Chapter 27

27

The castle isn’t really a castle. It’s a Renaissance fair, closed for the season. The entrance to the fairgrounds was made to look like a castle gate, and through the gate there’s a fake medieval village. The snow lends the place some legitimacy, concealing the modern, like utility boxes and signs for restrooms.

Naomi snores in the back seat. She passed out shortly after the second explosion and slept through the forty-five-minute drive, slept through Ilie putting the van in park, getting out, floating over the gate, and opening it for us so we could drive in. She slept through Elisa closing the gate behind us. She slept through us pulling up to the King’s Tavern, a large Tudor-style building.

I envy her. I’d love to be asleep. To be unconscious.

“Home,” Elisa says. “For now.”

“Wake up, terrible creature,” Tatiana says, tugging on Naomi’s hair.

“Wha-what? Where are we?” Naomi says, blearily.

Everyone gets out of the van, stepping into a few inches of wet, slushy snow. Elisa goes up to the tavern door and picks the padlock. I’d be impressed by how fast she does it if I weren’t so preoccupied with horror and hopelessness.

Elisa goes inside, her footsteps echoing. “Barely any cobwebs.”

The rest of us follow her in.

I’d expected the building to be only a pretty shell, but the interior is just as detailed as the exterior. There’s a giant stone hearth at the back, a built-in bar with decorative molding, crests hung up on the walls—intricately carved and painted. Of course, none of it is authentic, but it looks good enough. There are exposed beams overhead. Elisa was wrong about the cobwebs. They’re everywhere. And dust. There are tables and chairs and benches pushed up against the walls, all covered in a thick layer of dust.

Tatiana strolls in with a blanket tucked under her arm. She unrolls it on the floor and lies on it, stretching her arms, her legs wide. Making herself right at home.

It’s cold in here, but it’s manageable. There are no windows. I couldn’t think of a better hangout for a bunch of unhinged ancient vampires.

Ilie pulls out the chairs and benches, and I look for a place where I can be alone. I go behind the bar and sit on the floor, pulling my knees to my chest.

I shut my eyes, and they’re all waiting for me in the dark. Matthew, slumped against a tree trunk, neck slack, sleeve pushed up, the vicious array of teeth marks on his wrist. The man at the rest stop, his neck butchered, his lack of pulse. The woman at the gas station, the gaping hole across her cheek. The convenience-store clerk. The woman thrown from her hatchback. The truck driver with his hollow eyes, wheezing his last breaths.

Naomi’s right. I do think about death a lot, but in the abstract. Numbers on a Wikipedia page, in a news article. I never thought I’d be the cause.

“What do you think? We play cards?” Ilie says. “We play game?”

“Not cards,” Tatiana says. “I’m so bored of cards.”

“You’re bored of everything,” Elisa says.

“Of course I am,” she says. “It’s a miracle you’re not.”

“Naomi, you play cards?” Ilie asks.

“Where are we?” She yawns.

“Disneyland,” Henry says, and I kill my smile right before it hatches. I won’t be charmed by him. By any of them.

“I have actually been there once,” Ilie says, his excitement challenging my will. “It is very fun, but a little bit hard to be around so many people. Also, very expensive. But I ride roller coaster. As a boy, I could never imagine. So cool.”

I remind myself that an hour ago he was sipping from someone’s leg. The vampires’ ability to perpetrate and be so unfazed by such violence scares the hell out of me.

“What is the matter?” Elisa asks. “Our Naomi is very worried about something.”

“Not worried,” Naomi says. Must be nice. “Are we—do we, like, live here now?”

“Oh, no!” Elisa says, laughing. “We do not live anywhere. We live everywhere .”

“We like to travel. Keep it moving,” Ilie says. “It is part of the lifestyle.”

“We find new places,” Elisa says. “The castle is one of our winter places in America.”

“America is all McDonald’s and parking lots,” Tatiana says, sighing.

“It is not,” Elisa says. “I love it here.”

“Sloane and I were headed to North Carolina,” Naomi says. “My parents have a vacation house that’ll be empty ’til May. We could all stay there for a while.”

“Great,” I mumble to myself. “Sure. Why not? Invite them. Who cares?”

“Vacation house sounds nice!” Ilie says. “We go there.”

