Blood Like Poison

by M. Leighton

  When I finally felt courageous enough to approach the door, I knocked lightly, hesitant to disturb his mother if she was in there, but I got no answer. The house was silent and still.

  I had opened the car door and was about to slide in behind the wheel when a muffled sound reached my ears. I remembered the basement, the room Bo had taken me to. I imagined that it was likely some kind of hangout for him, one worth checking out if I had any intention of finding him.

  Quietly, I walked around to the steps. I peered down the dark well. At the bottom was the old red door. I could see pale streaks of light shining out from around the curtain that covered the small window towards the top.

  Though I felt compelled to find Bo, for a minute, I reconsidered. Approaching the door felt wrong somehow, like I was stalking him or spying on him, overstepping bounds that we hadn’t yet had a chance to set.

  A voice in my head reminded me that if Bo had wanted to talk to me, he would’ve either called or answered his phone when I’d called. But he hadn’t.

  Then, as if helping me to make up my mind, Bo’s tangy, soapy citrus scent wafted up the steps, creeping out from beneath the door to lure me in. I felt the invisible strings of it tugging at me, tugging at my guts.

  Another muffled thump had me descending the steps. I raised my hand to knock on the door when movement caught my eye.

  The curtain that covered the little window had been pushed to the side a tiny bit, leaving a small triangular opening through which I could see.

  Inside, Bo was on his knees in the center of the concrete floor, kneeling on a black towel. He was shirtless and covered in blood spatter. Under the slimy red sheen, I could see a sickly greenish black color seeping across his chest, radiating from the left side outward. It was darkest over his heart and it pulsed as if gangrenous death was being pumped throughout his body with every slow squeeze of the muscle. That, however, was not the most alarming part. The thing that caught and held my attention was his face.

  The blackness hadn’t reached that high yet and his face wasn’t covered in blood like the rest of him. I could see his skin perfectly. It was almost entirely translucent. I could make out the intricate webbing of his blood vessels as clearly as if they were drawn on the surface with an ink pen. But apart from the roadmap of his veins, there were other lines, deep cracks in the skin itself, like the damaged plaster of an ancient sculpture.

  In the center of his face, I saw that his normally hypnotic eyes had been affected as well. Gone was that rich almost-black color, washed away by a milky pale green that nearly matched the whites of his eyes. Something in them looked completely wild, feral even, and they started a shudder in me that rippled throughout my entire body. Though I was afraid, I continued to watch Bo, unable to tear my eyes away from the window.

  Bo moved, arching his back and letting his head fall back on his shoulders. He let out an agonizing howl that had the tendons in his neck straining beneath his bizarre skin. With a moan that bordered on a cry, he raised his right hand to his mouth. Bearing four elongated teeth, two on the top and two on the bottom, Bo sank his teeth into what looked like a bag of blood he’d been holding.

  I watched in nauseous horror as he made sucking, chewing motions and devoured the contents of the bag, blood dripping off his chin and falling onto the towel. He closed his eyes. Pleasure was written all over his face, belied only by the trace frown that pinched his brows together, as if he was resented the euphoria, wanted to resist it.

  My breath was coming in shallow pants and I felt a fearful sweat break out on my forehead. My heartbeat throbbed in my ears and pounded behind my eyes. I wanted to look away, but it was like watching a train wreck—I couldn’t not watch. I was frozen, rooted to the spot where I peeped through the curtains.

  Just when I thought for sure I was going to throw up, Bo quieted and his eyes snapped open. He turned his head a few degrees and looked right at me. I’m certain the surprise in his eyes mirrored the shock in my own, right before sheer panic set in.

  Frozen no more, I turned and bolted up the steps. Behind me, I heard the sounds of the basement door opening and Bo bounding up the stairs behind me, but I didn’t look back. I ran for all I was worth.

  It seemed like it took me ten minutes to get to my car, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. My mad dash wasn’t fast enough, though. When I opened the car door, Bo was standing in front of the hood, chest heaving, staring at me.

  “Ridley, let me explain.”

  His voice was gravelly, like his throat was dry. I thought of the previous night and I shivered.

  “Stay away from me,” I shouted, slamming the door shut and starting the car.

