Three Sides of a Heart

by Natalie C. Parker

  But no, those aren’t even the questions I want to ask. I want to ask real questions.

  Are you scared?

  Will you die without ever having been in love?

  How much does it hurt?

  Will you let me kiss you?

  I bite back the words, wrestle down the urge to pull her close to me and press my lips to hers. Cas is fascinated with her, Cas should be the one to kiss her. Except that she didn’t seek Cas out, she sought me out, and now that I can feel the aura of pain and vulnerability around her like a scarlet glow, I can’t think of anything other than kissing her.

  She breaks the moment by speaking again, her thoughts on something else entirely.

  “But how can you . . .” She bites her lip, that full lower lip, and it takes so much effort to drag my gaze back to her eyes. “The sun,” she finally says. “The crosses in church. Communion wafers.”

  “Stories,” I say simply. “Or maybe they weren’t, a long time ago. Maybe we’ve evolved.”

  She breathes out, nervously. “Can you die, then? Are you immortal?”

  Immortal.

  Once again I smell the sickness in her blood, slowly choking the life from her body. Never once has the word “immortal” given me pause. Never once have I thought about what immortality might really mean.

  Not once until now.

  “We can be killed,” I say quickly, and my earlier coolness is gone. Replaced by something I don’t understand. A need to feel close to her, similar to her. A need to feel mortal. “We can starve. And a stake through the heart will end us.”

  She smiles. “I learned that from Bram Stoker.”

  I almost speak again, almost finish my thought, but the distant organ music swells and the clouds close up even more over the sun; in the now-dim light, her eyes are almost black. Pain sings through her skin.

  She’s beautiful.

  And I hate myself for noticing how beautiful she is when she hurts.

  So I put the long-forgotten book in my bag, and I stand. “I suppose I just have to trust that you won’t stake me in my sleep now.”

  She raises an eyebrow, her lips twitching. “So you do sleep? In a bed?”

  “In a bed,” I confirm, shouldering my messenger bag. “A real bed with blankets.”

  “No coffin? No soil from your homeland?”

  “Coffins only fit one body,” I say. “And I think soil in my bed would kill the mood.”

  Her mouth parts in surprise, and I brush past her with a small smile.

  But my smile fades as I exit the garden and walk toward my room.

  I lied by omission back there. Because there is a third thing that can kill a vampire, and kill them more painfully than any stake ever could.

  Bad blood.

  Poisoned blood.

  Sick blood.

  I can extrapolate infinite life from just a few swallows of human blood, and so, conversely, I can extrapolate infinite death. If I drink from a tainted source, I will die within minutes. Maybe hours, if I’m unlucky enough to suffer that long.

  One taste of Esther’s blood and I’d die within a day. She’d be the literal death of me, dark eyes, full lips, and all.

  At first, Cas and I don’t talk about Esther. We don’t need to; the confusion and hungry pain is already in every kiss, in every bruise we leave on each other. But another week passes, and as we sit in the dark, empty chapel one night, our clothes rumpled and my mouth still wet with his blood, Casimir finally brings her up.

  “Esther’s sick, isn’t she?”

  It takes me a moment to answer. When I do, my voice is flat. Hollow.

  “Yes.”

  “You knew. Didn’t you?”

  “I’ve been a vampire longer than you, Cas. My senses are stronger.”

  He runs his uniform tie through his fingers. It’s off his neck because I yanked it off an hour ago in my desperation to get under his collar. “You should have told me.”

  “Why? Because you’re in love with her?” I meant it to come out in a dispassionate voice. Matter of fact. Kind, even.

  That’s not at all how it comes out though, and my bitter words echo against the stone walls and glass of the church, and I hate myself for that. Who am I to lob accusations against Cas when I myself have been thinking about Esther constantly?

  Casimir’s voice is pained. “I’m in love with you.”

  “Why?”

