Chapter 17 Elijah
Elijah
I’ve learned that Molly’s favourite food is Thai.
I sit across from her in a narrow restaurant in midtown, just a few train stops from the office.
Molly is a regular here–she doesn’t need to look at a menu to order, and the waitress brought her an orange tea and a water without her having to ask.
Molly picked two meals and an order of vegetable rolls, all of which smell divine on our crowded table.
She digs in immediately, and I watch, content to sit with her as she does.
‘So you don’t eat? Like… anything?’ she asks after taking a bite of steaming noodles that she squeezed lime slices over.
‘I don’t eat food,’ I agree, quiet enough that none of the distracted restaurant patrons will overhear. ‘I do drink blood, though.’
‘Human blood?’
I nod gravely, thinking of the vegetable crisper in Dylan’s fridge that’s been commandeered by my only source of nourishment. ‘Blood bags.’
Molly nods, not as fazed by this as I feared she’d be. ‘How many?’
‘One a day will suffice,’ I tell her. One bag of blood keeps me at an entirely manageable level of hunger, but it takes two for me to feel full, and even then, only until I need to eat again the next day.
This is not as efficient as feeding from the source–half a pint of blood directly from a vein can last a vampire for a full week, but I haven’t been in that particular habit for the better part of a century.
Yet another thing my brother would cite in my endless list of weaknesses as an immortal being.
‘What happens when you eat food?’
‘Makes me horribly ill,’ I say with a wince.
Ill feels like an understatement for the sickness that wracks me when trying to digest non-human-blood materials.
‘It’s a shame. I tried a few times in the nineteenth century, I couldn’t help myself.
It’s cruel that my scent is heightened but I can’t eat. My body took poorly to it each time.’
‘I love food,’ she says with a sigh that feels like a lament for me.
I try to remember the last thing I ate. A pastry, I believe, and the buttery flavour that filled my tongue was almost worth the pain of the ensuing days. Almost.
‘What’s the deal with the sun?’ she asks around a bite of noodles. Molly reaches across the table and taps the rim of my baseball cap, pulling it lower over my forehead. ‘Is a hat protection enough?’
I take the hat off and put it on her head instead, the look unbearably cute with her wild curls beneath.
‘Hats and sleeves help. Cloudy days like today aren’t so bad, but clear days–direct sunlight–it drains me quickly.’
‘Will it–’ Molly shifts in the booth and lowers her voice ‘–kill you?’
‘No, but if I’m in the sun long enough, I’ll become immobile until nightfall, which is a vulnerability I try to avoid,’ I explain.
I’ve seen a few films where vampires burn to a crisp in the sun, and I like the dramatics of it, but death is not so simple for us.
The stake to the heart myth is closest to the truth.
A vampire’s heart doesn’t beat, but it is the holder of our magic–or our curse, depending on who you ask–and death can only come by removing it from the body.
I’ve seen it happen, and it’s a grisly sight.
‘Sun lethargy isn’t fatal, but it takes more blood to restore energy. Plus, I sunburn like you wouldn’t believe,’ I tell her.
Molly snorts and scoops another spoonful of rice onto her plate before pouring green curry over it.
She’s taken every answer in stride; no disgust or shock shows on her face as I reveal each repulsive part of the monster that I am.
It’s strange. It makes me want to see how far I can go in my honesty before she inevitably starts to feel disgusted by me.
Even Ada, whom I believe loved me entirely, needed a few days to process the terrible truth of my existence in her world. I couldn’t blame her.
‘Doesn’t any of this concern you?’ I ask. ‘Why aren’t you more afraid?’
Molly thinks about the question, her jaw working as she chews slowly. She takes a long sip of tea, then water, and shrugs. ‘You ever seen Twilight?’ she asks.
I lower my brows. ‘I’ve seen more twilights than days you or your parents or grandparents have been alive, Molly. I’m four hundred and nine years old.’
Her face cracks into a grin and she laughs loud enough to draw the attention of the couple at the table nearest us. They smile, and I’m distracted from the question by the thought that someone in this city believes us a normal couple.
‘The movie,’ she says. ‘Based on a book series? Come on, I thought you loved reading. Brooding, handsome vampires became a worldwide phenomenon while you were in your century of isolation. Teenage girls led the charge.’
I lean across the table, both forearms flat on the tabletop.
I know of Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, Carmilla, and I even got a box set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but somehow this book missed my attention.
My local library was small, underfunded and slow to pick up new titles, though they did their best. I read nearly every single piece of fiction and poetry on those shelves.