  When I flipped on my headlights, it only further illuminated the slick fluid covering Bo’s body. With trembling hands, I jammed the shifter into reverse and sped backward down his driveway and out into the street.

  On the way home, my mind raced incoherently. By the time I arrived at my house, instead of being less freaked out, I’d worked myself up into a bigger tizzy. I was convinced that Bo was some kind of evil, blood-sucking mass murderer that was on a killing spree and would now be coming after me.

  The strange thing is that, all the while I was concocting terrible back stories for Bo, my heart yearned for him, my body ached for him. I didn’t understand how my emotions and my body could be so disastrously disconnected from my head, from logic and rational thought.

  Shouting a quick “I’m back” to Mom and Dad, I bypassed the living room and went straight to the bathroom. The mirror showed me that I’d cried on the way home. I hadn’t been aware of any tears falling, but my swollen eyes and red face promised me they had.

  I splashed cold water over my eyes and cheeks, wishing it was cold enough to numb the growing devastation I felt.

  When I walked into my bedroom and shut the door behind me, the first thing I noticed was that it smelled of Bo. I was instantaneously filled with trepidation. I reached back for the knob, starting to twist it and run. My body was wired and readied for escape when a voice broke the stillness. Despite my inner turmoil, it flowed over my frazzled nerves like raw silk.

  “Ridley, please let me explain.”

  Even in the darkness, I could plainly see him standing outside my open bedroom window, looking nothing like the person, the thing, I’d seen only minutes prior. Though he made no move toward me, I was still afraid of him. The screen was in place, but I knew it would provide very little protection if he decided to come in after me.

  “If you don’t leave this very second, I swear I’ll go screaming out that door and call the police,” I said warningly. The slight waver of my voice gave me away, however, a blatant indication that my bravado was superficial at best.

  “Just give me—”

  “I mean it, Bo,” I declared, my voice rising as I pushed the words through my tight lips.

  “Don’t you—”

  “I’m going,” I said, turning to open the door.

  “Wait, Ridley.”

  “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.”

  His next words caused my hand to still on the knob and my heart to constrict painfully inside my chest.

  “I’m dying, Ridley.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “What?”

  I could eek out no more than a whisper. My throat and my lungs failed me. I thought, I prayed, that my ears had failed me, too. Deceived me. Although at the moment I was terrified and confused by what I’d seen, it hadn’t seemed to affect the way I felt about Bo deep down. Apparently, my heart hadn’t gotten the memo.

  “I’m dying,” he repeated softly, sadly.

  A crushing tide of devastation swept in to wash away the fear and disappointment I’d been feeling. Its violent current nearly erased all traces of the creature I’d seen only moments before, leaving only traces of a strange sickness that threatened the life of someone I didn’t want to live without.

  Slowly, I turned to face him. On the one hand, I was hesitant
to believe him, especially after having seen him drinking blood.

  “You could be lying,” I pointed out.

  “But I’m not.”

  “But I wouldn’t know.”

  “Yes, you would.”

  On the other hand, I wanted desperately for it to be true, if for no other reason than that it meant he wasn’t a monster. It just wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be normal, to fall in love with a monster.

  But if he wasn’t a monster, then that meant he was dying. As the room slanted this way and that, tilting all around me, I realized that it would be far better to fall in love with a monster than to lose Bo altogether.

  Walking to the bed, I perched on the edge, staring down at my hands, wondering what I should do now, what I should say. Bo took care of that dilemma when he pushed on the screen until it popped out and then crawled carefully through my window.

  He stopped just inside it and leaned up against the frame, sure to maintain a safe distance from me, one that wouldn’t make me feel threatened. Whether he knew it or not, his thoughtful consideration of my feelings put me at ease more than anything he could ever have said.

  “You’re sick?”

  I asked the question as gently as I could, as if speaking the words quietly would make them less true, less concrete.

  “Can we turn on some music so that your parents won’t hear us talking?”

  “Oh,” I said, getting up to dock my iPhone. “Good idea.”

  I selected a random play list of soft music so that it would provide background noise, but not be annoying to us or to my parents. That would defeat the purpose entirely.

