Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,38

said in a press conference Thursday afternoon. “We will remember Grace for her courage and her inspiring presence.”

Citing the extenuating circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, police have decided not to press charges at this time.

* * *

My “death” was a gentle affair. Quiet. Rare snow had fallen all day and through the previous night, collecting on pines, willows, magnolias, southern branches unaccustomed to bearing more weight than violent-bright pollen or summer’s full bore. As day sallowed into dusk, limbs began snapping in a staggered cascade, like firecrackers, or blood vessels bursting. Above me, my father cried. His tears fell on my face and rolled down my own dry cheeks. I clenched my eyes shut. Listened hard to the sharp breaks in the distance. Felt my heart’s jagged beat way up in my ears. My chest refused rising. He cried and cried. He didn’t wipe my face. I couldn’t wipe my face. The backup generator buzzed. Another branch broke, louder this time. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Crack. One Mississippi. Two Missi—crack. One—

The sun rose fast and miraculously hot. At fifty degrees the forest floor had turned to muddy slush. By eighty degrees the ground was straw and red clay once more, the only signs of the unprecedented snowfall being a few zones still left powerless and the half-shouted can you believe? greetings from one driveway to the next. He must have planned to bury me, but the snow threw him. Seanan said there’d been a shovel propped against the trunk when she’d found me, a few aborted attempts at holes clustered in front of the magnolia’s wide base. Did he case our property in advance, searching for the perfect spot? Or did he know instinctively that he would settle my body snug under the centuries-old tree farthest from the house?

This is how I know my father was flustered: He left my body off-center, angled carelessly askew. Maybe he considered waiting until the melt and thaw to finish. But if he waited, he would have had to carry me back to the house, and where would he have stored me? My bed? The unfinished basement that would surely flood with runoff? The garage that, despite poor insulation, would still be too warm to stop me rotting? No. I needed a grave, and he needed help providing one.

He improvised.

This is how I know my father was desperate: He believed his freezing, shaking hands when he couldn’t find a pulse. Probably didn’t even think twice before leaving me there and heading for the station.

Seanan didn’t need to check my wrist for life, of course. She could smell it on me.

My coma broke like a fever as soon as she latched on to the inside of my thigh. The femoral artery, surrounded as it is by meat and fat, provides the best anchor. You can really clamp down, which means you can suck faster, which means there’s less chance the body’ll realize it should be dead before the venom can finish recoating the circulatory system. Wrist for sampling, throat for draining, thigh for turning.

I felt her pull the blood from my body, the sudden lurch and sway how I imagine a headrush must feel when standing too quickly, only amplified by fangs and intention and finality. Seanan couldn’t have known that my heart, like all my muscles, was so much weaker than in most humans. It couldn’t pump fast enough for her venom to flood me back to living. Not without some encouragement.

Everything was lurid and pure. No thought, only bright pain and a sense of falling.

Then heat. A mouth full—so much more than a mouthful—of something thick as molasses. The taste of moonlight and brass. Tongue trying to find purchase on teeth or palette, unmoored. I had no body, only this mouth and this liquid mass filling, rushing. I gagged. My throat opened and the flood drained downward. I had swallowed so little in recent years, using a feeding tube instead, but muscle memory took over. My mouth emptied, my stomach bloated with blood and bile, and I lost consciousness again.

* * *

“You shouldn’t be here,” Seanan says behind me. I don’t startle at her sudden appearance like I might have before, back when she was the strange loner girl at church and I was the awkward high schooler parked at the end of a pew. We’d never spoken, not once in the three years since she’d shown up alone and aloof one Sunday morning. News of her spread quickly those first weeks, more rumor