Four
Raising a dented old tumbler, I took its straw between my lips and braced for the first sip.
The first was always the hardest. The taste was fine, if not great, but the rush was dizzying—the sudden warmth that plunged through my body, like a jump start, like all of the lights in a city surging on after a power outage.
I could feel my own circulation chugging to life after running near empty.
I had often heard others say they craved this feeling, that it made them feel alive.
To me, it was just a reminder that I wasn’t.
The fridge was a welcome coolness against my back.
There were no windows in the kitchen, but the light was on, and the blood in the cup was nearly black through the clear lid.
I clutched the thirty-two-ounce tumbler and drank blood that wasn’t my own, blood that wasn’t even human.
In freshman year biology, we learned that blood cells have some of the fastest turnover in the human body.
They live briefly, but they replenish themselves before they die; they divide, and the heart keeps beating.
A vampire’s blood doesn’t replenish, because a vampire’s blood is never theirs to begin with.
The borrowed cells aren’t ours to divide; there’s no mitosis, no recycling.
The blood circulates sluggishly, pinkens our lips and brings color back to our skin—and then the cells are used up.
We absorb their life, and they dwindle. We pale, and we’re empty again.
All of that blood running through our bodies in circles, going nowhere.
It seemed terrible to me, moving just to stay in place.
The entire vampiric existence relied on the return to equilibrium, the rest position of a pendulum swing.
That was what it meant to live forever. I had been seven, younger than most, when I made the Trade to become Solar, exchanging my immortality for the ability to stand in the sun.
I had feared that kind of forever for as long as I could remember.
I drank in small swallows. The first sip was the most jarring, but the rest were disturbing in their own way. Each built on the last until I felt warm all over, like if I could see myself, I might be glowing.
Still, it was better than the hunger—hunger like I’d never felt before—after smelling Mason’s blood.
I was halfway finished before I could think clearly again. My first thought was glaring: I had stormed off and left Cella alone with a werewolf. I took a big gulp as punishment.
My next thought directly contradicted the first: Mason was not a werewolf.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it, but it had to be true.
Their blood was disgusting to us. This was indisputable, scientific fact.
This was evolution. I had smelled gasoline and smoking rot as Cedric led me away from the fight between my mother and the lone wolf.
I should have been sent running by the smell of Mason’s blood, repulsive like everything else about him.
We were two magnets with their north poles facing each other.
Up close, with his heart beating so angrily, Mason’s magnet had flipped.
Or maybe it was mine, I didn’t know. I only knew that his blood had smelled like need—like everything I needed, like my own need pulsing inside of him, deliciously sweet.
Its drumbeat was a siren song. It wasn’t what I had felt when I was seven, fresh off the Trade, at school for the first time and surrounded by children who were always bleeding somewhere—a scraped knee, a paper cut, a bloody nose.
Human blood smelled better than the blood in my tumbler; it smelled of want.
Mason’s blood crushed want beneath its soles.
I’d never felt such a strong desire to bite.
So Mason wasn’t irritating because he was a werewolf. He was irritating because he was an asshole.
But there had to be something else.
A series of doors slammed somewhere beneath me, one after the other.
In a minute, Cedric appeared, climbing the stairs up from the basement.
He stopped when he saw me. I knew instantly that there was news about the wolf.
Cedric was hungry, too, but in a completely different way—for blood from an open wound.
When we were younger, that look sometimes scared me.
Cedric was only four years older, but that look seemed to carry all of the lifetimes he’d yet to live—the lifetimes that would outlive me.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“We’re walking into an ambush, that’s what’s happening.”
“There will be no ambush.” It was our dad, following Cedric up the stairs. He looked like he’d sprouted a few more white hairs.
Cedric threw up his hands. “Either you’ve lost your mind, or you’re blind as a bat.” Angrily, he added, “That wasn’t a vampire joke.”
I sipped from my tumbler and raised my other hand with a little wave. “Super confused, here.”
“There was an . . . incident, today,” said my dad.
He was still in scrubs and mud-encrusted boots, and he smelled like a barn, so he must have rushed home from work.
