We were inches apart; I could have licked his lips if I wanted to.
“What’s funny?” I cocked my head to the right. The connection between us felt like a gold beam of light connecting us like a hot string.
“You’re here. But I know you’re not.” He giggled and leaned his head back against the wall. He was laughing so hard his cheeks were bright red.
“All right. Come on,” I said, holding him from under his arms. In my vampire state, especially this state, I was considerably strong. Not superhuman, but strong. I got him up. He swayed, but I helped hold his balance.
“Roy. Dude. Thanks, man.” Justin could hardly walk, but I steadied him. “Dude. I’m gonna puke again.”
He stumbled to the street and vomited. He leaned a hand on a car and when he was finished he lowered himself to the ground. I leaned on the hood of the car and crossed my arms across my chest. It was late enough and I couldn’t care less now what anyone here thought of my new, vampire appearance. Justin was here with me and that was all that mattered.
Justin looked up and squinted.
“Dude, Roy—I can’t focus my eyes. But right now, you look just like Lenah.”
I lifted him from the ground again, and we trudged quite sloppily toward the Wickham campus.
Justin’s single dorm room looked the same. Lacrosse sticks were strewn around the room, the nicest still tucked away protectively in the back of his closet. Dozens of sneakers were scattered unmatched in the front of the closet. Team uniforms and helmets were grass stained and littered every possible available space. Somewhere on the first floor music played and echoed through an open window. I wondered where the dorm RAs were at this hour. I looked up: There was something new. Justin had stuck tiny glow-in-the-dark stars onto the ceiling. I looked down at the bed and watched him for a moment. He wasn’t sleeping yet, but he was still. He brought his hand to his head and groaned. I lay down next to him softly, quiet so he wouldn’t feel it. But he turned on his side and opened his eyes. I was shocked to see that they held tears. I knew he would be horrified for me to see him like this, so I said nothing. He examined my face, and the tears billowed over onto his cheeks. “I know you’re not here,” he said. “But I miss you.”
I reached out to hold his cheeks in my hands but quickly brought them back to my sides.
“Lenah—” he croaked in a drunken whisper. And then in the next second, he slept.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The way the sun filtered through the blinds in Quartz was completely different from Seeker. Quartz was set back in a meadow and not blocked by any tall buildings, so the light was strong and bright. I sat on a bay window seat, my knees close to my chest. I leaned my head back as the light trickled into the room. It felt good. Like endless meadows filled with grass. Like summer days on an apple orchard. Like Rhode’s voice in my ear. The light made me feel like I was home. I had no need to fear it anymore. Rhode said I would have gifts I didn’t have before and wielding light with my hands was one of them. An unlikely weapon but a welcome talent.
I kept watching the grounds, but there was no sign of the coven. I only had one day to explain everything to Justin and keep him out of harm’s way. There was no doubt in my mind that the coven was already in Lovers Bay. I just didn’t know where. They too were guarded in their minds. Just when I thought I would have to wake Justin myself, he stirred.
“Ugh,” he moaned, and grabbed his head. He swung his legs sluggishly to the side of the bed and rested his elbows on his knees. He looked at the floor.
“How much did you drink last night?” I said, not moving my eyes from him.
“Jesus!” Justin jumped up and threw himself against the wall. A horrific realization passed over his face.
His mouth dropped, he laughed for a few seconds, and then his face went completely blank. I hadn’t noticed before but on the night table was a tiny vial filled with a clear liquid. He pulled out the stopper and sent the liquid flying at me so it splashed with force onto the floor. The vial cracked, and glass exploded on the ground.
“Are you mad!?” I asked, looking at the cracked glass and then up at Justin. He ripped a cross necklace from around his neck and held it out in front of him. “Get back.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
It was like an onslaught of every vampire cliché. He leaned to his left and snapped the shade so the entire bedroom lit up and I was awash in sunlight. It felt like a warm bath after a cold morning. He threw a clove of garlic at me, which whizzed by and smashed on the opposite wall.
“Justin, stop!”
Justin was pressed against the wall, his palms spread and tight against the wood. He was panting. Justin fumbled with the night table drawer and pulled out another vial of clear liquid. With a shaky hand he pulled the cork out of the top of the bottle with the cross chain dangling through his fingers. He tossed the contents of the bottle again so it splashed in my face. I wiped it slowly with the back of my hand. I stepped back.
Justin was balancing on the tips of his toes. “Stay back,” he commanded.
“Was that holy water? None of that is going to work. Vampires are older than Christ.”
“You said if you were ever a vampire again you would be evil—reprehensible.”
Justin tiptoed sideways like a crab toward his bedroom door. “It’s true. I did say that. But, I’m different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something happened in the transformation. I retained my humanity, my soul.”
Justin stopped moving but kept his hands raised, a crucifix extended in his grip.
“How?”
“I have no idea.”
Justin’s eyes narrowed, and he examined my face.
“I swear,” I said. “The only thing you can do is trust me.”
We were quiet. Voices of early risers echoed in the hall. Justin dropped his hands by his sides. “You look different,” he muttered. His eyes darted from the floor to me and then back at the floor.
