Page 23

23

RAHIL

What if he’d already ruined Mercer’s life once before without knowing it?

Rahil tried to shake the thought away as he worked with the software on Leah’s now structurally completed device. The device she’d left behind because she’d died. Because she’d been killed .

His fingers shook a little, and the layers of code—already not his forte—blurred together before his eyes.

But she’d asked him—she’d said—she’d been so sure—

He jumped as Leah’s notebook dropped off the edge of his knee, clamping closed the page he’d found labeled for Lydia . He couldn’t bring himself to pick it back up again. It didn’t matter, really—there’d been nothing more in the lists and procedures below the heading than what he’d already gathered by looking through the half-finished device.

But he couldn’t help thinking that perhaps there was still something in the book that he needed to read. Something that might solve the knot in his chest. The feeling that this all was his fault, somehow.

It was ridiculous, he told himself. Mercer’s wife hadn’t been sick. She had no reason to beg to be turned. She was murdered—a victim of a terrible crime, by some selfish vampire who couldn’t, or didn’t, control their thirst. That was what Mercer had told him.

Or, at least, that was what Mercer thought .

How many times had Rahil thought that Shefali had given up smoking, only to find her sneaking ‘just one more’ cigarette outside the grocery store or at the park or in the yard? Love did not make a person perfect—he knew that better than anyone. Leah could have loved Mercer, and still…

That was the final straw. Rahil flung himself across the room, snatching up Leah’s notebook and sprinting with it through the house, up the stairs. He jiggled his keys out of his pocket as he ascended to the attic, hopping over the squeaky stair, and sliding himself through the trapdoor like there was a ghost on his tail. He stood, panting, and turned away from the window toward the chest he’d tucked into the shadows at the back of the attic.

A layer of dust coated the top of it, billowing into the air as Rahil flung the lid up. Mementos assaulted him; photo albums, little-league trophies, the Beanie Baby elephant Jonah had carried with him on his adventures for years before trading it for a notebook and a pen, then a Sharpie and his own skin, and finally his skin with something sharper still. Matt’s favorite stuffed animal was tucked beside it. Had Rahil just forgotten that it was a bat? Little brown wings with Velcro ends and big green eyes. He’d worn it to kindergarten like an armband. Rahil had forgotten that. Or he just hadn’t wanted to remember.

He swallowed back the lump in his throat, wiping hastily at his eyes as he dug around his past, retrieving an envelope tucked against the chest’s side. When he’d realized the woman was dying, he should have set them out on the sidewalk with her, let the EMTs find them when they came, but it hadn’t occurred to him in the moment—the only thought in his head that she was dying, that she would be dead soon, that it was his fault. It hadn’t felt right to just throw them away after.

Rahil glanced over them, but they looked just as real as they had every other time, the top with her name cut off but everything else still there. Cradling them in his lap, he flipped through Leah’s notebook next, like he might find a duplicate of the scans tucked into their pages. Put the knots in his chest to rest or tighten them up for good.

Engineering note after engineering note filled the book, but the further in he went, Rahil found little scribbled sections that didn’t seem to belong. Headaches , one read, with a list of dates under it, two in March, five in April, ten in May, thirteen in June. Another seemed to track water and food intake—which, even to Rahil’s undisciplined eating habits, seemed wildly disproportionate at times. There were a few symptoms lists, a few lists of what seemed to be diagnostic possibilities, with most options crossed out. Finally, the nail in the coffin—though perhaps not literally—was a note that simply read Oncologist with a phone number. It matched the one on her scans.

Leah had been…

Rahil’s mind flashed back to the model Mercer had made of the vampire’s fangs.

“I could have found the bastard who bit her, at least.”

Ah. Well, he certainly had. Mercer had tied that vampire up, pressed holy silver to his skin, and bared his neck for him. Given him space in his home, in his life. And all this time, he hadn’t known. Hadn’t even seen the signs.

Rahil’s gut twisted, bile coming up the back of his throat at the thought of this notebook sitting in Mercer’s house, the key to a lie that Mercer had built so much of his life on. There was no final note in it, no reason to believe Leah had ever thought Mercer would find it. Maybe that’s how hard she had convinced herself that she’d live through this as a vampire, able to explain everything to him after she was already safe and well again. Or maybe she’d found some other way to justify it to herself.

There was no use interrogating a dead woman. Besides, she may have hidden her cancer from Mercer, but it was still Rahil who had cut short her life weeks or months before it might have otherwise ended. Still Rahil who’d left Mercer to deal with her agony, black blood spilling from her eyes and mouth and a gaping fang wound that refused to close in her neck. Still a decade of pain and personal failures that Mercer had been forced into because of Rahil.

Would it make things better for Mercer, or worse, to know that he’d allowed the very vampire who killed his wife to touch him, and press those same fangs into his neck, and bring him bliss with the venom that had ended his lover’s life? He’d worked through his grief for so long. Rahil didn’t know if it was right to rip open those old scars just for the sake of his own conscience.

His hands shook as he tried to gather the doctor’s papers back up. Each one felt forbidden, like he’d ripped them from a layer of protection around Mercer’s heart. He fit them into the back of Leah’s notebook, closing the other pages down onto it.

It didn’t make the information go away, though. When he saw Mercer again— if he saw Mercer again—he’d have to decide whether this knowledge was worth the potential heartbreak.

And what the hell was he going to do, then?