Nineteen

I wake up, blinking the sun out of my eyes. As I adjust to the bright light, I see Alex on my right, kneeling over me, holding my arm firmly. My heart ramps up again, and I try to pull away from him.

“Easy, easy,” he says.

“What happened?”

“You fainted.”

“Where am I?” I’m struggling to take my arm back, to get away.

“You’re safe, Kat. I won’t hurt you. I would never hurt you.”

“But—you’re a vampire.” I look at him closely, trying to see his fangs. But they’ve retracted, and he looks like Alex again, regular old Alex. Did I dream it all up?

Then he confirms, “Yes, I’m a vampire. But I’m not like Roman. You’ll have to let me explain.”

I don’t want to hear his explanation, but he’s holding me so firmly I can’t escape. My only option is to let loose a scream that can be heard for miles and hope to catch the attention of some hikers or campers. So I open my mouth, take a deep breath—and that’s when I look around me.

And I see that we’re not on the ground.

We’re in a tree. But this is not just any tree. I’m stretched out across a thick branch that’s as wide as a park bench, and surrounding me are treetops in every direction. When I glance down, I see the tree trunk disappear into mist, and I feel as though I might faint again.

“It’s okay, Kat,” Alex says. “You’re safe up here. I won’t let you fall. I promise.”

“How did I get up here?”

“I carried you.”

“Carried me?”

“That’s right.”

“But how—” I stop, remembering his fangs. He brought me up here where I have no way to escape. Except to jump.

My body begins to tremble. “What are you going to do to me?”

“Nothing,” he says. “I’m just going to talk to you, that’s all.”

“Why can’t we talk on the ground?”

“Because you were running from me. Up here, you can’t go anywhere. I need you to listen to me.”

“I don’t know about you, but I find it really hard to focus when I’m scared out of my mind.”

“I told you, I won’t let you fall. You need to know the truth about me, Kat. Then I’ll take you back down and let you go, and you’ll never have to see me again if you don’t want to. I promise.”

I take a few deep breaths and tell myself that if he’d wanted to hurt me, he would have already. But then again, I thought the same about Roman. Is there no one I can trust?

I can’t even scoot away from Alex, as much as I want to. I’m too afraid of falling. I look around and feel as though I’m at the top of a mountain peak; in all directions, all I see are the tops of trees. I’m surprised to see that the tree we’re in rises another twenty or thirty feet above.

“This is the tree,” I say, remembering what he said just before he bared his fangs. “We’re in the tallest tree in the world?”

Alex nods. He stands up and holds out his hand. I take it, not so much because I forgive or trust him but because I know that holding onto him is the only certain way I won’t go flying off this branch.

“When I was born,” he says, “this tree was only a hundred feet tall.”

“Wow,” I say. “I didn’t know they grew that fast.”

“They don’t.” He pauses, then continues, “This tree is more than two thousand years old.”

“I don’t—” I stop when I realize what he’s talking about. “Oh. The vampire thing.”

He nods again. “When I come up here, I don’t feel quite so old.”

He looks wistful, but also a little peaceful. Nothing like the way Victor and Roman had looked at me last night. Like they were ready to devour me.

“What did you mean when you said you’re not like Roman?” I ask.

“I don’t live on blood.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. “I thought that was the only thing a vampire can eat.”

“Not me. Not anymore.”

“What do you live on, then?”

“You’re standing on it.”

I look down, then look back at him. “Trees?”

“The blood of trees.”

“The blood of—” It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about. But then Roman’s voice shoots through my mind: sapsucker. “Sap. You drink sap.”

“Yes, I live on sap.”

“I didn’t know vampires could do that.”

“As I told you, we’re adaptable.”

“You eat only from plants?”

“Exactly.” He smiles. “So you see why I could never hurt you.”

“A vegan vampire,” I say, amazed to hear these words coming from my own mouth. Amazed that such a thing exists. Mostly, I’m relieved. My instincts have been right, maybe not about Roman, but about Alex. I am safe with him.

“Yes, a vegan vampire,” Alex says.

“I’ve heard about vegetarian vampires,” I say, “the ones that eat animals, not humans.”

