Page 7

7

RAHIL

Rahil was almost, kind of, beginning to like Violet. And that was a problem.

Every day she’d appeared that week—which was far too often and made him curse the existence of summer break with nearly as much vehemence as he had when his boys were home during it—he’d given her an outrageous task to prove her commitment.

“Pick us up a tub of peanut-butter from the grocery store, on foot, without letting the sun directly touch you for more than 60 seconds in total.”

“Figure out which of the pre-packaged foods in the freezer section have garlic in them.”

“Count all the pieces of silver jewelry on everyone at the local shopping center for the next hour.”

When she’d pointed out that none of it would be holy silver, he’d lifted a brow and replied, “How do you know that?”

Between the kind of tasks he could play off as vampiric training, he threw in some cleaning and a little yard work for the hell of it; he’d been meaning to try to prune out the weeds and plant a bed of wildflowers back there, even beginning to turn the lot’s various natural rocks into a pathway. If Violet was committed to being here, then she might as well do something useful, he figured, and if it made her give up faster, then all the better for it. Except she wasn’t giving up. Violet was still there, still badgering her way into his life like she belonged in it.

Every evening before she rode off on her bike toward the denser side of their suburban neighborhood, she’d scowl at him, her little nose ring twisted up as she asked, “Will you make me a vampire now ?”

Rahil would smile. “Maybe tomorrow, kid.”

Maybe tomorrow seemed to be his mantra.

Maybe tomorrow Violet would grow bored. Maybe tomorrow Rahil would find a job that lasted more than a few days. Maybe tomorrow he’d get a message from Merc. Maybe tomorrow he’d rest for long enough not to feel like his body was falling apart. Maybe tomorrow he could say yes to a family reunion, instead of dodging his nieces’ cute memes and his cousins’ invites and his brother’s gossip and his aunties’ probing.

If tomorrow required a good night’s sleep—or even a day’s sleep, for that matter—to get there, then he was out of luck.

As the end of the week neared, he lounged across the living room’s mattress-couch, his exhaustion plucking at his sanity the way the years plucked at the peeling paint on the ceiling. He’d finished off the rest of the peanut butter with a spoon an hour ago, and his stomach gave an awkward rumble for it. A small ache of blood-thirst followed. It was truly a misfortune that vampires still required all the regular nutrients of food on top of a supplementary-something from human blood. He swore he’d learned what that something was, at one point, but it must not have been interesting enough to remember. Also, based on how few actual facts anyone seemed to have in regards to vampires, it might have been a lie—or a myth, a theory, a piece of misinformation, whatnot.

As Rahil lay there, the soft coo coo of a dove echoed down the weathered fireplace. It was overwhelmed by the sudden shuffle, then the crude squawking of multiple crows. Rahil grimaced.

He flicked mindlessly through hookup potentials, swiping right on anyone who seemed halfway bearable, despite just how poorly both his prior dates that week had gone. He could have asked one of his resident humans for a hit of blood at any point, but now they were out for the weekend, either working long shifts or staying elsewhere. Besides, he hated relying on them. The humans crashing at his house would always leave at some point, and whoever showed up next might not possess the same generosity.

Maybe tomorrow things would get better, but maybe tomorrow things would get worse instead. Rahil could never be sure.

His soul wasn’t engaged in the hunt right now, though. It was probably due to his experiences earlier that week, he told himself. One had merely been so awkward that Rahil had only got a nibble before the young man clumsily decided he had better places to be, giving three entirely different excuses as he left, opening the door to the bathroom instead of the one out. Rahil would have chosen that over his more recent outing, though.

His date had been hot, in a lean, middle-aged hipster kind of way, with a sharp smile and a dry humor that was easy to banter off, and he’d enjoyed Rahil’s fangs enough to ask for a second bite, coming between Rahil’s legs for it, but the whole thing had felt wrong in a way Rahil had difficulty putting words to. He was accustomed to being treated as a sexual object, but the way this man looked at him, touched him, spoke of him, felt a step beyond even that, like every inch of himself was being recorded for later use.

It was the kind of feeling that made Rahil want to check for cameras. Or chains. Which reminded him uncomfortably of the fact that there were vampires he knew ran in his circle—if only by the names on their dating profiles and the occasional glimpse of them at the Fishnettery or one of the local hookup parks—who seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. Not, he suspected, into the arms of a lover, but into the basement of one. If they were unlucky enough, the basement of Vitalis-Barron.