“No, no. We’ve been in this horrible country far too long,” Tatiana says. “Let’s go overseas.”

Ilie and Tatiana start to argue back and forth, and I push myself to stand. “I’m going for a walk.”

Naomi moves to follow me.

“Alone,” I say.

—

I trudge through the snow, past a maypole, down Storybook Lane, with little kiosks that look like enchanted mushrooms. My socks are soaked through, and I shiver against a cold that can’t harm me beyond mild discomfort.

There are stocks to my left, a silly photo op. There’s a fairy-tale tower, covered in painted vines. There’s an elaborate stage, the backdrop tall, with stairs up to a Juliet balcony. There’s a giant chessboard, mostly covered in snow. There’s a large pond, frozen over, with a Loch Ness–esque serpent in it, covered in iridescent green scales, its long body sinking under and rising up out of the ice. Its face is more adorable than ferocious. Icicles hang from its chin like whiskers.

As I stare out at the serpent, I become aware that I, too, am under observation. That I’m being watched. I whip around and see no one, but that doesn’t eliminate my suspicion.

I keep walking, and my footsteps are clumsy, sloshing around in the wet snow. I hear none other than my own, but that doesn’t change my mind either. If a threat is quiet, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a threat.

My body knows a threat.

I walk faster, slipping as I approach the bridge over the pond. There’s a heart-shaped arch over the entrance with a sign that reads The Kissing Bridge .

“Don’t you dare follow me onto this bridge,” I say. The smell of tobacco and bergamot identifies the presence. It’s Henry. “I don’t want to be followed. Stop following me.”

If I say it enough, maybe I’ll convince myself that it’s true. That I’m not flattered by the chase.

I forgot how good it feels to be wanted.

But I don’t deserve to feel good. And neither does he.

“Your friend asked me to check on you,” he says, appearing first as a floating ember. Out of the inky darkness, he materializes on the chessboard, moving across it like a rook. “She’s concerned.”

“She needs to get her priorities straight,” I say, stepping backward onto the bridge. I realize I’m now directly under the heart arch and take another step.

“I warned you it was too soon to be out in the world. I warned you she was reckless.”

“This isn’t my fault. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Mm,” he says, pissing me off.

“Why did you let us go? If you were just going to hunt us down.”

“?‘Hunt’? That’s a strong word.”

“Is it?”

“What would you have done if we hadn’t shown up?”

“I…we wouldn’t have been there. We left the motel because you were parked outside like creeps.”

“Creeps?”

“Yeah.”

“We gave you a gift.”

“This isn’t a gift.”

“I meant the blood. Not the thirst.”

“Okay.”

“If we didn’t turn you, Naomi would have died.”

“If you’d told me about the man in the basement the first time I asked, we would have left, and Naomi would have been fine, and I would have been fine, and we wouldn’t be here right now, and those people would still be alive.”

“Speculating about alternate fates is a waste of time,” Henry says, reaching a corner of the board.

“I’m painfully aware of that. You don’t need to tell me.”

“Then why resist?”

“Resist what? You?”

“Your thirst.”

“Because it’s savage—that’s why. It’s wrong.”

“It’s survival.”

“It’s murder.”

“Not always,” he says. “We’re of a different mind, the rest of us. We come from another time. Lived through plagues. Fought in wars. Death is nothing to us.”

“I’m not talking about death. I’m talking about killing.”

“You didn’t kill anyone tonight, did you?”

“I was involved.”

“To exist is to participate in destruction.”

“You’re full of shit!” I say, so infuriated by the conversation that I scoop some snow off the bridge and throw it at him.

It lands at his feet. He’s amused by it. He does his goofy grin.

“Don’t,” I say. I turn to continue crossing the bridge, but there’s ice under the snow, and I lose my footing and fall, landing hard on my ass. The embarrassment and the frustration are too much. I lie back in the snow, roll around so I’m covered in it. I want to bury myself. I want to disappear.

“Am I allowed to come onto the bridge?”

“No!”

“Not even if I answer a riddle?”

“Hey,” I say, sitting up and looking back. He’s at the other end of the bridge. He lowers himself to the ground, stretches his legs out, props himself up on his arms.

“What if I dared you to let me cross the bridge?” he asks.

“I’m not playing games with you. It didn’t end well for me last time.”

