“But you never returned. I underestimated you. And it took years for me to find you again. And when I did, you took off again, and I lost you once more. I told myself then and there that the next time I would be much more careful.”
For a second I wondered if he could sense gifts. Did he know what I had the potential for? Even in only a subconscious way.
“Did you know my gift?” I asked him.
“No, only after observation did I see the seducing. But the knowing—that caught me off guard.”
“So what is it that I’m useful for? What do I unlock?
Ivy took a deep breath and rubbed his chin with his hand.
“I don’t quite know.”
“Which is why you want me to join you?”
“Which is why I want you close by. In my employ, so to speak. If you want to remain a vampire, by all means, you’re free to do so. But I want you close.”
“Close or dead, huh?”
“It’s your choice, Victoria. There is one thing I do know, and that is that I cannot allow you to act against me.”
If he only understood that I had no idea how to act against him, he might be a lot less worried. Nevertheless, he didn’t understand that and I had my back against a wall.
Find your desire.
The words came to me again, and I still didn’t understand how to use them. How this was all supposed to work. The fear that The Three had chosen wrongly surged through my body again and I felt helpless and impotent.
“So what now? You lock me up here and threaten me with sunlight if I don’t do what you want?”
“No. I let you go,” he said, and in his being I read that he was perfectly genuine.
“You let me go?”
“Yes. As I said, this is your choice. You have twenty-four hours to return to this house. You can bring your friends if you’d like. Speed and location are two gifts I don’t possess yet. And the copycat, well we’ll do something with him.
“And if I don’t?”
The fire returned in his eyes and it was the only thing lighting up the room.
“Then I’ll come find you.”
That was all he said before he waved his hand at me to say that I was dismissed.
5
An hour later, the four of us were back at my apartment, glad to be home but urgently trying to figure out what to do.
“So what if we just hide you?” Lola said, for at least the third time since we’d been home.
“Ivy has too many eyes,” Kace said. “I’d bet anything you wouldn’t last long in hiding. Even if you left this city, even if you left this country, he’d find you. And anyway, they’re watching us right now. If you think they didn’t watch us come home, and they won’t watch us when we leave, you’re crazy.”
I sat on the couch, rubbing my forehead and feeling tired. Not from lack of sleep, that rarely affected vampires, but from everything I had seen, everything I had learned.
“Maybe I should just go. Turn myself in, so to speak. Then I’d be on the inside. He said he won’t make me transform myself. Maybe I don’t have another good choice.”
I felt Matt’s large hand on my shoulder, and warmth radiated from it.
“What about your mission? What about finding your desire? Maybe there’s something you’re missing. Something you’re supposed to do.”
“Matt, my desire is...” I hesitated here. Embarrassed to say what it was in front of Kace. “...is to be human. There is no way to do that. I don’t...I don’t understand where The Three are leading me.”
The room went silent and I avoided Kace’s eyes, not wanting to see the judgment that might be in them.
And then I remembered.
“God,” I said, hanging my head, “and Raven’s dead.”
It was so odd to utter those words. That a vampire, any vampire, had died, it didn’t feel real to me.
“She would never have joined Ivy, Vic,” Lola said. “I don’t think her gift would have allowed it, anyway.”
Lola confirmed what I believed myself and as I turned to look at her in solidarity, a tear rolled down her cheek. I remembered the story she had told me at my spot.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said with finality, trying to impress upon my company that I really had no clue and that they should stop treating me like the heroine.
I now had twenty-three hours to sit and wait for my eventual capture and servitude. And this was how it all ended. In my apartment, the four of us sitting around, coming up with bad ideas.
It was bound to happen, I suddenly thought, and wasn’t even immediately sure to what I was referring to.
The whole “pure” immortality thing. Since it existed, someone was bound to find it sooner or later. If it hadn’t been Ivy, it would have been someone else.
That was the thing. You really couldn’t stop stuff from happening. Even in the vampire community, with our gifts and our powers and our strength, it felt like you could. It felt like you could control things. I knew that’s exactly how I felt for years. In those bars, hunting, almost always successful. Doing whatever I wanted. Knowing that I was essentially outside the law, outside of consequence.
Consequences were for humans. A price for their frailty. But not for me. I was too powerful.
And here I was. With my head up my ass, feeling sorry for myself and the people around me I was letting down.
I was resigned. I didn’t tell the rest of them, but in twenty-three hours I was showing up at Ivy’s or letting his people take me or whatever.
There was nothing else.
6
I went out on the balcony a little while later, presumably to clear my head and think things through, but really I just went out to watch the sunrise.
Now this is odd, but I’ve always really loved sunrises. Number one, I’m often up, and number two, the sunlight isn’t strong enough to hurt me yet. Especially not when I’m partially covered on my balcony.
