- 5 -
Even standing in the hallway, I could smell Peter and hated what it did to me. The ache I tried to ignore burned unbearably inside me, and my heart sped up so quickly, it made me weak.
Thankfully, Jack was downstairs, doing his penance by washing my laundry. Under normal circumstances, Mae would be happy to do it, but she’d been preoccupied with Milo, who required 24-hour care.
I’d been here for almost three days, and I had seen almost nothing of her. I hadn’t seen Milo since Ezra warned me not to.
That left me with a lot of time to wander around the house feeling lost and confused. Jack tried to console me while simultaneously keeping his distance, and it did little to make me feel better.
He’d been sleeping on the couch downstairs, leaving me with his room. I snooped through his drawers in hopes of finding something incriminating, but everything was innocent. He had a trunk of graphic novels in his closet that I leafed through, but it was hard to focus on anything.
I should have found comfort in this, because it meant that I would never have to give Milo up. Maybe if I had already turned I would feel that way, if I could completely understand what was in store for him. Instead, I had Jack’s vague assurance that being a vampire was awesome, and that was about it.
What if it did something horrible to Milo? And he got sick or died or turned into something completely vile? What if he stopped being Milo, the timid over protective geek I loved, and turned into some overzealous blood sucker?
Or what if he turned out fine, but he hated me for letting him turn? And for lying to him about vampires? What if I had to spend the rest of eternity with him hating me?
When I tired of searching through Jack’s room and driving myself mad with worry, I finally gave into Peter. I stood in the hallway for a long while, just breathing in the intoxicating, tangy scent that Peter left behind.
Since Peter took off last spring after the incident where he nearly killed me, Mae simply shut the door to his room. No one talked about whether or not he would be back, although he hadn’t packed any of his things.
The unspoken consensus was that Ezra would find a cure for us, and life would go back to normal. Not that I even knew what it would mean to be “back to normal” anymore.
I opened Peter’s bedroom door, checking the hall both ways just to make sure that Jack wasn’t around. Nobody had forbid me from entering his room. I doubted that Mae and Ezra would care at all, but Jack was liable to take offense.
Even mentioning Peter’s name made him tense up, and I hoped that someday, he’d be able to move past that. I began to doubt that Jack would ever want anything to do with Peter again, regardless of how our relationships resolved themselves.
His room was just as he had left it, but I barely noticed. I closed my eyes, breathing in more deeply, and a wonderful heat surged through me. There was a physical pull inside me, and I was drawn into his room.
Peter had been gone for months, and my body still clamored to get in every last drop of him.
On the floor in front of Peter’s massive bookcases, a white rug had been stained with a few drops of my blood. I remembered the terrible ecstasy when Peter bit me, and the way the life drained from me in this beautiful, peaceful feeling. Nothing, not even my magical kiss with Jack, had ever felt as good as that.
Even now, knowing what I know and having all that I have, I knew that if Peter offered to bite me in exchange for my death, I would gladly make the trade. My feelings for him were positively suicidal.
I walked around Peter’s room, admiring his odd collection of things. His furniture seemed to be primarily antiques, and everything was natural wood or white. His bed smelled too sweetly of him, so I deliberately steered clear of his white linens.
His shelves were lined with books from every day and age, and I let my fingers travel over their worn bindings. Then I noticed something that made my already shortened breath catch.
Peter had an entire section of books on vampires, and I don’t mean things like Bram Stroker or Anne Rice. They were books with titles like A Vampire Dictionary and A Brief History of Vampyres.
I pulled the latter from the shelf, carefully opening the cover to the yellowed pages. The moldy smell overwhelmed me, and I sneezed.
I sat back down on the chair by the bookcase, and I looked through it. It had no table of contents, but a page appeared to be missing. It started with a foreword:
“I am not the oldest of my kind, nor do I claim to be an expert on them. However, in my many years of existence, I have found little written on the subject of vampyres, other than questionable folklore.
“In an effort to dispel the mythology and to create a guide for the newly turned, I have decided to write this book. In no means is it to be taken as a ‘Bible’ for my kind, but rather, as the title suggests, a brief history of vampyres as far as I can tell.”
My fingers began to tremble, and I was afraid I’d rip the fragile pages out. Knowing vampires had a history was disconcerting.
I knew they existed, but the only ones I knew were Jack and his family, and they weren’t particularly frightening or disturbing. But thinking of vampires as a whole, an entire species of creatures out there, feeding on the living for the past millennia… it sent chills down my spine.
The first chapter was simply titled “In the Beginning.”
“Perhaps what is most unusual about vampyres is that while we carry many of the same traits of humans, we lack any real creation story of our own. Some vampyres still cling onto the religion of the people, while others banish it, saying that we are proof that God does not exist.
“What I have found to be true is much less sensational than one would hope. We have neither a direct line with God nor the devil. We are no closer to the meaning of life than any other human.