and drank it walking along a crowded Miami beach while Grandfather and his young wife partied the night away. I’d never had anything stronger than beer before that, and I’d been fascinated with the spicy, sweet headiness.

  Cas tastes like that. Like that first sip of spiced wine along the shore, and when I taste him, I taste Caribbean wind and billions of far-flung stars sparkling in a net over the sea. I taste the saltwater roaring against the sand, the vibrant city glowing in defiance of the night.

  I taste eternity.

  I look down at the rosary twined between my fingers, the white beads moving against my dark brown skin. I don’t pray, but I count the beads in every language I can think of, moving my mind along them so that it’s not tempted to move along Cas’s body instead.

  Unus, duo, tres . . .

  Ena, dio, tria . . .

  Eins, zwei, drei . . .

  It doesn’t work. Cas is my only prayer, my only meditation, and he has been since we met this year, both orphaned boys cast adrift on a sea of trust funds. I shouldn’t have done what I did to him, I should have protected him, spared him, but I am not a good person. I am a selfish person.

  And I wanted him. I wanted to bite him, wanted him to drink my blood, wanted him to change into someone like me.

  Chanting from the altar dissolves my thoughts, and then I’m walking down to take communion, which doesn’t burn my skin any more than the crucifix attached to the rosary I hold. After more prayers and chanting, we are set free to class. Casimir flashes me a grin as we gather up our things from the pews and move toward the door. We usually keep a careful distance between us in public. Partly it’s St. Marcellus—even the historically progressive Jesuits might not be ready to see two boys holding hands in church or kissing against the lockers—but there are even deeper reasons.

  Three years ago, I would have loved St. Marcellus, especially after being sent to school in Europe for so many years. Walking into this school where most of the other students were black felt like I could finally breathe the air in as deeply as I wanted, like I’d been holding my breath without knowing it. But that feeling, that easy breathing, only lasted a few seconds; I was finally in a place where I shared so much with the other students, and yet the one thing we didn’t share cut any chance of belonging into tatters. I was finally a part of a community that shared so much with me, a part of and yet necessarily apart from. The students at St. Marcellus should be my friends, my peers, my home . . . but I didn’t come to St. Marcellus as just another young black man. I came as Enoch, the vampire.

  This apartness, the insatiable hunger for blood, is why Cas and I keep our distance not only from each other, but from the other students. It’s best to hunt far from home and appear solitary at all costs.

  But we allow ourselves these few daylight moments in the jostle of the crowd, where the murmur and hum of two hundred other voices can hide our own.

  “Did you see that new girl crying during Mass?” Cas asks me, his head turning this way and that as we push through the narthex to get to the front doors of the church. He’s looking for someone.

  “I was only looking at you,” I say honestly.

  Cas flushes, pleased. Unlike me, Cas looks like the pale vampires from children’s storybooks. Bisque-colored skin and large eyes rimmed with thick eyelashes. His hair is black and wants to curl at the ends, his cheekbones are high and delicate, and his lips . . . well.

  I like his lips.

  “What did she look like?” I ask, deciding not to pursue that line of thought until we’re alone.

  Cas thinks for a moment. We walk through the wooden doors of the church toward the imposing stone edifice of St. Marcellus’s main building. The early April wind is warm and humid as it blows past us, and there’s a faint whiff of the decay that always seems to linger in Savannah, like the smell of a cemetery after a long rain.

  “She looked gorgeous,” Cas says finally. “And sad.”

  The way he says it bothers me, although it takes me the rest of the day to puzzle out why. But it comes to me that night, as I lie in bed and watch the moon swell and shrink and drift her way across the sky. It bothered me because the tone of voice he used to talk about the girl, filled with fascination and desire—it’s the same tone I imagine I use when I talk about him.

  I hunt at night, and right now I’m hunting for the only thing I want.

  I find him in the library, near the fireplace, sprawled in a leather armchair with a book on his lap. He’s wearing a T-shirt, too tight for his leanly muscled frame, and pajama pants with ducks on them. Ducks with little red deerstalker caps.

  “Your pants are ridiculous,” I say as I approach him.

  He tosses the book aside. “So take them off me.”

  “I didn’t say ridiculous was a bad thing.”

  Cas stretches in the chair, the hem of his shirt riding up over his flat stomach. There is a line of dark hair beneath his navel, which disappears under the waistband of his pants, under the ducks and their stupid little hats.

  “I’m going to kiss you,” I warn him.

  “Good.”

  “It’s going to hurt.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  And that is one of the many numberless reasons I am soul deep in love with Casimir Nowak.