  It’s the first time I’ve ever asked him this, but suddenly I need to hear the answer. I’ve killed people. I will probably kill more. Once a week, I go down to the river and I hunt innocent humans, take from them without their consent, and leave them slumped against alley walls, to wake up with no memory of what happened.

  I like it more than I should, the blood and the teeth, but more than that, I like the way the humid river air kisses my skin as I prowl. Boys like me are supposed to be afraid even when we’re innocent, but I’m not innocent or afraid. Instead, I get to move with power, with freedom, with the bone-deep knowledge that I cannot be hurt or killed in the ways that they might try to hurt or kill me. I am all the things this city doesn’t want me to be when I hunt—black and male and unafraid. That I crave this might have been inevitable, but the change is chemical, absolute. I drink life now, and I drink it without shame and with the kind of satisfaction that sparks along my skin.

  I took Cas’s mortal life from him for no better reason than I was in love with him. Even now, my love for him is indissolubly united with my hunger for his blood and his surrender to me.

  I gave him forever, but who would want that kind of forever?

  Cas climbs over my lap, fists my shirt in his hands, and kisses me fiercely. “I love you because you’re Enoch. And that’s enough for me.”

  I look up at him in the dark. “But will it keep being enough?” I know my voice and face betray every doubt, every fear, every corner of my loneliness.

  “Of course,” Cas promises in that impetuous, passionate way of his. “Forever and ever.”

  And for the first time in the six months since I turned Cas into a vampire, I bare my neck and allow him to bite me. And as the pain and ecstasy flow through my veins, I let myself feel every ounce of it, closing my eyes and wondering if this is how death would feel. Sweet and welcoming, sharp and dizzying.

  And then Cas turns and kisses me, his mouth warm with blood, and I stop wondering anything at all.

  The next evening, I stand outside Esther’s window on the lawn, lost in thought. Last night, with Cas’s teeth buried in my flesh, I decided that I needed to bring Esther closer to us, even though I also know that there’ll be no coming back from it if I do.

  But I know Cas is falling in love with her, and if I’m not mistaken from my days of watching the two of them, she might be falling in love with him.

  They’ve both been waiting for me. To give a signal or permission or consent, I’m not sure. But somehow, they both sense that I have to be part of it, and for that I’m both grateful and mortally wounded.

  It’s easier to be stabbed in the back than fall on the dagger yourself, you see.

  But my jealous martyrdom is complicated by two things.

  First, that Esther is dying, and even I’m not cruel enough to deny Cas and Esther each other when she’ll be dead within months.

  Secondly, that I also want Esther. Even without her blood, I want her—her mouth, her slender fingers, her curious mind. That mind is so present, so alive, so compassionate. So much like Cas.

  I rap on the window, and she’s at the glass a moment later, wearing a white nightgown with spaghetti straps and lace trimming, her gold Virgin medal gleaming at her neck. I almost laugh—she couldn’t look more like a vampire’s victim if she tried.

  “Cas and I want you to come with us,” I say.

  Her face—it’s growing thinner, I notice, it won’t be long before she has to leave school—lights up with a smile. “Okay.”

  I extend a hand and help her climb out the window. “You’re not going to ask
where? Or for what? Do you crawl out of your window for every vampire who knocks?”

  She quietly slides the window closed, and then she turns and looks up at me with shining eyes. “Only the vampires I want to be with.”

  Behind her, I see our reflection in the shadowed window glass. We are a study of contrasts in that reflection—black skin and bronze. Tall and short. Muscular and slender.

  Dead and alive.

  For a moment I imagine us together in the daylight, together like a normal couple. Holding hands, walking down the hallways, kissing in the corners where the teachers can’t see. But the reflection is missing something, and that’s Cas, and I can’t fight the sear of guilt for even fantasizing about a future that doesn’t include him. A future I don’t deserve, and that Esther may not even have.

  We walk in the moonlight across the lawn, a short walk, but a lovely one. I adore the sound of her bare feet on the soft new grass of spring.

  “Where are we going?” Esther asks.

  “The chapel,” I say. “They leave it unlocked at night, and unlike the dorms, there are no prefects to catch you and report you to the dean.”