His nose was pink with sunburn; for someone who worked outdoors and had been a Solar for decades, he was chronically bad about reapplying his sunscreen.
“Three werewolves came into your uncle’s shop. ”
“They were scouting us out,” said Cedric.
“They were shopping.”
Dad’s sister, Francesca, and her husband, Dante, owned a boutique meat processor and counter—that’s a nice way of saying a small slaughterhouse with an attached butcher shop—that had been passed down through Dante’s family.
They processed and sold high-quality, locally sourced, ethically raised cattle. Annalisa called it “hippie vampirism.”
It was where we got most of our blood. The rest came from my dad’s large-animal veterinary practice, which had been in the Callisto family for generations.
“There will be a meeting between ourselves and their pack on Saturday night,” Dad said.
Cedric snarled, fangs pressing over his bottom lip.
He had never been one to suppress them the way I did.
Dad continued, “A peaceful meeting, or better said, a meeting to make peace. Only the leaders and their heirs will attend. We have to show the leadership and unity of our family. It’ll seem like an attack if we bring half the clan. ”
“It should be an attack.” Cedric had his hands braced on the kitchen island, nails scratching into the marble.
He turned to me, and I nearly cringed away from that look, that rage.
Even in my oldest memories, my brother was always reaching out for something to carry.
As a baby, I had only ever seen him with his arms outstretched, asking to hold me.
When he was big enough, and sometimes when he wasn’t, he’d insisted on retrieving the heavy packages left at the end of the long, winding driveway.
He’d always seemed reluctant to put them down, as if he was searching for a weight he could bear forever.
He had found it when Mom died. Cedric carried all of the anger over her murder. It must have been heavy, but he refused to set it down.
For me, her death was a patchwork quilt of sensations and borrowings.
I remembered feeling the wolf’s presence, its demonic growl, the putrid smell of its blood, the crackle of my mom’s voice as she screamed for us to leave, the numbness in my legs, Cedric’s painful grip on my wrist as he dragged me home.
But as for the images, the actual what-happened, I couldn’t tell what had come from my own memory, if anything.
It was all muddled with Cedric’s shaky recounts, the details I’d overheard from Dad’s report after he hunted the killer down, and the depictions of werewolves I’d seen in shows and movies.
“We’ll be in their territory,” Cedric pressed.
“Don’t you think it’s better that we see where—and how—they live?”
“Well . . . yes. But we don’t know their numbers. If they attack—”
“They won’t.” Our dad rarely lost his patience or raised his voice, but now he did both. This argument had clearly been going on for a while. He turned my way, so I tried to straighten out my face. I must have done a pathetic job, because he repeated, gentler, “They won’t.”
Cedric came around the island to stand next to me, nudging the forgotten tumbler in my loose grip. Drink up.
“I understand that this is particularly difficult for you,” Dad went on. “If it’s too much, you don’t have to come. Just tell me beforehand, and I’ll try to arrange with Francesca. Close blood ties should be enough. That goes for either of you.”
“I’ll be there,” Cedric sneered, licking his teeth. “Kier will too.” I stared down into my cup, and he pushed our shoulders together, taking some of my weight. “Know your enemies. I won’t let them touch you.”
“You’ll be on your best behavior,” my dad said, pointedly. I caught Cedric rolling his eyes. It made him look like a teenager. “If you can’t get through one encounter without baring your fangs, you aren’t fit to be chief.”
The threat was only implied, but that didn’t make it empty. Cedric started to retaliate, then thought better of it, lips clamping. He shouldered past our dad to the side stairs, took one step, then said to me:
“You’re awfully quiet. The way things are going, you’ll need to fix that. Don’t tell me you’re still scared of the dark.”
Doors slammed in his wake.
***
It wasn’t strange for Cella to be quiet on the drive to school, but this wasn’t her regular sleepy quiet.
Her eyes were all the way open, and she kept fidgeting with her seat belt, until it stuck and she had to unbuckle, release it all the way, and buckle up again.
She was chewing on her hair, one of her grosser nervous habits, and drawing butterflies and phallic outlines in the dew on the window.
Mental age regression was a sure sign of emotional distress.