At St. Marcellus Boarding School and Elaborate Prison for Misbehaving Rich Kids, Wednesdays mean Mass, composition, and rugby later out on the field.
Mass is mandatory, rugby is not.
The chapel attached to St. Marcellus is even older than the century-old school building, having been part of the monastery that once stood on the grounds. And, like silent ghosts from the monastery’s past, statues of saints watch from the shadows, their faces pinched and narrow and sad—save for St. Martin de Porres in the far front corner. He’s the one black saint in the chapel for a mostly black school in the heart of Savannah, Georgia, and there’s something in his face, a weight of watchfulness and concern, like he’s carrying the brunt of the prayers from the students here.
Of course, I imagine he’d be rather reluctant to ferry my prayers up to heaven if he knew the solemn black boy in front of him was actually a member of the undead.
Mass is far from fatal for me as a vampire, if you were wondering. In fact, I rather enjoy it. Not the religious aspect necessarily, but the quiet dignity of ritual space, the soothing repetition of chants and hymns, the pantomime of drinking blood.
Mostly I enjoy it because Casimir enjoys it.
He kneels in the row before me, and I can see a spot of blood seeping through the snowy white of his collar. A human might heal from a vampire bite within a few hours, but for another vampire, it takes longer. And I’ll bite him again before it’s healed anyway.
Above the haze of incense, I smell the blood. Other blood smells of salt and silver, but Cas’s blood smells deep and sweet. Three years ago, when I was fifteen and human, I stole a bottle of my grandfather’s wine and drank it walking along a crowded Miami beach while Grandfather and his young wife partied the night away. I’d never had anything stronger than beer before that, and I’d been fascinated with the spicy, sweet headiness.
Cas tastes like that. Like that first sip of spiced wine along the shore, and when I taste him, I taste Caribbean wind and billions of far-flung stars sparkling in a net over the sea. I taste the saltwater roaring against the sand, the vibrant city glowing in defiance of the night.
I taste eternity.
I look down at the rosary twined between my fingers, the white beads moving against my dark brown skin. I don’t pray, but I count the beads in every language I can think of, moving my mind along them so that it’s not tempted to move along Cas’s body instead.
Unus, duo, tres . . .
Ena, dio, tria . . .
Eins, zwei, drei . . .
It doesn’t work. Cas is my only prayer, my only meditation, and he has been since we met this year, both orphaned boys cast adrift on a sea of trust funds. I shouldn’t have done what I did to him, I should have protected him, spared him, but I am not a good person. I am a selfish person.
And I wanted him. I wanted to bite him, wanted him to drink my blood, wanted him to change into someone like me.
Chanting from the altar dissolves my thoughts, and then I’m walking down to take communion, which doesn’t burn my skin any more than the crucifix attached to the rosary I hold. After more prayers and chanting, we are set free to class. Casimir flashes me a grin as we gather up our things from the pews and move toward the door. We usually keep a careful distance between us in public. Partly it’s St. Marcellus—even the historically progressive Jesuits might not be ready to see two boys holding hands in church or kissing against the lockers—but there are even deeper reasons.
Three years ago, I would have loved St. Marcellus, especially after being sent to school in Europe for so many years. Walking into this school where most of the other students were black felt like I could finally breathe the air in as deeply as I wanted, like I’d been holding my breath without knowing it. But that feeling, that easy breathing, only lasted a few seconds; I was finally in a place where I shared so much with the other students, and yet the one thing we didn’t share cut any chance of belonging into tatters. I was finally a part of a community that shared so much with me, a part of and yet necessarily apart from. The students at St. Marcellus should be my friends, my peers, my home . . . but I didn’t come to St. Marcellus as just another young black man. I came as Enoch, the vampire.
This apartness, the insatiable hunger for blood, is why Cas and I keep our distance not only from each other, but from the other students. It’s best to hunt far from home and appear solitary at all costs.
But we allow ourselves these few daylight moments in the jostle of the crowd, where the murmur and hum of two hundred other voices can hide our own.
“Did you see that new girl crying during Mass?” Cas asks me, his head turning this way and that as we push through the narthex to get to the front doors of the church. He’s looking for someone.
“I was only looking at you,” I say honestly.
Cas flushes, pleased. Unlike me, Cas looks like the pale vampires from children’s storybooks. Bisque-colored skin and large eyes rimmed with thick eyelashes. His hair is black and wants to curl at the ends, his cheekbones are high and delicate, and his lips . . . well.
I like his lips.
“What did she look like?” I ask, deciding not to pursue that line of thought until we’re alone.
Cas thinks for a moment. We walk through the wooden doors of the church toward the imposing stone edifice of St. Marcellus’s main building. The early April wind is warm and humid as it blows past us, and there’s a faint whiff of the decay that always seems to linger in Savannah, like the smell of a cemetery after a long rain.
