Page 5

5

RAHIL

Half a mile away from Merc’s house, and Rahil was still imagining the thrust of the man’s holy silver down the back of his throat. It wasn’t the nice kind of pressure—not being filled, but rather broken from the inside out. But that intrusion wasn’t for the nice kind of vampire, either.

It didn’t help that Rahil’s physical body was already annoyed with its actual situation. The sun was just low enough now to peek through the side of his hood as he jogged, slower this time, down the last five streets to his house, slipping into patches of forest whenever they came near enough to the sidewalk and dodging the road that led to the one cemetery in this city of gravestones that he couldn’t bring himself walk past without visiting. The sun-poisoning had come back with a vengeance. Or maybe those were just Rahil’s nerves.

Having Merc’s strong arms encircling his weakened body and gaze hot on his own had set him on fire, only for the weight of Merc’s threat to follow. It hadn’t dimmed any of the things Rahil felt towards him—none of the instinctual attraction, nor his growing romantic curiosity as he’d seen hints of who the man was beneath the strong exterior—but it had shaken something deep inside Rahil. Not because Merc had been vaguely hostile—he had every right to want his vengeance—but because Rahil knew himself.

He was the kind of person who damaged those he loved just by being near them, not realizing what he’d done until it was too late. There was a reason he’d never replied to anyone who’d asked for a second date. He tried not to dwell on it; there was too much guilt there, and for all his height and gangly limbs, his was still too small a heart to carry it all. But he could stop it from happening again.

He might not have been the one who sank his fangs into Merc’s wife, but his fangs had taken a life before, and his actions and inactions had taken yet more.

Rahil picked up his pace to a vampiric sprint as he rounded the corner of his lot. He dodged the mailbox propped against the pavement and the broken front fence, too decomposed to be useful as firewood, and jumped the giant crack in the steps to the porch for good measure. For all the house’s ghosts and grime, the derelict gothic three-story, with its absurd wrapping veranda and its pointed attic that peaked above the surrounding pines, felt like home, a place that had both figuratively and—in the well-wooded backyard—literally become its own little world, made just for him.

It was also home from the standpoint that he owned it, regardless of the safety hazard it constantly threatened to become. What he really needed to whip it into shape was fifty or sixty grand. What he had was taxes and a lull in income. Occasionally, someone would contract an electrical engineer who looked like a South Asian vampiric twink with a pirate’s wardrobe and only worked at night, if he gave them enough of a discount, or they had just the right set of kinks. But mostly they wouldn’t.

He’d figure something out, though. He always did, for all their sakes.

“Ray!” Sheanna waved at Rahil as he entered, almost falling off the living room couch she’d constructed out of an old mattress and various cushions.

Tal nudged her girlfriend’s leg, then went back to resting her chin on Sheanna’s thigh above the tear in her tattered fishnets. “Worried maybe you’d burned up, Mr. Zaman.”

“You look terrible,” Jim pointed out, lifting his buzzed head from his rolled-up sleeping bag.

Avery waved a wrist toward Rahil, and he couldn’t tell if they were offering him their blood or the beer in their hand. “We have drinks!”

Everyone else seemed to be partaking from the bag of gummies they’d positioned between themselves, so it was probably Avery’s blood on the menu. “I’m covered today, but thanks.”

Though Rahil had opened his crumbling home to a number of unhoused folks and anyone else who needed a safe spot with running water and an electrical outlet, whether for a few hours or a few years, he tried to keep his distance when he could—they were good people, but this arrangement worked best when they knew him primarily as the weird vampire who happened to own the place. The fact that this particular group was so free to offer him their blood already fucked with his heart enough.

In exchange, he’d offered to help with any electronic issues they had, fixing up their broken computers, phones, Tal’s digital drawing pad, and the half-smashed tablet that Jim had pulled out of a dumpster six months ago—because just letting them crash in his home didn’t cover things, clearly. He’d tried to convince his brain otherwise, but he genuinely liked getting his hands dirty with their occasional refurbishing. It broke up the monotony of constantly taking apart and reassembling his accumulated pile of electronic junk during bouts of insomnia.

If he could help it, there would be no sleepless fiddling this afternoon. He was in just the right place, between the after-effects of the sun-poisoning and his time with Merc, that with a strong enough dose of THC and a hot shower, he could probably manipulate his body into accepting a few more hours of sleep.

He eyed the baggie. “That batch any good?”

“You bet. Tanner ran it over around noon,” Avery replied. “We’ve got extra if you want some. We’re celebrating Sheanna’s layoff.”

“Is that something to celebrate?”

“If you knew her boss, yeah,” Tal grumbled, though from the looks on all their faces, this was an attempt to find the good in a bad situation. She bit half of another gummy between her teeth, then waved the remaining piece towards Rahil.

As he stepped toward them, someone shouted from the front of the house in a young, high voice, “Come out and face me, vampire! I know you’re in there!”

“The hell?” Jim sat up properly.

Tal squinted through the living room window. “Is that a kid ?”

It was a kid—at least, from what Rahil could see through the colored panes in the chipped front door. Her hair was stuffed under a beanie, her black-on-black outfit consisting of so many layers that it was amazing how much of her long limbs she still managed to show. With her hands on her hips and her nose in the air, she looked emotionally prepared to break down the entrance. Not that it was ever locked. Rahil had a key for his room, but anyone could come and go from the main house as they pleased, even young teenagers with attitude problems.

“Vampire!” she shouted again.

