Lust for Life

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  24

  Follow You Down

  Our bodies meet in flame. I feel Shane’s disintegration, his agony, as much as my own. The blackout curtain is a useless shield against such heat. We burn beneath it, flesh becoming ash and smoke.

  Shane groans, his mouth too melted to form words. I hold him close and tell him it’s okay.

  My last thought is: I’ll never live without him.

  25

  Into the Mystic

  It’s dark here. Not a tunnel, like when I died before. This darkness is a shapeless void that stretches forever.

  But I’m not alone. Shane’s here. I can’t feel my hand—or any other part of me—but I know he’s holding it.

  Was Shane right when he said he’d never be allowed into the light because he’d once asked for death? If I can move into the light without him, will I?

  No. I’d rather spend an eternity in darkness with him than in the light with the rest of the universe. I won’t let him be alone.

  I love you, I try thinking at him.

  I get a warm feeling in return, wordless but unmistakable.

  A white light appears in the distance, a pinprick in black velvet, just like when I died before. It comes closer, and I can feel Shane’s wonder and disbelief and resistance. He thinks the light’s coming only for me.

  I won’t let it.

  This man and I are a package deal. Take me and you get him, too.

  I imagine my soul wrapping itself around his until it’s as if the boundaries between us never existed. Like Shane has never been Shane and I have never been me. We’ve only ever been us.

  As the light moves closer, the surrounding darkness sinks into me until I feel nothing but . . . nothing. I claw and clamber at the void, wishing for pain, anguish, anything to make me feel alive again.

  That’s when I realize: Shane is gone.

  The light comes faster. I try to run away, search the darkness for him.

  Come back! I plead. I won’t go without you. I died to be with you, so don’t let me move on alone. Please . . .

  The light is almost upon me. It reaches out with greedy tendrils, promising peace. I push it away.

  No surrender, not even to this. No surrender. The Bruce Springsteen song by that name plays in my head, but I can’t remember any of the words, just the part where he and Steven Van Zandt sing, “Lay lay lay lay lay lay laaaay, lay lay lay LAY LAY.”

  The light hesitates, then pulls back in a great wave, like a tsunami before it crashes onto shore.

  I won’t go without him. Lay lay lay lay lay lay lay laaaay, lay lay lay LAY LAY.

  The light shoots forward, pulling me under, drowning me in a peace I don’t want.

  Shane! I call out as the wave sweeps me into another realm. I will find you. I promise.

  • • •

  Heaven—or whatever this is—has changed a bit from my first brief death. Now it has furniture.

  I’m in some kind of waiting room, like in a doctor’s office, but there are no magazines and no receptionist pretending to file things so she doesn’t have to make eye contact.

  The white walls don’t stand solid but rather pulse and sway like curtains. I’m made of light, too, iridescent instead of white, as is the furniture beneath me.

  The entire room zigzags in different colors and at different angles to form shapes. It’s like “Laser Floyd” without the Pink Floyd music.

  In fact, there’s no music at all. How can this be heaven?

  “You can’t hear the music?” rasps a familiar voice.

  I turn to see a woman lying on a bed, her bare feet pointed toward me. The bed’s legs are the flimsy steel of a foldout couch, but at least they’re not made of light like the thing I’m sitting—

  Wait. I’m not sitting on anything now. The walls have gone wispy, and the only clear thing is the bed and the woman with tawny hair. Her limbs stretch and shift like she’s in pain.

  She is in pain, as I recall.

  “Hey.” I walk over and sit on the mattress next to a sweaty, red-faced, pustule-marked version of myself. “You look like crap.”

  She stares up at me with bleary blue eyes. Blood seeps from the side of her neck. “Your highlights look amazing. New colorist?”

  “No, I’m a—we’re a—we were a vampire.”

  Human Ciara gives me a weak smile. “It worked, then.”

  “Sort of.”

