Chapter 16

16

I wake up in a strange bed, in a strange room. There’s a single window, a quilt hung on a curtain rod. I can see light peeking in at the sides. It’s daytime.

Naomi’s tucked in next to me, and the red crust at the corners of her mouth reminds me of what happened last night. I sit straight up, kick the covers off my legs. For a second I worry that I’m wearing no pants, just my underwear and the big T-shirt, but then I realize my leggings are on, just ripped to oblivion, and I can see immediately that where my calf was bitten, desecrated—there’s nothing. No trace of any injury. No mark.

I look down at my wrist. It looks fine, considering, except…

There’s a tiny shard of metal poking through my skin. I pluck it out like a splinter and flick it across the room. There’s a slight hole where it was. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t bleed.

I twist my hand, circle it around, and my wrist doesn’t click. Doesn’t ache. But I refuse myself the hope, the possibility, that something good has happened here, because I can’t reconcile it with all the bad, horrific, fucked-up things.

“Naomi,” I whisper, nudging her shoulder. “Naomi, you have to get up. We need to go.”

She mumbles something and reaches up to her neck, which, like my calf, bears no proof of injury.

“Naomi. We’re still in the house. We need to get out.”

“I’m tired,” she says, her voice hoarse. The last thing I remember is her screaming.

“We’ll sleep when we’re dead,” I say, because that’s what she used to tell me at sleepovers, coercing me to stay awake, stay up late, participate in her insomnia. Only now it might not apply, because for all I know, we are dead. “Get up.”

I rip the covers away and she groans.

“We’re not safe here. We need to…”

I trail off, not sure what we need to do. Go to the police? Tell them we were unwilling participants in a blood ritual? Tell them we encountered a group of vampires squatting in a lake house? That we were attacked by the starved owner of said house who was being held captive in the basement. That something was done to us.

My heart plunges into the pit of my stomach.

What are we now?

“Naomi…”

“What?” she says, yawning. Her breath is so bad, we both wince. “Yikes.”

It smells like rot.

“Do you remember what happened last night?”

She turns over and smashes her face into her pillow. “Did we drop acid?”

“No. We got mauled by a skeleton man and then attacked by vampires.”

A minute goes by in silence. Then she lifts her head, opens one eye, and says, “That sucks.”

“Are you being quippy right now?”

“The pun wasn’t intentional, but…” She sighs and flips onto her back, stares up at the ceiling. We’re both quiet for a long time. “Are you sure we didn’t drop acid?”

“Yes,” I say, with such confidence that I start to doubt myself.

“Fuck me,” she says. “ Fuck! A shared delusion, then. Maybe?”

“We need to leave,” I say. “I don’t know where they are, but…”

She hugs her knees to her chest and pulls a face.

“What?” I ask.

“I’m thirsty.”

“Okay…?”

“I’m thirsty,” she repeats.

“We can get you some water….”

“Sloane. I’m not thirsty for water.”

My hand comes to my throat, and I start pinching at my skin as I realize what she’s telling me. As I come to the grim understanding. “Right.”

“Right.”

It’s easy to forget that the brave aren’t immune to fear. There’s nothing more terrifying than sitting across from the bravest person you know and watching fear slowly take them, drag them under, bully them, break them until they’re as scared as the rest of us.

“I don’t know if leaving is the best idea,” she says.

“Come again?”

“Whatever happened last night, we don’t understand it. We need answers. They’re the only ones who can give them to us.”

“Naomi. They’re monsters. Literally.”

She gets out of bed and scoops her jacket off the floor, puts it on. It’s got bloodstains on the collar. “We don’t know that for sure. Not yet.”

She opens the door to the bedroom and marches out into the hall.

“This is a nightmare,” I say to myself. “This is an actual living nightmare.”

“Hello?” Naomi says. “Hello!”

I follow her into the hall. The house is dark, all the candles burned out, the fire snuffed. But my eyes adjust. They adjust pretty fast, and I can see fine. Better than fine.

Naomi squeaks.

“Oh! Oh fuck. Oops. I just kicked it. I kicked his head. I didn’t see it.”

The skeleton man’s body is in the same spot as it was the night before; no one bothered to move it. His head is now rolling across the floor. It makes a bad sound.

Naomi gags. “Oh God.”

“See?” I whisper. “This is why we need to get out of here.”

“Look who is awake.” Ilie comes sauntering down the hall. He wears a silk robe with nothing underneath. “I will make you coffee. It will taste different but still good.”

He’s so casual. He steps over the severed head like it’s a soccer ball in the yard.

I’m shell-shocked.

“Come, loves. It is early. Or late.” He hangs his arms around us and guides us into a big yellow kitchen. There are towels hung over the windows, empty cups in the sink, the wooden goblets left out on the counter. “Sit, sit.”

He gestures to the built-in table and benches in the far corner, a breakfast nook. He takes out a French press. Naomi shoots me a look.

“You probably are thinking, Ilie, we are not thirsty for coffee. I know. But it will be good. I put a little something in it for you. Quench your thirst. We sit, have coffee, we talk. I have feeling you might be”—he pauses, searching for the right word—“confused.”

“I think we’re more than confused,” Naomi says, sliding onto a bench.

Why is she sitting down? Is she really planning on staying for coffee?

She’s either ignoring my signals or not getting them.

“I explain. Drago insists he do it, but he is very serious. Too serious. I tell him, he will make you scared. It is not scary, to live this way. It is good. We are happy.”

