Chapter Fifteen
After school, we followed Sully again. This time with a determined single-minded focus. We were going to get him before he got us, before he messed with anyone else we knew. We were going to watch out for weaknesses, to see what he got up to, and we were going to deal with him, one way or another.
I prayed we could do it. At least before we killed each other.
Base and I were very different in some ways, too alike in others. It made for a feisty kind of friendship at the best of times. Throw in some fear and pent-up lust on my part, and things unbalanced themselves very easily. But I hadn’t figured for how awkward I would feel around Base, even after the closeness of sleeping next to each other, but especially after the things I had told him about myself. It was as though it had never happened, as though we had had a dozen different conversations that never happened. It made me mad. He made it feel as though the more I grew closer to him, the more he pulled away.
“Do you like Shauna?” I blurted as we drove behind Sully’s moving car, unable to stop myself.
“What?” He sounded genuinely stunned.
“Shauna. Do. You. Like. Her?”
“I hate her. Why?”
“You don’t act like you hate her,” I accused, but I was relieved to focus on something other than Sully. Following him around scared me so much that I pretty much had to think of something else. Even acting petty and childish was better than stressing over Sully.
“What on earth are you…” Brian glanced at me, a smile threatening his lips. “Unbelievable! Don’t tell me you’re jealous, Devlin.”
I made a weird sound through my nose as I choked on my own contempt at his audacity. “As if. As if I would ever be jealous of you or her. Don’t make me laugh.”
“This is getting too bizarre for words,” he muttered. “Look, Sully’s slowing down, so I’m just going to pull in here. I’m pretty sure he knows we’re following him.”
“Why?”
“Because he just looked right at us. And we’re seriously bad at this. I think he wants us to see this.”
“Why would he want us to see whatever he gets up to?”
“Maybe because it’s so bad,” he said after a minute. “Maybe he wants us to be scared, and scarred, for life.”
“Why do you always have to say such creepy shit?”
“Somebody has to make the guesses around here. You ready?”
Sully had gone into a pub, so we decided to wait around until he came back out.
“What if he does something in the pub?” I began.
“We can’t go in. Not when he’s there. Besides, he won’t do anything with so many witnesses. If he could, he would have murdered the entire school already. He has to have some limitations,” he said, pretty sensibly. “We’ll wait and see what happens. It’s all we can do. This was probably never the greatest idea, you know?”
“But we’ve no others, so we still run with it? Fine, but I feel like he’s going to just pick us off as we sit in the car.”
“He won’t. It’s too busy.”
And it was busy. A high profile football match pretty much guaranteed lots of folks in pubs and clubs that night.
“Besides, with your trusty bat, nobody in their right mind would go near us.”
I had to laugh at that. I had taken the bat with us, much to Base’s amusement, but I felt safer armed with something more than holy water. Although I had splashed some on my wrists that morning when Base wasn’t looking.
“I could never like her,” Base said out of the blue. “No matter what. I could never like Shauna, of all people.”
“Should I ask for the story behind that somewhat emphatic statement?” I teased.
“You could ask, but I wouldn’t tell,” he said with a grin, before nodding, the colour draining from his face. “There he is with some woman.”
A small brunette stumbled after Sully as he pulled her into the alleyway next to the pub.
“Jesus, Dev. She looks a bit like you.”
“What? No way.”
“I swear, she does. He’s trying to freak us out. Stay in the car. I’ll go,” he said, grabbing the camera.
“And me. I’m not sitting here alone waiting for you to get killed.”
We both crept down the road in a hurry, me with my phone in one hand, my bat in the other, trying to look somewhat normal. “Please be having sex,” I whispered over and over.
“I have to worry about you,” Base said, giving a nervous laugh. We quietened by the alley, peering around to see…
Sully kissing the face off the brunette.
Base lowered the camera with some relief. But I had my phone in my hand, filming, and I knew I couldn’t stop, just in case. She whimpered, and I didn’t think they were kissing any more.