“She looked gorgeous,” Cas says finally. “And sad.”
The way he says it bothers me, although it takes me the rest of the day to puzzle out why. But it comes to me that night, as I lie in bed and watch the moon swell and shrink and drift her way across the sky. It bothered me because the tone of voice he used to talk about the girl, filled with fascination and desire—it’s the same tone I imagine I use when I talk about him.
I hunt at night, and right now I’m hunting for the only thing I want.
I find him in the library, near the fireplace, sprawled in a leather armchair with a book on his lap. He’s wearing a T-shirt, too tight for his leanly muscled frame, and pajama pants with ducks on them. Ducks with little red deerstalker caps.
“Your pants are ridiculous,” I say as I approach him.
He tosses the book aside. “So take them off me.”
“I didn’t say ridiculous was a bad thing.”
Cas stretches in the chair, the hem of his shirt riding up over his flat stomach. There is a line of dark hair beneath his navel, which disappears under the waistband of his pants, under the ducks and their stupid little hats.
“I’m going to kiss you,” I warn him.
“Good.”
“It’s going to hurt.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
And that is one of the many numberless reasons I am soul deep in love with Casimir Nowak.
Within moments, we are in the darkest corner of the library, pressed against the cold stone of the old library walls. In the dark, his eyes glitter like onyx, like some sort of strange cat’s, and I know mine glitter back at him. It’s one of the few true signs of the monsters we are.
A crescent moon glows through one of the old windows, as pale and weak as a sliver of old bone, but we pay it no mind. There’s only our lips and hands and breath, my fingers gripping the back of Cas’s neck so hard I know it will bruise, and then that sweet surrender when he bares his neck to me and I sink my teeth into his skin.
It’s different than feeding from a human, biting Cas. A vampire’s blood is much more potent than a human’s, much more intoxicating. I don’t bite Cas to sate my hunger; I bite him because I love him. And he lets me bite him because he loves me.
The difference between a human’s blood and my boyfriend’s blood is like the difference between water and wine. One you drink to survive, and the other you drink to live.
I can feel Cas’s heart pounding in his chest as it’s pressed to mine, even through the wool of my uniform sweater and the cotton of his T-shirt, and he makes the smallest whimper of pain as his blood wells up to touch my tongue.
I hate myself for loving that whimper. It’s my greatest sin, and it’s been with me since I was turned into the predator I am today. But in these moments of pain, Cas becomes more beautiful and dear to me than ever.
My fingers grip his neck harder, and I want to squeeze him, shake him, scratch him, but I settle for feeding at his neck, for now, and then he gasps—not pain or pleasure, but alarm.
My head snaps up, and I spin around to see a girl standing between the rows of wooden stacks, lips parted, staring at us.
Cas transforms next to me, his body rippling with the same fascination and longing I witnessed in him earlier today, and then I know. It’s the girl from Mass, the crying one.
Cas didn’t lie: she is gorgeous. Heart-shaped face, delicate pointed chin, straight nose. Warm light brown skin, dark eyes, and long hair. She has curving, Cupid’s-bow lips that could rival Cas’s for my attention. A Virgin Mary medal glints at her long neck.
I wipe at my mouth, and the white sleeve of my uniform shirt comes away bright crimson with Cas’s blood.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and I don’t think I’m imagining the breathlessness in her voice or the way her eyes keep sliding over to Cas. Against his white skin, the smear of blood on his neck is obvious, even in the dark, and I know that she can see that inhuman glitter in our eyes.
“I’m new here and I couldn’t sleep and I just . . .” She holds up a book; through the dark, I can see how tightly she holds the leather spine. But she’s not afraid—no fear spikes her blood. There’s intense curiosity in her eyes, and a taste to the air around her that I can’t identify.
Interesting.
“I should go,” she whispers. “Good night.”
And then Cas and I are truly alone.
Esther Gonzalez, unlike Cas and me and most of the other students here, is not a spoiled troublemaker sent away for penance. She has no record, no distressed notes from former deans outlining misbehavior, and she has perfect grades. The only spot of interest in her file, which I’m currently perusing in the dean’s office in the middle of the following night, is an eighteen-month gap in her studies prior to this month. There’s no explanation, although she tested into all the highest-level senior classes, so clearly she kept up on her schoolwork somehow. Her parents live here in Savannah, only a couple miles away, so perhaps that’s the reason she chose to come here.
But still. It’s strange, and her being here is strange, and her crying in Mass is strange, and I resolve to watch her and learn more.
It’s not a terrible task, actually.
That week, Cas befriends her, and since he and I try to avoid each other during the day, I get the added bonus of watching him too. I watch them laugh together in the halls, study their calculus textbooks out on the lawn, sit together at lunch. They look good together—Cas graceful and tall, and Esther sunny and smiling—and my heart squeezes with jealousy.
