Page 106 of We Were Eternal Once

Soon I stand next to her, the water to just below my breast. Skye shows me how to balance, how to paddle, how to exist in the waves. We meet under the moonless sky, and with her tutelage I grow.

I no longer fear the water. I do not breathe, so how can I drown? If I swallow water, it will come right back up, just as all things that were not blood do. If I slip into the water, I have a rope to guide me to my board. If it breaks?

I am a vampyr. I can not die, even if I want to.

“Okay, this one has promise,” Skye says. She says that every time a wave comes our way. I’ve shrugged each of them away, finding some reason not to attempt to surf.

“Perfection is the death of progress,” Skye says as the wave moves under us, ignored by me.

“What does that mean?”

“Sometimes, the only way out is through,” Skye said. For a flash she is a blue haired woman with metal in her eyebrow and lip, then she is Skye once more.

Through.

When the next wave comes, I paddle and stand as she showed me. The wave knocks my board and I fall, toppling into the water. It’s a swirl of churning water, the taut rope around my ankle pulling me with it.

I surface at last, grabbing for my board, dragging myself onto it.

“You okay?” Skye shouts.

I paddle out to her, glaring at the shore.

I take the next wave. And the next.

And the next.

Until I finally stand, the board rolling with the wave, my balance maintained.

“The only way out is through,” I tell the waves.

I didn’t think of you once.

“These are my digs,” Skye says, opening her arms to her apartment. She lives in a shoddy one close to the beach, with walls so thin I can hear her neighbors breathe.

Posters cover most of the wall, obscured by the surfboards that lean against it. She has so many of them, there’s barely room for her furniture. Her couches are aged, falling apart at the seams.

“It ain’t much, but it’s home,” she says, pitching her voice low and imitating an accent like the ones in the south. I tilt my head at her.

“I know it’s rude to ask a lady her age, but I have a feeling you’re pretty old, Noë.” She collapses onto her couch and more stuffing bulges from the seams.

“Very old,” I agree.

“Like…older than television?” she asks, her lips quirking.

“Yes.”

“Well, I am not. I am thirty-four, and I was turned when I was twenty-two. So, young for both a human and a vampire. Kind of a funny story, you see. I got swept into this, like…occult group outside of LA. I was rebellious, my parents were super religious. Ran into the wrong crowd, learned about familiars. Charmed a dude into changing me, then bailed.” She grins at this, as though she’d won something, tricking the vampyr that turned her.

“Boogied down here to SoCal because it’s more my speed. Dropped the goth thing, became my own woman, found the crew here.”

Skye tells most stories like this—a flurry of information, hidden behind vagueness. She gives the impression of knowing her without actually knowing her. I marvel at the way she places her words and what she decides is worthwhile to say. I’ve always chosen silence, as it always seemed safer.

Now? I am unsure.

“And you like it here?” I ask.

“For now. I think one day I’ll have to grow up, get serious, figure out how to live. Eventually I’ll run out of money. But what do you do—get a job? All the older vampires I’ve met are old old, like have property they bought thirty years ago when land was like a dollar. What are us new kids supposed to do?”