  “But you also use the library to meet,” she points out.

  “Yeah, and we got walked in on by a nosy new girl, remember?” I say with a smile. “Trust me, the chapel is much better for late-night troublemaking.”

  We reach the flagstone path to the chapel, and Esther seems lost in thought. “I’ve been wondering something about that night I caught you in the library . . . why were you biting Cas?” she asks. “It’s not the same as feeding on humans, right?”

  “Right. It’s for fun, for—” I hesitate to use the word because it sounds old-fashioned, even for me. “For pleasure.”

  She looks at me. “But doesn’t it hurt him?”

  We reach the unlocked back door of the chapel and stop, and I lean closer, and run a finger along the smooth column of her throat. She sucks in a breath, her eyes fluttering closed.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it?” I whisper. “You’re hurting right now.”

  She nods, barely, but her eyes squeeze tighter and I wonder if it’s the first time she’s been able to be honest about her pain. The first time she hasn’t tried to be brave, the first time she’s admitted . . . it hurts. It’s the first time I’ve admitted that I know she’s sick, and she seems almost relieved by it.

  “When I bite Cas, I hurt him. And then I get to make the hurt go away. I stop the pain. And he kisses me after, like I’ve given him a gift. Giving pain is only one half of the scale, Esther. Taking it away is the other. That’s why I bite him.”

  “Because he’s grateful?”

  “Because I love him.”

  She doesn’t accuse me of perversity, but instead she opens her eyes. I move my hand to her throat, pressing my palm against the side. Her pulse thrums wildly, for once not with pain, but with fierce feeling and lust.

  “Love is pain,” I tell her seriously. “We feel it here . . .” I drop my hand to her chest, where I tap gently once, above her heart. Goose bumps blossom on her skin around the place my finger touched. “I just make the feeling real. A physical thing. Something we can hold on to.”

  “What can you hold on to?” Cas asks, coming up from behind us.

  “He’s telling me why he bites you when you kiss,” Esther says.

  “Oh, he could talk about that for ages. We better cut him off now before he really gets going.”

  I roll my eyes, and we go inside the chapel.

  Esther walks inside ahead of us, her head swiveling to take in the empty space, lit as it is with the faded jewel tones of moonlight through stained glass, with shadows draping the saints’ statues like shrouds and the distant smell of incense still hanging in the air.

  Cas and I have seen it a hundred times, and so he hangs back next to me. He finds my hand in the dark. “Thank you,” he whispers. “For bringing her here. For letting me—us—be together.”

  I nod wordlessly. I don’t trust myself to speak.

  He lets out a long breath as we watch her white-clad frame move through the shadows. “It will be hard—not to bite, I mean. But we can’t.”

  I nod again. Cas knows the rules; I was sure to drill them into his mind after I changed him. No bad blood. Never ever ever.

  I find my voice. “You can kiss her, of course. Touch her. But if you feed from her, you’ll die.”

  He closes his eyes, briefly. Even for a soul as gentle as his it’s a hard thing to ask a vampire. To separate one kind of lust from the other.

  But it’s the most necessary thing to ask.

  I plunder the sacristy for some cheap wine, as yet unblessed, and we find a comfortable alcove underneath St. Martin de Porres to drink it. Esther sits between us, leaning against Cas’s chest and her legs slung over my lap. Cas plays with her hair, and I feel the turning of my jealousy, softening into something else.

  “I saw the doctor yesterday,” she says after we’ve been there a while. “I already knew it, could already feel it, but he confirmed it. The leukemia isn’t in remission any longer. We did chemotherapy before, but this time it’s too advanced. Blood transfusions might work, for a little while at least. Mom and Dad want me to come home right away, but I begged them for another week.”

  “Why?” Cas asks. “Don’t you want to be with them when you’re . . .” He can’t finish his thought. Sweet Cas with his sweet immortal heart. He’s known Esther barely a month, and already the knowledge of her death tears a hole through him.

