Chapter 31
31
We make it to North Carolina but not to Wilmington. The morning sun forces us off the road, bright and yellow, a cheery antagonist.
“We can stay here today,” Elisa says, pulling into the parking lot of a Comfort Inn. “Or we can go to a campsite. Find a shady spot. All sleep in the back.”
“No,” Tatiana says. “There are too many of us. I want a proper mattress. Soft linens.”
I doubt she’s going to get either at a Comfort Inn, but since I don’t want to sleep in the back of the camper, I keep my mouth shut.
Elisa parks in front of the hotel, and we wait under the awning while she and Henry get us rooms. Ilie kindly unloads our luggage and the cooler, with its lone remaining bag of blood. I watch Naomi twitch in its presence, unable to take her eyes off it.
Tatiana sips from her flask. Her eyes are hidden behind a pair of glamorous cat-eye sunglasses. She offers the flask to me, and I shake my head.
“No?” she asks. “You don’t want?”
I do want. That’s the problem. “How are your eyes?”
“They sting,” she says. She tilts her head to the side, contemplative. Then she reaches out and tips my chin up. “You are unhappy when you deprive yourself. You are unhappy when you indulge. You are unhappy in your bones. Henry will not cure that. He will suffer trying. As your friend has.”
She cradles my face, then leans in like she’s about to kiss me. She whispers in my ear, “If only you could stare at your reflection. Be face-to-face with the one who holds your joy hostage. Perhaps then you could forgive her. Perhaps then you could hope to fall in love with your future.”
She does kiss me. Kisses my shocked, open mouth. Her lips are impossibly soft, and she smells like roses.
“Eternity is a long time to wallow, ma chérie ,” she says, lowering her sunglasses to show me her eyes, which are oozing, crusted with pinkish gunk. “Too long.”
She pushes her sunglasses up her nose and turns away from me. I touch my lips, now slick with gloss. Her words snake through my brain, and I feel naked, exposed. I zip up my coat, as if that’ll do anything to cover me.
“Keys!” Elisa says, whimsically leaping through the hotel’s automatic doors, holding up three key cards. “It is not the castle, but it will do.”
The hotel lobby is small, dimly lit, with linoleum floors and a drop ceiling. It smells strongly of bleach, but at least that means it’s clean. Elisa presses the button for the elevator. Naomi glares at the woman behind the counter, who smiles politely and waves, wonderfully unaware that the person she’s greeting so amiably wants nothing more than to rip her neck apart with her teeth.
“Nay,” I say, taking her arm.
“I’m fine,” she says, pulling away from me.
The elevator dings, the doors open, and the six of us cram into the elevator.
I realize we’re a sight—an eccentric bunch. Tatiana in her silk pajamas, Ilie in one of his hipster-pirate getups, Elisa in a long, flowing dress. Henry, Naomi, and I look relatively normal, though a little dirty. None of us are properly dressed for the weather—it’s below freezing out. If we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, we’re doing a pretty bad job.
Our rooms are at the end of the hall on the second floor. They’re all next to one another. Elisa and Tatiana take the first. Ilie stands outside the second, looking at Naomi, who looks at me.
“Whatever you want to do,” I say. The tension between us is supremely icky, and I hope she goes with Ilie so I can escape with Henry. So he can distract me from everything with his mouth.
“All right, Ilie,” Naomi says, slipping her arms around his waist and giving him a tight hug. “Let’s have ourselves a sleepover.”
“So fun,” Ilie says, smiling.
Henry and I take the last room. It’s nicer than I anticipated. The carpet is torn up in some spots and the wallpaper is peeling, but it’s clean. There are two queen beds, which presents an awkward predicament. Do we use the two beds? Or do we share one?
There’s a knock on the door, and my stomach flips before I hear Ilie’s voice.
“You have the cooler,” he says. “Naomi needs to drink.”
Henry opens the door and there they all are. Ilie, Naomi, Elisa, and Tatiana. They plop down on the beds, make themselves comfortable as Henry gets out the bag of blood. He takes the plastic cups from the bathroom, pierces the bag with his spile, and pours two even. They get passed around, with Naomi and I getting the cups last.
I consider abstaining, attempting to resist my thirst. But deprivation doesn’t seem to work. Any attempt I’ve ever made to punish myself has only led me straight to my next mistake.
Also, it’s not lost on me that this is it, the last of our supply. I don’t know when we’ll get more. How we’ll get more. Maybe this goes unnoticed by the others. It definitely goes unspoken.
I bring one of the cups to my lips, and I close my eyes and I drink. Let it in. A taste like no other. An immaculate medicine. It settles me.
“The day is young,” Ilie says. “Let us stay awake.”
Tatiana yawns. “I am exhausted.”
“Me, too,” Elisa says. She gets up on tiptoe, pirouettes, curtsies, then says, “Sleep sweet.”
