CHAPTER SIX

 

“What?”

I could eek out no more than a whisper. My throat and my lungs failed me. I thought, I prayed, that my ears had failed me, too. Deceived me. Although at the moment I was terrified and confused by what I’d seen, it hadn’t seemed to affect the way I felt about Bo deep down. Apparently, my heart hadn’t gotten the memo.

“I’m dying,” he repeated softly, sadly.

A crushing tide of devastation swept in to wash away the fear and disappointment I’d been feeling. Its violent current nearly erased all traces of the creature I’d seen only moments before, leaving only traces of a strange sickness that threatened the life of someone I didn’t want to live without.

Slowly, I turned to face him. On the one hand, I was hesitant to believe him, especially after having seen him drinking blood.

“You could be lying,” I pointed out.

“But I’m not.”

“But I wouldn’t know.”

“Yes, you would.”

On the other hand, I wanted desperately for it to be true, if for no other reason than that it meant he wasn’t a monster. It just wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be normal, to fall in love with a monster.

But if he wasn’t a monster, then that meant he was dying. As the room slanted this way and that, tilting all around me, I realized that it would be far better to fall in love with a monster than to lose Bo altogether.

Walking to the bed, I perched on the edge, staring down at my hands, wondering what I should do now, what I should say. Bo took care of that dilemma when he pushed on the screen until it popped out and then crawled carefully through my window.

He stopped just inside it and leaned up against the frame, sure to maintain a safe distance from me, one that wouldn’t make me feel threatened. Whether he knew it or not, his thoughtful consideration of my feelings put me at ease more than anything he could ever have said.

“You’re sick?”

I asked the question as gently as I could, as if speaking the words quietly would make them less true, less concrete.

“Can we turn on some music so that your parents won’t hear us talking?”

“Oh,” I said, getting up to dock my iPhone. “Good idea.”

I selected a random play list of soft music so that it would provide background noise, but not be annoying to us or to my parents. That would defeat the purpose entirely.

The first song to play was an old 80’s ballad that sang of dying in someone’s arms. I wanted to cringe. Bo and I looked at each other, he on one side of the room, me on the other. I thought about changing it, but I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I just restarted the conversation.

“Are you really dying?”

I pushed decorum and tact aside in favor of getting answers, answers I needed more than I needed food or water.

Bo nodded. I felt the air close in around me like thick soup—too thick to breathe.

“What is it? I mean, what’s wrong?”

“Over the last few years, do you remember hearing about some of the victims in Southmoore that they thought were being attacked by animals, but then discovered it was a person doing it? The Southmoore Slayer?”

A leaden ball of dread began to swell in the pit of my stomach. “Yeah.”

“Well, that’s what happened to me.”

“You were attacked?”

“Yes.”

“When? Do you know who did it?”

“It’s been three years now,” Bo said.

“What happened?”

Moving from his position against the window, Bo walked to my desk and picked up a clear glass heart-shaped paperweight. He toyed with it, rolling it from one palm to the other and back again.

“My father and I were hunting at the edge of Arlisle Preserve. We’d just gone into the woods and it was still dark outside. I heard some noises and thought it might be a deer moving around.” He paused. “But it wasn’t.”

“What was it?”

“Who,” he corrected.

“Who was it then?”

Bo looked at me intently for several seconds before turning his attention back to the heart. He answered me. “I don’t know, but I’m getting closer to finding out.”

I thought of the previous night, when Trent Long had come to visit. “Does it have anything to do with Trent Long?”

Bo’s head snapped up. “How did you know about him?”

“I saw him at your house then I saw his picture on the news. He’s dead,” I said swallowing. “Did you have something to do with that?”

“Ridley, you have to understand—”

“Ohmigod, you did!” I couldn’t help but take a step back, away from him, away from the truth, but the wall was behind me. There was nowhere to go.

“I think he killed my father,” Bo said, breaking into my rising panic.

“What?”

“Whoever attacked us killed my father and only managed to…infect me.”

“Infect you? Is it-is it contagious?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking.”

I shook my head, trying to focus on one thing at a time. “But you killed somebody, Bo,” I cried.

“He wasn’t human, Ridley. None of them are.”

Mouth agape, I stared at Bo in stunned confusion. “What are you saying?”

“They were—” Bo stopped suddenly, sighing. Palming the glass heart in one hand, he ran the other through his hair in frustrated indecision.

“They?” This was getting worse by the second. My mind scrambled for something safe and sane to latch onto, but it found nothing.

“Ridley, all I’ve done is rid the world of killers, cold-blooded killers. They were all- they were—”

He stopped again, as if still considering whether or not he wanted to tell me. I wondered, doubted, that I really wanted to know what he was going to say, but he’d already begun. I couldn’t let him change his mind now.

“Were what?”

“Ridley, they were vampires.” He paused. “Just like me.”