“It didn’t?” he asks, giving me his fox grin.

“I wish I never went to that house,” I say, unconvincingly. “I wish we did anything else that night.”

I’m surprised by how little I mean it. Ashamed, and yet maybe—maybe—exhilarated.

He hangs his head. “Another regret?”

“If you could be…be normal again, would you?”

“No,” he answers, too fast. “I’ve been this way for so long, I’ve forgotten how to be any other way. It’s this or nothing.”

“Nothing?”

He draws a finger across his neck.

“Is that possible?”

“There are ways,” he says. “But I told you, I am a coward. There have been times when I have wished for the forever sleep, the release of death. Not now. Not when things have just gotten interesting.”

“What’s interesting?”

“You.”

“Me?” I can’t help it; I laugh. “You just met me! Two nights ago. Maybe. Three? I don’t know.”

It feels like another life. I guess it was.

He runs his fingers through his hair, pushing it out of his face. “It’s been a long time since I was young. Since I experienced anything new. The longer you live, the more everything has context. You relate it all to what’s happened before, what you’ve already experienced. Look at the moon tonight; it reminds me of that time in Istanbul, when it was so low, you could almost touch it. These hills are like Tuscany. This hotel is like the one we stayed in in Paris. These people coming over to us in the bar—they look so familiar. But every face is familiar. Every place is familiar. Every conversation. Every emotion…But then I saw you. Your face. That freckle, right there, under your eye. I watched you move. I—”

“Watched me sleep,” I say, interrupting him.

I wait for him to apologize, admit it was weird. But instead he says, very matter-of-factly, “I wanted to see you again. I thought I might never get the chance.”

“Well, you did.”

“I did. You came to that house, and I listened to you speak, to the sound of your voice and your laugh, how you chose your words, expressed your thoughts. We kissed and I tasted you, and I felt you, the warmth of you. All this is to say, yes, we just met. But I’ve never met you before. You’re new.”

“I’m…” Should I tell him the truth? That I’m not new? That I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of bored, suburban thirtysomething wives just like me? Who got married for a sense of stability, to tether themselves to someone because they were terrified of being alone, because they were terrified of themselves. Who gave up on their dreams before they could fail. Should I save him the disappointment? Or should I just shut up? I think about how good it felt to be touched by him. How caught up I was in it.

The only feeling that compares is that of the spilling of blood down my throat. Nothing else comes close.

I think about the blood on the pavement, the accident at the gas station. The broken glass. The smell of gasoline. The bodies. I think about the tumbler that I held so tightly, that I would have drained to the last drop. I think about the fiendish selfishness that overtook me in that moment. The possession of bloodlust, like at the rest stop, in the woods behind the cottage, as the wooden cup was brought to my lips at the lake house.

I think about when he first kissed me. That wasn’t possession; it was surrendering to myself, to my desire, to pleasure.

I look up and there he is, on the other side of the bridge, perfectly framed by the heart-shaped arch, and it’s a cruelty. Does satisfaction always come at such a high cost? Does its pursuit always leave such ruin?

If I give in to this want, I betray everything else.

If there is a happy medium between being a resigned, mildly depressed thirty-six-year-old woman with a thankless job and cheating husband, and being an immortal vampire indulging her lust for blood and sex and her desire for love and excitement, it sure would be nice to find it.

“What if I can’t get past it?” I say. “What I am now. What you made me. What if I can’t live like this?”

“It’s early days,” he says.

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“What about Naomi? Will she get past it?”

“Naomi is past it,” I say, drawing spirals in the snow with my finger. “She’s maybe been a little more erratic than usual, and a lot less empathetic, but overall, she seems to be adjusting to blood sucking just fine.”

Normally I wouldn’t vent about Naomi to anyone other than Naomi. I’ve always kept my frustrations to myself out of love and loyalty. I refused to give anyone else the opportunity to agree with whatever I was annoyed about, because they didn’t know her like I did, or love her like I did. Whatever conclusions they would draw from my complaints would be wrong, and I couldn’t risk misrepresenting the most important person in my life, the only person who ever really saw me. That would be treason.

But right now, treason doesn’t seem like such a crime.