Tatiana follows her out, pausing in the doorway to say, “Ilie, leave the lovers in peace.”
I feel my cheeks go red.
“You are all no fun. Naomi, let us go have fun. We can watch TV. We can run around hotel, pretend we are spies,” he says.
“Do you have drugs, by any chance?”
“Of course I have drugs,” he says, laughing.
She jumps on him, and he piggybacks her out into the hall. Henry closes the door behind them.
“She’ll be okay with Ilie,” he says. “He’s smarter than he seems.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” He takes my face in his hands to kiss me. He stops to yawn. “Sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I say, catching his yawn. “I’m spent.”
“Should we sleep?”
Looking at him, I get a very good idea that I’m almost too shy to speak out loud. Almost. “Could we shower first?”
He grins. His fox grin. His cat-that-got-the-canary grin.
We undress each other. We soap each other, use our hands to create a lather. We look at each other. We kiss each other. We clean each other. It’s an intimacy like I’ve never experienced. Not even in all my years with…Joel.
For a second, I couldn’t even remember his name.
A small part of me wonders if I should feel bad about it, acknowledges that I have yet to process or fully comprehend the loss of that relationship. But most of me is busy washing Henry’s hair.
After we get out of the shower and towel each other off, we get into bed, one bed, and he holds me. His skin is still a little wet.
We lie in nectarous silence for a long time.
Then he says, “Do you want to hear my sad song?”
I nod, then rest my head on his chest, listening to his heart, the steady thump of it.
“I was a prince, once. Centuries ago. Far away from here,” he says, his accent shifting, voice going deeper. “I have seen many battles. Fought many wars. I have killed. I have won. I have lost. I was married to a girl whom I did not choose, did not love, who did not choose me or love me, who died too young. My father was cruel, and my younger brothers resented me. I had no friends whom I could trust. I thought I would die alone on a battlefield. I became this so I would not, so I might prove myself to a kingdom that no longer exists. Be honored by history, which I know now does not remember me. I have spent centuries drifting in the dark, hating who I’d been, unsure of who I’d become.”
He pauses.
“You remind me of what it once felt like to step into sunlight,” he says. “To feel warmth. To experience true brightness. All that’s tangible and intangible.”
It’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me, and I wish I knew how to respond. I wish I could believe his words, meet him where he is. I wish I knew how to trust this stranger—all his mischief, all his danger, all his beauty, and the pull between us that could be love.
My throat yearns, not for blood, but for sound, for the right words. I need to say something. I need…
“Thank you,” I tell him. Thank you. Thank you?
He grins a new grin. Not goofy or devious. Despondent. The grin of a man on a sinking ship, admiring the sky.
“Get some sleep,” he says, reaching over to the nightstand and grabbing his cigarettes. “I’m going out to smoke.”
“Okay. All right.”
He gets out of bed, gets dressed, kisses me on the forehead. Then he’s gone, and I’m alone, and I wonder what I should have said to him. Anything but “thank you.”
I close my eyes, and I see Ms.Alice, the skin between her teeth. I hear the echo of her horrible laugh. I remember her blood. The blood in the tumbler. Lee’s blood on Naomi’s lips. The blood of the man at the rest stop. Matthew’s blood, our first victim, left in the woods behind our cottage.
I remember my reflection, the last time I saw it, will ever see it, in the dirty mirror at the lake house. I picture Naomi, imagine her across the hall with Ilie, snorting illicit substances off each other. And Elisa, her curls haloing her face, pulling her sleep mask down over her eyes. Tatiana, sprawled across the bed in her silk pajamas, beautiful and bitchy and maybe even wise.
Perhaps I could hope to fall in love with my future. This future. With these people.
With him. Henry.
If I can get past the guilt and the fear. Accept my thirst.
I open my eyes and stare at the empty cooler at the foot of the bed, weary myself until I drift off to sleep.
—
When I wake up, Henry isn’t beside me. At first, I assume he took the other bed, offended by my tepid response to his romantic declaration comparing me to his fond human memories of sunlight. But once I get the courage to look over, I see he isn’t there. He isn’t in the room at all. I don’t think he ever came back.
The clock says it’s four seventeen p.m. It could be wrong, but if it isn’t, he’s been gone all day.
I slide out of bed and put on pants, a T-shirt, my boots without socks.
When I open the door of our room, Naomi’s standing there.
I slam my hand to my chest. “You startled me.”
She still wears her Penny Lane jacket, despite its being bloodstained. The stains have faded to an inconspicuous brown, though. No one would assume it’s blood. Hopefully.
“What are you doing out here?” I ask her.
“I don’t know. Ask Dracula,” she says, pointing to her room.
“What?”
“Your boyfriend knocked on our door, like, half an hour ago. They’re all in there plotting. I went out for a cigarette,” she says, tossing a pack up in the air. “Don’t have to worry about them killing me anymore. You know how I love to look for that juicy sweet silver lining.”