“Anyone who eats an animal, human or vampire, is not a vegetarian,” Alex says. “To be vegetarian is to spare all mammals, all birds, all fish. But then, you know that already.”

“Are you the only one?”

“There are others, but only a few. We have to keep a low profile, which is why I’ve waited so long to tell you. Many—vampires like Roman—believe it’s okay, even admirable, to kill a vegan vampire. We are lesser creatures in their eyes. And we threaten their existence.”

“So this is why you and Roman hate each other.”

Alex nods. “We don’t see eye to eye, to say the least. We’re in completely different worlds.”

“So why hasn’t he killed you yet?”

Alex shrugs. “As they say, keep friends close and your enemies closer. I think Roman and his type keep us around in case there’s ever a need for a scapegoat. In case they ever need someone to blame. I also think he’s worried. He tells himself that he can kill me easily—but what if he can’t? If he doesn’t try, he’ll never need to know that I’m stronger. He can just go on believing it.”

“So are you stronger?”

“I am now,” he says. “But I wasn’t so strong then. To be honest, I was close to ending my own life before I discovered the trees. Every time I took the life of a human, I was consumed with guilt. I couldn’t help doing it, of course—it’s the way I was made, and the instinct to live is so powerful. I always thought I had no choice. But it began to wear on me, all that death. I couldn’t help but think of those left behind, waiting, hopelessly waiting. And I began to wonder why my existence had to come at the expense of another. It was not just a matter of eating to live. I had removed human beings from the earth—people who were husbands and wives and parents and children—never to return. The weight of murder was growing too heavy on my shoulders. So I tried to limit myself to animals.”

“Did that work?”

“The guilt didn’t go away. Who’s to say a fawn doesn’t miss its mother, just because it’s a deer and not a human? Blood is blood in the end.”

“So what happened?”

“I starved myself, but that only made me weak. And in my weakest moments, my instinct returned, and I went back to my old ways again. So I was left with only one option.”

“And?”

Alex’s voice grows quiet. “I sought out the tallest tree I could find. Which meant, naturally, that I ended up here. I fashioned a sharp stake made of ash and shoved it into the ground, pointing up. Then I started climbing.”

“Oh, Alex.”

“I climbed to the top,” Alex continues. “And I prepared to jump and leave this world for good. But when I was up here, I caught a scent of something, something fragrant. It was coming from the trunk. And I was hungry again, so hungry—so I sank my teeth into the bark, like you’d bite into an apple. And then I drank.”

“What was it like?” I am still stunned, thinking of Alex’s fangs. Thinking of him drinking sap from a tree. Thinking of how he would rather have died than hurt another living creature.

“At first, the sap made me ill. Or so I thought—it was so different. I felt very hazy, very strange. I leaned against the trunk of this tree, four hundred feet in the air, and felt myself swaying, dizzy. I fell asleep—or I thought I did. I was dreaming, or maybe hallucinating, but all I could see were images of the world covered in green, this beautiful mossy green. Just like what you see on all these trees.” He shakes his head. “I thought I was dead. But then I recovered, and when I came to my senses, I realized I was stronger than before. That I actually felt better. So I took another drink. Then another. And I felt my strength returning.”

“How did you know you would survive?”

“I didn’t. That is, I didn’t have any proof. Deep down, though, I knew. There is a life force all around us. In trees, plants, animals—anywhere in nature. I just tap into it.”

“But doesn’t this harm the trees?”

“It doesn’t have to. This was the first tree I ever drank from, and look how strong it is. You remember Roman calling me a sapsucker, don’t you?”

“Who could forget?”

“He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but I actually take it as one. A sapsucker is a small bird that also lives off the trees. If you look closely at certain trees, you can see the tiny holes the sapsucker drills with its beak. What sapsuckers know—and what we know, too—is that if a tree dies, we lose a source of food. So the sapsucker feeds off of a number of different trees. We do the same thing. We have learned to take as little as necessary from a tree, and to drink from many trees, always alternating, the way a farmer alternates crops.”

“Symbiosis,” I say. “That’s smart.”

“Nature is smart,” he says. “In nature, there’s no such thing as overconsumption. No such thing as waste. Everything in nature takes what it needs and nothing more.”