Rahil had left while the unnerving man was asleep.

As a new match sent him a picture that should have made his ass ache and his mouth yearn, it wasn’t his most recent date’s nearly scientific fascination with him that turned him off, though. It was the thought of watching Merc as he worked, and every daydream he’d had of those hands since. They’d been his least raunchy fantasies in years—a single fingertip, tracing down his body like it was a work of art, as Merc looked on with that cool, thoughtful expression of his. It made Rahil’s skin hot all over, the air trapped in the sauna of his lungs.

He flopped his head back with a groan, cradling his phone against his chest. He thought a grainy flake of the ceiling fell onto his cheek, but as he went to swipe it off, a juicy mosquito squashed beneath his thumb. It left a smear of red across his skin.

“You didn’t want my blood anyway,” he grumbled.

Rahil tried not to move, to let the wave of exhaustion rolling over him carry him into a dream. His body ached for a slightly different position, and his brain responded by pulling him into thought after thought, half-dismantled but a little too solid to allow for actual sleep. Sweat beaded in the places his skin pressed directly against the mattress.

Around the corner of the foyer, the front door opened and closed. A single set of smaller footsteps made their way across the living room.

Rahil didn’t bother opening his eyes. “If you’re going to stake me, can you do it quick? I don’t have all day.”

The mysterious someone sat down next to him. His skull pinched as his braid was caught under their weight, but he didn’t have the energy to tug it free. Maybe he was more in need of blood than he’d thought? Probably just more tired. Definitely more depressed.

“Something tells me that inviting hunters to slay you is not the optimal way to be a vampire,” Violet huffed.

Rahil squinted at her. “I knew it was you,” he lied.

“The whites of your eyes look weird.”

“Oh.” He rubbed across his lids, but no smear of darkness came off. “Are they red or black?”

“Red.”

“That’s fine then.” He shut out the world for three more seconds, counting them in his head. One, two, and—there was her next question, right on time.

“What’s the difference?”

Girl couldn’t go four seconds without asking something about vampires. Rahil groaned and gave her a little push, tugging his braid free enough to sit up.

Violet sported a matching maroon beanie and tank-top today, disregarding the heat in favor of the fashion statement. It was something Rahil would have done at that age. Something he still did, in fact, over half a century later. At least with his vampire genes, he still looked young enough to fall for that kind of ridiculousness.

He straightened the ruffles at the v-neck of his completely ahistorical white linen shirt and twisted his pearl earrings. They were not quite the elaborate symbols of status his ancestors would have worn, but then, he was hardly the chaotic force of nature that nonhumans had often been viewed as in pre-colonized India. His own ancestors would have likely elevated him to the same pedestals of wonder and dread that held fully mythological creatures like his family’s djinn or the Hindu’s asuras. Vanishing into the wilds only to spontaneously influence the lives of humans for extreme good or ill seemed like a lot of work though. He seemed perfectly capable of causing harm to the people around him without any wilderness involved.

“Black in a vampire’s eyes is a sign of blood hunger. Younger vampires especially will start to lose their grip on reality and become unable to stop themselves from feeding on the nearest human if they stay in this state for too long.” Rahil still had to fight back the impulse to curl up so tightly he twisted himself out of existence whenever he thought back to the few times he’d let his need for blood get that bad. “You know the myths of crazed, villainous vamps? That hunger is part of where the stories come from.”

“What’s the other part?”

“Racism.”

“Typical.” Violet rolled her eyes, like she was flipping off the entire social structure in her head. “And the red?”

Rahil grinned. “That just means I’m tired of your BS.”

“Ha ha,” Violet said, pronouncing each syllable separately. She crossed her arms, tipping up her chin in a way that should have looked childish on someone so young, but was executed with the perfect amount of cynicism to work regardless. “So, what bizarre shit are you going to make me do today?”

“You talk to your mother with that mouth?”

“Yeah, the twice a year I do talk to her.” The way Violet’s lips twisted up reminded Rahil a little too much of his own kids. Or maybe it was just himself he was seeing. The pain, the loss, the inability to confront it all. He didn’t know how to break through that barrier any better now than he had with his boys, and he struggled to decide if he was even the right person to do so—it hadn’t turned out so well before, had it?—but Violet pushed the topic forward all on her own. “So, bizarre shit? Yes, no?”

Rahil’s gut twisted as he took the coward’s way out. “You’re the one who elected to be here.” He shrugged. “If you want to be a vampire, you’re going to have to learn how to get blood—ethically. By which, I mean consensually.”