“The pores seal during the transformation. Tear ducts, too. It gives us a glowing, waxy appearance.”
The way the light streamed into the room, a wash of morning shined over the wooden floor. All of Justin’s belongings felt suspended in time, frozen.
“We have limited time, and I must tell you why I’m here,” I said, and gestured to the bed.
Justin, still with his back against the wall, scooted until he reached his bed again and sat down. He leaned his back against the wall. I sat down a couple feet away from him, almost at the end of the bed. I didn’t speak just yet.
“I’ve thought about you coming back,” he said. “Thought maybe I dreamt the whole thing. But other people remembered you, and I knew all of Wickham hadn’t lost their minds. But I thought maybe I’d lost my mind, anyway.”
“You didn’t.”
“I wish I had.”
That stung.
“That night at winter prom—” I started to say.
“I just started to get my life back together,” Justin interrupted.
“I never meant to ruin your life,” I whispered.
“The absence of you ruined my life.” Hot shame oozed through my chest. “Where did you go?” Justin asked.
“Back to England.”
There was a beat of silence, but I continued.
“There is a reason I’m here. The fact that I retained my soul is a bit of a problem in the vampire world.”
I told Justin about Vicken, the coven, the whole lot. I told him of the young girl back in England and that once my true nature had been discovered by Vicken, I left straightaway.
“The bond between the coven magically binds Vicken to me. He cannot hurt me.”
“Because you loved each other a hundred years ago?”
“Yes.”
“But you can hurt him?”
I nodded. “Once I was made human, the bonds of love were broken. See,” I said, daring to rest my hand on the bed close to Justin’s foot. Justin didn’t jump
away, so I left it there and continued. “Once a vampire falls in love, they are bound. For eternity.”
“Are you bound, to, um, humans?” Justin asked. The apples of his cheeks flushed red.
“No. Only vampires are cursed by that particular piece of magic.”
“So we’re not bound.”
“Not in that way, no,” I explained.
Justin pressed his fingertips to his temples and rubbed them in small circles.
“What a day for a hangover,” he said, and got up from the bed. He looked out the bay window at the sleepy campus.
“I’m here for your protection,” I explained.
“So they’re coming? For me?” Justin asked. His tone was factual, not afraid, almost a little glib.
“No. They’re coming for me.”
“I don’t get it. Why come here?”
“The night of winter prom, I’m quite certain I saved your life. Vicken said that if I didn’t go with him, you would die. A few days ago, the night my true nature was uncovered, he saw into my thoughts. At least I think he did. The first place I thought to come was here. Vicken knows I would do anything to protect you. If I didn’t come here, they’d come, anyway, just to check, and kill you in the process. It’s a catch-22.”
A look of panic swept over Justin’s face. He swallowed hard.
“Okay,” he said, grabbing a lacrosse stick from the back of the closet as he paced. Unconsciously, he was cradling it like there was a ball in the net. “So, we need a plan. How can we kill a vampire?” he said, looking more like the Justin I knew.
“You can kill a vampire by sunlight. The other classic ways are beheading, or a stake through the heart.”
“I never understood that. The sunlight.”
“Vampires cannot be in sunlight because they are not whole. As I told you, our pores are sealed to protect the magic inside. When white light hits our skin, little fires ignite. The sunlight burns our sealed pores open, exposing the dark magic to the bright day, snuffing it out, as if it never existed. We are cold as ice, preserved in the darkness. Sunlight breaks these bonds down.”
“It sounds so clinical.”
“We are all born from the earth. It only makes sense that something natural would kill vampires.”
“What about garlic cloves and sleeping in coffins?”
“Authors like to have fun with vampires,” I explained. “Only the natural elements can kill us. And we can kill one another.”
We were quiet again.
“So this is you as a vampire?” Justin sat down on the bed next to me, the lacrosse stick still in his hand. “Doesn’t seem so bad.”
Justin’s eyes did that twinkle that they did when he spoke softly. He reached his right hand out and placed it on my left knee. With his other hand he touched my cheek and turned my face toward him. We looked at each other, and I could feel through ESP as well as my heart that he wanted to kiss me. He leaned forward, and I did, too. Just when his lips parted, I pulled back. “We can’t,” I said, looking at the floor.
“Because you’re a vampire again?”
“That’s the long and short of it,” I said, and stood up. I turned. “There’s something else.” I was facing him. “Something else you need to know.”
I placed my palms together so the left side of my right hand was touching the right side of my left hand. If I had matched the life lines from the left to the right hand, they would have been perfectly connected. I tensed my palms so my fingers shook, like they were vibrating. Then, in a low hum, my pores opened and light came through. A white trickle of light then became a strong ray and shone up from my palms and onto the ceiling.
I watched goose bumps roll over Justin’s arms. He stood up and squinted down at my open hands. Without looking away from the light shining out from my palms he said, “Don’t all vampires die in the sunlight?”
I placed my hands by my side, breaking the connection and throwing the room back into the light of the early morning.