Her arms thrashed about in the air, but Sully’s only gripped harder, then he looked at us and gave us a bloody grin, and I almost dropped my phone. But I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t call for help, and Base brought me back to earth by half-carrying me down the road after him.
“We need to get out of here,” he said urgently.
“But the girl.”
“We don’t know how to help her,” he said. “You saw. You have to believe what he is now.”
I shoved my phone in my pocket. “We have to see if she’s okay.”
He hesitated for only a second before nodding. We ran back down to the alleyway, but Sully was gone, and the girl was crawling on the ground, still bleeding. She looked older all of a sudden, less like me.
Base ran to her and helped her to her feet, but I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A movement in the shadows. Sully sprang from one wall of the alleyway to the other, his fangs on full show. I forgot about my phone and broke into a run as he pounced on Base, knocking the young woman to the ground. Base immediately turned to strike Sully, but he barely made an impact because Sully was already jumping back up the wall. So he didn’t fly. He just jumped. High.
He attacked Base again, both of them grappling. I lifted the bat and swung as hard as I could, connecting with the back of Sully’s head with a loud crack. Surprised, Sully let go of Base and stumbled to the side, but he shook himself off and leapt away. I wondered why until I heard voices from the end of the alleyway shouting. Sully’s victim’s friends had come to find her.
It took a bit of explaining as to why I was carrying a bat, but the woman, although a little confused, said she’d been attacked and that we’d helped her. Base and I slipped away while her friends fussed over her.
We got into the car, and Base sped off, ignoring me as I watched the video on my phone, over and over. Grainy images, but the bloody teeth were as clear as day.
“What is he?” I whispered.
“You know what he is,” Base said impatiently. “He’s a vampire.”
I wound down the window to counteract the sudden urge I had to vomit.
“Don’t do that,” Base said, making me wind it back up.
“Why?”
“We don’t know what he can do,” he explained. “He could be super fast as well as super strong, super anything. We have to be careful. He wanted us to see what he does. He wanted us to be afraid. Oh, God, poor Aoife.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said. “He told me stuff that didn’t make sense at the time. Like, how he only takes one. I assume he means he only kills one before moving away. To avoid suspicion, maybe. Either way, he’s revealed himself. Maybe he’ll move on. Maybe he’ll leave us alone now.”
“You don’t believe that,” Base said with certainty. “There’s no way you believe that.”
“I don’t know what else to think!” I yelled.
“He’s so strong, Dev. He could have killed me. Easily. You pretty much saved me back there.”
“He knew people were coming, I think. So let’s add super hearing to the list.”
“So much for holy water.” He shook his head. “I’m going to get some food, then we’re going to figure out what to do next, okay?
You need the sugar from a fizzy drink or something.”
His driving grew erratic, and I began to think it was him who needed the sugar.
“I can’t believe this,” I said a while later as we chewed our food in the parking lot of a drive-through. “I can’t believe this is actually happening. How do you kill a vampire? I mean walking in the sun is supposed to be a biggie, but he has no problems with it.”
“Stake through the heart? But never look them in the eye. We already know that one. Holy water might only work in large doses. That leaves beheading. Fire. Maybe silver,” Base rattled off in rapid succession with a strange focus in his eyes.
“Um, what, Rain Man?”
He shrugged himself out of the weird trance he was in. “I’ve been reading,” he admitted. “Lots of ways to hurt them. If we try them all, surely something will be right.”
“Well, no matter what he can do, he needs his brain, at least,” I said. “I wonder if he’s actually dead. I wonder how old he is. I wonder—”
“Please stop wondering,” Base said, holding up his hands. He took a long sip of his drink. “So it sounds like he feeds on girls. He’s fed on probably Aoife, your mam, and you, too. Even if it was only a little. But maybe he needs to kill to survive. Or maybe he just likes it. Either way, he can’t have dead bodies piling up, or somebody would notice pretty quickly. So we’re probably running out of time.”
“But we’d see on the news if girls everywhere were being sucked dry, surely.”