  Her brows dip in confusion, but then weakness overtakes her and she lets her eyes close. I realize that I can hear music now, soft as if it’s coming from a distance. It’s Shane on the guitar. But no words, only the chords of Luka Bloom’s “Ciara,” the song he played as I died. I look past the bed for Shane or Spencer or anyone else who was in the room at the time, but the bed meets the mist of the white wall a few feet away.

  Her breathing turns shallow and pained, like the air is full of daggers. “Now what?”

  “No clue. Have you seen Shane? We sort of came here together, but I lost him.”

  She nods without opening her eyes. “He’s right here.”

  The mist on one side dissolves into another room adjoining this one. It’s darker there, and instead of “Ciara” a desolate old Cure tune is playing. An empty bottle of whiskey sits on the nightstand.

  Shane lies on his back, eyes vacant. Blood soaks the pillow and sheets.

  I utter his name and crawl over Human Ciara’s body to enter the other room.

  “Take me with you,” she says.

  I stop, one hand in his world and the rest of me in hers. “Fine, come on.” I reach back my other hand.

  With her fingers an inch from mine, she says, “Do you know what this means?”

  “Not really. I’m fumbling my way through and hoping for the best.”

  Human Ciara smiles. Her feverish fingers grasp mine, and she and her world disappear.

  I’m on Shane’s bed now, where the walls aren’t misty white but an inky black. Under the bloodstained sheet, his body is pale and so, so thin. I listen as the breath rattles in his lungs, uneven and slowing.

  I reach to swipe the limp hair off his forehead, but something stops my hand. It’s not time yet.

  So I lie next to him, as close as I can get without touching, while the blackness presses in. The pupils in his pale-blue eyes expand with each blink.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whisper, “but I know who I am. And I know I’m not leaving without you.”

  His next blink lasts an eternity, and when his lashes part, that’s exactly what I see. Forever. It’s dark there—the blue of his irises has been swallowed by a black mirror—but I’m not alone.

  It’s time.

  I touch his cheek, turn his head, and bring my burning mouth to his freezing one.

  The light of this world dies with us.

  • • •

  Before my eyes open, I hear a distant voice, more familiar and intimate than a DJ’s or a lover’s or even a mother’s. A voice I’ve heard in headphones and earbuds my whole life.

  Jim Morrison wants us to break on through.

  It’s nighttime here, and down the hill, even the stage is shrouded in darkness, broken only by the flash of camera bulbs from an invisible audience. We’re at the Isle of Wight Festival, the English Woodstock of August 1970. Among the tents surrounding us, blankets are spread and bottles are strewn, but I see only one person, lying on the ground between me and Shane.

  Shane kneels next to his former friend. Jim’s naked body bleeds from three wounds where his arm, thigh, and neck have been bitten. No, four wounds. The blood on his mouth comes from his lower lip pierced with fangs.

  But his chest is whole and clean. No stake wounds, no pencil wounds.

  Where Shane’s pale eyes were full of darkness, Jim’s dark eyes are full of light. He’s blissed-out, from drugs or music or death or all three.

  But he blinks and focuses on Shane. “Hey, man.” His voice is casual, like they just ran into each other at the 7-Eleven. “What’s up?”
>
  “We’re dead, all of us. Like, really dead.”

  “Besides that, what’s up?”

  “I’m sorry I killed you.”

  Jim twitches his shoulder in a semi-shrug. “Can’t say I blame you.”

  I kneel on his other side. “Kashmir said you rehabilitated yourself in jail. The wood stuck inside your heart made you good?” It sounds ridiculous out of my mouth.

  Jim chuckles. “Babe, nothing could ever make me good. But it hurt like hell, and it made me think of all the pain I’d caused. You and Jeremy and Deirdre. Everyone.” He swipes a languorous hand over his neck, looks at the blood. “Hey, whatever happened to your cousin? That blond chick?”

  “Cass. She’s fine, I guess. She left town when she got out of the hospital. She was pissed I didn’t tell her about you killing her mom and stepdad.”

  “Yeah, sorry.” He stares at the sky. “I probably deserve to just lie here forever.”

