When I wake, it’s to the whir of wheels nearby, and shouting, and the thump and grunt of bodies hitting each other and the ground. I think I’m at derby practice.
Then I open my eyes and see the power tower stretching up over my head, seemingly for miles. There’s no sign of the blue fog that used to surround its foot. Of course, I’m in it. Would I see it if I’m in it? I can’t remember. My mind’s hazy.
I’m not as tired as I was when I passed out.
I also hurt like sin. My head aches, and the hole in my side is doing something unpleasant. Things are moving in there. What the—?
I’m breathing better, anyway. I look lower and see the heads of my teammates whizzing by. They’re skating in a big circle around the base of the power tower leg, where I’m lying in a pool of my own blood.
I struggle up on my elbow. My feet are unnaturally heavy. I’m wearing my own skates.
I hear Fist’n Grey holler, “It’s working!”
“What is?” I croak.
I hear Nick yell, “Hel! Oof!”
I take a deeper breath, and taste sweet prana in the air. My girls are feeding me! I can feel my torn entrails knitting together. It feels weird, but it beats bleeding to death.
Now I see Nick. He’s trying to break through the circle of skaters. They’re fending him off with J-blocks, hip checks, and highly illegal back blocks, and I give him credit, he’s not punching any of them back. He looks kind of beat up.
I glance around, trying to spot Sageman, but I can’t see him.
I look for Nick again. Our eyes meet. Something tight and dark inside me starts to unwind.
Then Rapture Snatch and Dom-De-Dom-Dom come up beside him and popcorn him between them. He puts his arms around his head as he’s battered back and forth.
“Hey,” I say feebly. “Let him alone.”
Sacker whizzes out of the rushing circle and plow-stops about four feet away. “How you doing? How much longer should we keep this up?”
I can feel her energy even at four feet. I want it. “Stay away!”
She rolls backward a foot or so. “Okay?” Her energy field slips out of my reach and I go dizzy, as if my hunger has lunged after her and just missed grabbing hold.
“Keep your distance! I’m not — I don’t know — I don’t trust myself.”
“What about the meat-head?”
I glance over at Nick. He has stopped trying to break through my bodyguards and pauses, looking at us, while derby girls whiz by and slam him, one after another. He rocks, but he’s still on his feet.
“I don’t think I can hurt him,” I say.
“We don’t give a shit about him,” Sacker says unapologetically. “Although, as a matter of fact, that seems like the perfect solution. Yo!” she hollers over her shoulder, and when heads turn in the circle, she taps her hips.
Instantly my teammates skid to a stop.
“Bring him over here. She’s still hungry.”
Nick doesn’t resist as Dom and Rap grab him by the arms and shove him through the circle.
He drops to one knee beside me.
Sacker grabs him by the hair and yanks his face up. “Hurt her and you’re dead.”
“Understood,” he says, and she lets go.
She strides off counterclockwise around my power tower leg, twirling her finger over her head as she rolls. The team’s circling resumes.
I sigh. My eyes close as the trickle of prana they’re making begins to soak into me again.
Nick takes my hand. His hand is hot. Energy boils off him.
Without opening my eyes I say, “You idiot. I can’t stop myself from taking your energy.” I take a taste. He tastes fabulous. The disgust and revulsion I tasted in his prana when he found me in the alley is all gone. He seems ... happy.
“I don’t want you to die,” he says.
“I think I’ll kill myself if I end up killing you,” I say, looking at him, soaking up his deliciousness.
He’s big and gloriously red in the face. “Take what you need. You’ve never hurt me yet.”
I frown with tiredness. “I know. I can’t figure it out.”
With this hopeful thought, I relax, thinking to draw a bit more of his prana, and then I realize I’ve been drawing a lot already without noticing what I was doing. That scares me. I’m too drained and hurting to fight the hunger.
“Tell me if you start feeling weak,” I say.
“I will,” he says.
We sit there for a while, me gasping in big gulps of his prana and the prana my teammates are generating, and trying to ignore the feeling of my innards stitching themselves back together, and him quietly watching me.
Then I think of something that’s been worrying me. “What happened to your boss?” Last time I remembered, Sageman was lying beside me on the asphalt with maybe some broken bones.
Nick looks around. “I tied him up and left him unconscious.”
“You left him unconscious? Don’t you know he’s got the coin?”
“Does he?” Nick frowns.
“Dammit!” I struggle up onto my knees. The world swims around me.
Nick helps me to my skates. The feel of his hands on me is died-and-gone-to-heaven. I sway there, feeling the ache in my side throbbing with a weird pleasure-pain as I pull in his prana, while the air soaks me with the prana my girls are making.
Then he kisses me.
He’s all swirly inside, emotionally. Well, I resemble that. I cling hard to him, feeling the heat of his mouth, his desperately plunging tongue, his hands kneading my shoulders. I also feel his confusion. He pulls away and looks at me. He looks a little swoony himself.
“Do — do you have to kill me?” he says.
My mouth falls open. “Where did that come from?”
“I need to know,” he says, staring past me at derby girls whirling by.
“Why?” I blink. “Do you mean, to keep my secret?”
“Nnno.”
“Why would you have to die?”
His body heat flares. In his aura, I feel that swirling emotional confusion. I wish for once that I could read thoughts, like Sageman.
He says, “Like you killed that guy in the alley. Will he become a vampire?”
I give a panicky half-laugh. “No!”
“Do I have to die to? To be with you?”
That reminds me horribly of my first sexual encounter ever. Seventeen. Hormones raging. Neighbor boy. His sofa. Crazy feelings all over my body and the hunger raging in me. The feel of him softening in my arms, softening to powder.
I turn cold at the thought. “I would do anything to prevent that.”
But Nick and I have already gone that far. All the way and farther. I have no idea how far we might go before — oh.
He wants to be with me.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “You’re the first person I ever—” I take a deep, wobbly breath. I feel a tear begin to leak out of my eye. “I must be the most clueless vampire.”
I look at him shyly. I open my mouth. I know something soppy is going to come out with my next breath.
Something screams right over our heads.