“They were what?”

My voice sounded shrill in the confines of my room.

“Vampires,” he repeated quietly.

“You think- you think you’re a vampire?”

Bo nodded.

“Bo, I hate to break it to you, but there are no such things as vampires.”

“That’s what I used to think, too.”

My mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. I had no idea what to say to that, but I thought it was probably a good time for him to leave.

“Maybe you should go,” I suggested as calmly as I could. I certainly didn’t want to make a crazy person angry.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, more a statement of fact than an accusation.

Duh was the first thing that came to mind, but I swallowed it. “Did you honestly expect me to believe something like that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone before.”

All things considered, I thought it was pretty remarkable that he managed to make me feel guilty. But he did exactly that.

I relaxed a bit against the wall. My head was pounding, my pulse throbbing dully behind my eyes. I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed.

Maybe I should try a different tack, let him say what he needed to say and then pray that he left. I’d always heard that you shouldn’t try to talk an unbalanced person into reality. I’d heard that you should just go along with their delusions.

“Is that why you were so bloody tonight? You were- were…”

Bo nodded. “There was someone I had to take care of.”

“Because this person was a vampire.”

Bo nodded again.

“And you think you’re a vampire.”

Again, a nod.

“Alright, so you say you are, in fact, a vampire. Let’s just go with that for a minute. If I’m not mistaken, vampires are dead. Yet you told me not five minutes ago that you’re dying. How do you explain that?”

“Well, first of all vampires aren’t technically dead right from the start. We can ‘die’,” he said, using air quotes. “But we can only die the same way once. The venom, it mutates our cells, our DNA, causing us to regenerate very quickly. When we do, we’re sort of immune to whatever harmed or killed us. We can no longer be killed that way, not again.”

“So these people that you killed, you think they’ll…come back?”

“Oh, no. They’re very much dead.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, shaking my head. “Then how did you kill Trent Long? I’m confused. ”

“The only way you can actually, truly kill a vampire. I destroyed his heart.”

“Well, if that’s the case then what do you mean when you say you’re dying?”

Bo returned his attention to the heart in his hand. He leaned back against the desk and held it up to the moonlight pouring through the window, peering through the thick bubbles of heart-shaped glass. He didn’t speak until he lowered it.

“I know I’m dying because I’m killing myself.”

My heart lurched in my chest. I wasn’t expecting that.

“What? Why?”

“The very last blood that pours from a vampire’s heart contains memories of his life, his knowledge, his experiences. But it’s toxic. Very toxic. These men that I hunt, one of them will lead me to the person behind my father’s murder, but to learn that, I have to drain them before I kill them.”

Out of all that, out of all the questions that his explanation generated, the only thing I could think of was that he was killing himself. For a moment, I was drawn into his world of make believe.

“So you’re killing yourself to learn who killed your father?”

“Yes.”

“Your life is worth so little to you that you’d just throw it away for revenge?” That hurt more than I was ready to acknowledge.

Bo looked up at me, his eyes meeting mine in the low light of the room. As they did the first time I saw him, they burned into me, searing me all the way to my soul.

“I had nothing to live for until I met you.”

Despite what he was telling me, despite the fact that he was crazy or sick or deranged or something, my heart swelled inside my chest. It was as if he held my heart in his hand rather than the glass paperweight. It was no longer mine to control. And it felt just as fragile.

That’s when it hit me. What if he’s telling the truth? The way he looked in the basement, he barely looked human at all. What if vampires really are real?

“But you said the only way to kill a vampire is to destroy his heart.”

“Correct.”

“So you should be fine then, right? I mean, you should…come back,” I said, searching for the right phrase.

“The poison attacks the organs, Ridley. Including the heart.” His expression was grave, hopeless.

“Is that why you looked the way you did earlier?”

Bo nodded, dropping his head in either shame or embarrassment. I wasn’t sure which. “It’s worse for a day or two after I drink the…the poison.”

“Well, can’t you just stop?” Finally, I felt brave enough to step toward him. “Can’t you just let it go, let them go, before it’s too late? Can’t you just… live?”

Bo shook his head sadly, lowering his gaze once more to the heart he held in his hand.

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why? Why can’t it be exactly that easy?”

“I’ve taken in too much of their blood. I can tell that it’s killing me. The human blood that I drink, from the blood bank, is barely keeping me alive now and I don’t know how much longer that will last,” he confessed. “I’m having to drink more and more, but still this form wears down that much more quickly.”

“This form? What do you mean?”

“We—vampires—regenerate so quickly, our cells multiply and divide so fast, that they have a translucent appearance once we’ve metabolized our food. Kind of like we’re in a constant state of flux, like we’re growing too fast for light or human eyes to track,” he explained. “But the blood that I drink is used up fighting off the effects of the poison most of the time, so I can’t maintain a human appearance for as long as others.”