It was never a question that we could also love girls. No, it was simply that it was also never a question that we only wanted each other. That we would give each other forever.
And during our nights together this week, I wonder if he thinks of her when we kiss, if he wishes she were here with us.
Or worse, here instead of me.
The truth is, I know what Cas looks like when he’s falling in love. I saw it when he fell in love with me. And now I have to watch as he falls in love with someone else.
Esther finds me in the garden a week later. I know she’s seen me watching her, and I can tell she’s drawn to me, mesmerized maybe. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I don’t lift my head from the book I’m reading. I don’t acknowledge her at all, even as she sits on the bench next to me. She sits on the very edge and she holds herself completely still, as if she’s sitting next to a cliff’s edge, a posture not of fear but of respect. Respect for the danger next to her.
I finally raise my eyes to hers, but I don’t speak.
“You’re different,” she starts. From somewhere deep in the nearby chapel, organ music plays. Practice for Mass later. “You and Cas.”
I can lie. I can invent a thousand stories, weave a thousand tales, to explain that night in the library. The glittering eyes, the blood dripping from my mouth.
But I find I don’t want to. I want her to know. To scare her? Humiliate her? Seduce her?
I don’t know.
“Yes,” I say, as neutrally and coolly as I would say anything. I sound like I’m answering a declension question in Latin class. “We’re different.”
She nods. Like in the library, she’s not scared. Deep intelligence and curiosity sparkle in her eyes, and a smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. She reminds me of Cas, suddenly, that constant smile, that joy for living pressing so close to the surface. What’s it like to smile like that? To live like that? Even love is serious work to me.
“The blood and your eyes . . . ,” she says. Pauses, then speaks again. “You’re a senior, but you don’t act or talk like anyone else here. What kind of different are you?”
“Why don’t you ask Cas these things?” I ask. “I notice you two are spending lots of time together.”
Her cheeks darken in a blush, and I feel that jealousy like a vise around my chest again. But then she says, “Because I wanted to talk to you. I want to know you.”
And the way she says it.
And the way she says it.
I take a deep breath. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
And then I find that I want to tell her everything.
So I do.
I tell her that my parents died when I was in junior high. That my grandfather and I never got along, even after he became my guardian. He believed in his money like people believed in their gods, maybe even more than that because he created his business empire ex nihilo, built his money and legacy from scratch, and so his idol was actually a depiction of himself. And who loves anyone more than themselves?
Money’s never held any sway for me, but power—now that was something I could crave, and crave it I did, even from a young age.
I tell her that after years of battles with teachers and fights with other students, I landed at a boarding school in Rome—much like this one, actually—filled with more rich, disaffected people at various states of rebellion.
And Rome is where I met them.
They were beautiful, like Cas and Esther are beautiful. And they were different colors, different sizes, different ages, boys and girls, some young enough they looked like children, some old enough that they easily passed for adults. They found me outside a club after someone had tried to rob me. I’d stopped him, of course, had beaten the would-be thief until he fell half unconscious to his knees, and then I looked up to see them watching me in my fit of righteous violence.
They smiled, and then I knew I’d either finally found the nameless power I was looking for . . . or I was about to die.
How could I have guessed that it would be both?
Esther’s face is rapt as she listens, and seemingly without thinking, she’s slid off the bench and now sits on the ground in front of me, her legs crossed like a child listening to a teacher tell a story.
“And that’s how you changed?” she asks.
“Yes. The power I wanted wasn’t over money or politics. This was the power I’d been seeking all my life, without knowing it.”
She realizes that I’m not talking about the past right now, that I’m talking about something present. “This?” she asks, confused.
I gesture to her sitting at my feet, and then, to highlight my point, I reach down and take her chin in my hands, tilting it upward. Her breath catches as I run my thumb along her lower lip. “This,” I say.
“Oh,” and all at once as her pupils dilate into huge black pools, her breath shudders out.
And it’s then, with my thumb against her lips, that I smell it. Taste it in the air. Feel it pulse against my thumb.
Esther is sick.
Very sick.
It’s early, I think, at least early enough that it took me this long to detect it, but there’s no doubt now as I fill my lungs with the air between us. The sickness is deep in her blood, and it will be fatal.
I search her eyes. Does she know?
She stares back at me, evenly, bravely, and I see that of course she knows. Pain is creased in tiny lines around her eyes, there’s a slightly ashen cast to her skin that wasn’t there even as recently as last week. I start to say something—what, I don’t know—but then I think better of it and decide to continue with my story until I’ve processed this.
I let go of her chin, even though I find I don’t want to. “Anyway, within a few months after my sixteenth birthday, I was changed. And then a few months later, I deliberately provoked a fight with a teacher so my grandfather would have no choice but to find a new school for me. The Roman vampires were . . . they lived how they wanted, as bloody and wild as they wanted. And I couldn’t live that life with them any longer without losing myself.”