“There’s a blood charity in Ala Santa now,” Violet pointed out.

“Go ahead, then.” Rahil motioned to the door, one brow raised. “The Ala Santa neighborhood is, what, ten miles from our suburbs? Probably fifteen if you want to stay safe on that bike. With vampires coming from all over the city, you’ll have to get there early to be far enough ahead in line—just don’t start out before the sun sets, or take the same route too often, or ride too near the police, or else you might not make it at all.”

The sudden discomfort on Violet’s face was harrowing.

“It’s a lot harder than you first anticipated, I know.” He hadn’t meant to be gentle with her—had been trying this whole time to scare her off, not ease her fears—but he knew the pained look of a child realizing the world was crueler than they’d anticipated, and he couldn’t stop his impulse to soothe that aching, especially when the child in question had clearly already seen her share of hurt. “You get used to it, though; find ways to make it work.”

Violet chewed on her lip, bouncing her shoulders like she could throw off the hardships of vampires if she shrugged enough. As obstinate and abrasive as she was, she didn’t seem like the type who could find it in herself to actually do so. Though neither had Rahil’s youngest, until suddenly it was too late. Violet caught him looking at her—imagining a different child in her place—and huffed at him. “How do you get your blood, then?”

“Mostly hookups,” Rahil admitted. He held up his phone, tapping the screen back to life and flipping through the current match’s profile: all mundane gym shorts with half the man’s face covered in a camera flash. “It’s dangerous though, see, because you have to judge whether someone is going to be safe based on limited interactions, and no matter how certain you are, you’re not always right.” Rahil hummed. “I suppose it’s like being a woman on a dating app, except when your date kidnaps or murders you, people care even less.”

“Fuck that.”

“Indeed.”

She held out her hand. “Can I…?”

He offered her the phone, but as she navigated effortlessly back to the main feed, the profile in view switched to one far more suggestive. Rahil snatched the device back. “You know, actually, maybe this is not a good show and tell scenario.”

Violet smirked in a way that should have been illegal for anyone her age. “You afraid I’ll see a dick?”

Rahil cleared his throat, tucking the phone away entirely—into the pocket furthest from the literal child, just for good measure. “I think this is a conversation you should be having with your father.”

Blowing out air through her lips, she leaned back onto her elbows. “I don’t think Dad wants to see dicks.”

“To be fair, most men don’t,” Rahil pointed out.

“No, I mean, Dad likes dicks—or men, I guess—he just doesn’t want to see them. You’d think he’d be over Mom by now, but he’s still being all touchy about dating.”

Boy, had this conversation really gotten away from him. “And um, how does that make you feel?”

“You’re not my therapist.” Violet scowled at him as she said it, like she didn’t have a much higher opinion of her actual therapist, though Rahil couldn’t imagine most rebellious probably-preteens felt differently. She turned her attention to her feet, pointing and flexing her floral-covered Converses. “So, how does someone get blood if you’re like…”

“A child?”

“A teenager .”

“I don’t have any direct experience; I was already an adult when I turned.” How functional an adult was debatable, but Rahil did not need to be having that conversation with Violet of all people. For her sake, he gave it genuine thought, nodding as he finally answered, “You would need to have someone in your family who you know will always be there for you, who’s willing to give up parts of their own life to make sure you’re safe and healthy and happy. And preferably a phlebotomist. Drinking directly from the skin gets weird if you’re not into the person.” Not that it stopped him from accepting his housemates’ offers when he couldn’t find anything better. At least they weren’t family.

Violet stared all the more aggressively at her shoes, her brows sinking lower. She didn’t seem to come to any sort of conclusion by the time she shuffled to her feet. “Right. Well, I’ll—I’ll think about that. Thanks.”

“You do that, kid.” It was an abrupt shift, but maybe this was for the best. If she truly did think about it, she might finally realize that vampirism wasn’t right for her—wasn’t particularly right for anyone, so much as it was a thing that some people were , and therefore became a distinct part of them. A challenging, occasionally-traumatizing part, that also had its lovely aspects when life let up the stress and struggle enough to allow space for them.

Violet did a little spin on her heels and headed for the front door.

“You don’t want to weed more of the backyard while you’re here?” Rahil called after her.

“Maybe in your dreams.” She flipped him off as she left.

What a kid.