A sinking feeling began in the pit of my stomach and seeped into my arms and legs, making them feel like lead, like dead weight. “What do you look like when it wears off, when the poison’s gone and the blood’s gone?” Even after the question was out, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

Bo’s lips curled up into a bitter, mirthless twist. “Invisible. I look like nothing.”

I knew that answer alone would spawn hundreds of questions, but right now my focus was on his demise and just how imminent it was.

“So, what will happen when you,” I paused, swallowing the enormous lump in my throat. “When you die?”

Bo looked out the window. “I don’t know. The only information I’ve been able to find out about it is that draining a vampire will kill you, poison you. That’s it.” He shrugged. “Nothing else ever mattered until now. The only thing I cared about was finding out who killed my father.”

“How long do you have until…”

“I don’t know that either, but I’d say not very long.”

I felt the sting of tears and, though I blinked them back, there was no stopping the drops of heartbreak as they welled in my eyes.

The words to the song that had begun to play stabbed at my soul. The sad voice of a woman singing of doomed love resonated within me. Though they had little time, she had a love for him so strong that wild horses couldn’t drag her away.

“There has to be something that we can do,” I said, trying to still my trembling chin.

A look of sheer agony crossed Bo’s face as he laid the glass heart back on the desk and crossed the room to me. Slowly, gently, he pulled me into his arms. He was giving me the chance to pull away, to turn away, and my heart wrenched all the more at his tenderness.

“This is why I should’ve stayed away from you,” he whispered against my hair.

“Don’t even say that. I wouldn’t have traded this time—however much we have—for anything,” I said, leaning back to meet his eyes. “Not for anything.”

Bo’s eyes searched my face for a few seconds before he lowered his lips to mine. He kissed me with such sweetness, such hopeless softness, that my throat constricted even further. When a light saltiness reached my tongue, I knew that my tears had finally overwhelmed my eyes and spilled down my cheeks, mingling with our kiss.

Bo dragged his lips away and leaned his forehead against mine, his eyes still closed.

“I wish I could just walk away from you. Just walk away and leave you alone, to live your life,” he breathed.

“You can’t save me from pain, Bo,” I cried.

“I can when I’m the one who brought pain into your life.”

“You think you’re the only pain I’ve known? I know all about pain and loss,” I said, pulling back once more to look into his eyes. “My sister died in a car accident three years ago and I was with her. I survived when I shouldn’t have and everyone in my life wishes it had been the other way around. I might as well have lost my entire family in that accident, so I know all about loss.” I reached up and touched his face, which was burning hot. “But even after that, after surviving all that, I don’t think I could survive losing you, Bo. Not you. Not you,” I sighed, leaning my head against his chest.

I felt his arms come around me again, hugging me close to his feverish body.

“You’re burning up,” I murmured. “Is that part of it?”

“Sort of. My temperature will run hot while I metabolize the blood I just drank. When my body starts to cool, I know I need to feed soon.”

That explained a lot about his widely varied body temperature. Until recently, I must’ve always seen him when he was nearing a feeding.

“So I guess you feed before school and it wears off throughout the day?”

“Yeah. A couple of times I’ve had to run home in the middle of the day. It just depends on what’s going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I exert a lot or get overly excited, I burn more energy.”

Bo was rubbing his hand slowly up and down my arm and, even in these terrible circumstances, I felt a tiny flame of desire flicker to life deep in my belly.

“So when you say excited, what kinds of things do you mean?”

I heard Bo’s breath hitch in his chest. When he finally let it out, it hissed through his pursed lips.

“Let’s not talk about that right now. You’re liable to get a first hand look at what happens.”

Bo pushed me back to arm’s length and took a step away from me. When I looked into his eyes, I knew why. He was feeling the same kindling of passion that I was and he was struggling to resist it.

We were saved from further temptation when my father called my name from the living room.

I yelled in answer, mainly to keep him from coming in search of me.

“Coming!” When Bo cringed, I cast him a sheepish look. “Sorry.”

He grinned and my heart skipped a couple of beats.

“No problem. I should’ve known, being a cheerleader, that you’d have some serious lungs on you,” he teased. “I guess that’s my cue to leave, huh?”

Before I could answer, he turned and walked back to the window.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” I was anxious, almost fearful, to let him out of my sight, afraid that I wouldn’t see him again.

Bo stopped at the window, still facing away from me. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

Every fiber of my being cried out in answer, even before I could get the word off my lips. “Yes.”

Bo looked back at me and smiled, a breathtaking lift of his lips that said he was pleased with my answer. I couldn’t help but smile in return. “Then yes, you’ll see me tomorrow. I’ll call you, ok?”

“Ok,” I said, walking to the window.

“Ridley!” Dad shouted again.

I turned my head toward the door this time, so that I wouldn’t blast Bo.

“Coming!”

When I turned back to the window, Bo was gone.