Avery grimaced. “Should we…?”

Rahil shook his head. “I can deal with this…”

He hadn’t even let down his hood yet, so he slipped back out the front door with an air he most certainly hadn’t had coming in. His fingers still shook and his bones ached from the sun-poisoning of his jog home, but he leaned against the porch column with his arms languidly crossed, lifting one eyebrow. “You summoned?”

The kid’s bike was propped against the tree nearest the sidewalk, positioned in a way that seemed prepared to allow her to flee if she needed to. So, she wasn’t entirely an idiot, regardless of what the size of her nose ring suggested. She still took a few steps toward him, though, scowling into the shade of the porch. “Let me see your fangs…”

Rahil smiled for her.

She nodded slowly and looked him dead in the eyes. “I need you to turn me.”

Rahil couldn’t help himself: he laughed. It was too ironic, too much of a knife in the gut. How many times would the universe try this? He bared his teeth wider and said, bluntly, “No way, kid.”

“I’m not a kid.” She held her chin high as she marched closer. “I need this.” It amazed Rahil how little she sounded like a child as she said it, something tough behind her gaze—a sharp mix of rage and resolve. He’d seen that in his youngest son in the decade when it was just the two of them left; seen it destroy him.

“You don’t know what you need.”

“I’ve done my research,” the girl countered. “I know everything about vampirism. Not just the strength and the speed, but the sun poisoning, the garlic allergies—and garlic is in loads of premade things, I know that too—and how bad the change hurts and that it doesn’t heal you, it just makes you better at healing yourself and halts certain types of progressive diseases and cancers and—and seizures.”

Rahil had to force himself not to flinch at that six-letter c-word hidden in the mix. He had no right to the grief it stirred, only the guilt. He focused on that guilt, one brow still lifted as he sneered at his tiny opposition. “Then, you know the change has half a chance of killing you, too?”

“Not half.” The girl moved closer, coming right up to the edge of the porch. “Thirty-one point seven percent. According to a two-hundred participant epidemiological study conducted over the last five years. That’s not even a third .”

The exact statistic made it sound worse to Rahil, not better. He had been the sixty-nine percent. If the universe, or science, or the God much of his family still followed—whose existence Rahil had, at best, only a wavering hope in, which he decided he couldn’t quite classify as belief anymore—only allowed so many successful turnings, it made him feel very much like he’d taken one away from someone else. Someone who’d actually deserved it. He narrowed his eyes at the girl. “Why’s this so important to you that it’s worth that risk, huh?”

Instead of answering, she took the two steps up to the porch, her fists balled at her sides. “Turn me.”

When Rahil tried to step back, she only closed the distance, twisting to stay at the center of his attention.

“I’m telling you I want this,” she said. If the data couldn’t scare her, maybe the physical reality would.

“You want this, huh?” Rahil hissed. As quickly as he could while ensuring he only shoved her hard enough to hurt momentarily, he grabbed her by the front of her loose jacket and pinned her against the nearest porch column, fangs bared and mouth wide. She was so much smaller and lighter than him—clearly just a kid, no matter how much she was trying to act the cool, full-fledged teenager.

But instead of shrinking like a child or struggling away from him, she barely flinched. Immediately, she grabbed for her own collar. She pulled it down and pushed away the brown plaits that fell from beneath her beanie, tipping her head to the side. Baring her neck.

It was almost comical how unappealing that view looked to Rahil. He let her go with a scoff and a final directing shove toward the street. “Go home , kid.”

Rahil didn’t give her a chance to protest, wheeling on his boot heels and storming back into the house. The door rattled behind him as he slammed it.

It immediately opened again.

“I’m not leaving!” the girl shouted, stalking into the entry hall.

To the left of them, Sheanna, Avery and Jim all awkwardly peeled back from where they’d been snooping through the front windows. Tal popped the second half of the gummy she’d bitten into her mouth and waved at the girl, grinning. The girl didn’t seem the least bit fazed.

Goddammit.

“Stay, then.” Rahil shrugged dramatically, like he wasn’t currently trying to calculate all the possible crimes he could be charged with for letting a minor into his house like this, and comparing them to those for forcibly removing said minor by slinging her, bound and gagged, over his shoulder and dumping her on the sidewalk.

For the first time, she hesitated. She scowled at him, her nose ring twisting as her lips pinched up. “Really?”

Rahil grinned. Finally, some kind of progress. “Sure! For the daylight hours, at least. If you truly want to be a vampire, then you might as well see how one lives. I could use a part-time thrall.” If he was lucky, then by the end of the week she’d have written the idea off entirely. Maybe the bike commute alone would annoy her out of coming.

Slowly, the girl nodded. “Vampires don’t actually have those, you know.”

“I’m not all vampires.”

“Getting those vibes, yeah.” She crossed her arms. “Okay, but, so you know, I won’t like, do sexual favors for you or anything. I’m too young to give consent to an adult.”

Good fuck, maybe sex ed was a bad idea after all. “Kid, if you ever so much as mention sex to me again, I swear on the sun I’ll turn myself in to the cops then and there. Got it?”

She nodded. “That’s fair.”

“Good.” Dear god—what had he gotten himself into? “You have a name?”

The girl hesitated, but when she extended her hand, she looked as confident as ever. “Violet Demondza.”

“Master Ray Zaman, elder vampire, lord of the castle. Welcome to your dark apprenticeship.” If he was so good at ruining things, maybe—just maybe—Rahil could ruin vampirism for her.