IT WAS SMALL TALK FOR the first few hours. Small talk and me napping. I was so tired, I felt like I could sleep for days. I was tired right down to my weary bones. I awoke just as we were crossing the border from LA into Arizona, in a town called Needles. If I had stayed asleep five minutes longer, I would have missed Needles completely.
“Can we stop?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
Sam frowned. “It’s only been three hours.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I need to pee.”
Sam shrugged in agreement and turned into a gas station. As soon as I got out of the car I regretted it. The temperature had to be at least a hundred and five, and the sun burned my skin the moment I was outside.
Ten minutes later, I was scratching my reddened skin as we left California and drove into Arizona. The Mojave desert stretched ahead of us, shimmering with mirages of things that did not exist.
“That sucks,” Sam said, reaching over and pressing two cool fingers to the pink flesh at my wrist. The skin stayed white for several moments, indicating a nasty burn.
“I remember that,” Sam said. “It took months before I could go out in the sun without getting fried.”
They called Sam the Ripper. Ryan’s words came back to me like a knife to the heart.
“What was it like for you?” I asked carefully. “In the beginning.”
He didn’t answer, and after several minutes had passed I guessed that he wasn’t going to.
“Have you ever wanted to kill someone? To feel their life force fade away? To take everything from them?”
I thought of Caleb. Of Ryan.
“No,” I replied. “Maybe.”
He tore his eyes from the road and stared straight at me. The anguish in his gaze was unmistakable and raw.
“I did. I feasted on the suffering of others. The more they hurt, the better I felt. Their blood was like a never–ending river of pain.”
“You … hurt people?”
“I killed people, Mia. I killed a lot of people. And worse.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. His eyes were glossy, and I wondered if he was going to cry. I’ve never seen a guy cry before.
“There are things worse than killing someone. I’ve done most of them.”
I swallowed thickly and cracked the window, staring straight ahead. The landscape was barren and desolate, but it looked positively radiant compared to sitting in the car listening to Sam talk about murdering people. I was suddenly all too aware of the fact that nobody knew where I was. Or who I was with. The one person I had trusted in the midst of chaos, and he was telling me this?
Hot, stale air flooded the car, and I closed my window again. I slumped down in my seat and looked limply at Sam, concentrating on the road ahead. I could tell by his expression that he felt me staring, but he didn’t turn to look at me. He was clearly locked inside his own struggle.
“Would you do that now?” I asked. “Would you hurt someone again? Would you hurt me?”
He cleared his throat. “Of course not.”
“Did you hurt anyone before you were a vampire?”
Now he looked at me. “I know what you’re doing.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re trying to pass the blame. Like it wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I replied forcefully. “Unless you decided to let someone Turn you, to make you a vampire, then none of it is your fault.”
“But what about you?” Sam repeated. “What happened to you that you’re so different? You don’t even like blood.”
I blushed, stared at the floor.
“Oh, come on, Mia. A few minor cravings is nothing compared to what I’ve just described. Trust me.”
The funny thing was, I did trust him. Even after what he’d told me. I glanced at his hands and couldn’t imagine them being used to inflict misery upon somebody.
“I tried to bite Ryan,” I said sheepishly. I didn’t need to tell him the rest.
Sam laughed! I felt my face turn even redder.
“Sorry,” he said. “I would love it if you bit him. A scar would be even better. God knows he deserves much worse.”
I frowned. “You don’t like him very much,” I said, “do you?”
“Do you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. And I really didn’t. The pull I felt towards him was incredibly intense. If I thought about moving further away from him, it hurt, a dull thud between my temples and a sharp spike in my chest.
“Don’t you have that feeling with Ivy? That pull?”
Sam’s face fell a little. “Not exactly,” he said. “I love her, but we don’t have that bond a vampire and maker normally share. It’s a long story.”
“Is that why?” I asked gently. “Why it was so bad for you? Because you didn’t have that voice in your head telling you everything would be alright?”
Because as much as I hated to admit it, Ryan’s voice inside my head, infuriating as it could be, was the only thing that had kept me sane during those first few weeks after waking up as a baby vampire.
“Maybe,” Sam replied. “Who knows? It was a long time ago.”
He continued to drive while I thought.
“How old are you, again?” I asked. I knew he had told me when I first met him, but in the murky recesses of my brain, the number had vanished.
“Thirty-seven” Sam said.
“You don’t look a day over twenty–one,” I remarked.
“That’s because I’m not.” Sam grinned. “I was Turned on my twenty-first birthday. Well, technically it was the next day, so I guess you could say I am a day over twenty-one.”
“How did it—what happened?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer. I still couldn’t talk about what had happened to me. Who was I to think that he was any different?
“I was living in New York at the time,” Sam began. “Ivy and I had had this huge fight, because she needed to go back to LA and wanted me to go with her, and I couldn’t, because my dad was sick and I wanted to be close to everyone and finish school.
“I turned twenty–one in May. My parents threw me a huge party at their house. We were all drinking. Most people were gone by 2 a.m. I went to bed after that. I didn’t even wake up and the whole house was on fire.
