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“Solon,” Jim says, and I look up to see him at the top of the stairs. “Why don’t you come up here and we can put on some coffee. You do drink coffee?”
We don’t have any blood, is what the rest of his brain is saying.
I nod and I go up the stairs, though it feels like I’m stepping into a trap, one that I might deserve to be stuck in.
I’ve never been in their apartment before, only Lenore’s. Theirs is protected by a thousand wards, just as Lenore’s was, but I was able to bypass them. Here, though, I feel like I’m walking through quicksand as I push through the doorway and into their kitchen. The pressure builds around my head, my body, making my bones rattle, and then with a pop I’m through.
“Sorry about that,” Jim says, reaching for the coffee pot. “We have to protect ourselves more than ever now. Atlas found us with ease, there could be others.”
“Are there others?” I ask. “Because Lenore is missing. We have no idea where she went, if she went anywhere. But there was the smell of sulfur in the room.” And they, and their house, smells of rich Ethiopian coffee, lavender, sage, dill, and other herbal arrangements. Not a trace of sulfur.
Jim’s hand starts shaking as he attempts to pour the coffee into a mug, and he has to put the pot back on the burner. “Sorry, my arm. After Yanik…”
Any other time I would ask him how he’s doing. I would be cordial. These two are my enemies at heart, not my friends, but there’s always been a distant formality between us in all our dealings.
But this is not that time. There is only one thing to discuss.
“What happened?” Elaine asks, folding her arms across her chest as her eyes burn into mine. “Tell me everything that happened. Did you see who took her? Do you know? Maybe it was a vampire. Were you having a party?”
Her voice is getting higher, more frantic, but I have no inclination to calm her down because I’m not calm myself. I’m barely holding it together.
And I’m bracing myself for what I have to tell her, knowing exactly how she’s going to react. That blade will be in her hand in seconds.
I swallow hard. “I think she’s hurt. There’s so much blood. Everywhere.”
Her eyes go wide. “What?”
“What do you mean, her blood?” Jim says, looking like he’s about to smash the coffee pot over my head. “Did you…were you…”
I shake my head, knowing what he thinks. “No. I was not feeding on her.”
“Well what the fuck happened, Absolon?” Elaine says. “Was someone else? Another vampire?”
“I don’t think so,” I tell them. Shame makes me avert my eyes, concentrating on the water ring stains on the kitchen island. “It was me. I’m the one who hurt her.”
“But you said…” Jim begins.
“How?” Elaine interrupts. Then she reaches out and shoves me on the shoulder, hard enough that I have to look up to meet her eyes, eyes that want to kill me. That knife is singing away. “How did you hurt her?!”
“There’s another part of me,” I say quietly, my voice raw, barely above a whisper and brimming with shame. “A part I’ve lived with for a long time.”
Elaine looks horrified. “No. No, those are supposed to be legends. Fairy-tales.”
“Horror stories,” Jim fills in grimly.
I nod slowly. “They are true. Whatever you’ve heard, it’s probably true. That I carry a beast inside me, that this beast…I have no control over it. I can only keep it buried, but your daughter, she—”
Suddenly the blade is in Elaine’s hand, carved silver and glowing with blue electricity, and she comes at me in a blur that’s fast even for my vampire eyes. She takes the blade and presses it against my chest above my heart, piercing through my t-shirt, pointing into my skin, drawing the faintest bit of blood.
“If you killed her, I will drive this knife straight into your heart and out the other side!” she screams at me, spit flying in my face as she shakes, her eyes glowing with blue crescent moons.
I wrap my hand around the blade, holding it tight, letting the painful pulsing current slice my fingers, make me bleed. “If I killed her, I will be begging you to end my life,” I growl. “I’ll want you to make it hurt. I’ll want to suffer just like I made her suffer.”
Her nose flares with anger, blue lighting now sparking from her eyes, her hair starting to rise like she’s a living wire, a current uncontrolled, and I know how she’s feeling, I know every single part of it, because I feel it too. I feel this wild, uninhibited rage directed at myself, the desire to rip my own fucking head off and shove it down my throat, to kill and torture myself a thousand times over.