“And we are leaving,” I say. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Ilie says, plugging in an electric kettle. “After coffee.”

I look at Naomi, and she shrugs. “Things are what they are. What’s the difference if we stay for coffee?”

“Can’t wait to find out,” I say, stomping over to the table and sitting down next to her. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m not,” she says. “I’m just…I’m thirsty. Aren’t you?”

“No. Not really. No.” There’s an alien tickle in my throat. A weird wriggling. It’s not thirst, not exactly. It’s more like a craving. A bratty insistence.

“I get special coffee for you,” Ilie says. “We don’t put milk in our coffee, you know.”

He winks at us.

“Christ.” I put my head down on the table. Whenever I would wallow about getting older, or occasionally lament the monotony of my life, I would take at least some solace in thinking that my worst mistakes were behind me. That I would never again have to wake up in a stranger’s house with a headache and the most potent strain of regret, wearing last night’s clothes and a heavy crown of shame.

Ilie measures out some coffee grounds for the French press, and I think about the morning after I lost my virginity, in that random guy’s apartment, when he made me coffee and it tasted like possibility. I think about all the mornings after that followed, the taste diluting over time.

Ilie opens the fridge, which is moldy and dirty and mostly empty, and he retrieves a bag of blood, and I wonder, How will the coffee taste this morning?

—

“How is it?” Ilie asks.

I push my mug away, but Naomi downs hers.

“Careful. It is hot. You will burn your tongue,” he says.

“Very kind of you to show concern for our well-being,” I say.

“You are being sarcastic, yes?” he asks me.

“You brought us here to—to…to hurt us! To drink our blood!”

“No, no. That is not true. We did not intend for things to happen like that. It was supposed to be fun party; that is all. You come, we have good time, then you go or stay. You do what you like. But, sometimes, you know, things get crazy. The drama. Drink. Try the coffee.”

“I don’t want it,” I say. “I don’t want any of this.”

“I gave you the choice, and you said yes.” Henry is at the counter pouring himself a cup of coffee. I didn’t notice him come in. His presence makes all my muscles tense, and I realize that before this second, the painful, persistent knot in my neck wasn’t bothering me, for the first time in years. “Last night. You chose this.”

“Under duress. What was I supposed to do? Let my best friend die?”

“You don’t need to worry about death anymore. Not a natural death.”

“I was fine to die,” I say, out loud, by accident.

“Why would you say that?” Naomi asks, grabbing my arm. “Why would you say something like that?”

“Things are what they are, right? What difference does it make? Now we’re…we’re…”

“Are we vampires?” Naomi asks.

Henry squeezes a few drops of blood into his coffee and sits down at the table. “Yes.”

I burst out laughing, surprising everyone, including myself.

Ilie joins me. “Oh yeah! It is crazy.”

“You’re right, guy. It is crazy.”

“I’d think you were fucking with us if I didn’t feel so funky,” Naomi says. “My body doesn’t feel like my body. It’s like it’s lighter or something.”

“It feels good,” Ilie says. “Much better. Most people, they feel very bad in their body. Their bodies get old, get sick. Not us.”

“You feel good at the expense of others,” I say, standing. “You hurt people.”

“It’s complicated,” Henry says.

“It’s not,” I say. “Whatever mental gymnastics you do to justify violence, that’s what’s complicated. The truth is very simple.”

“You eat meat?” he asks, and takes a slow sip of his coffee. “That’s violence.”

“Is that your argument? A chicken or a cow isn’t the same as a human being.”

“You’re right. Humans are evil.”

“Wait. Can we just drink cow blood? Animal blood?” Naomi asks, licking her lips. “Is that a thing?”

“You could but it is not the same,” Ilie says. “Tastes like piss. Look. We are not bad guys.”

“I’m sure the owner of this house felt differently.”

“ He was bad guy,” Ilie says. “Very, very bad. We know him many years. We come see him, and it was bad, so we put him in cellar.”

“Hold up. He was a vampire, too?” Naomi asks.

“Yes. But also no,” Ilie says. “Not like us.”

“A feeder,” Henry says.

“Right,” I say. I don’t think I want to know any more. “Naomi, please. Let’s just go.”

“Go where? We need blood, don’t we?” She looks to Henry. “Don’t we?”

“You need to manage your thirst. It will get easier over time, but in the next two, three days, it will be a challenge. Some struggle to resist their bloodlust. Others suffer denying it.”

“We can deny it, though?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “You can. But deny yourself for too long, and you will essentially die of thirst.”

“I thought you said we didn’t need to worry about death.”

“Theoretically, no. Not of natural causes. But there are fates worse than death,” he says. “If you don’t satisfy your thirst you will wither away, quite like the man you saw last night. Not alive, but not dead. In a state of eternal torment, with enough awareness to be present in your pain but without the strength to end it.”

I reach across the table, pick up my mug, and throw it at the wall. Blood-laced coffee and slices of porcelain splatter everywhere.

“Great. Looking forward to it,” I say, turning on my heel and walking out of the kitchen into the main hall. My little outburst wasn’t as cathartic as I’d hoped, maybe because now there’s a scent in the air, faint but bright and inviting, a scent I don’t know how I can identify as that of blood, but I can, and I do, and it has me salivating. It exacerbates this peculiar tickle in my throat.

I get my coat off the rack. My shoes are by the door, next to Naomi’s. I slip them on.

“Sloane?” Naomi calls from the kitchen. “Where are you going?”

I wish I knew.