by Molly Harper
“Probably the right choice,” he said. “It couldn’t be worse than the possum, though.”
“I accept my position as the slower, weaker, and less-willing-to-eat-mystery-meat person on this hike from hell.”
“You’re human. It’s not a fair comparison. You’re never going to be as fast as I am, unless I turn you.”
Around another cracker, my voice was garbled. “Was that a ham-handed shortcut to asking whether I want to become a vampire?”
“Well, considering the peril we’ve experienced over the last day or so, it’s not a completely absurd question. Consider it a precautionary gesture. Obviously, you’re into that sort of thing. Having all of the information, so you know what to do.”
I could appreciate that he had figured out that bit of my personality. But I’d barely figured out how I felt about Ale-8. I wasn’t able to make a huge decision like “Eternal Life: Pro or Con?” at the moment.
“No. For right now, that is not something I am interested in. It’s not that I think vampires are horrible or anything,” I insisted. “I just don’t know enough about you or your lifestyle to make a decision one way or another. I don’t think I’d make a very good vampire.”
“I think you’d make an excellent vampire,” he told me, grinning broadly as he tapped the Ale-8, reminding me to keep drinking. “You’re tenacious and relatively sneaky.”
“Thank you.”
“And vicious when you have to be.”
I protested, “I’m not vicious!”
“Says the girl who has repeatedly threatened someone with a knife right in front of me.”
I poked my finger into his face, which he did not seem to appreciate, given the way he sneered at it. “OK, for the record, it was the same someone on each of those occasions. And I was defending myself, and you, I might add, because you weren’t doing anything to help.”
“On the second occasion, I was too busy curled up on the ground in the fetal position, smoking and slowly dissolving into ash,” he told me. “Because you wandered away, during daylight hours. After I asked you not to.”
“Those pauses are unnecessary,” I told him.
“Not when dealing with your level of righteous indignation.”
Stuffing more delicious, salty carbs into my mouth, I opened my bag and checked on the book. It was safe. And I was eating for the first time since that my granola bar. For the moment, life was good.
“We should keep moving,” I told him. “I’m hydrated, and I have food in my belly. We should take advantage of that while we can. It’s not like we were going to do some Swiss Family Robinson thing and stay here long-term.”
“You are one big ray of sunshine, aren’t you, kitten?”
“I’m just saying, we shouldn’t waste our time building a giant water wheel and pirate traps,” I told him.
“I just wanted a little rest before we started trekking,” he grumbled.
“Oh, poor darling,” I cooed, patting his shoulder.
“Don’t patronize me,” he chided me in a strident tone that was clearly meant to be some sort of impersonation.
“That sounds nothing like me,” I told him. “And I wasn’t going to patronize you. I was going to tell you to suck it up.”
“I think I like it better when you patronize me.”
“Trust me, you wouldn’t.”
5
Much like in space, in the woods, no one can hear your embarrassing confessions that will ultimately bond you together with your vampire companion.
—Where the Wild Things Bite: A Survival Guide for Camping with the Undead
It turns out that there was a profound level of hunger I had to reach before I could eat potted meat, and I had not hit it yet. I already felt bloated and sloshy from consuming a dozen saltines and two bottles of liquid. I felt bloated and sloshy but absolutely at peace.
Unfortunately, that peace was short-lived. My body processed those drinks pretty quickly, and almost as soon as I’d finished the second bottle, my bladder protested mightily.
I made a sudden break for the trees, startling Finn, who was still staring out into the distance, trying to pick up on lights or signs or Ernie’s white pilot’s shirt. He caught my wrist¸ and the strength of his grip made me wince. He loosened his hold immediately, his expression softening. “Where are you going?”
“Uh, all of that nature is calling me.” I realized that in my urgency to leave, I’d shoved my bag and the hunter’s supplies into his hands. The fact that I could part with my bag, even mentally, after all I’d been through to keep it, bothered me.
Had I really let my guard down around Finn that much? I mean, yes, I knew that I trusted him a little more than I had the moment he’d thrown me out of the plane. The fact that he hadn’t abandoned me when he had the chance spoke well for him, but there was so much I didn’t know about him, so much he’d avoided telling me. And deep down, even after the plane crash and the starvation and the blisters, I was still the same girl from the real world who hadn’t been on a date in almost a year because she had trouble trusting strange men without a background check.
“Well, you’re not going alone.”
“I wasn’t expecting to,” I told him. My need overran my concern about tripping, and I made for the nearest tree.
“Stay over there!” I whispered, unbuttoning my jeans.
“Wouldn’t dream of violating your space right now,” he swore.
“And hum or something,” I told him. “Stupid vampire superhearing.”
I addressed the problem with as much dignity as possible and returned to where Finn was waiting.
“Don’t say a word,” I told him, taking my bag back and dropping to the ground beside him.
He shook his head. “Wasn’t going to. You’ve seen me eat a possum. I am now aware that you have functioning internal organs. Moments like this are going to come up when two people are stuck out here with no barriers or filters . . . except the enormous walls that you throw up around yourself like a force field.”