“All I remember is Ivy dragging me out of bed and jumping out of the window with me in her arms. That was the first time it really occurred to me that there was something different about her. You know … something not human. She had been giving me blood samples for my research at the university, but she always told me it was someone else’s blood we were studying.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What happened?”
“I was dying,” Sam said. “Well, I did die, I guess. I had burns to most of my body. Before I passed out, Ivy offered to save me, to give me some of that blood, and when she cut her wrist I knew the blood had been hers. I had watched the virus in that blood completely overtake human blood and change DNA. I didn’t want it touching me. I said no.”
I thought of falling from that building in Mexico, and being offered the same deal by Ryan, and I shuddered.
“But she did it anyway.” He looked terribly sad, clutching the steering wheel with white knuckles.
“And your family?” I probed gently.
“All dead in the fire,” Sam replied stoically. “My mother, my father, a sister and two brothers. All gone.”
My throat was so tight I could barely speak. Without thinking, I reached out and squeezed Sam’s right hand, the one that wasn’t on the steering wheel.
“Did you forgive Ivy? For Turning you even though you said no?”
“Of course,” he replied. “She saved my life. She loved me.”
Something about that story made me terribly uneasy, but I couldn’t put a finger on it.
She loved me. Sometimes love makes people do crazy things.
We travelled in silence for another twenty or so minutes.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, breaking the sadness that lingered in the air like dead souls.
Sam just looked at me. “Again?”
The truth was, my stomach was turning in on itself again, and I was terrified of throwing up in the car while we were doing ninety on the interstate. I told Sam this and he appeared concerned.
“How long have you felt like this?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure. A few weeks, maybe? It’s hard to remember with everything that’s been going on. I’m sure it’s just part of being a vampire.”
He frowned. “It’s not something I’ve ever heard of. And you say you still eat mostly regular food?”
“Sure,” I said. “I get cravings for cheeseburgers a lot. I think it’s the red meat.”
“And the blood? You crave that, too?”
“A few times,” I admitted, embarrassed. I almost told him how I had slept with Ryan, but changed my mind. I liked Sam. I didn’t want him knowing that dirty little secret.
“A few times a day?”
“No,” I replied. “Just a few times. Once I wanted to bite Ryan. Another time I smelled the blood in the refrigerator. Other times, it makes me feel clearer, but I don’t crave it. It still kind of grosses me out.”
“You need to stop and pee a lot for a vampire,” Sam mused.
“Gee,” I replied. “Awkward much?”
“Sorry,” Sam said, giving me one of his enormous puppy-dog smiles that reached all the way to his eyes. “I’m just trying to get a catalogue of symptoms so I can try and figure out what’s making you sick all the time.”
“I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal,” I said, suddenly alarmed. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me? Ryan says I sleep a lot for a vampire.”
“You do,” Sam confirmed.
“Great, so I’m basically a lazy sloth vampire.”
“Cravings. Nausea. Vomiting. Excessive urination. Fatigue. If I didn’t know better,” he joked, “I’d say you were pregnant.”
I laughed. “That’s impossible. Vampires can’t have babies.”
“Plus, it takes two to make a baby,” Sam added. “Unless it was the immaculate vampire conception.” He was still chuckling to himself when he caught a glimpse of my red face and his smile vanished. “Whoa,” he said. “You and Ryan?”
“It was a mistake,” I said, shaking my head.
“I hope he didn’t compel you,” Sam said tightly. “I might have to murder him if he did.”
“No, he didn’t compel me,” I said, burying my face in my hands. “Oh. My. God. I am so mortified right now.”
“It’s no big deal,” Sam said. “It’s none of my business.”
Neither of us spoke for a few minutes.
“In that case,” Sam said pointedly. “My earlier diagnosis may have some merit.”
“That’s not funny,” I said angrily.
“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” Sam said, looking at me seriously. “Mia, it can and does happen from time to time. Don’t think yourself impervious to getting pregnant just because Ryan told you so.”
My jaw dropped. “You’re serious. You’re actually serious. This is insane!”
Sam was pulling into a small cluster of shops that I hadn’t even noticed.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“To buy something,” Sam replied. He pulled into a parking bay, shut off the engine and took the keys. “Need anything? Snacks, water?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks.” I really wanted to ask him to pick up some kind of hotdog with extra salt, but I didn’t want to give his outlandish theory any more fuel, so I didn’t.
I pondered Sam’s crazy idea while I waited for him to come out of the convenience store. There was no way I could be pregnant—my mind couldn’t even comprehend such a possibility. Besides, Ryan was older and wiser than Sam, at least when it came to vampire–related facts. If he said all vampires were sterile, then I believed him. Sam was just being crazy.
By the time he had returned, I was happy again and thinking about what I would do first when I got home. A visit to Jared, of course, then a quick trip across the Hudson River to see my mom at her work offices in Manhattan sounded good. I still hadn’t thought of a convincing story as to why I was home when school was days from starting. I decided to stick with good old–fashioned homesickness as my excuse. Besides, it was true.
Sam handed me a brown paper bag as he got into the car. “What’s this?” I asked as I opened the bag, at the same time realizing what the pink cardboard box contained. “Jesus, Sam!”
“Just humor me,” he said, starting the car. “Take the test. Tell me how wrong I am. And then we’ll never speak of it again.”