“Wickham is so different from what I’m used to,” I said, holding on to the banister with my right hand and my bookstore bag with my left. “There are people everywhere.”
Tony looked back and smiled. He was ahead of me, leading the way up the circular staircase. “I like your British accent,” he said. I didn’t respond, but a tingle crept through my chest and I knew that I liked the compliment.
At the top floor, we reached the art studio.
“Like I said, this is where you can find me almost any time,” Tony said, and placed his own bookstore bag onto the floor.
Small, rectangular, castle-like windows lined the circular, stone walls. Easels were peppered about, though they were without artwork as the school year hadn’t started yet. Papier-mâché masks dangled from the ceiling by thin wires. Some were made to look like bulls with horns, others like human faces. Paintbrushes and black charcoal stubs lay in metal and plastic bins, and ten wooden desks circled the room, each with their own particularly unique splatter of paint. The room held a vibration, one of promise and creativity. I could tell, no, I could feel, that wonderful moments had been experienced in that room. As a vampire, this would have enraged me.
How odd, I thought.
“I’m not a spectator to happiness anymore,” I said while running a hand across the top of an easel.
“What’d you say?” Tony asked.
“Oh, nothing.” I spun around to face Tony.
“You like Wickham?” Tony paused. “I’m here on an art scholarship.”
“What does that mean?” I examined a painting of a vase of flowers to the right of a window.
“It means I’m too poor to pay for this place, so they let me go to school for free. As long as I produce quality artwork. What about you?”
“I’m not on scholarship,” I said, watching Tony carefully to see if this would matter to him.
He shrugged. “It’s cool. Just promise me you’re not one of those rich girls who only dates guys who play lacrosse or football and drive really nice cars.”
I had no idea what half of that even meant.
“I think I promise,” I said.
“I live in Quartz. We passed it on the way here. It’s one of the guys’ dorms,” Tony said. “I have to live with all the jocks.”
“Justin Enos?” I offered with a sly smile.
“Yeah,” Tony said, rolling his eyes. But in my mind, Justin was bronzed and beautiful, pushing his way out of the ocean.
I turned to Tony. “Well, don’t worry. I won’t be one of those girls circling around Justin, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“His girlfriend? Tracy Sutton? Her and her two best friends are in this like, group. They call each other the Three-Piece.”
“Three-Piece?”
Yep, it’s as stupid as it sounds. They each date an Enos brother and they hang out in the dorms in this annoying group. They’re always together, and always making everyone around them want to poke their eyeballs out.”
“The Three-Piece’s eyeballs?”
“No, their own.”
I laughed at first, but after a moment, the sheer familiarity of what Tony was talking about echoed in my mind. My fingers grazed the crisp, dried hairs of the paintbrush as my eyes fell out of focus. That sounded familiar—too familiar.
“I was like that. At my old school.” I looked up at Tony, who was listening politely. “I wasn’t part of the group. I was the group.” I shook my head quickly, to clear out the crazy thoughts. “Anyway,” I said, “I won’t be like that.”
“Can I paint you sometime?” Tony asked. This was a new twist. “Paint…me?”
I had my portrait painted in the early 1700s, but nothing since, only photographs.
“Yeah,” he said, and leaned back against the wooden shelf that lined the circumference of the room. Above his head was one of the small, narrow windows. Outside, I could see the clouds darkening. “Portraits are kind of my thing. I’m good, too. I’m going to apply to Rhode Island School of Design next year.”
Tony was a good-looking Japanese boy, though the only face that I could see was Song’s, a vampire in my coven. Altogether there were five in the coven, including myself, Song was the second-youngest man I’d made into a vampire. He was eighteen when I found him, a Chinese warrior I’d discovered in the eighteenth century. I saw him across a crowded room and decided to seduce him. When I chose someone for my coven I based my choice on stealth, endurance, and capacity for giving death. Song was the most lethal martial artist in China. I chose him so I would never have to worry about protecting myself ever again.
My eyes refocused on Tony’s high cheekbones and smooth skin. Behind him, I could see the rain starting to fall in a steady rhythm. Even from there I could smell the wet earth, not because of any vampire senses but because it had been so long since my sense of smell included anything other than blood and body heat.
“Besides,” Tony said, still talking about the portrait, “you have a different look. And I like different. I don’t run with the crowd here.”
“I doubt I will,” I said. “I’m reformed,” I finished with a smile. Tony smiled. “Cool,” he said, and crossed his arms over his chest.
“I should go.” I started back toward the door, then turned to face Tony in the last minute. “And, yes, on the painting. It’ll be an exchange. You’ll teach me how to drive and I’ll be your model.”
Tony smiled, and in that moment I noticed that his teeth were very white. This was a clear indication of good health and food intake. His blood probably tasted sweet and earthy.
“Deal,” he said.
I walked down the twisting and turning of the winding staircase.
“Crap. Crap. Crap,” Tony said, and ran past me down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Just noticed the rain!” he said. “Left my window open!”
Tony hopped two steps at a time, so his bag of schoolbooks swung dangerously in the air. His sandals slapped against the stairs all the way until he reached the ground floor. Then I heard a smack on the tile and the opening of a door.