“Naomi grew up with money. She’s always had something to fall back on. She doesn’t understand what it is to lose,” I say. “She hasn’t had it easy, but she’s had a safety net. I never did. I understand there are consequences. I’m not sure that’s a lesson she ever learned.”

Why am I telling him all this? Because he’s easy to talk to or because I need for someone to listen? Because there’s too much on my chest and I’m being crushed under the weight.

“I don’t know her like you do. She said you think of death, and yet she strikes me as someone afraid of dying. She lives as though she’s running out of time. There’s a desperation about her. Even now, when the long shadow of death is gone, she fears it. And you’re the opposite. You fear living. A pity. You’d be so good at it.”

It’s too much effort to feel insulted. Besides, I suspect he’s right. About me, at least. I’m not so sure about Naomi. “Why do you think she’s desperate?”

“You don’t see it?”

The way he asks—something about his tone—makes me feel oblivious, like I’ve missed something obvious to everyone but me. I hate it.

I stand up and brush the snow off. “You can cross the bridge now. I don’t know any riddles.”

“No riddles? No truth or dare?”

“No. Definitely not.”

He laughs. He stands, bows, and crosses the bridge to me. He stops about three-quarters of the way over.

“No chance you’ll meet me on it?” he asks, pointing at the arch.

“Nope,” I say, turning my back to him.

“Do I have permission to follow you?”

“You’ve never needed it before,” I say, walking to the other side of the pond, toward a shipwreck. Another photo op, maybe. Or a big prop for kids to climb all over with their greasy turkey-leg fingers.

“Will you forgive me?” he asks.

“For what?”

“Following,” he says, walking a few steps behind me.

“You don’t care about forgiveness.”

“Yes, I do.”

We reach the ship. Its name is carved in the side in big, bold script. Unfortunately, appropriately, the Demeter .

There are stairs up to the deck. I climb them cautiously, afraid there’s ice hiding under the snow. I don’t want to fall in front of him again. I listen for his footsteps, but he doesn’t make any sound. He’s stealthy.

From the deck of the ship there’s a solid view of the fairgrounds. The kingdom. It’s a clear night, and the moon is out, the stars. They reflect off the frozen surface of the pond, make everything shimmer.

“Have you thought about what you want to do next?” he asks.

“Well, Naomi so generously shared our plan to go to Wilmington,” I say. “But I don’t know what after that. It’s hard to make plans when you don’t know if you’re a fugitive or not.”

“We took care of that for you,” he says.

“What about traffic cameras? What about other witnesses? What if the convenience-store camera footage uploaded to the cloud? It’s not so easy to get away with things these days.”

“I know,” he says. “Not like it used to be.”

I remember something he said to me in the conservatory. Something I’d initially dismissed as a joke. “Are you really five hundred years old?”

“Five hundred and ninety-two. But who’s counting?” he asks, leaning back against the mast of the ship.

He’s too old for me. Way too old. “How old were you when you were…?”

“When was I turned? Twenty-seven.”

He’s too young for me.

If this had to be my fate, couldn’t it have at least happened when I was twenty-seven? Before the mercilessness of collagen loss. I was insecure then, of course, but now I aspire to those insecurities.

“I thought it might bring me glory,” he says. “But we never know where the paths we take will lead us until we get there.”

“Didn’t lead you to glory?”

“It did. Until it didn’t.”

“You won’t go into detail?”

“Another night,” he says, staring out across the pond. “This one is too pretty to spoil with sad songs.”

“I love a sad song. All the best songs are sad.”

“No,” he says, coming toward me. “You can’t believe that.”

He takes my hand and spins me around. He’s dancing with me. We’re dancing, gliding across this fake ship deck. My clothes are soaked from the snow, and I can’t remember the last time I showered. I don’t know how I look, since I can’t check my reflection, but I can’t imagine it’s beautiful. It’s been a long time since I felt beautiful. Desirable.

I’d given up on romance. I’d already settled. I figured the only women over thirty-five who get to be swept off their feet are the ones in books and movies. In fiction.

But I’d thought vampires were fictional, too, so who the hell knows?

I get so dizzy spinning that I forget all the bloodshed of the last forty-eight hours and press myself against him. I squeeze his hand, his skin against my skin the answer to a prayer I was too shy or too jaded to ever conceive, ever utter, ever whisper into my pillow at night.