  I look around at the Isle of Wight’s hills and valleys. Unlike the rooms where the dying Ciara and Shane lay, the walls of Jim’s turning place appear far away, a gray mist near the English Channel. “Could be worse.”

  “You can stay if you want. The Who is up next. You like them.”

  “We can’t stay.” Shane is already getting to his feet. “But you can come with us.”

  With some effort, Jim turns his head to me. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.” I reach over his body to take Shane’s hand. “But I’m going with him.”

  “Cool.” Jim focuses on the sky beyond us. “I like it here.”

  I look up and gasp. The stars are every color, close enough to touch. The black velvet tapestry they dance upon rotates like a sped-up film of the night sky, with the Milky Way stretching and rippling purple and white. It’s almost like being on another planet, but it doesn’t need to be. This one is beautiful enough, especially through Jim’s eyes.

  I join Shane and lean back against his chest. Together the three of us watch the sky and listen to the Doors. It’s not heaven, but it’s damn close.

  And it’s not for us. “We have to go,” I tell Shane. “Now.”

  “Last chance, man.” Shane’s voice is close to breaking. “I put you here, but she can get you out. I think.”

  “Nah. This is good. When I get sick of it, I’ll go there.” He points to the brightest part of the Milky Way’s arm, where a blinding white light pulses. “If Kashmir asks, tell him everything is groovy with me.”

  “I doubt he’ll believe us.”

  “Then tell him I found Lemuria. He’ll know what that means.”

  Jim is still laughing when I take Shane’s hand. But as we step away, Jim closes his eyes, stealing the light.

  • • •

  I am nowhere.

  I am nothing.

  I reach out with formless hands, call out with a silent voice, but Shane is gone.

  What have I done?

  I teeter on the edge of despair, doubting every choice of my life, my unlife, and both brief, foolish afterlives. It would take just one step to fall into that comforting eternity of regret.

  And then I hear . . . a voice? Music?

  It grows louder, until I can hear the raw, aching tones I’d recognize anywhere.

  Shane is singing my song. The one he wrote for me as an engagement gift, even though vampires supposedly can’t write songs, can’t create anything new. He did it for me.

  He’s still here.

  Unless it’s a cruel trick. If I’m actually in hell, there’d be no worse torment than to hear my lover’s voice only to lose it. I think of Orpheus, the Greek hero Lori told me about, who sang his beloved wife Eurydice out of the underworld.

  Well, almost. At the last second, he disobeyed Hades’s terms of release and looked back at Eurydice, either in fear or joy. She fell back into the land of death, this time for good.

  I’m not Eurydice, and I don’t believe in hell.

  • • •

  “Ciara!”

  I see nothing but black. “Shane, where are you? Where are we?”

  “Just follow me. This way.” He starts to sing again, this time the second verse.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been here before.”

  He continues the song, and suddenly I see his voice, streaming out in bright, dancing dots, guiding my way like airport runway lights at night.

  But I’m falling behind. Shane is on the third verse, the one that talks about our future. He wrote it when I was still human, so it speaks of me growing old and him staying by my side until I die.

  What happens if I don’t find him before the end of the song? I want to call to him to wait for me, but what if that means dragging him back into the darkness? I can’t do that to him. If he can find a way out without me—

  “Almost there.” His voice is so close now, like it’s coming from inside my head. “Can you feel this?”

  A hand slips around mine, warm and solid. I gasp.

  “How . . .”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where we are, but I know one thing.” Shane moves closer, and now his entire body is against mine. He pulls me into his arms. “No place without you should have the balls to call itself heaven.”

  I burrow my face into his chest, afraid to speak and break the spell. Soon death will part us. Nothing lasts forever, not even this.

  Suddenly I feel heavy as a sandbag. I fall to my knees (I have knees!), which meet something that feels like the ground (there’s ground!). I reach down to feel dirt and a few sprigs of cold, dry grass.

  If these are the Elysian fields, they’ve been oversold.

  “Shane?”

  “Shh. Do you hear that?”

