By Blood We Live
Page 12

I seemed to get to my feet without getting to my feet.
Then I felt it.
Sunrise.
Minutes away.
I didn’t know how I knew, since the drapes were closed, but I did. You just do. You feel it inside. It’s like a shadow made of pure light rushing towards your heart.
I had to get blood into him. Hide the bodies. Get us underground. I knew I had to do these things and I knew there wasn’t time. There just wasn’t. It was impossible.
When I moved it was like I was constantly catching up with my body. I kept finding myself doing things: running through the hall; opening the fridge; carrying him over my shoulder (he weighed nothing) down the vault stairs. And the whole time the sun was coming. I pictured myself caught by daylight halfway to the garage, dragging three corpses out to the cars. You’ll burn. Your skin knows. Your skin screams when you even think of it.
I managed to find four pouches. I laid him on the bed. Raced back upstairs—but moving got harder. Space went syrupy, like in those dreams where you’re running but it feels like you’re wading through treacle. The sun loved it. The sun wanted me slow. I was thinking how weird it was that the sun straight away became your enemy, really an enemy, like an evil old man, like a god who hated you.
Two minutes till it came up.
One minute.
Thirty seconds.
My head and arms and legs were hot and everything had a confused edge. All I could do was throw the corpses into the hidden place that led down to the vault. I couldn’t stand the thought of bringing them into the vault, to spend the night with us. There was nothing I could do about the blood all over the study. Just had to hope no one came snooping.
I got the doors locked and sealed. All the system lights were green. I’d never felt the vault like this before, all that snug concrete and fat steel no amount of sun could get through. I’d never felt the goodness of that until now.
On the bed I had to hold him up and pour the MREs into his mouth. His breath totally stank. The pouches wouldn’t be enough. I knew that, too. I could feel he’d drifted far away. I thought I heard his voice saying: No, don’t, angel. I won’t be able to stop. But I blanked that out and bit into my wrist. I felt the blood rush up and something like a big rubber band in my heart snap. Then I forced the punctures up against his mouth.
Dark and heavy and blurry after that. Except for one image: him trying to keep my wrist there and me grabbing him by the throat and squeezing and strangling until he let go.
Then I guess I must have passed out.
I sat up now in bed in the vault and looked at him. Still sleeping. His body was calm in the wrong way. Like in a film when someone’s sitting there smiling and peaceful but it’s shock because their entire family’s just been hacked up in front of them. Inside myself I could feel a sort of faint copy of what he’d been through. He’d been to the edge of death. A blackness like deep space where even the stars have run out. For a moment I got scared: What if it was like before and he didn’t wake up for years? All those nights I’d come down and tried to wake him (I burned the back of his hand with a cigarette one time; it didn’t make any difference. The skin just healed in front of my eyes)—but the moment passed. He was coming back. I could feel him hauling himself on my blood like someone going hand-over-hand up a rope. My blood. Our blood. His before it turned into mine. Mine before it turned back into his.
If I wanted you to Turn me one day, I’d always asked him, would you do it?
He’d always said: If I believed it’s what you really wanted, yes.
If I wanted you to Turn me.
Not if. When. That first night in New York I stood there looking at him and I knew what he was and the voice in my head said: This is the way for you. It’s the only way. It’s just a matter of time.
Now I’ve done it. Now there’s no way back. Ever.
No way back reminded me of something: last night, standing in the study listening to his voicemail just before he walked in I’d noticed the title of one of the books on the shelf in front of me. It was called You Can’t Go Home Again.
Was this what he’d told me about, the way things started to connect? Signs. Coincidences. He said you had to be careful of it. He said it was a … what was the word?
Beguilement.
I lifted my hands and looked at them. My skin was whiter. Fingernails grey glass. The turquoise nail polish was gone, even though I didn’t take it off. Fingernails. I’ve seen him open a can of cherries with his. You feel what your new fingernails can do. You feel what the new all of you can do.
I ran my tongue over my teeth. Nearly laughed. Fangs. The movies. True Blood. What the movies and TV don’t show is the way fangs feel. Like they’re little alive things in your mouth. If someone pulled them out—
Ohmygod.
Blood-rush. Puke coming up. A scream trapped in my skull.
I grabbed the edge of the bed and held on. Breathed through it.
Fuck. Lesson one: You don’t want your fangs pulled out. And not—another blood-rush, barf-rising—your fingernails, either.
I put my feet on the floor. Stood.
Stupid strength. Sick strength. This time I did laugh. I could feel it in my shins and thighs and butt and shoulders. Crazy power. You could pick that up with one hand. Punch through that. Pull that off like a button. Objects told me what I could do to them now. There were a lot of things I’d be able to do, now.
As long as I didn’t mind being a murderer.
That had been in me from the second I woke up. Like a new person living inside my body who was more alive than I was, someone I had to catch up with. Now she was there I realised I’d been waiting for her ever since. Ever since all of it.
All of it was the other thing that had been in me from the second I woke up.
I’d thought it might be gone, but it wasn’t.
I used to know this crackhead on the street, Toby Dreds. Mentally fucked, but harmless. His thing was philosophical questions. Suppose you got a car, right? Like it’s a Lexus, right? And every now and then something on it breaks and you have to replace it. You go on replacing parts as they wear out. Years, right? But at some point, if enough of its parts have been replaced, isn’t it true that it’s a different car? It can’t be the same car if all the parts have been replaced. It’s still a Lexus, but it’s not the Lexus you started with. It’s notionally the same car, right? But it’s not materially the same car. He knew big words. Notionally. That killed me. I’d never heard it before, but I got what it meant. Like a notion. Like an idea.