  Within moments, we are in the darkest corner of the library, pressed against the cold stone of the old library walls. In the dark, his eyes glitter like onyx, like some sort of strange cat’s, and I know mine glitter back at him. It’s one of the few true signs of the monsters we are.

  A crescent moon glows through one of the old windows, as pale and weak as a sliver of old bone, but we pay it no mind. There’s only our lips and hands and breath, my fingers gripping the back of Cas’s neck so hard I know it will bruise, and then that sweet surrender when he bares his neck to me and I sink my teeth into his skin.

  It’s different than feeding from a human, biting Cas. A vampire’s blood is much more potent than a human’s, much more intoxicating. I don’t bite Cas to sate my h
unger; I bite him because I love him. And he lets me bite him because he loves me.

  The difference between a human’s blood and my boyfriend’s blood is like the difference between water and wine. One you drink to survive, and the other you drink to live.

  I can feel Cas’s heart pounding in his chest as it’s pressed to mine, even through the wool of my uniform sweater and the cotton of his T-shirt, and he makes the smallest whimper of pain as his blood wells up to touch my tongue.

  I hate myself for loving that whimper. It’s my greatest sin, and it’s been with me since I was turned into the predator I am today. But in these moments of pain, Cas becomes more beautiful and dear to me than ever.

  My fingers grip his neck harder, and I want to squeeze him, shake him, scratch him, but I settle for feeding at his neck, for now, and then he gasps—not pain or pleasure, but alarm.

  My head snaps up, and I spin around to see a girl standing between the rows of wooden stacks, lips parted, staring at us.

  Cas transforms next to me, his body rippling with the same fascination and longing I witnessed in him earlier today, and then I know. It’s the girl from Mass, the crying one.

  Cas didn’t lie: she is gorgeous. Heart-shaped face, delicate pointed chin, straight nose. Warm light brown skin, dark eyes, and long hair. She has curving, Cupid’s-bow lips that could rival Cas’s for my attention. A Virgin Mary medal glints at her long neck.

  I wipe at my mouth, and the white sleeve of my uniform shirt comes away bright crimson with Cas’s blood.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and I don’t think I’m imagining the breathlessness in her voice or the way her eyes keep sliding over to Cas. Against his white skin, the smear of blood on his neck is obvious, even in the dark, and I know that she can see that inhuman glitter in our eyes.

  “I’m new here and I couldn’t sleep and I just . . .” She holds up a book; through the dark, I can see how tightly she holds the leather spine. But she’s not afraid—no fear spikes her blood. There’s intense curiosity in her eyes, and a taste to the air around her that I can’t identify.

  Interesting.

  “I should go,” she whispers. “Good night.”

  And then Cas and I are truly alone.

  Esther Gonzalez, unlike Cas and me and most of the other students here, is not a spoiled troublemaker sent away for penance. She has no record, no distressed notes from former deans outlining misbehavior, and she has perfect grades. The only spot of interest in her file, which I’m currently perusing in the dean’s office in the middle of the following night, is an eighteen-month gap in her studies prior to this month. There’s no explanation, although she tested into all the highest-level senior classes, so clearly she kept up on her schoolwork somehow. Her parents live here in Savannah, only a couple miles away, so perhaps that’s the reason she chose to come here.

  But still. It’s strange, and her being here is strange, and her crying in Mass is strange, and I resolve to watch her and learn more.

  It’s not a terrible task, actually.

  That week, Cas befriends her, and since he and I try to avoid each other during the day, I get the added bonus of watching him too. I watch them laugh together in the halls, study their calculus textbooks out on the lawn, sit together at lunch. They look good together—Cas graceful and tall, and Esther sunny and smiling—and my heart squeezes with jealousy.

  It was never a question that we could also love girls. No, it was simply that it was also never a question that we only wanted each other. That we would give each other forever.

  And during our nights together this week, I wonder if he thinks of her when we kiss, if he wishes she were here with us.

  Or worse, here instead of me.

  The truth is, I know what Cas looks like when he’s falling in love. I saw it when he fell in love with me. And now I have to watch as he falls in love with someone else.

  Esther finds me in the garden a week later. I know she’s seen me watching her, and I can tell she’s drawn to me, mesmerized maybe. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

  I don’t lift my head from the book I’m reading. I don’t acknowledge her at all, even as she sits on the bench next to me. She sits on the very edge and she holds herself completely still, as if she’s sitting next to a cliff’s edge, a posture not of fear but of respect. Respect for the danger next to her.

  I finally raise my eyes to hers, but I don’t speak.

