He’d always had the sense that the people who worked for Our Lady said that to the kids because they themselves wanted to feel part of an elevated platform, a righteous, better-than-anything-else kind of thing.
Performance piety, he thought.
But whatever, fine, he’d been one of the chosen ones, kept out of the foster care system, saved from some terrible fate that clearly had Charles Dickens–in-the-twenty-first-century written all over it.
In reality, he’d found growing up without parents, and waiting around in a valiant hope that some couple would come and declare they wanted to adopt a scrawny kid who couldn’t talk, to be pretty grim, even if he’d had a warm place to sleep, three squares a day, and free dental.
And then there had been the Christmas season.
For reasons that, in retrospect, now totally escaped him, every December the orphans were loaded onto a bus and taken to the local mall. They weren’t allowed to sit on Santa’s lap, because the season wasn’t about all that—but they were instructed to walk around and see all the presents they would not be getting, and all the families they were not a part of, and all the normal that, through no fault of their own, they could not participate in. And this was back before online shopping, when throngs of people crowded into those shopping centers, carrying out bags and bags of Christmas morning loot into parking lot sections that were standing room only for new car arrivals.
He’d never understood the why of that trip.
Reaching up to his shoulder, he pushed at the wound and rotated the socket. The pain made him remember something else. Back when he’d been growing up, he could recall the nuns and adults at the orphanage telling the children that youth was wasted on the young.
Like the Christmas mall trip, he’d never understood why they felt compelled to point a blaming finger at something a kid couldn’t fix and didn’t get. You were the age you were, and death was just not a preoccupation for somebody who’d been on the planet for only eight years. Ten years. Fifteen years.
More to the point, if you’d already lost your mom and dad and had no one who cared for you in the world, what did anything else matter? If dying meant you lost everything, hello. John hadn’t even had clothes of his own. Books. Toys. Even the pillow he put his head on every night had “Our Lady of Mercy Orphanage” stamped on it in ink.
No possessions. No control over his destiny. Nothing ahead of him.
He might as well already be dead, he’d always thought.
As the cold wind off the river curled around his legs, the chill made the scene in front of him replace the images of the past. And for some reason, he thought about how old he was. In calendar years, he was not even thirty. For a human, that was the tail end of the transition into proper adulthood. For a vampire, it was a drop in the bucket, a blip on a centuries-and-centuries-long lifespan.
Assuming you didn’t die young.
He thought about his wound and the spread of the stain in his skin.
Death had taken ahold of him. He knew this without any doubt.
So now he understood about the youth wasted on the young thing. It was hard to fully comprehend the prospect of dying, the way it consumed the mind and the soul, the way it eclipsed previously “important” preoccupations, the way it reordered your priorities … until you were forced to stare your grave in the eye.
Children had no capacity not just to appreciate mortality, but to see clearly that they had made a bargain at birth that, even though there was no consent, was nonetheless an enforceable agreement with a payment due.
All things that lived died.
The best that anyone who breathed could do was a skate-by into old age, dodging the slings and arrows of biological failings and accidents, until you could sit back with your aches and pains and mourn the loss of your relevancy, your generation, your place in the population pecking order.
He had never expected to die. Ironic, given that he hunted the enemy every night as his vocation.
But here he was, standing out in the open, a sitting duck for a lesser, not worried that he had no weapons, no phone, and no backup.
Then again, he’d already decided his life was a moot point. The question was, with whatever time he had left, what did he want to do?