“Because you hated it?” she asks.
“No,” I say, and I hear the self-loathing in my own voice. “Because I loved it too much.”
A cloud passes over the sun.
“So it’s true,” she says after a minute. “Vampires. At my school.”
I search her face again. I want to bring up her sickness, I want to know everything. Is it why she missed school for those eighteen months? Did she go temporarily into remission? Is it why she’s going to St. Marcellus—to be close to her parents in case her illness takes a turn for the worse?
But no, those aren’t even the questions I want to ask. I want to ask real questions.
Are you scared?
Will you die without ever having been in love?
How much does it hurt?
Will you let me kiss you?
I bite back the words, wrestle down the urge to pull her close to me and press my lips to hers. Cas is fascinated with her, Cas should be the one to kiss her. Except that she didn’t seek Cas out, she sought me out, and now that I can feel the aura of pain and vulnerability around her like a scarlet glow, I can’t think of anything other than kissing her.
She breaks the moment by speaking again, her thoughts on something else entirely.
“But how can you . . .” She bites her lip, that full lower lip, and it takes so much effort to drag my gaze back to her eyes. “The sun,” she finally says. “The crosses in church. Communion wafers.”
“Stories,” I say simply. “Or maybe they weren’t, a long time ago. Maybe we’ve evolved.”
She breathes out, nervously. “Can you die, then? Are you immortal?”
Immortal.
Once again I smell the sickness in her blood, slowly choking the life from her body. Never once has the word “immortal” given me pause. Never once have I thought about what immortality might really mean.
Not once until now.
“We can be killed,” I say quickly, and my earlier coolness is gone. Replaced by something I don’t understand. A need to feel close to her, similar to her. A need to feel mortal. “We can starve. And a stake through the heart will end us.”
She smiles. “I learned that from Bram Stoker.”
I almost speak again, almost finish my thought, but the distant organ music swells and the clouds close up even more over the sun; in the now-dim light, her eyes are almost black. Pain sings through her skin.
She’s beautiful.
And I hate myself for noticing how beautiful she is when she hurts.
So I put the long-forgotten book in my bag, and I stand. “I suppose I just have to trust that you won’t stake me in my sleep now.”
She raises an eyebrow, her lips twitching. “So you do sleep? In a bed?”
“In a bed,” I confirm, shouldering my messenger bag. “A real bed with blankets.”
“No coffin? No soil from your homeland?”
“Coffins only fit one body,” I say. “And I think soil in my bed would kill the mood.”
Her mouth parts in surprise, and I brush past her with a small smile.
But my smile fades as I exit the garden and walk toward my room.
I lied by omission back there. Because there is a third thing that can kill a vampire, and kill them more painfully than any stake ever could.
Bad blood.
Poisoned blood.
Sick blood.
I can extrapolate infinite life from just a few swallows of human blood, and so, conversely, I can extrapolate infinite death. If I drink from a tainted source, I will die within minutes. Maybe hours, if I’m unlucky enough to suffer that long.
One taste of Esther’s blood and I’d die within a day. She’d be the literal death of me, dark eyes, full lips, and all.
At first, Cas and I don’t talk about Esther. We don’t need to; the confusion and hungry pain is already in every kiss, in every bruise we leave on each other. But another week passes, and as we sit in the dark, empty chapel one night, our clothes rumpled and my mouth still wet with his blood, Casimir finally brings her up.
“Esther’s sick, isn’t she?”
It takes me a moment to answer. When I do, my voice is flat. Hollow.
“Yes.”
“You knew. Didn’t you?”
“I’ve been a vampire longer than you, Cas. My senses are stronger.”
He runs his uniform tie through his fingers. It’s off his neck because I yanked it off an hour ago in my desperation to get under his collar. “You should have told me.”
“Why? Because you’re in love with her?” I meant it to come out in a dispassionate voice. Matter of fact. Kind, even.
That’s not at all how it comes out though, and my bitter words echo against the stone walls and glass of the church, and I hate myself for that. Who am I to lob accusations against Cas when I myself have been thinking about Esther constantly?
Casimir’s voice is pained. “I’m in love with you.”
“Why?”
It’s the first time I’ve ever asked him this, but suddenly I need to hear the answer. I’ve killed people. I will probably kill more. Once a week, I go down to the river and I hunt innocent humans, take from them without their consent, and leave them slumped against alley walls, to wake up with no memory of what happened.