“There are over a million people in Dublin. Maybe he hides the bodies, but even if he doesn’t, we don’t hear about everyone who dies. Nobody does, not even with the Internet. I’ve googled his name, and it doesn’t look like he exists, so he probably uses fake names everywhere. We just need to kill him before he decides to stop playing games with us.”
“We could sneak into his house and…” I motioned slicing my throat.
“Unless he gets us first.”
“I’d rather go after him than keep being afraid to look behind me in case he’s there.”
“I have this big list of things that might hurt him. If we just stockpile, we should be okay.”
“Unless everything we know is wrong,” I reminded him.
“Unless everything we know is wrong,” he echoed softly. “Maybe we just set his house on fire some night.”
“Which wouldn’t work if he didn’t sleep, or had a great sense of smell, or was, like, psychic or something.”
“He can’t be psychic, or he would never have come here in the first place,” Base said, grinning.
“Yeah. We’re kind of a pain in the arse,” I agreed.
His phone beeped. A text from his mother who wanted her car back.
“Want me to drop you off first?”
“No!” I shook my head.
“What?”
“I don’t want to be alone. Dude, don’t you remember what we saw tonight?”
“I don’t think I can get away with another night away from home.”
“Sorry,” I said, biting my lip. “Of course. I forgot.”
“Screw it,” he said after a minute. “I don’t want Sully following me home. She’ll get over it eventually.”
He ended up pretending he was staying in a friend’s house because he needed a break from his family. I heard his mother cry over the phone, and I felt awful, but I had a feeling he wasn’t lying. Besides, it was safer for his family if he didn’t go there. My mother had already been bitten by Sully. There wasn’t much I could do about that, but Sully had never been to Base’s house. Hopefully the invitation thing stood for something.
The sad fact was neither of us could save our families from Sully. If he wanted to kill us all, he probably could. But I didn’t think he would, partly due to the whole attention factor. He would be remembered if so many people died. If one girl disappeared, people might think she had run off with that boy who lived in town for a while. But people would look for the creepy weirdo outsider if entire families were wiped out. At least, that’s what I told myself.
I waited in a café while he dropped off the car and picked up some clothes and his laptop. I sat there alone, an untouched cup of coffee in front of me, and tried to control a knee that wouldn’t stop jumping, until he came to get me.
“I warned them not to answer the door to anyone who looks even remotely like Sully. Just in case,” he said as he sank into the chair opposite me.
“Good.” I reached across the table to touch his jaw. “Brian, your face.”
He took my hand away from his face, but he didn’t let go. Using his other hand, he touched his jaw gingerly. “Yeah, I had to explain the bruising away. Didn’t go down well.”
Wincing, I stared at the bruises in concern. “Are you okay?”
“Worrying about me now?” He shook his head and let go of my hand. “Sad part is that he didn’t even hit me very hard, Dev.”
My mouth formed into an O.
“Yeah,” he said. “My reaction exactly. Should we head on then? Get this over and done with?”
I nodded, so we walked to my house, and I regretted every step of the journey. I felt as though a million eyes watched us as we walked together, but Base kept talking and distracting me from it. I took a deep breath when I got to my front door, but my mother wasn’t home, and she had left a note saying she was staying with Richard at a hotel. I wanted to vomit. Reverting to type already. She had no sense at all, yet this one time, it would probably work in her favour.
We watched the news to see if there was anything about the girl Sully had bitten outside the club, but there was nothing.
“Maybe it’s too early,” I said as he looked online for any stories about it.
“It’s probably not big enough of a story. She didn’t even understand what happened to her. People still don’t know what’s out there. That’s the problem. It keeps him safe.”
I locked up the house as he searched for information on vampires on his laptop.
When I came back into the room, I watched as a muscle in his jaw tensed and wished I could wipe away the bruise there.
I cleared my throat. “Should we lock ourselves in my room again? Easier to defend than the entire house, you know?”
He shrugged, still staring at the screen. “I can sleep on the sofa if it makes you more comfortable.”
“There’s a vampire running around who wants to drink my blood. I’ll never feel comfortable again.”
He laughed. “Fine. You can lock me in your room, you little sex pest.”