  I shut my mouth and listen. Voices are screaming in terror. Oh, crap, we are on our way to hell. Sucks that I was wrong about that.

  His whisper is taut with fear. “It’s coming.”

  “What’s coming?”

  “The sun. Ciara, get down!” Shane throws his body on top of mine as the world turns white.

  26

  Now We’re Getting Somewhere

  I scream at the searing heat on my arms and scalp and feet, the only parts Shane isn’t covering. The sun must’ve burned out my lungs, because I can’t breathe.

  Is this what we have to look forward to for an eternity? Burning again and again? I promise, next time I’ll stay on the Isle of Wight with the Milky Way and the Doors.

  The morning sun pierces my eyes, so I shut them and wait to catch fire.

  And then, I don’t. The sun is warm, but only compared to the hard ground beneath me. The hard ground my hand is on. Totally not burning.

  “Ciara!” Shane’s voice rasps in my ear. He grabs my hand, trying to cover it. He’s also not on fire.

  Lori is screaming—that’s who I heard in the other place. A thick black blanket is thrown over us. I cough from the heavy coating of dust.

  “Your foot!” Lori yanks the blanket to cover my toes. “Ciara, Shane. Where were you? Where’d you come from?”

  Shane and I stare at each other under the blanket. I can see him because one of the edges is lifted slightly, letting in the morning sun. Which, again, is not burning us.

  “Where were we?” he whispers, echoing Lori’s question. “And what are we?”

  My body feels different yet familiar. It’s the way I felt seven months ago. Warm. Weak. “Alive.”

  “Human?” He cups my face with one hand. “How?”

  “Who cares?” I whip off the blanket, making Lori shriek. “See?”

  David gapes at us, and I realize we’re both naked. I pull the blanket back over us and tug it up to my armpits. Lori hands Shane one of the other blackout curtains. It wafts a strong scent of smoke.

  David points to the scorched grass beneath us. “You guys went up in flames. You disappeared.”

  “How long were we gone?” I ask him.

  “Half an hour at least.”

  I look at Lori’s face, so
aked with tears. “I’m alive.”

  “It’s a miracle.” She drops to her knees and hugs me hard. “I thought I’d lost you forever this time, but instead you’re back. You’re back for good.”

  “I thought you were at home.”

  “David called and told me. I came right away. So did Franklin.” She tightens her grip. “Now you can have babies, too!”

  “Whoa, whoa, we don’t know that.” I disentangle myself from her embrace and send Shane a nervous glance. But he’s not looking my way.

  He’s looking at the world. Turning his head slowly, he sets his gaze on one mundane object after another: the Dumpster, Lori’s compact sedan pasted with wet leaves, the radio tower reaching for the clear blue sky.

  After six months without sunlight, I have to admit it looks amazing—everything in full color, nothing a shade of gray.

  But for Shane it’s been sixteen years of night.

  We stand up together, still wrapped in the curtains. I touch his hand, speak his name. He lowers his chin and gazes at me.

  “Your hair,” he whispers. He pulls it forward in front of my shoulder. “Look.”

  The sunlight glimmers on the golden strands. I have to admit, it’s gorgeous. I gasp and look at my right hand. It has every finger and a thumb.

  His eyes meet mine. “You know what I want to do? More than anything in the world?”

  I give him a wicked grin. “What?”

  “Eat pancakes.”

  I laugh long and obnoxiously loud, then throw myself into his arms. Our future just got shorter but potentially much, much sweeter.

  Shane cries out in pain suddenly, dropping me. I stumble back. “What’s wrong?”

  Lori and David shout as he bends in half, grasping for the ground. His knees buckle and he collapses.

  “Shane!” I reach for him, then feel something twist and stretch inside me. “Ow!” I put a hand to my temple.

  Lori turns from Shane to me. “Ciara, you okay?”

  “Yeah. Nasty headache for a few seconds.” I look at David kneeling beside Shane. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “No idea.”

  I take Shane’s shuddering body into my arms. He gasps and writhes, clutching at me. Did we come all the way back from death and beyond just to disintegrate in agony?