I like it more than I should, the blood and the teeth, but more than that, I like the way the humid river air kisses my skin as I prowl. Boys like me are supposed to be afraid even when we’re innocent, but I’m not innocent or afraid. Instead, I get to move with power, with freedom, with the bone-deep knowledge that I cannot be hurt or killed in the ways that they might try to hurt or kill me. I am all the things this city doesn’t want me to be when I hunt—black and male and unafraid. That I crave this might have been inevitable, but the change is chemical, absolute. I drink life now, and I drink it without shame and with the kind of satisfaction that sparks along my skin.
I took Cas’s mortal life from him for no better reason than I was in love with him. Even now, my love for him is indissolubly united with my hunger for his blood and his surrender to me.
I gave him forever, but who would want that kind of forever?
Cas climbs over my lap, fists my shirt in his hands, and kisses me fiercely. “I love you because you’re Enoch. And that’s enough for me.”
I look up at him in the dark. “But will it keep being enough?” I know my voice and face betray every doubt, every fear, every corner of my loneliness.
“Of course,” Cas promises in that impetuous, passionate way of his. “Forever and ever.”
And for the first time in the six months since I turned Cas into a vampire, I bare my neck and allow him to bite me. And as the pain and ecstasy flow through my veins, I let myself feel every ounce of it, closing my eyes and wondering if this is how death would feel. Sweet and welcoming, sharp and dizzying.
And then Cas turns and kisses me, his mouth warm with blood, and I stop wondering anything at all.
The next evening, I stand outside Esther’s window on the lawn, lost in thought. Last night, with Cas’s teeth buried in my flesh, I decided that I needed to bring Esther closer to us, even though I also know that there’ll be no coming back from it if I do.
But I know Cas is falling in love with her, and if I’m not mistaken from my days of watching the two of them, she might be falling in love with him.
They’ve both been waiting for me. To give a signal or permission or consent, I’m not sure. But somehow, they both sense that I have to be part of it, and for that I’m both grateful and mortally wounded.
It’s easier to be stabbed in the back than fall on the dagger yourself, you see.
But my jealous martyrdom is complicated by two things.
First, that Esther is dying, and even I’m not cruel enough to deny Cas and Esther each other when she’ll be dead within months.
Secondly, that I also want Esther. Even without her blood, I want her—her mouth, her slender fingers, her curious mind. That mind is so present, so alive, so compassionate. So much like Cas.
I rap on the window, and she’s at the glass a moment later, wearing a white nightgown with spaghetti straps and lace trimming, her gold Virgin medal gleaming at her neck. I almost laugh—she couldn’t look more like a vampire’s victim if she tried.
“Cas and I want you to come with us,” I say.
Her face—it’s growing thinner, I notice, it won’t be long before she has to leave school—lights up with a smile. “Okay.”
I extend a hand and help her climb out the window. “You’re not going to ask where? Or for what? Do you crawl out of your window for every vampire who knocks?”
She quietly slides the window closed, and then she turns and looks up at me with shining eyes. “Only the vampires I want to be with.”
Behind her, I see our reflection in the shadowed window glass. We are a study of contrasts in that reflection—black skin and bronze. Tall and short. Muscular and slender.
Dead and alive.
For a moment I imagine us together in the daylight, together like a normal couple. Holding hands, walking down the hallways, kissing in the corners where the teachers can’t see. But the reflection is missing something, and that’s Cas, and I can’t fight the sear of guilt for even fantasizing about a future that doesn’t include him. A future I don’t deserve, and that Esther may not even have.
We walk in the moonlight across the lawn, a short walk, but a lovely one. I adore the sound of her bare feet on the soft new grass of spring.
“Where are we going?” Esther asks.
“The chapel,” I say. “They leave it unlocked at night, and unlike the dorms, there are no prefects to catch you and report you to the dean.”
“But you also use the library to meet,” she points out.
“Yeah, and we got walked in on by a nosy new girl, remember?” I say with a smile. “Trust me, the chapel is much better for late-night troublemaking.”
We reach the flagstone path to the chapel, and Esther seems lost in thought. “I’ve been wondering something about that night I caught you in the library . . . why were you biting Cas?” she asks. “It’s not the same as feeding on humans, right?”
“Right. It’s for fun, for—” I hesitate to use the word because it sounds old-fashioned, even for me. “For pleasure.”
She looks at me. “But doesn’t it hurt him?”
We reach the unlocked back door of the chapel and stop, and I lean closer, and run a finger along the smooth column of her throat. She sucks in a breath, her eyes fluttering closed.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” I whisper. “You’re hurting right now.”
She nods, barely, but her eyes squeeze tighter and I wonder if it’s the first time she’s been able to be honest about her pain. The first time she hasn’t tried to be brave, the first time she’s admitted . . . it hurts. It’s the first time I’ve admitted that I know she’s sick, and she seems almost relieved by it.
“When I bite Cas, I hurt him. And then I get to make the hurt go away. I stop the pain. And he kisses me after, like I’ve given him a gift. Giving pain is only one half of the scale, Esther. Taking it away is the other. That’s why I bite him.”