Rahil was pretty sure she wouldn’t be the person invading his dreams though—unless they were nightmares. With how little sleep he got, his brain seemed to be doing its best to avoid those. What he couldn’t seem to avoid were the day dreams. He spent the rest of the sunlit hours wandering between the living room mattress and the one in his room, carrying around a few pieces of wiring to fiddle with and uselessly checking the empty cupboard during each trek, before finally traipsing to the sheeted-off section of the porch when the heat got too much to bear up in the house.

Rahil tried, again, to close his eyes, but half an hour later he was scrolling through old messages on his phone. He checked on the news while he was at it, searching specifically for any updates on the Wesley Smith-Garcia trial. Each time he ventured into the discourse surrounding it, he could feel his blood pressure spike, but it was too important a case to ignore. Rahil was no expert in legal matters, but from what he’d gathered, after Wesley had helped a vampire escape from the Vitalis-Barron labs, he had been charged with attempted second-degree burglary of trade secrets. His lawyer argued that the willful intrusion into the private space was solely to assist people he knew were in danger and was therefore covered by something called the Good Samaritan Law.

The prosecution claimed that Wesley couldn’t have entered the area solely to assist anyone, pointing to the video evidence Vitalis-Barron had supplied of Wesley originally bringing the vampire he’d ultimately rescued into the lab in the first place. The defense then asserted that since the video proved Welsey had been brought by Vitalis-Barron employees into the building, he was there legally up until the point where he left his escort to help those in danger, so the Good Samaritan Law still applied. It felt like watching people build a picture out of a puzzle by putting the pieces in an objectively wrong order.

It made Rahil sick to think that this was how the lives of vampires were regarded: as sidepieces in a theatrical retelling of history that continued to center the humans. And yet, the more knowledgeable people of the internet seemed to believe that this—the Good Samaritan argument, specifically—could be the beginning of major legal change for vampires. If Wesley Smith-Garcia won, that was.

At the moment, everyone seemed on the fence about that, Rahil included.

He distracted himself with a few games, then a few videos, then another useless news search. By the time the mosquitoes came out in full force, he was shivering from a mild case of sun-poisoning, staring at the screen of his nearly dead phone and watching for a read notification on the last five messages he’d sent Merc.

Five mistakes he did not totally regret.

R. BabyCock

Just curious, how much do you charge for one of those ridged dildos?

(That is not flirty, by the way. THIS is flirting):

Just curious, babe, how much skin do I have to show before you put one of those ridged dildos inside me?

You’ve ensnared me in your ouroboros. Teach me how to be as subtle as your fingers as you enjewel that great long staff of yours. I’m ready to be staked by your holy silver. Come work the cold hard metal of my heart.

;)

But the thread just kept looking as though no one had been on. Before, Merc had always at least read his messages. Had seeing Rahil in person really made things this bad? Merc hadn’t seemed particularly interested, but he’d still been kind to Rahil—kinder than Rahil deserved.

Or maybe it was worse than disinterest. That William Douglas fellow had been very insistent when he’d demanded holy silver last Saturday. Merc might have scared him off then, but he hadn’t seemed like the kind of person who would leave well enough alone.

As a couple more days—and twice as many unanswered messages—passed, that worry started to seem less and less like an excuse to think about Merc, and more like a potential reality. If he did go—just show up at Merc’s shed again without warning—it would likely get him into trouble, and ruin Merc’s day to boot.

But whether or not William Douglas was the kind of fellow who would leave well enough alone after all, Rahil Zaman certainly wasn’t.

The cords were tighter this time, Rahil was sure of it.

It didn’t help that he’d been here for an hour already, creeping out of his house early enough that neither the sun nor the out-cold form of Jim on the mattress-couch took notice of him. Now though, there were beams of light pouring through the small windows along the top of the barn-style shed. Why, oh why, did he never realize just how bad a decision was until it was too late?

But he’d known, hadn’t he, that Merc wasn’t planning to see him again. That he might not arrive for hours, or days. That he might even turn his back on Rahil the moment Merc saw he’d invaded his space for a second time. And that he would be well within his rights.

But being here, taking this risk, had still seemed worth it in the moment. It was also seeming less worth it by the moment.

Rahil’s fingers had definitely gone numb again, his stomach growled from missed meals, and his whole body felt sore with the bone-deep fatigue of too many insomniac nights. He’d begun to shake and ache in bursts by the time the shed door finally opened.

“Oh,” Merc said, “It’s you.”