“So you don’t kill the trees that feed you?”

“No, we don’t. Fortunately, in Lithia, we are next to a million acres of forest, a virtual smorgasbord. For all my long life, I assumed that not having blood meant certain death, that no vampire could survive without it. But I did. Not only that—I thrived. Just as I thought my life was over, it actually began. Now I’m free of the guilt, of the cycle of death.” He smiles. “And, if I do say so myself, this diet has done wonders for my skin. You’ve seen how pale Roman is.”

“Why hasn’t Roman converted?”

“Roman doesn’t see any reason to change his ways. If anything, seeing me go through this transformation only gives him more reason to cling to his ways. I called him an old-school vampire once, and he nearly fought me to the death. He talks of tradition and instinct and fate, like we are all frozen in amber. But we’re not. If humans can change their diets, why can’t we?”

“Do you still crave blood?”

“I used to, for the first few years. Any new habit requires letting go of an old habit. But since that day up here, I’ve never killed another human or animal. I’m proud of that.”

“Roman has killed people, hasn’t he?”

“What do you think?”

I know the answer, but I don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe that someone I once liked so much could be responsible for the deaths of others. Probably a great many deaths, which I don’t want to think about either.

“Wait,” I say. “He could have killed me weeks ago. Why didn’t he? When I first got here, no one knew who I was. Nobody even would have noticed.”

“I can think of two reasons why he didn’t,” Alex says.

“What are they?”

“For one, you’re a vegan.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“To a vampire, the blood of a human vegan is no different than that of a deer. The blood will keep you alive, sure, but it won’t taste the same, and it won’t offer the same energy. I think it’s because you don’t eat meat that Roman doesn’t crave your blood as much as others. It wouldn’t satisfy him.”

I think back to that first date with Roman, at the steakhouse. Roman had pushed me to eat steak; he wanted me to change. Was he setting me up for the kill?

“That’s why you made me promise to stay vegan.”

“Right,” Alex says. “I’m pretty sure he’ll leave you alone as long as you are.”

“But what if he changes his mind?” I ask with a shudder. “Or what if he gets so hungry that he can’t help it?”

“That brings me to the second reason.”

“Which is?”

“Roman seems to like you right where you are,” Alex says. “He doesn’t want to kill you.”

“But shouldn’t it be the opposite? I mean, if he does like me so much, wouldn’t he want me to become a vampire like him? Eternal life and all that?”

“There are no guarantees,” Alex says. “You might become a vampire, but you might also simply die, depending on your body’s reaction. There are some antidotes, too. Roman probably wasn’t ready to take that risk.”

“But he might. Someday.”

“Not on my watch,” Alex says.

My heart does a little flip-flop in my chest. “I shouldn’t have gone running last night without you,” I confess. “I wish I hadn’t. I just—I wanted to see if I could find Stacey up there. On the trail. I know it sounds silly.”

“Not at all,” he says. “But I’m glad you understand now.”

“I miss her.”

“I do, too.” Alex reaches out and pulls me close to him, and we sit down in the tree, letting our legs dangle from the branch. I swing my legs back and forth, feeling free, knowing that Alex won’t let me fall.

“Do you always come here to eat?” I ask him.

“Not always,” he says. “It’s fun for Thanksgiving. A good place for a feast.”

I laugh, and he laughs, too. I look up at him, at his happy face, and before I know what I’m doing, I’m reaching up to kiss him. He kisses me back.

I turn to move a little closer, and then I feel myself slipping, slipping off the rough bark of this tree, hundreds of feet in the air.

Then Alex is lifting me, pulling me back up with a preternatural strength I’d never have imagined.

“I won’t let you fall,” he promises again.

I lean my body against his. “Can we stay here forever?” I ask.

“We can try,” he says, a smile in his voice, “except we both have to be at work tomorrow.”

I sigh. “I guess you’re right.”

“But we’ll stay here for a while,” he says. “I want you to see this place after dark. From here, the stars are so much closer, you won’t believe it. You feel like you can reach out and grab them.”

He wraps his arms around me, and I lean back to look up at the sky. It’s still early, and I’m glad. It means I have hours and hours, alone up here in this tree with Alex, before he’ll want to show me the stars.