“Because he’s grateful?”
“Because I love him.”
She doesn’t accuse me of perversity, but instead she opens her eyes. I move my hand to her throat, pressing my palm against the side. Her pulse thrums wildly, for once not with pain, but with fierce feeling and lust.
“Love is pain,” I tell her seriously. “We feel it here . . .” I drop my hand to her chest, where I tap gently once, above her heart. Goose bumps blossom on her skin around the place my finger touched. “I just make the feeling real. A physical thing. Something we can hold on to.”
“What can you hold on to?” Cas asks, coming up from behind us.
“He’s telling me why he bites you when you kiss,” Esther says.
“Oh, he could talk about that for ages. We better cut him off now before he really gets going.”
I roll my eyes, and we go inside the chapel.
Esther walks inside ahead of us, her head swiveling to take in the empty space, lit as it is with the faded jewel tones of moonlight through stained glass, with shadows draping the saints’ statues like shrouds and the distant smell of incense still hanging in the air.
Cas and I have seen it a hundred times, and so he hangs back next to me. He finds my hand in the dark. “Thank you,” he whispers. “For bringing her here. For letting me—us—be together.”
I nod wordlessly. I don’t trust myself to speak.
He lets out a long breath as we watch her white-clad frame move through the shadows. “It will be hard—not to bite, I mean. But we can’t.”
I nod again. Cas knows the rules; I was sure to drill them into his mind after I changed him. No bad blood. Never ever ever.
I find my voice. “You can kiss her, of course. Touch her. But if you feed from her, you’ll die.”
He closes his eyes, briefly. Even for a soul as gentle as his it’s a hard thing to ask a vampire. To separate one kind of lust from the other.
But it’s the most necessary thing to ask.
I plunder the sacristy for some cheap wine, as yet unblessed, and we find a comfortable alcove underneath St. Martin de Porres to drink it. Esther sits between us, leaning against Cas’s chest and her legs slung over my lap. Cas plays with her hair, and I feel the turning of my jealousy, softening into something else.
“I saw the doctor yesterday,” she says after we’ve been there a while. “I already knew it, could already feel it, but he confirmed it. The leukemia isn’t in remission any longer. We did chemotherapy before, but this time it’s too advanced. Blood transfusions might work, for a little while at least. Mom and Dad want me to come home right away, but I begged them for another week.”
“Why?” Cas asks. “Don’t you want to be with them when you’re . . .” He can’t finish his thought. Sweet Cas with his sweet immortal heart. He’s known Esther barely a month, and already the knowledge of her death tears a hole through him.
Esther meets my eyes as she answers. “I wanted to have more time with you.”
Cas can’t speak after that. He closes his eyes and swallows hard, like he’s swallowing back a scream. The only response he can give her is to rub her hair in between his fingers, the same way you might rub a rose petal between your fingers on a summer’s day. She responds by wrapping her arms around him in a hug and holding him tight, and they’re both so beautiful that I could watch them forever.
Of course, we don’t have forever. Not with Esther.
The night becomes hazy, heady with wine and murmured conversations in the dark, and I begin to lose track of time, all time except for the moment where one thing becomes very clear to me.
I was right, and over the past three weeks, Cas and Esther have fallen in love.
Clarity and grief and—yes, still jealousy—cut through my heart like an icy sword, leaving only bloody intention in its place. I look up at the silent statues flanking the chapel walls, and instead of seeing the saints, I see the face of every human I’ve ever attacked. The three I killed when I couldn’t stop myself in time. The countless others I’ve bitten and left weak and vulnerable in the night. I see the uncountable, unknowable others to follow in the future, legions and legions of victims, blood like rivers, tears like rain, muffled screams breaking the night.
And when I close my eyes, I see Cas. Cas, who had his mortality and humanity and everything else stolen from him. By me.
I see Esther, facing down death, asking for nothing from the two immortals she’s fallen in love with.
If God is real, if these saints really speak to him and intercede for us sinners here on Earth, will they intercede for me? If I atone?
Because there is something I can do, something I can give Cas and Esther both, and even as fear moves cold and slippery in my veins, my thoughts freeze into one certainty.
I can save Esther.
And maybe, just maybe, I can save myself.
“I’ve never skipped class before,” Esther says excitedly as we park my car in front of Bonaventure Cemetery.
“There’s a first time for everything.” I get out of the car, and then cross around to help Esther out. She leans on me quite a bit as we walk down a path leading to the river.
“Where’s Cas?” she asks.
“Cas can’t skip Latin,” I respond, keeping my voice uninflected with everything I’m feeling right now. “He can barely even count to ten in it. And I left him a note in his room to come find us after class.”