  Esther meets my eyes as she answers. “I wanted to have more time with you.”

  Cas can’t speak after that. He closes his eyes and swallows hard, like he’s swallowing back a scream. The only response he can give her is to rub her hair in between his fingers, the same way you might rub a rose petal between your fingers on a summer’s day. She responds by wrapping her arms around him in a hug and holding him tight, and they’re both so beautiful that I could watch them forever.

  Of course, we don’t have forever. Not with Esther.

  The night becomes hazy, heady with wine and murmured conversations in the dark, and I begin to lose track of time, all time except for the moment where one thing becomes very clear to me.

  I was right, and over the past three weeks, Cas and Esther have fallen in love.

  Clarity and grief and—yes, still jealousy—cut through my heart like an icy sword, leaving only bloody intention in its place. I look up at the silent statues flanking the chapel walls, and instead of seeing the saints, I see the face of every human I’ve ever attacked. The three I killed when I couldn’t stop myself in time. The countless others I’ve bitten and left weak and vulnerable in the night. I see the uncountable, unknowable others to follow in the future, legions and legions of victims, blood like rivers, tears like rain, muffled screams breaking the night.

  And when I close my eyes, I see Cas. Cas, who had his mortality and humanity and everything else stolen from him. By me.

  I see Esther, facing down death, asking for nothing from the two immortals she’s fallen in love with.

  If God is real, if these saints really speak to him and intercede for us sinners here on Earth, will they intercede for me? If I atone?

  Because there is something I can do, something I can give Cas and Esther both, and even as fear moves cold and slippery in my veins, my thoughts freeze into one certainty.

  I can save Esther.

  And maybe, just maybe, I can save myself.

  “I’ve never skipped class before,” Esther says excitedly as we park my car in front of Bonaventure Cemetery.

  “There’s a first time for everything.” I get out of the car, and then cross around to help Esther out. She leans on me quite a bit as we walk down a path leading to the river.

  “Where’s Cas?” she asks.

  “Cas can’t skip Latin,” I respond, keeping my voice uninflected with everything I’m feeling right now. “He can barely even count to ten in it. And I left him a note in his
room to come find us after class.”

  By which time, of course, it will be too late, but that was the point. I can only be brave for myself; I wouldn’t be able to be brave for him too. Wouldn’t have been able to bear his pain along with my own, because I feel everything of his more strongly than I feel my own.

  Even now I won’t pretend it’s noble. My love for him is selfish, and it always has been.

  It’s the first of May today, beautiful beyond measure. The leaves above the path have unfurled into a thick green canopy, and the sunlight that reaches us is dappled and green-gold. I stop when we reach a clearing by the river, and I take a moment just to breathe the air, to listen to the water rushing and the breeze rustling and the birds chirping far off in the distance. Just to watch Esther be happy and at peace, her eyes clear and alive despite the shadows beneath them, despite the hollows in her cheeks.

  I wish Cas was here, just so I could see him happy and at peace too. But I have last night, and even if I were to die a thousand times, last night would still be enough to hold on to.

  “Are you afraid of dying?” I ask after a few moments.

  Her eyes are so sublimely pained, so honest and golden when she answers. “Yes.”

  “Me too,” I say.

  “Afraid of me dying or of you dying?”

  “Both.”

  She nods. She could accuse me of being selfish or paranoid or morbid, but she doesn’t. Instead she says, “There are times when I’m not scared. When I remember that it will probably happen so gradually that I won’t be that aware of it. There are times when I believe that God will take care of me. And then there are times when I feel like the only thing separating me from death is a flimsy veil. A handful of painful, tiring weeks. And those are the times when I know there’s nothing on the other side of the veil. No new life, no white light, nothing. Just—the end.”

  And I hear the void in her voice, the bleak despair, and it’s like a thumb against my already-bruised heart. It hurts to hear the end of Esther’s curiosity, to see the bounds of her readiness to learn and explore and live.

  “You’ve never asked us to change you,” I say quietly.