Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
“I’m …” Kyle edges along the wall, trying to get to Elias. “I am just trying to live my life in peace. I didn’t invite you here.”
“But you did,” says Lazarus. “I could smell you, for so many nights. I crept upon the perimeters of your life, I watched, and I grew frustrated. You’re so young, you should seek those of us who can help. It isn’t wise to live here with your food, like sleeping on your dinner plate.” He peers back at the bed, wipes blood off his chin, licks it off his fingers, sneers. “These games are so childish.”
By the second, by each word uttered from Lazarus’s thin, terrible lips, Kyle grows sicker. “He isn’t just my food. It’s not a game, and it’s none of your business. You need to leave. Now.”
Lazarus’s eyes sharpen.
“I’m … not like you.” Kyle continues inching along the wall, determined to get to the bed, to free Elias, to protect him with whatever means he has, despite his crumbling confidence in being any match whatsoever against this powerful being. “I’m not like that. I’m not a … a …”
“What?” Lazarus slowly strolls, the first time Kyle has seen him use his actual legs, following Kyle along the wall, keeping himself between Kyle and Elias, as if suspecting exactly what Kyle is attempting to do, a step ahead of him. “You’re not a … what?”
Kyle grimaces. “You know what.”
“Look at that disgust on your face. Why are you disgusted? Who made you hate what you are? It is power. It is control. The blood is our only god. Why can’t you even …” A gleam of anger darkens his eyes. “… say the word?”
“Because it’s not what I am. It’s not who I’ll ever be.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to be. I’m human. Mostly. And I’ll stay as human as I can until—” Kyle stops, his patience run out. “I don’t owe you answers! I didn’t invite you here, no matter what you say. I want you gone. You’re all supposed to leave us alone. That’s the deal Tristan struck with Lord Markadian.”
“Deal? Tristan? What are you talking about?” Lazarus lets out a boom of laughter that surprises Kyle. “I think you may have me mistaken for something else entirely. Do I look like a man who strikes deals with Lords? Do I look like a man who needs permission from anyone or anything to do as I please?”
Elias yanks even more urgently against his binds, grunting, hardly moving for as stretched as he is. Blood pools at his neck where he was last bitten, red streams down the side of his chest.
Kyle holds his breath. “You’re … You’re not one of—?”
“I do what I want. I live how I want. No one governs me. Look at you. You can’t even say what I am.” He emits another terrible boom of laughter that fills the room like a drum. “This is why we have such words. Like human … or pet. You are a child. Maybe it’s why you still play with your food and suppress the thirst in your being … why you cannot even bring yourself to utter the word that which fucking defines you …”
A flash. Lazarus is upon him, long hands crashing against the wall on either side of Kyle’s head with such strength, cracks in the paint and plaster shatter outward from his palms like spiderwebs, the ceiling over their heads shuddering, dust raining down.
“Vampire,” states Lazarus, baring fangs, then plunges into Kyle’s neck.
6.
Your First Lesson.
—∙—
As if through some deep, murky pool, Elias’s screams swim around the room, far away, dreamlike and unreal.
The weight of the being’s body, flattening to the wall, Kyle rests his chin on a granite-hard shoulder, as if being embraced, seeing stars through the dim light of the bedroom, circling.
Vampire, Lazarus had said.
Vampire. The word pulses in Kyle’s ears like Elias’s distant cries. A word Tristan never let fly from Kyle’s lips, a word that in some way felt locked up like a shameful secret, a terrible word.
Uttered so plainly, cleanly, in Lazarus’s deep, crystal voice.
Vampire.
It seems like a lifetime later when Kyle finds himself on the floor, back slumped against the wall, head drooped. Lazarus is a mountain over him, a web of blood drawn down his chalky white chin and chest. “I am just one,” he states clearly, “but there are hundreds of us, thousands perhaps, that the self-appointed, self-important ‘Lords’ of our kind can never control. We are bound by no one. Organized by no one. Truly free. The strength of gods in our teeth. Give me one night of your life,” he says with a lift of his bloodied chin, “and I will show you what you are.”
Kyle doesn’t even have the strength to lift an arm, to shift his cramping leg, to tilt his dizzy head. He just gazes upward at the being, eyes half open, jaw hanging, weak.