did so a pearl of creamy liquid, like snake venom or dandelion milk, beaded on my fingertip.
“That hurt?” I asked, tugging, watching the drop grow fat and heavy. The syrup spilled over, soon began marbling with red. Harley’s blood oozed down the length of my finger and pooled, ghosted with white fluid, in my palm.
“Nuh.” He shook his head, unintentionally snicking my digit in the process.
“Watch it,” I said, snatching my hand away, sucking to stem the flow——being leached from my neck. No: Harley’s neck. Energy sapping from my body, pulsating. Teeth stinging like horseflies in the dip beside my collarbone, the crook of my elbow. Smiling faces, kissing, drinking. “He tastes like swimming,” a high voice says. That’s Nellie Porter, maybe. Or Ike. No: Ike’s at my feet, draining the webbing between my toes. They like me, I think—Harl thinks: and, They need me. I’m warm, so warm the room is fuzzy. I’m sleepy, so sleepy. I can hardly feel the table beneath my back. My plate is broken; rare beef from dinner squelches under my hip. “He tastes like sunshine,” says Alistair. I giggle. My friend is giving me a hickey, and now there’s a fire in my belly. A hunger. I sit up, nip him on the shoulder. Barely break the skin. “That’s enough.” Doctor Jeffries claps, whistles till the tingling stops. “End of lesson.” The small mouths pull away, melt into the room’s dim corners. The doctor keeps Ike and Alistair back. “What have I told you? Stun with the jus; drink only enough to make you feel strong; bite hard to inject your charge. Don’t be greedy: no killings within the Haven.” My head is woozy, I can’t lift it to see where they’ve gone. Too heavy. “No killings in the family—”
“When did this happen?”
Harley looked at me like I’d gone crazy. “What?”
“This—” I licked the last trace of Harley’s venom-laced blood from my finger. “This.” I yawned, felt a prickling in my lips. “The biting, them other kids—”
“Oh, that.” Harl crossed his arms, flicked a lock of hair from his eyes. “Ain’t nothing. You know, it happens.”
I wasn’t convinced by his cool demeanor. Again, I tasted the blood and milk from Harl’s tooth, and it hit me like a kick to the ribs. The scent of cedar and hot dirt. Bullfrogs at the bottom of gullies on our land like croaking men clearing their throats. Ma’s chamomile shampoo. Her soft singing lifted on bathroom steam. Pure, unrefined memories of home. The other children had tasted these moments. Ingested them. And Harl hadn’t stopped them.
“I can’t believe you’d let them do that to you,” I hissed, emphasizing the word let. “You ain’t even tried to stop them—not even a little bit!”
Harl sighed, and for the third time his shoulders rose and fell noncommittally. He looked empty. Emptier. “I can’t always fight, Ada. Not always.”
Beth kicked me in the shins when I took her face in my hands, drew her mouth to mine, and sucked blood and venom from her teeth. Where Harl’s fangs had grown close together, adding a rat’s angular profile to his already narrow features, Beth’s had sprouted from her canines. Blunt but strong. When the hanging lights reflected in her dark eyes, she was no longer a seven-year-old girl but a feral cat.
I dragged her behind a folding screen, checked that no one could see us, and sat her down on the foot of a cot.
“This ain’t—isn’t—my bed, Ada. I mean, Adelaide. Mine’s over there—”
“Quiet,” I hissed, grabbing her face again and drinking. I stopped the instant the flavor of her memories shifted from ash to honey, when the liquid was more red than clear. My mouth was numb from her poison; it itched down my throat, made me woozy. Beth bit my lip as I pulled away—then immediately asked what had happened, why was there blood on my chin? Exhaling, I swallowed visions of her and Miah smothered in a swarm of grabbing hands; suckling at Arianne’s shriveled neck and breasts. Something was missing, and it wasn’t just my sister’s memory of the past thirty seconds.
There was no essence of fear. Not in Beth, not in Harl. Tinges of sorrow seasoned the cloudy blood I drank, yet it wasn’t overwhelming. It wasn’t purely their own. They felt Ma’s loss, I could taste it. But not acutely, not like I did. That sadness was buried in them, beneath dozens of other, foreign sadnesses. Those they’d adopted from their new playmates.
For a few