It had been a long, dark night. Longer and darker than most, and what I craved right now was something to cut through that. Like a good acidic component to something rich. Something to cut through the fat.
I sat in my plastic chair, propped my feet up on the metal railing, and thought about how many more sunrises I had seen than the average person.
And yet, they never stopped being beautiful.
The door slid open behind me, and I turned around to see Kace, swinging his head to get his hair out of his eyes. He sat in the plastic chair next to me and propped his feet the same way.
“Sunrises, huh?” he said, making his eyes wide in irony.
“Yep. I’m a vampire who likes sunrises. What’s it to you?”
Kace smiled, but it wasn’t so searing anymore.
“It’s funny. Lucas liked sunrises. I was still in my phase of running around all night, drinking and smoking whatever I wanted, playing with my gift, you know, jumping up to high places...” He laughed here and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. “And I just thought it was the strangest fucking thing.”
The topmost portion of the sun had risen above the tallest buildings that I could see, like a glowing banana.
“How did you know him?” I asked.
“He was someone I met,” Kace stopped here and waved his hand toward the city, “out there. On the streets. I had run away. For the third—and final—time.”
He smiled here again, but this time his mouth twisted into something that looked painful.
“Lucas was always...around,” he began, and my first thought was that it was probably his hunting spot. “And, he always looked so...together is the way I thought of it. Nothing seemed to bother him. He didn’t seem to live on the streets, but he was there so often, I thought he must.”
“Mind if I smoke?” Kace asked, being shockingly polite, I thought, and I shook my head.
He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook out one of them, and in an instant had it in his mouth and lit it with a match.
“One of the best advantages of be
ing a vampire, if you ask me,” he said and then blew smoke out of his mouth. “No health consequences.”
He smiled and really did look like a teenager who thought he was getting away with something.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I was kind of intimidated by him, honestly. And, frankly, I found him attractive. He was like a minor celebrity in my part of town.”
I remembered Lucas’s purple eyes and this seemed about right to me.
“I was afraid to talk to him, but I wanted to. He seemed to know everybody, but nobody that I knew well. My friend,” I picked up the slightest hesitation here, “Susanna, she was like my best friend out there. She used to say that she would see Lucas looking at me. Like staring. But I never caught it. I felt drawn to him, though, but didn’t really feel like I could go up to him.”
“One night, we were at a club, spending money we had stolen, and I was up at the bar. The music was loud—you know, really pounding through my chest—”
“I’m more of a bar girl, myself,” I added.
“Yeah, I get it. That’s your element,” Kace said, blowing smoke and smiling. “Yeah, so I was up at the bar, and feeling really, really good. Like fantastic. It might have been the drugs, but it might have just been the night too—maybe both, but whatever. I felt a tap on my shoulder, and it was Lucas.
“I remember him leaning in real close to me, so I could hear him. I couldn’t believe it, it was better than the drugs. The feeling.”
I looked up to see that the sun had risen halfway, and it burned over the city, cleansing it of the sins of the night.
I was really involved in Kace’s story and I hadn’t noticed. I liked him. He felt like a kid brother or something. And, he was different than what I first thought. I think it was because he put the theatrics away.
“Long story short. We became friends—well, more than that. But, the best part was, he had an apartment—I was wrong about him being on the streets.”
“I’m assuming that was his hunting grounds,” I said, well aware that Kace had probably pieced this together by now.
“Exactly, but hindsight is twenty-twenty, you know?”
Kace stopped, lit another cigarette and looked out over the city.
“I started to notice strange things. Like, for one, he never slept. I mean, ever. I guess at the time, I assumed he was sleeping when I did. But even if he was he seemed to need a whole lot less sleep than I did, and I was practically nocturnal at the time.”
“Also, he barely ate. He’d nibble at stuff but had a perfect body. Muscular, medium build, you know, the whole nine yards. Anyway, you don’t need to hear all the things that made me suspicious of him. You already know them.
“But, whatever, I didn’t say anything. Oh—and Susanna had moved in with him too. So we were like the Three Musketeers for a while. We had a place to stay, anything we wanted, really—he seemed to have plenty of cash, and then, one night, we were fooling around, me and Lucas, and he asked me if I wanted to be immortal.”
When I heard this, it occurred to me that there was one more general reason a vampire might turn someone. Why he might create. Earlier I said pity and anger were the two most common reasons, and they still are, but another one is pride. The simple ability to create.
To create another immortal simply because you can.
This seemed to fit with what I had experienced with Lucas, but it was a much less common reason than the other two. Ivy’s group was unusual.
“You know,” Kace went on,” I thought it was just part of the moment, the atmosphere, and so I said yes. And before I knew it he was kissing my neck.
“Only this was unlike any kissing I had ever known before. I felt warm and numb and free, all at once, and then I was lying on the bed alone.
“Time was passing strangely because it felt like two minutes had gone by, but the sun was up, and I was hungry.
