Page 93 of So Thirsty

I pinch my throat, the thirst blossoming.

“We don’t do what we did tonight every night,” he says, bringing my hand to his lips. “Hardly ever.”

“What’s ‘hardly ever’ to someone who’s lived hundreds of years?”

“It’s been maybe…” He pauses to think. “Fifty years since we’ve had to take measures.”

“That’s what you call it?”

“Would you prefer I say ‘kill’?” he asks, letting my hand down. “We try to get our blood without violence. We take it from hospitals. We buy it in dark alleys. We have our ways.”

Robbing hospitals and buying black-market blood isn’t exactly ethical either, but it’s better than leaving a pile of bodies in our wake. Better than murder.

“If you stay with me, I will show you,” he says, stepping up to a platform where there’s a sword stuck in a stone. He gestures for me, and I go to him. I put my hand on the hilt of the sword; I grip it and I pull, and I break it. I break the hilt clean off.

“Oops.”

He laughs. “See? You’re strong.”

“Now I feel bad.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

I attempt to press the hilt back into the stone, because I’m too thick and stubborn to recognize when something broken can’t be fixed, can’t be unbroken. And I wonder if that means I’m too thick and stubborn to recognize when something broken isn’t actually broken. If I’ve spent my life trying to glue pieces back together when I should have just let them lie. Or set them on fire.

“It’s okay,” I say, tossing the hilt into the snow.

He takes a breath. “We will take you wherever you want to go. We will not linger if you do not want us to. But you should think about it. What you want. Who you want to do it with. You have time. It’s on your side now, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” I say, looking back at the swordless stone.

“Though just because you have all the time in the world doesn’t mean you can’t still waste it.”

Sometimes wisdom sounds like a threat.

28

W e spend the rest of the night wandering around the fairgrounds, until I get too thirsty. He leads me to the van and goes into the back for the cooler, which is stocked with bags of blood. He reaches to the chain around his neck, pulls it out from under his shirt, revealing the spile. He uses it to puncture a bag. He lets me drink first, and I nearly empty it. He takes the rest.

I watch him drink, watch his neck move as he swallows.

It’s almost as satisfying as if I were drinking it myself. I can almost taste it.

When we’re done, he tosses the empty blood bag into the back of the van and closes it.

“Is it okay that we just took one? We didn’t need to ask?”

“I’d be the one to ask,” he says. I already sensed that he was in charge, but I never wondered why until now. “The sun will be up soon. We should go inside.”

“I bled. Before. I bit my lip, and I bled a little. I didn’t know that was possible.”

“We bleed. There is blood in our veins. We have thick skin, but we aren’t impenetrable. We need to be careful; we do not have much to spare. It’s painful to lose.”

“Didn’t really notice,” I say, cracking a grin. “Preoccupied.”

He chomps at me, and I laugh. “Is that how we don’t empty ourselves? Because it hurts too badly?”

“Yes, in part. Vampire blood doesn’t taste the same as human blood. It tastes like nothing,” he says. “As soon as we consume it, it’s altered. Before you ask, I don’t know why or how. I don’t know everything. Not sure I care to.”