Chapter 12 – Lily
LILY
The words hang in the air between us like an anvil dangling from a string, and I can’t take them back. Can’t unsee what I just saw—those gleaming white points that came from nowhere and caught the light like polished ivory. Sharp, predatory and absolutely terrifying.
Cassini hasn’t said a single word in at least a minute, so I ask him again, “What the fuck are you?”
His face is expressionless. His hands, which had been gripping my waist with ferocity a few moments ago, fall away like I’ve slapped him. His dark green eyes I’ve come to obsess over replaced by two rings of glowing amber.
“Lily—”
“Don’t.” I scramble backward on the couch, nearly falling off in my haste to put space between us. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat, and every instinct is screaming at me to run. “Don’t you dare say my name. I don’t even know you. Who the fuck are you? What are you?”
He sits up slowly, like he’s trying not to spook a wild animal, and silently weighs his words. I don’t know how it’s possible, but the sharp points of his fangs have disappeared, and if I hadn’t just seen them with my own eyes, I might think I’d imagined the whole thing.
But the metallic taste of fear is sharp on my tongue, and my hands are shaking as I press them against my chest to feel the palpitations gradually settling into a more natural rhythm.
“You can ask me again,” he says softly. “I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Why can I hear your thoughts?”
“I think you know why.”
The air in the room stills, and my words come out croaky, small and loaded with fear. “Because you’re…not alive.”
“Not completely,” he says. “But I am not dead either.”
“How…is that possible?”
He stares off in the distance like he’s searching for the right words somewhere in the atmosphere, but none come to him. The silence feels like it drags on for minutes, but it’s only a few seconds.
“I’m a vampire.”
The word hangs heavy in the thick silence. Then it dissipates as the room fills with a loud, high-pitched shrieking sound. A sound, I realize, I’m the source of.
I’m laughing, cackling actually, like a feral hyena, and he’s staring at me like I’m insane. It’s so funny, so absurd that I’m laughing so much it hurts. Grasping my aching ribs and wheezing in between gulps of air.
He’s got to be fucking kidding me.
“A…a…what?” I manage between breaths.
His face is grim and irritated, but he doesn’t budge. This time he says it louder: “A vampire.”
I laugh and laugh until I get it out of my system, and when I can breathe normally again, I swipe away the tears that have streaked my flushed cheeks and make a move to stand up. Cassini smiles at me, and the two gleaming fangs are back, glinting in the darkness like a couple of terrifying shards.
“Oh my God, you’re serious, aren’t you?” I say, pulling back slowly.
“Yes. I’m serious.”
I leap off the couch and scuttle backwards until my back slams against the wall with a thud.
“What…the… How? How is this possible? How long have you been…” I gesture vaguely at him, unable to finish the sentence.
“Dead?” A bitter smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “A very long time.”
“How long is very long?”
He’s quiet for a moment, like he’s debating how much of the truth to share with me. “Many centuries. I am much older than your so-called America.”
The air leaves my lungs in a rush. “Centuries? Jesus Christ.”
“I’m not as old as him. No.” He leans back to relax into the couch, like this is all totally normal, and gestures for me to sit down next to him. “I know you have a lot of questions, and I’ll answer them. You can come back if you like. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Yeah, right. That sounds like a trap. I’ll go sit down next to the hot old undead guy and wait for him to drain my blood and leave me for dead.
I hear his voice in my head, but his lips don’t move.
Lily, nothing’s changed. I’m not going to hurt you.
I push him back with my thoughts. Don’t fucking do that! It’s so rude. Get out of my head.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t do that. I’ve just never had a connection like this.”
“Me neither,” I admit. “But you lied to me, and this is an insane thing to process. How is this even happening? Can you always hear me thinking?”
He stares down at his lap, “No. I don’t understand it either. This is new to me too.”
I pause and consider my next move. “I have a lot of questions, and I don’t trust you, so here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to go get my baseball bat, and then we can talk. Don’t you fucking move.”
