Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
“I just noticed something,” says La-La, tilting his head, all his thrashing white hair twisting in the wind. “You’re missing half of an arm.”
For a flicker of an instant, Raya feels a stab of humility.
Kyle’s Reach feels it, too.
La-La’s grin returns as he leans forward, the tips of his toes digging deeper into Kyle, causing him to grunt in discomfort as the vampire’s face draws closer to Raya. “I want to know how it happened. Tell me. How you lost it. How you lost a part of you forever. Did you even get to tell it goodbye?”
“Fuck you very much,” says Raya.
“Tell me how deeply it hurts your soul. Tell me how much you miss your arm. Would you like me to take your other one?” La-La’s throat bubbles up with laughter again. “I would like so very much to cut you into many pieces. You are so proud right now. That delicious, breakable pride … It will be so beautiful to watch you shatter before my eyes.”
Raya, for the first time since confronting La-La, feels fear. True fear. Kyle picks it up at once. Raya steps back, shaking.
That single step back causes La-La to cackle with delight.
Kyle has only one weapon left. It’s not the scalpel he still grips in his hand, which would be just as effective as a toothpick against a vampire. It’s a weapon everyone else on the bus has, too, only no one would dare brandish it intentionally.
Kyle lifts the scalpel to his own palm—then slices. His skin is strong. It takes several attempts before at last yielding blood.
La-La’s eyes drop to the bleeding wound at once.
Utterly fascinated.
“I killed my family, too,” hisses Kyle, extending his sliced-open palm as if meaning to give the vampire a high-five. “Taste it. Real despair. It was my fault. I killed them. All of them. My vampire lover and I … We drank my whole family dry.” Tears spill out without meaning to. “I-I’m the reason they’re dead. You can taste all of that. Right here. Take a drink from my body and taste my fucking despair.”
La-La takes hold of Kyle’s wrist with surprising gentleness.
Lowers his face to it. Inspects closely.
That’s when Kyle feels a chill, from far away.
Icy, desolate, stinging.
A familiar chill that has nothing to do with La-La.
A familiar chill from his Reach.
He listens. The sensation he picks up is painfully cold and sticky, like a warm tongue to a frozen pole. The closer it grows, the farther away Kyle wants to get from it. But unlike all of the other times when he uses his Reach, he isn’t the one doing the reaching. It feels as if the frigid fingers are reaching for him instead, hunting him through the blinding storm.
Then it makes contact.
Kyle loses his breath.
He knows exactly who it is. He knows this terrible feeling. He made the excruciating mistake of Reaching for it once when it was just a shadowy figure in the alleyway behind his bar in Nowhere.
Only this time, Kyle senses that the cold presence isn’t here to threaten him.
It’s here to help.
But how?
That’s when Kyle gazes past La-La’s mesmerized eyes, past his own blood-dripping palm, up to the hole in the sky.
A shape emerges through the screaming sands.
A man, leaping into the bus from the roof.
A man covered completely in blood.
He slams down, shakes the floor as if weighing twice what the bus does, an earthquake from his landing.
La-La spins around, long white hair whipping, as the man’s bloodied arms close around him like a muscular red cage snapping shut, with a barbarous roar that combats the storm.
Rips La-La away like he weighs nothing.
Kyle sits up and watches as the man backs away with La-La trapped in his arms—La-La, who has given in to another bout of hysterical cackling. “I want despair!” he cries through his laughter. “I want to taste it! Feel it! The sadness and the longing! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt true despair? Since I’ve felt anything—” His cackling reaches a new, shrill, blood-freezing height. “—anything at all?”
Through the wildly thrashing curtain of La-La’s long white hair, the man’s bloodied face appears.
And through the curtain of blood, a familiar handsomeness.
Bright, familiar eyes in a sea of red.
Kyle recognizes it.
Recognizes him.
Then the red face is lost again behind La-La’s white hair and the toiling sand as the two plummet backwards, crashing through the back door of the bus.
But La-La flings out a hand, grabs the edge of the door, as if refusing to be finished with Kyle just yet, the vampire’s wild eyes affixed to him—his yearning, murderous, unblinking eyes.
Kyle stares back, shaken by the vampire’s words. Is that the truth? What La-La has wanted all along? Just to feel something? Is that why he craves making people hurt? Because he relishes in feeling anything at all, even pain, even villainy, even hatred?