My cheeks heated up, which only made him laugh all the more, and we prepared to spend the night in my room. Again. In the bathroom, I changed into a rather prim looking pair of pyjamas, and ignored Base’s amused glances when I returned to the bedroom.
“I’m never going to jump your bones unless you beg me first, so you don’t have to put on the granniest pair of pyjamas you can get your hands on.”
“They’re comfortable.” I pouted as I locked my bedroom door. “And it’s not like you’re the Style King of the Universe.”
“I’m comfortable in my own skin, I’ll have you know.” He lay on the bed, his arms under his head, looking more relaxed than I felt. I couldn’t believe how at ease he looked in my bed when it wasn’t so long ago that we were constantly at each other’s throats. “I think we should hunt him down and kill him tomorrow.”
I tripped over a shoe and practically fell onto the bed. Pushing myself back onto my feet, I gaped at Base. “Are you serious? I mean, we’re not ready.”
“Ready for what? To kill a vampire? Don’t think there’s a class for that, Devlin. We should do it tonight.” But he didn’t move.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
“So am I,” he admitted. “But I can’t let him kill Aoife.”
He had consoled himself with ringing her house frequently to make sure she was still alive. Sometimes she answered the phone, sometimes she didn’t, but it gave him a bit of peace each time she did, knowing sh
e was okay.
“Why hasn’t he done it yet?” I asked, thinking hard.
“Maybe because we’re watching him.”
“But why would he be afraid of us? What’s he waiting for? He could go there in the middle of the night and take her for all we would know.”
“Am I supposed to understand the mind of a vampire?” Then he hesitated. “What if… what if he wants us to see it?”
I swallowed hard, not relishing that thought at all. “He said he could taste our pain. Maybe having an audience makes it taste better or something. Maybe he feeds off their fear, too.”
“I wonder how many he’s killed. If he’s made their families watch. If he’s done that hypnosis thing and made them think it never happened. Made them think something worse happened.” Base didn’t look confident anymore.
“Maybe we should—”
The window shuddered as something hit it hard. I yelped with fright, staring at the shadow behind the curtain from where the streetlight shone at my window.
“Devlin O’Mara,” it began again.
“I can’t take this,” I whispered, and Base grabbed my hand.
“We’ll wait it out,” he said. “Just like last night. As long as he’s here, he’s not hurting anyone, right? He’s just trying to scare you. Like you said, he feeds on your pain.”
But Sully kept throwing himself at the window. What did he want from me? All I knew was that I was terrified, and my dreams would never be easy again.
But then I had to imagine what Aoife was going through. If she knew what was happening to her. If that girl in the alleyway had realised she was being attacked by a vampire. Did she remember? Did she think she was going crazy? I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind, and I got up to pull my phone out of the pocket of my jeans and watch the video again.
“I’m going to upload it,” I said. “I’m going to make sure people see this. Whether they believe it or not, at least I did something to warn them. If it makes one person think twice, it’ll be worth it. I think he’s going to kill me, Base. I think it’s going to be me, and not Aoife. That’s why he comes here. That’s why we rarely see her with him. He just wants me to suffer before I die. To make it special.”
“Upload it,” he said. “I’ll share it on all of my accounts, too.”
Bolstered by the latest idea, we both sat quietly and waited for the online world to pick up on what most people would call a hoax. Still, some people would be warier for it, and people at school would see that Sully was at the very least a creep, if not, a monster.
I pushed my phone away, the sound of Sully’s voice sticking to my skin and spreading across my body in a cool chill. He would probably make everyone who watched the video forget. It was all so pointless.
“It can’t be real,” I mumbled, sitting on the side of the bed and shaking so badly that I couldn’t hold still for love nor money. “None of this can be real.”
“Hey,” Base said, coming over to kneel in front of me. He lifted my chin so I would look at him. “You’re holding me together here. I can’t let you fall apart now. Save it until it’s over. Can you do that for me?”