‘I liked reading,’ Molly tells me. ‘Witches, vampires, fallen angels, fairies, werewolves–I was kind of a freak for all of it. I think…’ She exhales and closes her mouth.
I lean closer, hanging on every word, wanting her to continue.
‘I wanted it to be real, wanted magic to be real. I’m almost relieved to know at least part of it is. ’
I’m unbearably charmed by this romanticism in her. It seems so antithetical to her sometimes standoffish exterior at work. Or maybe that’s reserved just for me.
‘So, do you sleep in a coffin?’ she asks, bringing us back to topics less revealing of her.
‘A bed is just fine, when I do sleep.’ I remember the years I would lie in the sun just so that it would drain me enough to fall into a dreamless slumber until night fell and there was no escaping the guilt and anguish. ‘I don’t often.’
‘How do you feel about garlic?’
‘Same physical reaction to consuming any other food, though not particularly repulsive to smell.’
‘Holy water?’
‘Just fine, it’s a witch’s curse that keeps us as we are, not a devil’s.’
She leans closer, eyebrows raised at this revelation. ‘What do you know about devil’s curses?’
I laugh aloud, delighted by her line of questions, her curiosity, the excitement behind her eyes. ‘Nothing, but my sister did some research on demons a couple of centuries ago. You two would get along.’
Molly leans back in the booth, her back hitting the pleather seat with a light thud. She looks at the table, mystified. She still wears my hat, her blonde curls peeking out beneath the brim, and I want to see her wear it every day. I’d like to see her wear all sorts of my clothes.
‘Can you turn into a bat?’ she asks.
‘I can.’
‘No fucking way.’
I laugh again, so thoroughly amused by this woman; I don’t know the last time I laughed this much. ‘No, I lied. I can’t.’
‘Jerk.’
I reach across the table and swipe a bit of sauce off her chin with the pad of my thumb.
She watches my movements, a flush on her cheeks, as I lick it off.
Just the taste won’t make me sick, I think.
I hope. I’m not sure if it’s the taste of the tangy Thai sauce or the fact that it was on her skin that makes me think it all the more desirable.
‘Do the thing with your teeth again.’
‘Later, if you ask very politely.’
Molly blinks, refocusing on my words. ‘Politeness is one of the traits I’m known best for. Shouldn’t be a problem for me.’
‘Yes, your gentle disposition is second only to your patience.’
‘I did say I’d help you with human stuff,’ she says.
‘I didn’t ask for your help with human stuff.’
‘That’s what makes me so generous. What, you don’t want my help?’
If Molly knew just how much I want from her, she would never speak to me again.
I dip my chin and shake my head. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Seemed like you wanted a lot from me on Friday night,’
she says, in obvious challenge.
My capacity to lie is great, but I will not lie to Molly about this. ‘Yes,’ I say simply.
‘Why’d you leave then?’
I hope my stare doesn’t look like I want to eat her–I don’t, of course not really–but the burning desire to have her and hold her again, kiss her again, feel her hot breath again, is extreme.
I crave her more than I crave her blood, and I fear it shows on every slope and slant of my face, this want for her, the way I’ve been hungry for four centuries, but she makes me feel starved.
I didn’t want to hurt you, but I fear I already have; irreparable damage done just by revealing this secret.
‘Sometimes my fangs are difficult to control,’ I explain. ‘I didn’t want you to see.’
‘Are they always so volatile?’
‘Not always,’ I say. Vague, but better than telling her that the effect of her body against mine, her skin beneath my lips, was basically a fang boner, as Dylan so eloquently called it once after he’d hooked up with a young vampire a few years ago.
‘Were you afraid you’d bite me?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t know how to admit without scaring her that when I am around Molly I feel exceptionally out of control.
It’s like I am all instincts and inevitabilities, my mind telling me to be by her side, smell her skin, touch her hair, taste her lips, and that feeling is frightening.
Especially when for the last hundred years I’ve maintained significant distance and isolation to escape feeling much of anything.
‘Why did you kiss me?’ she whispers.
‘I wanted to,’ I admit. ‘Badly.’
‘And did you like it?’ she asks, so bold even with her cheeks flushed red.
‘Molly,’ I start, ready to tell her just how much kissing her turned me inside out, when our waitress steps up to the table to ask how we’re getting on, if we liked the food, if we want the check.
I offer the woman my plastic bank card and she disappears to the back. ‘You didn’t have to get it. You didn’t even eat anything,’ Molly says.
‘I invited you here, no?’ A date, I don’t remind her.