“What?”
“I’m just saying that after surviving a plane crash and sleeping in various weird outdoor locations with you, I know absolutely nothing concrete about you, other than that your name is Anna and you don’t have sex in libraries.”
“You are not going to let that one go, are you?”
“Oh, come on, not even once, during your wild college days?”
I yawned and plopped my head back down on the ground. “You have listened to me while I’ve spoken, right?”
“You’d be surprised what I hear when you speak,” he muttered. “Come on, this will go easier if we get to know each other a little bit better. Where are you from?”
“Where are you from?” I countered.
“Where-are-you-from? That’s a strange-sounding place. Is it in Canada?”
“I live near Atlanta,” I told him, rolling my eyes.
“You don’t sound like you’re from Georgia,” he noted. “I thought Georgia accents were supposed to be all peaches and custard. You are decidedly peach-less.”
“I’m from Virginia originally. And you?”
“Cleveland.”
I snorted. Of all of the exotic origin stories I’d expected, the dashing vampire from Cleveland had not even entered my mind. Somehow a childhood in Cleveland just didn’t live up to the “lonely soul trekking through history” hype, even if he’d been born in colonial Cleveland. “And when are you from?”
“I was born in the early forties.”
I snorted again, closing my eyes.
“What’s with the horse noises?” he asked, shaking my foot.
“I don’t know. It’s kind of disappointing. You know, you think vampires, and you think of a lone figure standing in front of an ancient Romanian castle, his cape blowing in the wind. Not pulling a little Radio Flyer wagon around Cleveland.”
“I lived through a world war!” he protested.
“When you were a toddler.”
“You ge
t cranky when you’re faced with starvation.”
“Right back at you,” I told him. “So what do you do for a living?”
He didn’t answer. I supposed I’d touched a nerve, mocking his Cleveland roots. So I asked, a bit more gently, “Do you do anything for a living? Vampires do have to earn a living, right?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“No. I think I want to know,” I said, gasping suddenly, as if seized by a brilliant discovery. “Are you a stripper?”
He burst out laughing, and I felt a little better about pressing him into this conversational corner. “No.”
Under my breath, I said, “You’ve got the body.”
I wanted to clap my hand over my mouth, but that would have tipped Finn off to exactly how embarrassed I was to have let that little gem spill from my lips. But honestly, who could blame me?
A man who looked like Finn knew how good-looking he was, even in our current frazzled state. A man didn’t walk around like he did, with the flirty smirk and the deep V-necks, without some idea of how he affected the women in his path. But he didn’t need to know that I was (profoundly, pathetically) aware of how good-looking he was. He certainly didn’t need to know that I’d almost come apart just letting him slide my finger in and out of his mouth. So I clenched my arms, forcing them to stay at my sides in what I hoped looked like a relaxed pose, and pretended I’d just made some smartass joke.
“But to my everlasting shame, I don’t have the musicality.” Smirking all the while, he pressed his hands over his silent heart, as if to mourn his lost potential in pole work. I laughed, and he asked, “Can we talk about you for a minute?”
“You already know what I do for a living, which is not having sex in libraries.”
“It’s a deep personal disappointment to me. Plus, you make funny faces when I mention it.”
“What else do you want to know?”
“Why did you move to Atlanta?”
“It was close enough to the contacts I’d developed but far enough away that . . .” I trailed off. The stupid fatigue and hunger had my mouth running off at all kinds of inconvenient speeds. I would much rather wax poetic about Finn and his lickable collarbone than disgorge my parental issues to someone who would have little to no interest. Because if I had to bet on Finn’s level of “giving a damn,” I was coming down hard on the side of “no interest.”
“Your mother, huh?”
I glared at him. “I thought you said you couldn’t read minds.”
He shrugged. “I can’t. I just figured someone who is as organized and neurotic as you has to have problems with one parent. And your responses aren’t quite right for a girl with daddy issues.”
I rolled toward him, eyes narrowed. He was right, I supposed. It was difficult to develop daddy issues when your mother’s personality was so overwhelming. “Are you saying you’ve been trying to poke my ‘daddy issue’ buttons?”
He could have at least feigned guilt as he pursed his lips, letting his eyes slide down my frame as if he was searching for those buttons at this very moment. But sadly, he didn’t bother. “Occasionally.”
“You, sir, are a horrible individual.”
He scoffed. “Come on, I needed to know what sort of girl I was doing the forest death march with, didn’t I? I needed to know how to motivate you properly if you started to slow down.”
“So now that you know, why do you even care about the rest of my background?”
“Is it so hard to believe I’m just curious about you?”
I paused for a second before throwing my hands up. “Yes!”
“Well, the fact that you won’t tell me just makes me more curious. But on a less defensive topic, how did you get into the not-having-sex-in-libraries business?”
“How is that supposed to make me less defensive?” I asked him.
He slung an arm around my shoulders. “Come on, tell me something about yourself. Something important to you.”
I was lost. He was so close, and it felt good to be near someone who could possibly understand how scared and uncertain and uncomfortable I was. I closed my eyes, and he ran his hand along my arm, making it relax underneath his touch.