By which time, of course, it will be too late, but that was the point. I can only be brave for myself; I wouldn’t be able to be brave for him too. Wouldn’t have been able to bear his pain along with my own, because I feel everything of his more strongly than I feel my own.
Even now I won’t pretend it’s noble. My love for him is selfish, and it always has been.
It’s the first of May today, beautiful beyond measure. The leaves above the path have unfurled into a thick green canopy, and the sunlight that reaches us is dappled and green-gold. I stop when we reach a clearing by the river, and I take a moment just to breathe the air, to listen to the water rushing and the breeze rustling and the birds chirping far off in the distance. Just to watch Esther be happy and at peace, her eyes clear and alive despite the shadows beneath them, despite the hollows in her cheeks.
I wish Cas was here, just so I could see him happy and at peace too. But I have last night, and even if I were to die a thousand times, last night would still be enough to hold on to.
“Are you afraid of dying?” I ask after a few moments.
Her eyes are so sublimely pained, so honest and golden when she answers. “Yes.”
“Me too,” I say.
“Afraid of me dying or of you dying?”
“Both.”
She nods. She could accuse me of being selfish or paranoid or morbid, but she doesn’t. Instead she says, “There are times when I’m not scared. When I remember that it will probably happen so gradually that I won’t be that aware of it. There are times when I believe that God will take care of me. And then there are times when I feel like the only thing separating me from death is a flimsy veil. A handful of painful, tiring weeks. And those are the times when I know there’s nothing on the other side of the veil. No new life, no white light, nothing. Just—the end.”
And I hear the void in her voice, the bleak despair, and it’s like a thumb against my already-bruised heart. It hurts to hear the end of Esther’s curiosity, to see the bounds of her readiness to learn and explore and live.
“You’ve never asked us to change you,” I say quietly.
Esther looks at me.
“You ask about everything else. You have a burning curiosity that seems insatiable. So why not ask about this? It would be natural to.”
She opens her mouth and then closes it. She only speaks after she turns away from my gaze, which is unusual for her. She’s never shied away from me before, even when she should. “It didn’t seem like a question I could ask. Everything else—well, I knew you would forgive me for wanting to know. Especially when I wouldn’t be alive to know your secrets for very long.” Her voice nearly breaks under the strain of keeping it free of emotion. “But asking for what you have . . . I guess it didn’t feel like the kind of thing that could be asked for. It felt like it had to be given. Offered freely.”
She’s facing the river now, and she hasn’t heard me walk up behind her. She startles a little as I sweep her hair off her neck and over her shoulder, and then she relaxes back into me. The posture is disarmingly trusting, and I feel a tight pain in my chest.
“I’m offering now,” I say, my mouth near her ear. “I can make you like us. You wouldn’t die from the leukemia, you wouldn’t have to die for hundreds and hundreds of years. You could live.”
She doesn’t speak, but I can smell the cocktail of emotions running through her blood—adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin.
Caution laces her voice when she speaks. “What would happen to me? My family?”
Respect for her overwhelms me. Casimir—so deeply unhappy in his life and so unloved by whatever family he had left—had jumped at the chance when I offered. Had practically flung himself into my teeth. But not Esther. She’s too intellectual, too perceptive, to take any step when she can’t see where her foot would land. Even in the face of certain death.
That takes a strength that even I don’t have.
“You wouldn’t physically age. Your parents would notice, eventually, but probably not for another decade or two would they realize it’s something more than good genetics.”
“And I would have to feed . . . like you and Cas?”
I run a fingertip along her throat, finding the yielding thrum of her jugular vein. “Yes.”
She shivers. “I don’t know if I can do that. Hurt people. Kill them.”
“You don’t have to hurt them when you bite. There are ways to do it gently. And you never have to kill a victim if you don’t want to. Many vampires give themselves over to a feeding frenzy and drain all their victim’s blood. But it’s not necessary. Cas has never killed, for example.”
“But you have.”
“Yes.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“You know that I did,” I say heavily. “I’m not a good person anymore, Esther. But that doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t be. That Cas isn’t.”
Still leaning back against me, she turns her head so she can look up into my face. “I think you are a good person,” she says quietly. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have left Rome. You’d still be killing.”
I don’t have an answer for that. Maybe she’s right, but I doubt it. Good people don’t bite their boyfriend until he bleeds. Good people don’t enjoy the feeling of having people they love at their feet, humbled and marked.
Esther looks back at the river, and we spend a long time like that, with the water rushing past and the breeze waving the green branches above us and the cemetery silent at our backs.
“Okay,” she says finally. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I want to be like you. Change me.”
This was the answer I wanted. This was why we came here. But I still can’t help the flash of deep anger I feel. Not even anger, really, but anguish.
Pure anguish.
I keep it all inside. “It won’t take long,” I explain to her. “I’m going to bite you, and I will feed from you. A lot. You will probably feel light-headed. You may even lose consciousness. I will help you wake up enough to drink my blood.”
