Page 20
LEX
Google Says Vampires
Here is a list of things I typed into my laptop at 1:14 a.m., in the dark, in Room 214, with my hood still up.
man drinks blood
is drinking blood a medical condition
guy who doesnt sweat
why are some people ice cold
do vampires exist
do vampires exist no really
vampires in professional sports
The internet, as usual, was a great comfort. It told me I was anemic, that I might have Raynaud’s, that a Slovakian man in 1725 had definitely been a vampire and was also, according to one comment, “a whole mood,” and that if I truly believed a person could be a vampire I should seek help from a licensed professional. One website informed me that vampires do not appear in mirrors. Another said they do, but they sparkle. A third was a forum for people who identify as vampires, and I spent eleven minutes reading their thread about which brand of iron supplement was best before I remembered I was supposed to be terrified.
I was terrified.
I want that on the record. I don’t have to say it out loud, but it’s true. Sitting on that big carved bed with the laptop on my knees, I had a hand pressed flat over the middle of my chest as if I could hold my heart in with it. The stack of crates. The wet red shine on his mouth. That sound she made. Two points of red light, turning in the dark, looking straight at me.
Nope, said the word in my head. That word doesn’t exist in your dictionary.
Well. The dictionary was wrong. It was very, very wrong.
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to, and I’m a little ashamed of it. When he walked away, when he stood there six feet from me and could have done anything he liked, he didn’t. I have thought about that a lot. A predator with an audience of one, and he turned his back and left. I don’t know why that scares me more than the teeth did.
I googled do vampires eat pizza.
The results were unhelpful.
I was on the third page of a forum about garlic when I heard the key card in the door.
I slammed the laptop shut so hard it made a noise like a gunshot.
The door swung open. He stepped in, and the hall light fell across the floor and went out again behind him as the door closed, and for a moment I couldn’t see his face, only the shape of him, tall and black against the window. His coat was dusted with snow. He stood very still, the way a man stands who’s listening for something.
He knew. God, he knew. I could feel it in the air like the pressure before a storm.
I lay back down. I pulled the blanket up to my chin like a kid. I closed my eyes, and I said, in the calmest voice I could manage, “You’re back late.”
Silence.
It went on so long I started counting. I got to nineteen.
“Yes,” said Maksim.
That was all. He crossed to the closet. I could hear him hang up his coat, hear the small clink of a bottle against the shelf. Everything about it was slow and quiet and ordinary, and I lay there with my eyes squeezed shut, sweating through my T-shirt, listening to a vampire put his coat away.
It was, and I say this with love, the most upsetting thing that has ever happened to me.
He went into the bathroom, and I heard the water run while he washed his face, or did whatever it is the dead do to a face. Then the tap shut off, and the bathroom door opened, and the footsteps came back out across the floor toward the daybed and past it.
They stopped beside my side of the bed.
