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 won’t drink it,” says Lazarus with a nod at the bed, “but not due to any respect for it. My actions are in respect to you and your claim over it and its blood.”
“I’m … I’m not …” Kyle can barely muster the strength for words. “I’ll never …”
“You need food.” Lazarus crouches down, brings his face close. “Let me teach you your first lesson.”
Lazarus bites his own hand until blood pools at his palm. Then he presses it over Kyle’s mouth with force.
At first, Kyle fights back, annoyed by the intrusion of the hand over his face. But his fight is pitiful, only a twitch of a leg, a flinch of his arm, a tug of his eyebrows to express anger.
Then his mouth fills with Lazarus’s blood.
A thirst takes him over like he has never known before.
An all-consuming, absolute, primal thirst.
He swallows, at first reluctantly, then deeper, until he finds himself holding Lazarus’s palm over his face and sucking for his life, gulping mouthful after mouthful, eyes wide and crazed.
Too soon, Lazarus pries his hand away. A ghost of a smile creases his powdery face. “Good,” he says simply, then rises.
Kyle’s legs are slow to respond, but he too rises, stumbles on his first step, then braces himself against the cracked wall. “I didn’t want that,” says Kyle, spits once, spits twice, two fireballs of blood spattered upon the bedroom floor. “I don’t want—”
“Yes, you did. And you want more.” Lazarus stops at the door. “Come and find me. All your questions will be answered with no words exchanged at all. Just see us with your own eyes. If you can’t find me with your vampire senses, then I will leave you my address.” His grey eyes tighten. “Run away from the sun. Find us hiding beyond a dark mouth, itself armed with teeth. Just one night of your life, that’s all we need.” He frowns at the bed where Elias has grown quiet, still trembling in fear.
A flash, like a train flying by, close enough to nip the nose.
And Lazarus is gone.
Kyle stumbles over to the bed, releases Elias’s ankles, then up to the headboard for his wrists. Elias rips off his blindfold, eyes wet with tears of panic as he takes in the sight of Kyle. “Oh shit, are you okay? Babe! There’s blood all over you!”
“And you,” says Kyle wearily, though he hasn’t even looked into a mirror yet.
“Don’t mind me, I-I’m—” Despite their mutually bloodied state, Elias embraces him so tightly that Kyle grunts. “I’m just relieved you’re okay, so relieved. I was scared for you. I thought he was gonna …” He lets out a shivery sigh. “I don’t even know what the fuck he was doing, what was going on …”
Still embracing, Kyle stares over Elias’s shoulder at the wall where Lazarus’s hands thrust into, the lightning-like fissures of plaster that run as high as the ceiling, as low as the baseboards, and the dust on the floor from where the ceiling above cracked.
Kyle decides in this very moment, staring at those cracks in the wall, that he never wishes to see Lazarus again.
Nor any other creature of the night, of which he still won’t say that bitter word. They don’t need identifying. Kyle wants absolutely nothing to do with Them.
He wants no answers. Only peace.
These are his thoughts when he takes a shower, and Elias joins him. They wash each other’s blood away, caringly, quietly. Kyle stares at the blank tiled wall of the shower and a dark spot in the grout that looks like three tiny eyes, surprised that the spot seems to become more and more detailed the longer he looks at it, as if his eyes are slowly becoming microscopes. Is it the blood he drank from Lazarus? Elias plays the role of the unshakable, protective boyfriend, whispering sweet words of comfort as he washes Kyle off. “It’s okay … it’s all gonna be okay, babe … I’ve got you …” over and over.
But threaded between Elias’s words, Kyle picks up his fear. Pressed between every heartbeat, Kyle feels his desperate effort to hide how truly shaken this past hour has made him.
In fact, Kyle hears every throb and pulse and twitch of each and every muscle and vein in Elias’s body. Every single pop of the soapsuds. Every droplet of water as it flees the showerhead, cuts through the air, explodes against their skin or the floor.
It’s mesmerizing, like a strange dream, all these extra pieces of information Kyle is suddenly acutely aware of.
While Elias checks the windows and the doors of the house for the fifth time, locking, securing, closing curtains, Kyle takes clippers to his fingernails, a simple post-shower human activity to calm his mind and feel a little normal again. But as he presses the clippers to the nail of his thumb, he finds himself grunting as he squeezes harder, then harder, until at last the fingernail clips away. Each nail seems more difficult than the last, tiring him quickly. Is he weak? Or are his nails stronger?