When I reached the second floor, there was a window, much like those in the art tower. It was small and rectangular, but it had a clear view of the meadow and Student Union. I placed my bag down on a step and rested my palm on the cool stonewall. I stuck my face close to the window and watched the rain drops hit the cement of the pathways below. Then it occurred to me—I hadn’t stood in the rain and let it drop down my skin since 1418. The last time I felt the rain drops was the night I left my mother’s earring in our apple orchard. The night I met Rhode and fell in love at first sight.
The night I died.
HAMPSTEAD, ENGLAND—APPLE ORCHARD
1418
The rain fell on the roof of my father’s house. We lived in a small, two-story manor behind the grounds of a monastery. The monks were far off from the orchards, separated from our home by two great meadows of apple trees. My father was an orphan, entrusted to the care of the monks upon his childhood. There they taught him about growing apples.
It was the middle of the night, and the rain fell against the roof in an easy rhythm. I sat in a rocking chair, looking out at my family orchard. The house was silent despite the pattern of the rain and my father’s snores echoing downstairs. The embers of the nightly fire still lingered, and my feet were warm. It was the beginning of autumn, and it was warmer than anyone had anticipated. Although it was early September, my family rested easier. We had already sent the first batch of our prized apples to the royal Medici family in Italy.
I was dressed in a white nightgown. In those days the nightdresses were flowing and sheer. If someone wanted to, they could see all of my fifteen-year-old self. My hair was still long and brown, but it hung in a loose braid over my left breast and stopped somewhere near my belly button.
Through the wet window, rows and rows of orchards stretched into darkness, and somewhere to the right, in the distance, wa
s a tiny orange glow of candlelight from the rectangular windows of the monastery. I rocked back and forth in the chair, lazily watching the rain. I reached up to remove my mother’s earrings that she had let me borrow that morning. When I touched my earlobe, I realized the right one was gone. I stood up from the chair. The last place I had them…where was the last place I had them? My father had complimented the glint of gold in the sun in the…last row of the orchard!
Before thinking twice, I was out the back door. I ran through the rows and fell to my knees. I crawled up and down the last row. I didn’t care about the time of night or that my chemise would be sullied and dirty from the rich earth. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my mother’s face when I told her I’d lost one of her favorite earrings. She would caress my face, tell me it was only an earring, and mask her disappointment. I had let the rain coat my face and was crawling from one end of the row to the other when a pair of black, silver-buckled boots stepped into my view. These were not the high heels that we are accustomed to in the modern world. These boots were low heeled, made from a thick hide, and covered the man’s legs all the way up to his shins. I followed the length of his legs, up his body, until I looked into the most piercing set of blue eyes I had seen or ever would see. They were framed by dark eyebrows that highlighted the man’s masculine jawbone and thin nose.
“Having an adventure?” he asked as casually as if he were wondering about the weather.
Rhode Lewin squatted down on his heels. He had shaggy hair then. As always, he had a proud mouth and a constantly furrowed brow. I was almost sixteen, had never left my parents’ orchard, and the most beautiful man in the world stood in front of me. Well, he looked like a man, though he could have been young, perhaps my own age. There was something in the way he looked at me that told me this boy, despite his smooth cheeks and the youthful expression, was much older than me. As though he had seen the whole world and knew of its many secrets. Rhode wore an all-black ensemble, which made the color of his eyes pop out at me from the impenetrable night.
I fell back onto the ground. It was wet, and I was soaked through. The mud squished under my heels as I pressed into the ground to move away from the man in front of me. “This is private property,” I said.
Rhode stood back up, placed his hand on his hips, and looked in both directions. “You don’t say,” he said, pretending as though he didn’t know where he was.
“What do you want?” I asked. I leaned back onto my hands and looked up at Rhode.
He walked closer so that there was only a foot of space between us. He extended a hand. I noticed an onyx ring on his middle finger. It was different from any gem I had ever seen before. It was black and solid, flat without any glint or sparkle. He opened h is fingers and in the middle of his palm was my mother’s hoop earring. I looked at the hoop and then into Rhode’s eyes. He smiled at me in such a way that I instantly felt something within me that I had never felt before. Something tingled near my heart.
I stood up quickly, all the while keeping my eyes on the man in front of me. The rain splattered onto the wet ground. I reached out for the earring, my fingers shaking. I was about to touch the gold when I thought for sure he would close his fingers around mine. The rain fell onto his hand, onto me, and his palm was slicked with drops. I looked up at Rhode and snatched the earring with a flick of the wrist and placed my hand back by my side.
“Thank you,” I barely whispered, and turned back toward my family’s home. In the distance, I could discern the flat shape of the roof even in the dark, rainy night. “I have to go. And so should you—” I said, walking away from him.
Rhode turned me back to face him with one hand on my left shoulder.
“I have been watching you,” he said. “For some time now.”
“I’ve never seen you,” I said, and raised my chin in defiance. I didn’t realize I was showing him my neck.
“The problem, for you…is that I’m in love with you,” Rhode said, though it sounded more like a confession.
“You can’t be in love with me,” I said stupidly. “You do not know me.”