He holds my waist. He leans down and presses his forehead into mine, our noses almost touching.

“You should come with me,” he says. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

“I…I don’t know where I want to go.”

“Somewhere warm? Somewhere cold? The mountains? The desert?”

“I still don’t know how to live like this. With the thirst.”

“You wouldn’t need to worry. I would make sure your throat was never dry. You’d never crave anything. You’d have whatever you needed. Whatever you wanted.”

I wish I could stay in the fantasy. I wish I could believe him. “That sounds too good to be true. You can’t promise me all that. You can’t promise me that you wouldn’t get bored of me eventually. When I’m not new anymore.”

He tilts his head back, looking at me with a strange face.

“What?” I ask.

“You could be right. There’s no way for me to disprove that in this moment. But why would I promise you something with no intention of following through?”

I can’t tell if he’s being serious or cheeky. It’s an innocent question, and he’s not innocent.

“To use me.”

He furrows his brow. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. Because you like to play games. Because you’re a—”

“A monster?”

“ A man was what I was going to say.”

He laughs. “Even worse!”

He spins me again, then pulls me in. “If I’d had any doubt about you, I would have drained you and let you die. And if I’d wanted to use you, I wouldn’t have let your first taste of blood be your own. You would have been forever bound to me, the one who turned you. Now you are bound to no one but yourself. And whoever you may choose.”

The wind blows, rattling the mast, my bones.

He reaches out and takes my face in his hands. Gently. Almost too gently. He traces the outline of my lips with his fingers.

“You’re beautiful,” he tells me, and somehow I believe it. I know it. I feel it. My skin sparks at his touch. Maybe he was right, what he said as we stood in the hallway of that terrible house. Maybe whatever this is between us is more than attraction. It feels like more.

There’s a gravity to it. To us. But it isn’t heavy, or constricting. It’s almost like walking with the wind at your back, a confirmation from nature that you’re going the right way. I let the feeling carry me. Push me toward him.

I kiss his fingers. His hands. His wrists.

He kisses mine. My left hand. My left wrist. He kisses the exact spot where he ripped the metal out with his teeth, extracting the painful remnants of my greatest shame.

He takes my hand and pins it behind my back. He nestles his face in my neck. He lets his teeth scrape the place where he turned me, and then he presses his lips there. His lips. His lips. His tongue.

My free hand reaches for his jeans, for his belt loop. I pull him closer to me and it still isn’t close enough. He lets my other hand go. He shifts my face so he can kiss me on the mouth. I wrap my arms around him, grab his back. Closer. Closer.

He slides his knee against my inner thigh, lifting up my leg, lifting me up onto him. His hand is on my hip, his fingers pressing down hard enough that I release a breath, a sound—one I’ve never heard myself make before—and it sets me off; it’s like gunpowder. The sound of me getting off gets me off. Discovering I’m capable of this kind of hedonism.

My back hits the mast, and I reach behind me for it, slip around to the other side of it.

“Where are you going?” he asks, circling.

He gets to me, and moves to kiss me, and I slip away again.

“I thought you didn’t like to play games?” he asks, darting after me as I swing around the mast. I smash into him, burrowing my head into his chest. He puts his hands on me, sails them up from my hips to my waist, to my ribs, chest, neck, jaw, hair.

“If it’s me,” I say. “It’s only me.”

“It’s only you.”

—

On our walk back from the ship, however much later, I try to remember the last time I talked about sex with Naomi, or with any friend. The day after I lost my virginity, she took me out to her favorite tapas restaurant and I gave her a play-by-play as we split a pitcher of sangria that we were legally too young to drink, but Naomi flirted with the waiter, so he served us anyway.

She’d already lost hers and had been giving me explicit details for years. It was silly fun to sit there and giggle and blush. It was novel to us then. But by the time I got with Joel, and she got with Lee, we were past all that.

I’d never seriously considered cheating on Joel. I wasn’t motivated, and I wondered who would want me anyway. I thought decent, routine sex once a week was just part of being married, part of what I’d signed up for. I’d made my peace with that, and over the years, sex became an obligation, something I did because it was part of life, like haircuts and taxes. I’d hear pop songs on the radio and wonder why everyone was so obsessed, then think, Because they’re young. Because these pop stars are young, and sex is exciting when you’re young.