  “You’re different,” she starts. From somewhere deep in the nearby chapel, organ music plays. Practice for Mass later. “You and Cas.”

  I can lie. I can invent a thousand stories, weave a thousand tales, to explain that night in the library. The glittering eyes, the blood dripping from my mouth.

  But I find I don’t want to. I want her to know. To scare her? Humiliate her? Seduce her?

  I don’t know.

  “Yes,” I say, as neutrally and coolly as I would say anything. I sound like I’m answering a declension question in Latin class. “We’re different.”

  She nods. Like in the library, she’s not scared. Deep intelligence and curiosity sparkle in her eyes, and a smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. She reminds me of Cas, suddenly, that constant smile, that joy for living pressing so close to the surface. What’s it like to smile like that? To live like that? Even love is serious work to me.

  “The blood and your eyes . . . ,” she says. Pauses, then speaks again. “You’re a senior, but you don’t act or talk like anyone else here. What kind of different are you?”

  “Why don’t you ask Cas these things?” I ask. “I notice you two are spending lots of time together.”

  Her cheeks darken in a blush, and I feel that jealousy like a vise around my chest again. But then she says, “Because I wanted to talk to you. I want to know you.”

  And the way she says it.

  And the way she says it.

  I take a deep breath. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  And then I find that I want to tell her everything.

  So I do.

  I tell her that my parents died when I was in junior high. That my grandfather and I never got along, even after he became my guardian. He believed in his money like people believed in their gods, maybe even more than that because he created his business empire ex nihilo, built his money and legacy from scratch, and so his idol was actually a depiction of himself. And who loves anyone more than themselves?

  Money’s never held any sway for me, but power—now that was something I could crave, and crave it I did, even from a young age.

  I tell her that after years of battles with teachers and fights with other students, I landed at a boarding school in Rome—much like this one, actually—filled with more rich, disaffected people at various states of rebellion.

  And Rome is where I met them.

  They were beautiful, like Cas and Esther are beautiful. And they were different colors, different sizes, different ages, boys and girls, some young enough they looked like children, some old enough that they easily passed for adults. They found me outside a club after someone had tried to rob me. I’d stopped him, of course, had beaten the would-be thief until he fell half unconscious to his knees, and then I looked up to see them watching me in my fit of righteous violence.

  They smiled, and then I knew I’d either finally found the nameless power I was looking for . . . or I was about to die.

  How could I have guessed that it would be both?

  Esther’s face is rapt as she listens, and seemingly without thinking, she’s slid off the bench and now sits on the ground in front of me, her legs crossed like a child listening to a teacher tell a story.

  “And that’s how you changed?” she asks.

  “Yes. The power I wanted wasn’t over money or politics. This was the power I’d been seeking all my life, without knowing it.”

  She realizes that I’m not talking about the past right now, that I’m talking about something present. “This?” she asks, conf
used.

  I gesture to her sitting at my feet, and then, to highlight my point, I reach down and take her chin in my hands, tilting it upward. Her breath catches as I run my thumb along her lower lip. “This,” I say.

  “Oh,” and all at once as her pupils dilate into huge black pools, her breath shudders out.

  And it’s then, with my thumb against her lips, that I smell it. Taste it in the air. Feel it pulse against my thumb.

  Esther is sick.

  Very sick.

  It’s early, I think, at least early enough that it took me this long to detect it, but there’s no doubt now as I fill my lungs with the air between us. The sickness is deep in her blood, and it will be fatal.

  I search her eyes. Does she know?

  She stares back at me, evenly, bravely, and I see that of course she knows. Pain is creased in tiny lines around her eyes, there’s a slightly ashen cast to her skin that wasn’t there even as recently as last week. I start to say something—what, I don’t know—but then I think better of it and decide to continue with my story until I’ve processed this.

  I let go of her chin, even though I find I don’t want to. “Anyway, within a few months after my sixteenth birthday, I was changed. And then a few months later, I deliberately provoked a fight with a teacher so my grandfather would have no choice but to find a new school for me. The Roman vampires were . . . they lived how they wanted, as bloody and wild as they wanted. And I couldn’t live that life with them any longer without losing myself.”

  “Because you hated it?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, and I hear the self-loathing in my own voice. “Because I loved it too much.”

  A cloud passes over the sun.

  “So it’s true,” she says after a minute. “Vampires. At my school.”

  I search her face again. I want to bring up her sickness, I want to know everything. Is it why she missed school for those eighteen months? Did she go temporarily into remission? Is it why she’s going to St. Marcellus—to be close to her parents in case her illness takes a turn for the worse?