Page 47 of So Thirsty

I need it.

“I still remember how it felt,” Henry says.

“She’s fiending,” Miri says. “Sweet baby.”

“Look,” says Tatiana.

I can barely see, my eyes too dry to focus, but I can feel the fresh misery of my wrist re-forming. Splintered bone stitching back together. It’s so inexplicably terrible that I’m screaming despite the fact that the screaming is almost as painful.

“I’m not listening to this,” Tatiana says. “I’m giving her another sip.”

She doesn’t wait for Henry’s permission.

It’s just a drop, but it’s enough.

It goes beyond satiating; it unleashes stars. A pleasure and a peace like I’ve never known, so pure, I could cry but I laugh instead.

“She’s prettier when she smiles,” Tatiana says.

I consider saying thank you, but the dumb-happy feeling doesn’t last, and the blood in my system has granted me enough clarity to realize that Naomi still isn’t moving.

She’s slouched against Ilie’s leg, and he holds her head back as Elisa drips blood between her lips.

“Nay?” I croak. Naomi!”

Her eyes pop open.

I’ve never been so grateful to hear her scream.

16

I wake up in a strange bed, in a strange room. There’s a single window, a quilt hung on a curtain rod. I can see light peeking in at the sides. It’s daytime.

Naomi’s tucked in next to me, and the red crust at the corners of her mouth reminds me of what happened last night. I sit straight up, kick the covers off my legs. For a second I worry that I’m wearing no pants, just my underwear and the big T-shirt, but then I realize my leggings are on, just ripped to oblivion, and I can see immediately that where my calf was bitten, desecrated—there’s nothing. No trace of any injury. No mark.

I look down at my wrist. It looks fine, considering, except…

There’s a tiny shard of metal poking through my skin. I pluck it out like a splinter and flick it across the room. There’s a slight hole where it was. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t bleed.

I twist my hand, circle it around, and my wrist doesn’t click. Doesn’t ache. But I refuse myself the hope, the possibility, that something good has happened here, because I can’t reconcile it with all the bad, horrific, fucked-up things.

“Naomi,” I whisper, nudging her shoulder. “Naomi, you have to get up. We need to go.”

She mumbles something and reaches up to her neck, which, like my calf, bears no proof of injury.

“Naomi. We’re still in the house. We need to get out.”

“I’m tired,” she says, her voice hoarse. The last thing I remember is her screaming.

“We’ll sleep when we’re dead,” I say, because that’s what she used to tell me at sleepovers, coercing me to stay awake, stay up late, participate in her insomnia. Only now it might not apply, because for all I know, we are dead. “Get up.”

I rip the covers away and she groans.

“We’re not safe here. We need to…”

I trail off, not sure what we need to do. Go to the police? Tell them we were unwilling participants in a blood ritual? Tell them we encountered a group of vampires squatting in a lake house? That we were attacked by the starved owner of said house who was being held captive in the basement. That something was done to us.

My heart plunges into the pit of my stomach.