“Don’t I? I watch you carefully tend to your father’s orchard. I watch the way you braid your hair in your bedroom window. That when you walk, you glow, as bright as a candle flame. I have known for some time that I must have you near me. I know you, Lenah. I know how you breathe.”
“I don’t love you,” I said without a clue why I said it. My chest shuddered with every breath I took.
“Oh, come now,” Rhode said, and cocked his head to the side. “Don’t you?”
I did. I loved that he looked rugged though his skin was flawless and completely polished. He could have told me he slayed a dragon with both hands tied behind his back and I would have believed it possible. Perhaps it was the allure of being in the presence of a vampire. I didn’t know at that moment that Rhode was a vampire, but the more time passes, the more I am sure that I fell for him in that very instant.
Rhode looked me up and down and I realized he could see through my sleeping gown. He ran a fingertip from my throat down through the middle of my breasts and ended at my belly button. I shuddered. Out of nowhere, he hooked a hand around my waist and brought me against him. It all happened so languidly, as though it were choreographed. The slap of our wet bodies when Rhode brought me close, and the feel of his palm on my forehead as he wiped a string of hair out of my eyes. He groaned when he met my eyes. And in that instant, Rhode sunk his teeth into my neck so fast that I didn’t notice the sound of my skin breaking.
The rain fell in gorgeous patterns outside the art tower window. The campus was drenched, and once my eyes refocused I watched students run for shelter or jump over puddles. There were dozens of students outside. But the ones closest to me, two girls and a boy about my age, were smiling, holding their hands over their heads. The boy linked his arm around the waist of one of the girls, and they ran into the shelter of Quartz dorm. I stepped back from the window into the darkness of the art tower stairs and looked at my inner wrist.
In moments of passion Rhode dug his teeth into my skin. “Just a taste,” he would say. It was as if his lips were touching my ear. How his voice moaned at me in the darkness. I sighed and rubbed at my wrist unconsciously. My chest hurt, my muscles ached from the transformation, and I wanted to punch my hand through the stone wall of the tower until my knuckles bled.
“Oh…,” I said aloud, and my knees gave way. I collapsed on the tower steps.
This was grief.
It was odd how much more acutely this emotion affected me in my human state. Human grief wasn’t muted by other pain as in my vampire existence. As a vampire, grief was muddled by the presence of every imaginable sadness. I took deep breaths until the adrenaline running through my lungs and stomach subsided. Would I cry? I reached to touch my cheeks, but they were dry.
I continued down the stairs, pushed out of the main foyer of Hopper, and stepped back into the meadow. I walked away from the building, and soon the raindrops were patting my head. After a few moments, my arms were drenched and Rhode’s sweater was, too. I could barely see in front of me though I knew I was headed for the walking pathway at the other side of the meadow. I wiped the rain from my eyes.
Having an adventure?
See, the problem is I’m in love with you….
I stopped in the center of the green. I kicked off my sandals and placed the bookstore bag onto the ground. I put my arms out and let the rain fall. I thought of my mother’s face, my father’s laugh, Rhode’s blue eyes, and the coven’s comfort.
The will and the desire to give up your life in order that another may live. It’s the intent, Lenah.
Tiny splashes hit my face, and I could feel the drops run down my cheeks. A chill ran through my body. In my vampire state, I would have felt nothing but the drops hitting my body, like a body gone numb. I would have known I was drenched but would have felt nothing. This time, I raised my hands higher in the air and closed my eyes, letting the rain dr
ip between my fingers and down my arms. The water drenched through my jeans and eventually I was soaked through. I curled my toes into the mud and took in a deep breath.
“You do this often?” I heard a boy’s voice call from afar. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. From a top floor of a dormitory across from me, Justin Enos smiled from an open window. I hadn’t realized I was standing next to the boys’ dorm, Quartz. I took a second to think of a retort.
“Maybe,” I called back.
“Glad to see you found your pants,” he said, and folded his arms on the windowsill. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” A thrill of goose bumps shimmied over my arms. I noticed in a couple of other windows some boys were watching me as well.
“Like you’ve lost your mind.”
“It’s not racing boats at a murderous speed, but it’s invigorating nonetheless.” I smiled, and a crack of thunder crashed in the dark sky. I didn’t flinch at the sudden boom. Justin smirked.
“All right. I get you,” he said, and closed the window. Maybe he was offended? I snuck a peek behind me. A hundred feet or so away was the Union. I looked back at Quartz dorm. A stone arch framed a darkened alleyway leading to the lobby. After a moment, Justin came through the archway in no shirt and a pair of mesh shorts with the words wickham in white lettering. He was barefoot and joined me in the middle of the green.
My arms at my side, I lifted my chin toward the sky. Justin smiled at me and then did the same. The rain slapped on the cement path and lightly tapped against the grass beneath our feet.
“Definitely not racing boats,” he said after a moment. I opened my eyes. His chest was covered in rain, and we were both drenched. We smiled at the sky, then at each other, and for the moment I forgot I was nearly five hundred years older than he was. “What’s your name?” he asked, his green eyes protected by long, wet lashes.
Infinite Days Page 5