“I’ll spare you all the details of the first few days because you already know what they are, but eventually Lucas and I went our separate ways. Not before he turned Susanna, though. At her—and my—request. We were still close after that, but with access to money, I finally moved out and Susanna came with me. And his hunting grounds became my hunting grounds. We carefully coordinated.
“My family thought I was dead. That I hadn’t made it this time, so that was easy to take care of, and I began my life as a vampire.”
A bird chirped and the sound brought me back to the present. The sun was up. The day had started.
I’m not sure what came over me, but I started to tell the story of my own transformation, biting into live rabbits and all. Kace listened as the sun rose higher and higher. Soon we would have to go inside, but I finished the story just as the heat of the day started to get noticeable.
“Crazy. So you made it all on your own, huh?” he said.
“Yeah, and Ivy finally filled in for me why that was.”
“Wow. Your life would have been completely and totally different. I wonder what he would have done with you. If you’d...”
Kace stopped here and I knew what he was going to say.
If you had been put to sleep.
A chill went up my spine, despite how warm it already was.
“I’m going back, you know, tonight. To Ivy’s.”
Kace turned and looked at me, still smoking. He deftly blew his smoke the other way.
“I know,” was all he said.
“What does it feel like for you? My gift,” I asked.
He put the cigarette to his lips and nodded his head while taking a drag, about to tell me.
“It’s funny. Some gifts are so obvious. Like with Matt’s. I can suddenly just be really, really fast and I can feel it as soon as I’m near him. Like something changes in my body.”
“But some gifts are very, very subtle. Like yours. Or Ivy’s for that matter.”
Something clicked in my brain that I couldn’t pull up consciously at his mention of Ivy. When I couldn’t get the thought after a few minutes, I let it go and turned my full attention back to Kace.
“It actually took me a couple of hours to realize what was happening when I was around you. I knew I should be able to imitate knowing, but I thought it was going to hit me like a ton of bricks, you know. That, suddenly, I would have all this information, directly and immediately at my disposal, but that wasn’t it. Is it?”
He smiled here. And the smile I once found so searing and mean, one that would cut through me, was warm and friendly and full of humor.
“It’s more like...my attention shifts to something I didn’t realize was there. And then a thought floats up from, like...down here.”
Kace indicated his lower torso and I was fascinated by his description of what I could do. It was helping me to understand what I could do.
“And I know it’s correct. Without a doubt I know it’s true. And that’s when it hit me.”
“Knowers don’t know information. They know the truth.”
“The truth of the circumstance. The truth of the person. They can see it. Feel it. It’s in them. It is them. What a beautiful gift.”
He blew more smoke out of his mouth and I realized we would have to get inside soon.
“It’s a burden too,” I said quietly, not sure why I was willing to share this with Kace. “And I don’t always understand how to use it. Or I try too hard to pick up on something. Or I feel like I should know something and I don’t.”
He ground out his cigarette in the ashtray and did not light another one.
“The more esoteric gifts always are,” he said. “At least that’s what Lucas always told me.”
I didn’t have anything more to say after this, and the silence stretched out between us in a comfortable way, like a hammock.
“I think we’ve got to go in,” Kace said, getting up from his chair.
I didn’t say “yeah, you’re right.” I just got up from my own chair, knowing that he knew I agreed.
7
I wanted a last meal.
But I didn’t want to leave the apartment. Not to eat, anyway.
We all ordered food, from one of my favorite places, and I said I’d go walk to get it.
Matt wanted to come with me, but I told him I’d rather go alone. Nobody argued.
I set out, keeping to the shade, but I wasn’t entirely worried about the sun. It was only a ten-minute walk, so even if I had walked the entire way in the sunshine, I’d only be stinging once I got there. After my experience the other night, that felt like child’s play.
I’d ordered a burger. Isn’t that funny? My last meal, and what I wanted most was a beef patty on a roll.
Granted this was some of the best beef money could buy, and the toppings weren’t exactly ketchup and pickles either, but still, it struck me as funny.
I wondered what people on death row asked for as their last meals for a minute and was sure there were a few burgers in there. People wanted what they wanted and often, it was the familiar that won out.
I wondered what Ivy would do with me once I got to his place tonight. What he would use me for. And then I wondered if I wasn’t making a big mistake.
Maybe I should fight. You know, make them take me.
But that’s not what I knew I needed to do.
I knew I should walk up to his door, ring the damn bell, and say, “Here I am.” Only, I had no idea what would happen after that.
I turned the corner to where I was crushed and the sudden memory of having every bone in my body screaming in agony came back to me. I wondered what that was all about.
He had already tried to put me to sleep and to make me feel so much pain that I would...what, give up? Maybe.
Maybe he was just that erratic. Didn’t know exactly what he wanted.
Bored To Death: A Vampire Thriller Page 20