“How much will I have to drink?”
“Not much. You probably won’t want much. Enjoy that feeling, because it will be the last time you will feel it.”
I say it with a smile, but she doesn’t smile back. She’s shivering again, covered in goose bumps.
“Are you ready?”
She nods, suddenly determined. “Yes.”
I put my hands on her shoulders and turn her around so she faces me. And then I cradle her face with my hands.
She blinks up at me, her long eyelashes casting shadows in the May sunlight.
“There’s one more thing,” I say, swallowing past the tightness in my throat. “When I change you—the process will take a lot out of me. I’ll almost certainly lose consciousness after a while. So don’t be alarmed.”
The lie comes out easily, too easily maybe, because part of me bitterly rebels at the idea that she won’t know what I’m doing, what I’m giving up for her and Cas. But if she knew, she wouldn’t allow it to happen, and so it has to be this way.
But I don’t bother to hide the pain and fear in my voice when I ask her, plead with her, “Will you . . . will you hold me as I fall asleep? Promise not to let me go or leave?”
Her brow furrows. “Of course.” She reaches up to touch the tears clinging to my own long eyelashes, and worry clouds her expression. “Enoch?”
I bring my mouth crashing down onto hers before she can say another word. I kiss her with everything I have, every angry, scared feeling. I kiss her for all the kisses she and I will never share, and I even kiss her for all the kisses I’ll never share with Cas. I kiss her with all the hope I have for the two of them, for the forever that they’ll have. And then when her body is arching against mine and her heart is pounding with something other than fear, I kiss a line of hot kisses down to her neck, whisper a prayer to a God I don’t believe in, and sink my teeth into her flesh.
She cries out, and her blood spills into my mouth, hot and metallic, delicious even with the poison it carries. I thought I would have to force myself to drink, that my body would resist the tainted blood, but it turns out that’s not the case. Biting her was the hardest part—now that I’m here, drinking my own execution is as easy as drinking wine on a Miami beach. As easy as falling in love.
Her cry, which echoed through the trees, is replaced now by a soft sigh, half surrender, half sweet sensation, and I wish I could freeze time and live in this moment forever, my face in her neck, her body warm against mine, the sun gentle above us.
But of course, the moment must end, and I reluctantly pull away. She stands, dazed and delirious in my arms, and as I bite my own wrist to offer my blood to her, I feel the first swell of death radiate out from my stomach. It won’t be long before her blood is absorbed into my own, and so we have to move fast.
“Drink quickly,” I urge her, and she slowly lowers her mouth to my wrist, her eyes glassy. I cup the back of her head, and then she’s drinking. Her mouth twists against her first sip, the hot copper taste new and unpleasant, but she still drinks. One swallow, two swallows, three swallows.
It’s enough. I pull my wrist away, and for a moment we both sway on our feet, our mouths dripping with blood. And then I fall to my knees.
She takes in a deep breath, and another one and another—her breathing ragged and her eyes wild—and then she also drops to her hands and her knees, gasping and retching as her body slowly transforms itself.
I watch with drooping eyes, wishing I could be there to hold her and comfort her as I did with Cas. I transformed Cas under a full moon, as chilled November winds blew around us, a proper vampire transformation, but it feels fitting that Esther should get the warm spring and the sunlight, the splashing river and the chattering birds.
And if I’m honest with myself—and why not be, at this point?—I prefer this May afternoon for my death too. It feels less lonely to die during the daylight, somehow.
Next to me, Esther lifts her head, her body finally still and her breathing even.
And then she’s there to hold me. As I slump to the side, and she’s cradling me in her arms, and I feel dizzy dizzy dizzy, the forest ceiling spinning above me, even the steady beat of her heart seeming to come from all distances at once, far and near, near and far.
I want to tell her I love her, want her to tell Cas that I love him, that I love him so much that it hurts me, that when I met him it had felt as if I’d always loved him, always known him somehow.
I want them to be happy.
I don’t want to die in vain.
But I can’t seem to make my mouth work. I can’t seem to order my thoughts. Esther is speaking to me, and I hear the fear in her voice as she realizes that something is wrong, that something is happening that shouldn’t, and then I hear pounding footfalls on the path and I know that Cas has found my note and has come racing here.
I force my eyes open, and pure joy flits through me as I see my Casimir’s face one last time. They are both touching me, and Cas’s face is pressed against my neck as he sobs, and it is like I imagined that night alone with him in chapel.
Death is sharp.
Death is sweet.
And finally, as my last breaths rattle erratically in and out and my senses dim—as I feel the boy I love crying against me and the girl I’ve just begun to love kissing my face—death becomes more than sweet sharpness.
Welcoming.
Dizzying.
Enough.