“This is a particularly unique gift.”
Justin swallowed and said nothing.
“During the day, you’re safe,” I explained, trying to calm him down. “Vicken is the only one strong enough to stand the sunlight. He wouldn’t risk exposure in a place he doesn’t know well. If for some reason we’re separated, around six o’clock make sure you are indoors in a locked room.”
I watched goose bumps roll over Justin’s arms again. His eyes darted to the window and the day breaking over the green trees that decorated his view. “It’s morning now,” he said. “Everything’s changed.”
And so it was.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It took an hour to convince Justin that he needed to go about his day as though I wasn’t there.
“I’ll meet you at your lacrosse practice. In the woods that separate the field from the beach. Just come to the edge. I’ll see you.”
When I finally left that morning, I tried to keep a low profile. I wore one of Justin’s black baseball hats, jeans, and a black T-shirt. Every few moments I touched the outside of my jeans, on my pocket, just to make sure that I still had the ritual tucked away safely. It was six in the morning, so I knew as well as anyone that the campus was basically deserted.
Cherry blossoms dripped off the branches of the trees that lined the pathways. Daisies and tulips grew on every manicured lawn, and the grass was greener than ever. I passed the crowded Wickham greenhouse; it was almost bursting with plants.
While Justin showered and got ready for his day, I had something I needed to see. The art tower at Hopper. It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to think of Tony while I was in Hathersage. Quite the contrary. If I thought of him, my focus would have come crashing down, revealing my true intentions to the coven. It was already a struggle not to think about Justin every time I blinked an eye.
I climbed the familiar art studio stairs, running my hand over the banister of the twisting and turning wooden staircase. I looked out the small, square windows with a dull pain in my heart. I stepped quietly. I knew there was a banister beneath my hands, but I could not feel the textured wood or the coolness of the air in the tower. Just that there was air in the stairwell and it entered in and out of my body.
Finally coming to the top of the stairs, I stepped into the art studio doorway. There, across the room, and in the same spot from that winter, was my portrait. I walked toward it and stopped at the other side of the room. Unlike my sense of smell before, which was limited to blood and flesh and occasionally herbs, this time, every smell was heightened. For instance, I could smell every single ingredient in the paints. I could tell just from taking a breath which colors were which. The pine green paint had more ammonia than the red. The brushes smelled clean, like soap. There were exactly 5,564 cracks in the wood of the wall behind the painting. These days the preciseness of my vision and the strength of my smell was too much to take. It was just another pain I had to endure.
I looked over the portrait. It was amazing how accurately Tony had depicted the muscles in my back and the exact curvature of my mouth. And the tattoo on my back, as well. Tony had captured Rhode’s handwriting. My eyelashes, too, and the golden tint of my skin.
Thump thump, thump thump. Someone was coming up the stairs to the art tower. Because of a lumbering step, I knew that weight on the right side of the body was heavier than the left and remembered Tony’s mismatched boots. He stepped into the doorway.
Tony gasped. I kept my back to him though I turned my face so he could confirm for himself that it was me. I turned back to look at the portrait. He, on the other hand, was staring at the back of me. I could feel the intensity of his gaze. Although the normal human cannot see the vampire aura, they can feel it.
The air was still. The only sound was a rush of the breeze through the open windows. A whir, then silence.
“Rhode Lewin,” I said.
Tony didn’t move.
“He was a fourteenth-century vampire.” I stared at the features of my portrait.
“Original member of the Order of the Garter. A ring of knights under Edward the Third.”
Tony walked toward me. After a moment, he was standing beside me and we both stared at the portrait. Neither one of us looked at the other.
“Coined the phrase ‘evil be he who thinketh evil.’ He was the man in the engraving and in the photo. He died in September.”
I looked to my right and met Tony’s eyes. They widened as he searched my face. My vampire appearance must have frightened him—the sealed skin, and the radiating aura. Like a gleaming ghost. The blue of my eyes was like sea glass, hard and flat. Tony swallowed hard and kept his eyes on mine. In this state, in a dark room, my pupils were almost entirely closed like a cat’s in bright sunlight.
I examined Tony’s face for the first time in four months since I saw him slow dancing with Tracy at the winter prom. He looked the same except he had shorter hair and bigger gages in his ear. It made his lobes seem even larger than the size of a quarter.
I looked back to the portrait, this time noticing the slope of my shoulder. Tony had depicted it exactly right. With the small dimple right at the joint of my shoulder. I could feel the energy coming off Tony, his heat, the sudden drops or changes in his body. I wasn’t scaring him at all; he was anxious.
“Rhode once told me that when vampires first came into existence, we really were just corpses filled with blood. Enchanted by whatever black magic curses us.” I paused and looked at Tony again. “But we evolved, as all things do.” We shared a small, comforting smile. There was a beat of silence while I looked over the features of my former self. As I turned to leave, I added, “Who are they to judge the damned?”
Once my back was to him, Tony called, “So that’s it? You’re just gonna leave?”
I turned back to Tony, who remained in front of the portrait.
“I came to tell you the truth, as I should have months ago.”