I sighed. “I studied library science and classic literature in college. I got a student position at the college library, something my mother only allowed because work hours in the library were required for my major. And it was definitely expected that I finish my degree. I wasn’t very good at working with the public, as you can imagine—too many people making too many demands, and the books were always so filthy when they came back in the return. I went through a bottle of hand sanitizer a week, and my sinuses . . .” I let loose a small shudder, which made Finn smile. “Because my father was a faculty member, they let me work in the special collections, where the public rarely visited because the books were so rare we didn’t loan them out. There was this big box of battered old books in the storage closet that no one had bothered to catalogue because they were in such bad condition. The library had just accepted the donation from an alumna’s family and forgotten about them. My boss told me to throw them out, without telling anyone, but as I was breaking down the box, I noticed a name scrawled on the inside front page of one of the journals. U.S. Army Lieutenant Randall Tenney. I recognized it, because my father had spent quite a bit of time researching Tenney, who served as an aide-de-camp to Robert E. Lee, right up until Gettysburg, where he’d disappeared off the battlefield, never to be heard from or seen again. My father spent years trying to track down what happened to him, going through eyewitness accounts and field-hospital records. It was frustrating to him, not being able to prove what happened to someone who should have been safe, back at the administrative camp, someone who was well known among the men and should have been noticed when he went missing. But he never found anything.”
“That’s not all that unusual,” Finn told me. “Vampires are always attracted to battlegrounds, particularly epic battles. The noise, the chaos, the bloodshed. Who’s going to notice that a few soldiers among thousands go missing?”
“Well, what was unusual was the dates scrawled across the front page of this book. August 1863, a month after Gettysburg, to May 1883, twenty years after Gettysburg. I stopped what I was doing and started reading through the book, which was no small feat, I tell you, trying to read that spidery, cramped handwriting on pages so delicate I thought they’d crumble in my hands. And you’re right, vampires were attracted to the Battle of Gettysburg. The diary entries were all written by Tenney, who stated that vampires were picking soldiers from both armies off the field as soon as the sun set. He tried to help a wounded man back to camp and was bitten for his troubles. He woke up three days later, feeling as if he’d failed Lee, failed the South, and deserted, however accidentally. And he couldn’t go back to the Confederacy as a vampire, so he gave up and moved out west. I approached the World Council’s local office, near my college, and asked them to contact Tenney for me, to let him know that I’d found his diary and ask if he wanted it back, and he did. He even traveled to Richmond to reclaim it from the Council office. I didn’t go to meet him, of course, I was too intimidated, but he wrote me a lovely thank-you note and sent my father a full accounting of what happened to him on the battlefield.”
“What did your father think of that?”
“He looked at me differently afterward,” I told him. “It was like he saw me as a person for the first time, not as his child or some problem that my mother needed to deal with, but a person who had potential, someone he could treat like an equal. He talked to me, took an interest in my studies. I don’t know if he was thrilled with the subject matter I had become interested in, but the fact that I’d solved a puzzle he couldn’t? It made a big difference to him. And I couldn’t get enough of the special collections after that. It was like everything we knew in the history books was, well, not wrong but just sort of a top layer of icing on a deeper, richer cake.” At the mere mention of cake, my stomach growled
, and I groaned. Finn chuckled and commenced rubbing his hand along my arm again to distract me.
“There was this whole second layer of history that happened in the shadows that humans weren’t even aware existed. And if I was learning about that history, I wasn’t just building on the work of other students and teachers who had tumbled over those events ad nauseam, but I was discovering something new, something unknown. It was fascinating and exciting, and I loved it. I got my master’s degree in historical literature and wrote my thesis on the movements of vampires throughout Europe to avoid the dangers of the Inquisition, using diaries and Council records to verify my theories. I learned to deal politely with the undead, using e-mail and the Internet as a protective filter. And then I went to work on my doctoral thesis.”
I closed my eyes and stilled my hands. I hadn’t even realized I was wringing them, cracking and twisting my fingers just so I had something to do with all of the nervous energy gathering in my body. This was the hard part. The years of my life I didn’t like to talk about, not even with my therapist, when I could effectively deflect. The final ugly break from my mother. My father’s death, so soon after I’d finally started building some sort of relationship with him. Michael’s betrayal and the loss of my work, my reputation in academia. The years that had—however temporarily—derailed my life.
“So I should be calling you Dr. Kitten?” Finn prodded me. “Somehow I like that even more.”
“No, I ended up not completing the program,” I said, pulling away from Finn’s touch, tucking my chin against my chest, and wrapping my arms around myself to fight off the chill that crept up my spine.
“Really?”
I tried to sound nonchalant about it, like the loss of my PhD didn’t bother me in the slightest, like it wasn’t something my mother held over my head as proof that I couldn’t make it all by myself after all. “Mm-hmmm.”
“What stopped you?”
“Nothing, I just didn’t finish,” I told him. “Now, can we talk about you for a while? I think I’ve earned a couple of answers from you now, Finn.”