Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,29

feels better being able to look down at the other boy. “Got you out as fast as I was able,” he says, his stomach cramping again. “It’s backbreaking work.”

Maxwell curls his lip at the word work. As he does, the moon peeks out again, making the boy’s teeth gleam, wet and white. The sneer is repulsive, as is the pale face—too handsome. As though it had been carved of marble, like one of the statues scattered around the churchyard. “You should have brought help,” Maxwell says.

“I thought you preferred discretion,” Will reminds him. Better than to mention that help costs money. “It’s important in my line of business.”

“To be sure.” With a dismissive look, Maxwell holds out one smooth, uncalloused palm. “Lift me out of this hole.”

Will raises an eyebrow. But if he refuses to act like the boy’s footman, Maxwell will likely remember the insolence more than the intervention. Gritting his teeth, Will takes the boy’s hand. Then he draws back with a shudder. “You’re cold as death!”

Maxwell stiffens for a moment. “No surprise there. I’ve been lying in that box for hours.”

The boy holds out his hand again, impatient, but Will hesitates. He has handled more than his share of corpses, and there is something too familiar about the clammy touch of the boy’s flesh. So this time, when he takes Maxwell’s hand, he doesn’t haul him up out of the grave. Instead, he presses two fingers against the blue-white wrist.

“What is this?” Maxwell says, trying to pull away, but Will has strong hands from digging. He probes and pushes, searching but not finding. “What are you doing?”

“Checking your pulse.”

At that, Maxwell wrenches away, but it’s too late. Will’s examination might have been cursory, but the diagnosis is falling into place—the pale skin, the bright teeth, the notable lack of a pulse. The recent spate of live burials—but no. Those bodies were dead after all.

Will’s mind is racing—not with the price of improved burial cases and the thought of a front seat in the lecture hall but with memories of the raucous laughter of the students in last week’s dissection. The corpse had come in two bags, rather than the usual one, and upon lifting the head to display the muscles of the throat, a whole head of garlic had fallen out on the table. Will had laughed too, then. It was all superstition. Fear and folklore were fit for novelists, not for doctors. Or so he’d thought, before he’d wrapped his hands around Maxwell’s lifeless wrist.

And if the myth of the vampire is true, what else? Does a soul exist inside the cell? Is there a God to hear the church bells ringing?

Will’s own heart is pounding so loud it sounds like he’s listening with a stethoscope. He stares at the boy in the grave, trying to resist the impulse to scrub his hands on his filthy coat. “What are you?”

“I might ask you the same thing.” Maxwell lifts an eyebrow, and the sneer is back. His teeth look very long. Not the pinched-gum rictus of a corpse but the long and pointed canines of a predator. “I’m fairly certain the college doesn’t let women practice medicine.”

At the word, Will’s eyes go wide; his stomach twists at the wrongness. He is repelled all over again. “I’m not a woman,” he says through his teeth, but Maxwell only grins.

“I can smell it, you know. The blood.” Maxwell shrugs as Will’s stomach twists again. “It seems as though discretion might benefit you more than me.”

Ting a ling ting—the wind touches the bell, and the shivering leaves sound just like the rustle of skirts. Or is that only an echo in Will’s head? And now instead of the seat at the front of the hall, Will sees himself on the table, his body an object of curiosity, the other boys pointing and staring. “You can’t tell anyone,” he says, and though the wind is gusting past, he feels as though he is the one in the coffin, the air running out.

“I can’t?” Maxwell cocks his head, as though he’s never heard those words in his life. “Perhaps I won’t. It might be useful to know a doctor.”

The tone of his voice is grating—the way he dangles the word over Will’s head. Perhaps. Mrs. Esther used to do the same. Perhaps you’ll sleep after the party; perhaps we’ll get you a new dress at Christmas; perhaps you’ll eat after the guests have gone. There is a bargain in it—but what does