I nodded, unable to look away. “Everything’s going to work out in the end,” he said, pulling me closer to him with a sigh. I clung to him, inhaling his scent, and drawing whatever comfort I could from him. At first, it was just a hug, but my hands seemed to move by themselves, from clinging to stroking. They slipped under his shirt, and he drew in a harsh breath. He was so warm, so safe, and the closer I got to him, the easier it was to ignore the sounds outside.
“What are you doing?” he whispered, but he didn’t move to stop me.
“I don’t know.”
He held my face between his hands and stared at me, his dark eyes unrelenting even as a particularly loud bang shook the window frame. He ran his thumbs across my cheeks, a look on his face that made me feel wanted.
“I want to kiss you so bad,” he said in a hushed voice, and I relished the sound of those words.
“Is that a warning?” I tried to sound light-hearted, but it came out too seriously, and I reached for him instead. He met my kiss with one of his own, and I ended up kneeling on the floor with him. We swayed together in one desperate kiss, and the sounds faded away.
My head was full of the thumping of my heart, my mouth full of his taste, and there was no room for fear. He kissed me in a way I had only read about in books, as though he couldn’t survive without being as close to me as possible. I was even hungrier. I couldn’t get through the night without him. Everything had come together; all of the stress, tension, lust, and longing had turned into need. Kissing was no longer overrated.
He pulled away, practically panting, but he was grinning, and it made me feel better about the whole latching on to his face like a horny suckerfish thing.
“I didn’t expect that,” he said.
“We needed something else to think about.”
He gave me a funny look. “That’s not exactly a compliment.”
“I like you,” I whispered, immediately wishing I could take it back. I looked away, mortified, but he made me face him, and I wanted to be real for a change. To show how I really felt. To be free from the constant fear.
So when he got up and slid his arms around me, his mouth on mine again, I let go, more than willing. He lifted me in his arms, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. He sat on the bed, still holding me tight, one of his hands drifting up and down my spine, and I cupped his cheeks as I kissed him back just as fiercely, both of us frantic in our urgency to get closer to one another. He stopped unexpectedly, holding me away from him.
“What?” I asked, a little annoyed at the interruption.
“It’s gone quiet,” he said, glancing around. “Is it over?”
I realised he was right. Nothing but silence. Too silent, in fact. And then it began, an awful scratching at the window. With the curtains closed, it was only scarier as my imagination lifted into full flight. What was he doing out there?
“Can he get in?” I said, holding onto Base for dear life again. Somehow the screeching sound of nail on glass was worse than the banging.
“He could easily smash the window if he really wanted in,” Base said sensibly. “He’s trying to scare you. Because you stopped feeling scared for a minute there, right?”
I nodded, licking my now swollen bottom lip. I had completely forgotten to be afraid.
“He’s trying something new to attract your attention then. That’s all.” He dropped light kisses on my neck, but the moment was gone. I was afraid all over again.
“I can’t stand another night like this,” I said. “Us locked away, him outside knowing we’re terrified.”
“We won’t,” he promised. “This is the last time he gets to do this.” He ran his hand through my hair, gazing up at me with that longing again, and I leaned into him, knowing it was a mistake. It was just the situation we were in, the risk of dying soon, I knew that, but I felt so much better around him. I wanted more from him, wanted to savour the good moments for the rest of my life, especially as I was growing convinced that I didn’t have long to live. I had pissed off a vampire, and he wanted his own back. But Base… Base had always been the one for me, even when I tried to hate him.
“Brian,” I whispered in the dark, holding his gaze.
“Yes,” he said, his voice deepening.
“I think I’m going to beg you now.”
His breath caught in his throat audibly, and a little gleeful squirm ran through my body. He rested his hand on my knee, drawing it upward slowly. I found his lips again, delighting in his obvious nervousness. Sully wanted me to be petrified, but I had Base, and I didn’t have to be afraid. I knew Base could distract me from the horrors of the night. I knew that for one night, Base would help me forget.
I slid lower onto his lap, facing him as I ran my fingers through his hair. Moving his head back to take a good look at me in the dark, he unbuttoned my so not sexy pyjamas so slowly, I t
hought I might explode. I needed warm skin against mine, and although he hesitated, I pulled his shirt over his head, and I didn’t think about my bad memories, didn’t think about the vampire outside my window.
