The Ram’s bullet struck his heart. Jin stumbled. Fell. One knee hit the cold, hard floor, then the other.
He had long wondered what death would feel like. He had lived surrounded by it. Weekends in the morgue with his parents and their research, those harrowing minutes when he’d looked for them in their burning house, then life with the girl who’d pulled him out of the rubble.
Jin didn’t know if Arthie was bleeding out somewhere in this hall, just like he was. He didn’t know if she was aware of how much he appreciated her. Loved her.
He blinked groggily, because his eyelids weighed more than a barrel of gunpowder. He saw the Ram’s men fall one by one at the hands of vampires he didn’t know, joining the reporters who had come here for the truth, and then he saw the Ram herself inching away, disappearing before anyone could stop her.
Matteo’s shadow fell over him. “Jin. It’s fatal. Let me—”
Jin knew what he was going to suggest. What he had to offer. He thought he nodded, but then he was alone again and another pair of footsteps skidded toward him. Flick. She wasn’t crying for him, was she? She didn’t like him that much. She had kissed him. Beautifully. Jin found himself laughing, it made the pain sharper, colder. He liked it. At least he was going to die happy.
“Jin,” she was saying. Over and over.
And then she was moving aside. In her place was the girl who had stepped between him and death’s scythe again and again and again. She was alive. Of course she was alive. She was Arthie Casimir. She never needed saving.
“At last,” he murmured. He still had so much more to do—find his parents, rebuild Spindrift, love a girl who had sunshine curls and pastel berets—but he knew Arthie would track them down and do the tearoom justice. And Flick would find someone else to love her.
“No,” Arthie said fiercely, thickly, but not even she could stop this. “No, Jin. Look sharp.”
Jin felt his eyes flutter shut. He heard voices shouting, arguing, fading away. He was fading away. Then he felt a pain unlike any other, as if the life was being sucked out of him, as if he was being drained, the blood leaving his body. He thought he was screaming, but he couldn’t tell.
And then something pressed against his lips, and someone pinched his nose, forcing him to drag a broken breath through his mouth. Metal. Metal flooded his tongue in liquid form. Sweet and tangy and sharp. Blood.
And then a whisper.
“Live,” said death in his ear. “For me.”
Jin’s eyes flew open to a halo of mauve, a pair of demon eyes. Arthie. There was something wrong with her.
There were fangs in her mouth. There was blood in his.
And as fire bled through his veins, he thought, impossibly, of coconut. Because that was how denial worked: The brain refused to believe the truth in front of it and tucked it away instead.
Jin remembered it now, like a shock. Hidden behind the lavender aster bushes in the front lawn of the Siwang Residence as the last of his life went up in flames, an eleven-year-old Jin handed Arthie a coconut. Her eyes took on a faraway look when she saw it, and then she seemed sad.
He didn’t know her well enough to know that she’d come from the same country as this coconut; he thought she simply didn’t know how to open it.
And if coconuts made people happy, he owed it to her to make her happy, didn’t he? He rose on shaky legs and found the gardener’s tools, cracking open the coconut the way Ceylani coconuts ought to be cracked—divots hacked into the top, not in half like the fibrous brown ones—and poured it into Arthie’s dirty cup. “Drink.”
She stared at him, wanting to say something. If only he’d known she wasn’t sad—she was a vampire. If only he’d known she was afraid to drink because she thought vampires only drank blood.
“Drink,” he insisted, rattling the coconut to show her that there was more inside.
Her gaze dropped to the vein jumping at his throat, but she took a sip. She blinked down at the cup immediately and took another sip. Then another. Then she tipped the cup upside down until the very last drop disappeared in her throat.
Jin hadn’t thought anyone could move so quickly. Then again, he didn’t know what she was. He didn’t know he was changing her life by leading her through the unburned side of the kitchen to a barrel full of the same green coconuts. He didn’t realize it wasn’t because of her love for them that she used her ingenuity to create an icebox to preserve as many of his father’s coconuts as they could, until years later when she found her footing and began importing them herself.
For Spindrift, she would say. For myself, she never admitted.
“I believe a vampire can subsist on coconut,” his father had once said.
“And not blood?” Jin had asked, eyes wide. That explained the plethora of coconuts scattered in his father’s study, some cracked open, half-full glasses littering the room.
There was one such glass on the dinner table. It was murky with little milk-white slivers floating about. Jin’s father took a sip. “Only the Ceylani coconut seems to do the trick, though they need to have some blood in them for it to work.”
“Are you a vampire then, Pa?”
“I think your mother would have sent me back to the grave already, lad,” he replied with a laugh, and gave Jin some to try. It was sweet, and somehow made him feel lighter, happier. “Good, isn’t it? In addition to making excellent weapons, coconuts make you happy.”
How could he have been so blind? It wasn’t tea she lived for, but the coconut. He’d only ever seen her drinking coconut water happily—rarely anything else. When she’d insisted on keeping a batch in reserve. When she’d always ask after the status of its shipments more than that of the tea.
She had never told him a word.
You were right, Father, Jin thought now. Vampires can subsist on coconut.
“Wake up,” came a voice, dragging him from the gallows, from that curtain of forever black. “Jin, wake up.”
His eyes fluttered open, and he drew away with a hiss. Everything was too bright, too white. And the hunger—good grief, he was hungry. Starved. Ravenous. Hadn’t he just eaten? He slid his tongue along his teeth, a sinking, harrowing feeling in his stomach.
Fangs. He had fangs. That hunger wasn’t for food, but blood.
Arthie sat back on her heels, the folds of her sari in disarray. Her relief was bare on her face, but she didn’t smile because she knew him.
She knew he was not happy with the secrets she’d kept. She looked smaller, frailer. Broken. She stumbled and righted herself. He didn’t know what to say, and so he watched as Arthie threw the drape of her sari back over her shoulder, a fan of red and crimson and blood, and then she was gone.