I slowly back out of the room, but before I can leave, he stops me.
“A baseball bat won’t do anything,” he says, but there’s no threat in his voice. “Would you feel better if I told you how you can hurt me?”
I consider this and rest my hand on my hip. “Yes. I would actually.”
“Do you have any silver?”
I nod, mentally going through my jewelry box and landing on a delicate sterling silver chain I got given as a teenager—a gift from Pat when I turned sixteen. “A necklace. Would that work?”
“Go get it.”
I hesitate for a moment, then go to my bedroom and retrieve the chain and weigh it in my palm, and grab my baseball bat for good measure. The little “L” charm catches the light as I carry it back to the living room.
Cassini is standing by the couch, and when I return, he pulls his T-shirt over his head, exposing the canvas of his chest. Tattoos sprawl across his skin in elaborate patterns—thorned roses and vines that curl around his ribs, Latin script over his collarbone.
His body is beautiful in the way classical statues are beautiful, which I guess is nice if you like that kind of thing.
I did, until I found out he was fucking dead.
He catches me looking, and the corners of his lips threaten to form a roguish grin. I roll my eyes, and he halts the burgeoning smile, all business again.
He beckons me closer and points to the middle of his chest. “Put it here, and watch what happens,” he says, preparing himself by sucking in a slow deep breath through his nose.
I move a little closer, still not sure I can trust him, and press the chain to his skin.
Within a few seconds, his flesh starts to sizzle, and steam rises from the wound that’s rapidly forming. He stays still, looking at me, fixing me with a steely look and breathing slowly and steadily.
The acrid smell of burning flesh fills my nostrils, and I watch in horrified fascination as the silver chain brands him. The little “L” charm presses into his skin like a hot iron, leaving behind an angry red welt in the perfect shape of my initial.
“Sorry,” I gasp, jerking the chain away. “I’m so sorry—”
But Cassini doesn’t flinch, doesn’t cry out. He just looks down at the mark I’ve left on him with a sick kind of curiosity. The letter “L” is seared into the flesh between his pecs, the edges still smoking slightly.
“Does it hurt?” I whisper, unable to look away from the brand.
“Yes,” he says simply. “But I’ve had much worse.”
Even as we speak, I can see the wound healing as the charred edges stitch themselves back together. The angry red fades to pink scar tissue, then to the pale olive of his normal skin tone. Within a minute, there’s nothing left but unblemished flesh, as if I’d never touched him at all.
“It heals that fast?”
“One of the perks of being undead.” He pulls his shirt back on, covering the spot where my initial branded him.
“You should also know that wooden stakes through the heart will kill us if they’re blessed wood, and we can’t enter homes without an invitation.
Which is why I wasn’t worried about Cyrus and his buddies coming in, but that doesn’t mean their humans can’t. ”
“That guy from the tattoo shop was a vampire?” I ask.
“Yes. Most of the Sixth tattooists are. In fact the whole street is full of them. So I’d avoid that place if I were you.”
I clutch the chain tighter in my fist, the metal now warm from contact with his skin. “Good to know.”
“Feel safer now?”
I consider this, weighing the baseball bat in my other hand. “A little, but I’m keeping this too, just in case.”
“If it makes you feel safer, do whatever you need.”
There’s a part of me that’s still in disbelief. Not about the vampire thing, because as weird as it is, I believe that. No, what’s twisting my brain right now is the fact that I’ve never had a man do anything like this before. He chose to hurt himself to make me feel safe.
Cassini just let me burn him. Without hesitation, without making me feel guilty about it. He handed me the power to hurt him and told me exactly how to use it.
It’s fucked up that a literal monster has shown me more consideration than most human men ever have.
“Thank you,” I whisper, and something in my voice wobbles.
He’s quiet. “You shouldn’t have to thank me for that.”
“But I do. Because most guys would never—” I shake my head, not sure how to finish that sentence. “You could have just told me about the silver. You didn’t have to prove it.”