Base was beautiful in his own way, and I ran my hands across his chest in a kind of wonder. I hovered one hand over his heart, and he covered it with his own. My own heart thumped wildly at the sensations running throughout my body. Everything had changed. I might explode if it didn’t change even more.
He slid my pyjama top off my shoulders, letting it fall away so slowly, my skin tingled. His fingers ran down my bare arms, giving me goose bumps. He grasped my waist with two hands and pulled me closer to him.
“You’re so beautiful, Devlin,” he said right before he kissed me. His tongue explored my mouth, and my temperature shot up all over again as his hand found my heart, his fingers drifting along my skin, leaving a blazing trail in their wake.
He lifted me again, this time laying me on the bed beneath him. He hesitated as if unsure I was comfortable with that, but I pulled him closer. I needed to make new memories.
His warmth surrounded me completely, and I savoured his weight on me. I made a small sound of pleasure as his hands roamed my body, relishing the new sensations until he froze, and all of the noises outside came back in a rush.
“What’s wrong?” I asked in confusion, brushing his hair out of his eyes.
“When you said nobody’s slept in this bed, you really meant… You mean, not even Deco?”
“What? Why on earth are you thinking about Deco right now?”
“Shit.”
“Brian?” I spoke in a small voice, and he backed away, putting space between us again. “Brian, stop it.”
“You really don’t want to do this. I’m so sorry,” he groaned. “I shouldn’t be taking advantage of you when you’re scared out of your mind like this. Not after everything that’s happened to you.”
“What are you talking about? I want… I want you.”
“Do you?” he demanded. “I mean, you hated me with every bone in your body a week ago. So I’m finding that hard to believe. Do you really want me, or is this a way to distract you so the night will be over?”
I bit my lip. “That too.”
He stood, preparing to throw his shirt back on, but I flung myself at him, refusing to let him close up again.
“Stop it,” I said. “I’m standing here in my bra and the most ridiculous pyjama bottoms known to mankind, so stop trying to make me feel even more of a fool.”
“I don’t think you’re a fool,” he said softly, laying his hands on my waist. I leaned toward him automatically, and he pressed his forehead against mine and squeezed his eyes shut. Just as I began to relax, he pulled away abruptly and ran his hands over his face.
Dread wound its way around my body. “What’s the problem?”
“You’re embarrassed to be seen with me. You’ve made it clear that you hate me many, many times. It doesn’t exactly do a lot for my confidence, okay?”
A cold chuckle drifted into the room, soon becoming loudly derisive laughter.
“He likes this,” I said with trembling lips. “He wants us to turn on each other.”
“This has nothing to do with him,” he said. “This is me and you, getting back to normal.”
“I don’t want normal,” I protested. “Why do you have to be so stubborn all of the time?”
“Me? Stubborn? So says the one who woke up one day and thought, “Ooh, I’ll make a fool of Base to save my pride.” Give me a fucking break, Dev!”
I stepped back in shock. “Are you serious? This is what you’re thinking about?”
“Every time I see you, I think about it,” he hissed, his eyes seeming black in the dark. “Every time.”
I covered my body with my arms, full of shame about everything that had happened. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I made a mistake, and I’m sorry.”
I turned around to put my top back on, but his hot palms against my shoulder blades rooted me to the spot.
“We shouldn’t fight,” he said in a calmer voice. “But we obviously live in two different worlds. As soon as Sully’s gone, you’ll regret this, and I really don’t want to be anyone’s regret.”
“Why don’t you let me think for myself?” I snapped, whirling around to face him. “You’re the only one coming up with reasons why we shouldn’t touch each other. So you’re the only one with the problem.”
“Maybe I am,” he said simply. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
I wanted to shout at him and say I didn’t want him to, but I didn’t. I lay in the bed alone that night, crying silently as Sully called in harsh words aimed at my ears. I didn’t want to face him alone. I didn’t want to face him without Base. But the choice had been taken away from me.