“What do you mean, plotting?” I say. “Let’s not stand in the hall.”
I pull her into my room and close the door behind us.
“Sharing a bed, I see,” she says, flopping down on the other, still-made queen.
“What did he say? When he came in.”
“They’re robbing a bank,” she says casually, lighting a cigarette. “I fucking missed smoking. Lollipops? What was I thinking?”
“Are you joking?”
“Blue raspberry doesn’t hit the same, you know?”
“No, I mean about the bank. And put that out—you’re going to set off the alarm.”
She groans but does as I ask, getting up and putting the cigarette out in the bathroom sink. “They’re robbing a bank tonight.”
“Are you being serious? I can’t tell.”
“Sorry. We’re robbing a bank tonight,” she says, leaning against the wall. “A blood bank. And yes, I’m serious.”
“What specifically did he say?”
“He knocked on the door, woke us up. Woke up Tatiana and Elisa. They all huddled in our room. He said he found a blood bank and they’re going to rob it tonight. There was some hesitance because it’s, like, short notice. I gather they usually plan these things well in advance. Ilie was, like, what’s the rush? Henry didn’t say but I think we all know.”
“Know what?”
She gestures to me. “The rush.”
“Me?”
“Well, and that.” She points to the cooler. “Ms.Alice cleared us out.”
“I don’t want to hold up a blood bank.”
“Seems like it’s going to be more Ocean’s Eleven than Bonnie and Clyde .”
I fall on the unmade bed and put my head in my hands. She sits herself beside me.
“This clearly isn’t their first time,” she says. “We’ll get what we need without…” She mimes chomping into me. “Sip it out of a cup like it’s Diet DrPepper. What is DrPepper a doctor of, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Physics,” I say, flatly.
She laughs. “Buck up. We’re not expected to participate in the heist. I have a feeling they want us to stay out of the way. It’s kind of romantic. Him robbing a bank for you. Like a hot Dracula John Dillinger.”
“He’s not Dracula,” I say.
“Do you know that for sure, or…?”
I squeeze my head between my hands, close my eyes, clench my jaw.
“You don’t want to talk about real shit, hash it out, so I’m keeping it light. Surface level.”
“Should we try talking them out of it?” I ask, standing.
“Why? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? I mean, under these circumstances. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“They’re going in after hours. It’s going to be more of a breaking-and-entering situation. A stealth operation,” she says, eyes sparking.
“Are you into this?”
“Kind of, yeah,” she says, swinging around so she’s lying sideways on the bed, posing like a starlet. “Outlaws. Vampire bandits. What’s not to like?”
“Other than all the bloodshed?” I ask.
“That’s the best part,” she says. “Kidding.”
“Are you?”
She’s suddenly, eerily, dead serious. “I don’t know how to make it right, Sloane. I’m scared, too. I have my regrets. I’ve done plenty of things that I’m not proud of over these last few days. But what am I gonna do? I can’t change it. What’s done is done,” she says, sitting up. “I can only move forward.”
I remember Henry’s observation. She lives as though she’s running out of time. I used to think Naomi never considered consequence, that she felt no shame, or fear. I can see now that I misunderstood. She’s burdened by the same things that burden me. Only her solution is to live harder, move faster, attempt to outrun, while I hide away, make myself small and static. I thought she was the reckless one. The dangerous one. But maybe I just wanted to believe that I wasn’t.
“You’re the person I love most in this world. I don’t want to lose you. I need you. You can’t be mad at me forever,” she says. “Literally forever.”
“I’m not mad at you, Nay,” I say, and as the words leave my lips, I realize they’re true. It’s easy to project anger at the person closest to you when the person you’re really angry at is yourself.
“You can’t be mad at yourself forever either. You know that, right?”
I flip her off. “Mind reader.”
She takes my hand and gives it a squeeze, and it’s like we’re in the back of Meghan’s mom’s minivan, like the moment we became friends. The moment we found home.
“I’m sorry, Sloane. For all of it.”
“Me, too, hoss.”
“Huh. Yeah, you can pull off ‘hoss.’ I mean, I kind of thought it might be my thing now, but…”
“I feel like I actually can’t pull it off, but you don’t want to tell me that, so you’re using it so I won’t use it. Taking a bullet for me.”
“Nah,” she says. “What do you say? Should we go crash their party? Find out the grand plan?”
“I guess.”
She leads me out of the room, across the hall. She takes out her key card but pauses before opening the door.
“Wait,” she whispers. “First, you have to tell me what’s going on with you and probably-not Dracula.”
“Now?”
“Yeah. Real quick. Spill it,” she says. The way she’s looking at me, her stupidly beautiful face bright as a firework, her giddiness contagious, I’m defenseless. So I tell her. And she gasps and giggles and we’re teenagers again and everything is perfect and normal until I remember it isn’t.