“Yes, I did.” He’s pragmatic. “Words without action are worth nothing, Lily. They’re a sequence of unfulfilled promises. It’s what we do, not what we say that counts. You needed to know you could defend yourself if you had to.”
I tentatively sit back down on the couch, gripping the silver chain so tightly it cuts into my palm. He follows my lead, settling beside me but keeping space between us. We both stare ahead like commuters on a long train journey.
“You have questions?” he asks. “There are some things I can’t tell you, but everything I can answer, I will.”
My mind is spinning with a thousand questions, but I start with something that won’t make me want to run screaming. “You said that ‘we’ can’t come into houses without an invitation. How many of you are there?”
“Many. Thousands, maybe even tens of thousands all over the world.”
The number crashes over me. I lean back against the couch cushions, trying to process it. “Thousands…” I whisper, then a horrible thought occurs to me. “Are they all like you?”
His jaw tightens. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” I gesture helplessly at him. “Do they all just sit around having polite conversations with humans, or are some of them actually—” I can’t finish the sentence.
“Dangerous?” He runs a hand through his hair. “Most of them, yes. Very dangerous.”
I pull my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them. “And you’re not?”
He’s quiet for so long I think he’s not going to answer. “I try not to be.”
That’s not exactly reassuring. I fidget with the chain, and another question bubbles up. “If you can heal so fast, how come you have all those tattoos? Wouldn’t they just disappear?”
He holds up his hand, showing me the mismatched symbols decorating his knuckles. “We use a special ink with silver particles. The wounds never fully heal.”
I stare at the raised skin on his hand. “That must hurt constantly.”
“You get used to it.” He shrugs, running his thumb over the raised ink. “Besides, it makes me look cool.”
Despite everything, I almost smile. “That’s dedication to the aesthetic.”
The room falls quiet again, and I find myself watching him out of the corner of my eye. He’s so still—barely breathing, no fidgeting. It’s unnerving.
Wait. Breathing.
“Do you actually need to breathe?” I ask suddenly.
“Not in the same way you do.” As if to prove his point, he stops. His chest goes completely still, and the silence becomes absolute. After several seconds that feel like minutes, he inhales again. “But I forget sometimes when I’m nervous.”
“You get nervous?”
Amusement flickers across his face. “Around you? Yes.”
My heart stutters behind my ribs, and I have to look away. This is insane. I’m developing warm and fuzzy feelings for a vampire. A real, dead-man-walking, blood-sucking vampire who’s sitting on my couch and just told me most of his kind are dangerous.
“One more question,” he says, glancing toward the window. “I have to beat the sun before it rises. That part is true—daylight is fatal for us.”
I want to ask him what he eats, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that answer. Instead, I chicken out. “Are you really repelled by garlic?”
He gasps dramatically, clutching his chest. “Me? I’m Italian. It would be a sin.”
Despite everything, I laugh. “Yeah, I guess it would be.”
“But we don’t eat food,” he adds, his tone growing more serious. “So if you forced me to eat garlic knots, I’d feel very sick.”
“An eternity without garlic knots sounds like torture.”
“You’re telling me.”
The moment of levity fades as reality crashes back. He’s not human. He doesn’t eat food. And I still don’t know what he does eat, though I have a pretty good idea.
“I should go,” he says, rising from the couch and reaching for his jacket. “You need sleep, and I need to get somewhere safe before dawn.”
I wrap the blanket tighter around my shoulders, suddenly feeling cold. “Will you…will I see you again?”
“Do you want to?”
The question hangs between us. I should say no. I should tell him to stay away from me and never come back.
But instead, I hear myself whisper, “I don’t know.”
He nods like he expected that answer. “I’ll be nearby if you need me. But no one will come tonight. I’m sure of it.”
Then he simply leaves.
No simmering tension.
No kisses goodbye.
No promises to come back tomorrow.
And even though I’m relieved to be getting out of here in a few hours to a place of safety and normality, there’s another part of me that yearns for something else. Something I dare not even think aloud.