Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,40

“If you wanted closure or time to grieve, that’d be one thing. But coming here every night, asking about him all the time … It’s not healthy.”

I snatch my hand away, turn my head toward the scent of dying flowers. After a moment, I say, “How many people have you turned?”

“Pardon?”

“How many? Surely I’m not the first.”

It’s probably a rude question. I’m not well-versed in vampire etiquette yet. The silence thickens, and right when I’ve decided she won’t answer, she says, “A handful over the years. Only in situations like yours.”

“Freak blizzards and morphine overdoses?”

“Murder.” She speaks plainly, a mere description, but the word pierces through me as surely as her fangs did in the snow. “Even then, turning them is a last resort. I don’t make the choice unless the only other option is … well. I figure an unnatural life is better than an unnatural death.” She shrugs. “Sometimes I’m wrong.”

“What, they don’t want to be saved?”

I face her again. She’s staring at the base of the magnolia, too. Past it, maybe. I wonder who turned her all those centuries ago. I wonder if she wanted to be saved.

“That’s the thing,” she says. “One man’s salvation is another’s damnation.” Her words linger between us, almost tangible in the cool night air. She kneels so we’re at the same eye level, which feels condescending somehow, though I know she means to be comforting. “They could still press charges.”

I stiffen. “They won’t.”

“They could.”

“If they wanted to arrest him, they would have done it as soon as he walked into that station saying he killed his daughter. But they didn’t. They let him go home.” My voice rises, not quite to yelling, but the dark has a way of amplifying everything. “There was no police tape around the house. No handcuffs. No questioning the neighbors. They patted his back and offered their condolences. They let him stand at this makeshift memorial and cry.”

My hands hurt. Why do my hands hurt? I look down to find curled fists. I’ve dug bloody crescents into my palms. I’m still not used to this new strength. Vampirism is almost the exact mirror of the disease I had in life, strengthening instead of weakening my muscles. I tried to lift my head when I woke after turning and nearly snapped my neck from the utter lack of resistance. I still can’t walk, of course. No amount of increased strength will ever stretch out tendons strung taut as tightrope from years of disuse, and thank God for that.

I don’t think I could’ve handled losing that much of myself.

I swipe my palms on my jeans. Blood seeps into the fabric’s dense weave, spreading from thread to thread.

“You have infinity ahead of you,” Seanan says. “Lifetime upon lifetime. Would it help to focus on that instead? The future?”

She looks so hopeful. Three hundred years old and still her face is gentle and lovely as dawn. How has she stayed so warm for so long when my entire being is frozen solid?

“His original plan was to turn off my oxygen, you know. Said that was the easiest option, just flick a switch and let nature take its course.”

“Why didn’t he?” Seanan asks.

I turn my palms to the night’s meager light: healed, the stain on my jeans the only proof that I can still bleed.

“He thought it would be too hard for him.” My voice comes out steady, if distant, like I’m hearing myself from another room. “He planned to let me slowly suffocate to death but didn’t think he’d survive it. Morphine was kinder, he said, like going to sleep. ‘Just putting my little girl to sleep one more time.’

“Once the drug took hold, I couldn’t move. Couldn’t lift my hand or turn my head. Every inch of me felt impossibly heavy, like my veins were filled with lead. I couldn’t speak, either. Couldn’t scream, although maybe that was more panic than anything. The only thought that made it through the haze and the terror was…” I take a deep, ragged breath and choke on the burn in my useless lungs. I keep forgetting breathing’s optional now. “I thought, I have to tell him something’s wrong. He has to get help.”

Seanan reaches tentatively for my hand again. I don’t pull away. She rubs her thumb over the life line on my palm, where a few minutes earlier there had been four bloody half-moons.

“That’s when he told me what he’d done,” I say. “When I couldn’t do anything with the panic