But just moments ago, I was on my back on a fake ship in the middle of a deserted Renaissance fair, staring up at the stars as Henry pulled off my jeans and kissed up my thighs. He spread my legs, and I dug my nails into his back as I felt him move inside me, his dirty-blond hair hanging in my face. And I took my hands from his back to his chest, where I could feel his heart beating, alive, alive . Then I touched his face, his grinning, magnificent face, and he kissed my hands, dragged his teeth across their flesh, took my fingers into the softness of his mouth. We melted the snow, and we were wet with it, wet with sweat.

And then he bent me over the ship’s railing to take me from behind, and I was eye to eye with the sea monster and I bit my lip so I wouldn’t laugh, and I bit my lip for other reasons. Hard enough to draw blood, which stung but was worth it just so I could deliver it to him, to his lips, his mouth, his perfect tongue.

My body was new to me, new again. Capable of this new, transcendent satisfaction.

After we both came, we carried on kissing, with our hands in each other’s damp, tangled hair, and I realized that wonder isn’t reserved for the young. That maybe my best years aren’t behind me, after all. Only my human years…

I want to share this with Naomi. I want to tell her everything. I want to pull her aside, throw a blanket over our heads so we can gossip and swoon. But what I don’t want is for her to think that because this happened I’m fine with the rest. That because I slept with someone, had an incredible night, the ugliness that came before is absolved.

The ugliness I hold her accountable for. Along with the others. Henry included.

Living is complicated and messy, she said to me at the rest stop. “Messy” is an understatement for whatever I feel now, as I subtly slip my wedding band out of my pocket and drop it into the snow.

Henry and I pass by the fairy-tale tower. I can see the tavern up ahead.

“Do we have to go back right now?” I ask him.

“No,” he says. “We can keep walking, if you aren’t cold.”

“I’m not cold,” I say. “Or maybe I am, but I don’t get cold like I used to.”

“That happens.” He takes my hand to hold, like we’re going steady. Like we’re walking through the halls of our high school. Only I doubt he’s ever been to high school.

“Do you read books?” I ask him.

“No, I hate reading,” he says, and I experience a moment of acute panic before he starts to laugh. “What else would I do with all this time?”

“What your friends do,” I say.

“They’re more family than friends. Brothers and sisters.”

“They don’t act like brothers and sisters.”

“I meant, to me. Not to one another. There’s no enjoyment in food or drink. There’s sleep. There’s sex. Material things. Books. Films. Art. Fashion. People—though rarely.”

“You can be around people without…”

“Without draining them? Yes. You’ll see.”

I pinch my throat, the thirst blossoming.

“We don’t do what we did tonight every night,” he says, bringing my hand to his lips. “Hardly ever.”

“What’s ‘hardly ever’ to someone who’s lived hundreds of years?”

“It’s been maybe…” He pauses to think. “Fifty years since we’ve had to take measures.”

“That’s what you call it?”

“Would you prefer I say ‘kill’?” he asks, letting my hand down. “We try to get our blood without violence. We take it from hospitals. We buy it in dark alleys. We have our ways.”

Robbing hospitals and buying black-market blood isn’t exactly ethical either, but it’s better than leaving a pile of bodies in our wake. Better than murder.

“If you stay with me, I will show you,” he says, stepping up to a platform where there’s a sword stuck in a stone. He gestures for me, and I go to him. I put my hand on the hilt of the sword; I grip it and I pull, and I break it. I break the hilt clean off.

“Oops.”

He laughs. “See? You’re strong.”

“Now I feel bad.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

I attempt to press the hilt back into the stone, because I’m too thick and stubborn to recognize when something broken can’t be fixed, can’t be unbroken. And I wonder if that means I’m too thick and stubborn to recognize when something broken isn’t actually broken. If I’ve spent my life trying to glue pieces back together when I should have just let them lie. Or set them on fire.

“It’s okay,” I say, tossing the hilt into the snow.

He takes a breath. “We will take you wherever you want to go. We will not linger if you do not want us to. But you should think about it. What you want. Who you want to do it with. You have time. It’s on your side now, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” I say, looking back at the swordless stone.

“Though just because you have all the time in the world doesn’t mean you can’t still waste it.”

Sometimes wisdom sounds like a threat.