  The first song to play was an old 80’s song, I Just Died in Your Arms by The Cutting Crew. Bo and I looked at each other, he on one side of the room, me on the other. I thought about changing it, but I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I just restarted the conversation.

  “Are you really dying?”

  I pushed decorum and tact aside in favor of getting answers, answers I needed more than I needed food or water.

  Bo nodded. I felt the air close in around me like thick soup—too thick to breathe.

  “What is it? I mean, what’s wrong?”

  “Over the last few years, do you remember hearing about some of the victims in Southmoore that they thought were being attacked by animals, but then discovered it was a person doing it? The Southmoore Slayer?”

  A leaden ball of dread began to swell in the pit of my stomach. “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s what happened to me.”

  “You were attacked?”

  “Yes.”

  “When? Do you know who did it?”

  “It’s been three years now,” Bo said.

  “What happened?”

  Moving from his position against the window, Bo walked to my desk and picked up a clear glass heart-shaped paperweight. He toyed with it, rolling it from one palm to the other and back again.

  “My father and I were hunting at the edge of Arlisle Preserve. We’d just gone into the woods and it was still dark outside. I heard some noises and thought it might be a deer moving around.” He paused. “But it wasn’t.”

  “What was it?”

  “Who,” he corrected.

  “Who was it then?”

  Bo looked at me intently for several seconds before turning his attention back to the heart. He answered me. “I don’t know, but I’m getting closer to finding out.”

  I thought of the previous night, when Trent Long had come to visit. “Does it have anything to do with Trent Long?”

  Bo’s head snapped up. “How did you know about him?”

  “I saw him at your house then I saw his picture on the news. He’s dead,” I said swallowing. “Did you have something to do with that?”

  “Ridley, you have to understand—”

  “Ohmigod, you did!” I couldn’t help but take a step back, away from him, away from the truth, but the wall was behind me. There was nowhere to go.

  “I think he killed my father,” Bo said, breaking into my rising panic.

  “What?”

  “Whoever attacked us killed my father and only managed to…infect me.”

  “Infect you? Is it-is it contagious?”

  “Not in the way you’re thinking.”

  I shook my head, trying to focus on one thing at a time. “But you killed somebody, Bo,” I cried.

  “He wasn’t human, Ridley. None of them are.”

  Mouth agape, I stared at Bo in stunned confusion. “What are you saying?”

  “They were—” Bo stopped suddenly, sighing. Palming the glass heart in one hand, he ran the other through his hair in frustrated indecision.

  “They?” This was getting worse by the second. My mind scrambled for something safe and sane to latch onto, but it found nothing.

  “Ridley, all I’ve done is rid the world of killers, cold-blooded killers. They were all- they were—”

  He stopped again, as if still considering whether or not he wanted to tell me. I wondered, doubted, that I really wanted to know what he was going to say, but he’d already begun. I couldn’t let him change his mind now.

  “Were what?”

  “Ridley, they were vampires.” He paused. “Just like me.”

  “They were what?”

  My voice sounded shrill in the confines of my room.

  “Vampires,” he repeated quietly.

  “You think- you think you’re a vampire?”

  Bo nodded.

  “Bo, I hate to break it to you, but there are no such things as vampires.”

  “That’s what I used to think, too.”

  My mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. I had no idea what to say to that, but I thought it was probably a good time for him to leave.

  “Maybe you should go,” I suggested as calmly as I could. I certainly didn’t want to make a crazy person angry.

  “You don’t believe me,” he said, more a statement of fact than an accusation.

  Duh was the first thing that came to mind, but I swallowed it. “Did you honestly expect me to believe something like that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone before.”

  All things considered, I thought it was pretty remarkable that he managed to make me feel guilty. But he did exactly that.

  I relaxed a bit against the wall. My head was pounding, my pulse throbbing dully behind my eyes. I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed.

  Maybe I should try a different tack, let him say what he needed to say and then pray that he left. I’d always heard that you shouldn’t try to talk an unbalanced person into reality. I’d heard that you should just go along with their delusions.

  “Is that why you were so bloody tonight? You were- were…”

  Bo nodded. “There was someone I had to take care of.”