Lust for Life

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  In the far corner of the shop lies a shadow. A hand pokes out of the shadow, palm up, fingers curled limply. As my eyes adjust, I see a dark-haired middle-aged human man. A mustache, a checkered shirt.

  Johnny Crosetti.

  Billy killed him in front of my mother. By the pool spread around Crosetti, already drying, it looks like he did it by tearing out his throat.

  “Mom, I’m sorry.”

  “She didn’t know about vampires, did she?” Kashmir goes to the worktable to her left, where a large stone slab is sitting faceup. “Shame she had to find out this way.”

  “Why’d you have to kill him?”

  “Once he let us in and showed us how to work the equipment, we didn’t need him anymore. With him here, it was too many people to keep track of. A tactical risk.” He smiles past me. “Besides, Billy was thirsty.”

  Billy chuckles into my hair. It tickles and makes me want to shove an elbow through his solar plexus. But it’s too soon to start a fight.

  Shane speaks first. “Jim was my friend, too. I didn’t want to kill him. I had to.”

  “You don’t know anything about Jim.” Kashmir caresses the smooth granite slab. I strain to see the name engraved on it.

  JAMES ESPOSITO, JR. Below his name are three dates: his birth, his turning, and his final death.

  Kashmir’s face is reflected in the shining gray stone, but the dark mottled surface of the slab erases the reflection of his teardrop scar, as if it doesn’t exist in more than one reality. “Did you know that graphite and diamonds are chemically identical?” he asks me.

  “Graphite is like coal, right?” I remember the line from that ’80s movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, something about Cameron, one of the characters, being “so tight, if you shoved a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond.” Shane is probably thinking the same thing, since it’s one of his favorite movies, and why am I thinking about this now? The vampiric compulsions are not serving me well at the moment.

  “The word ‘graphite’ comes from the Latin graph, meaning to draw,” Kashmir continues. “These days, only four percent of graphite is used to make the thing we draw with most.” He slides open a shallow drawer in the small table nearby and pulls out . . .

  . . . a single, sharpened pencil.

  “Funny thing about graphite. It’s so very soft. To keep it in one piece, it must be encased in wood.” He gazes at the tip in wonder, eyes softening. “Such a simple implement, to cause so much pain. Shane McAllister, did you ever wonder why wood through the heart can kill a vampire?”

  Shane remains still and silent, held tight by his two captors. Only his chest rises and falls with his steady, rapid breath.

  Finally he says, “It’s life. Literally.”

  Kashmir blinks slowly. “That’s my guess as well. When our hearts are pierced by life, they cry out in joy, recognizing all they’ve lost. And a moment later the wood leaves us, and our hearts shriek. We turn inside out with sorrow. But for that one beautiful moment”—he taps the pencil point against his own chest—“our hearts are home.”

  He’s dropped the Big Bad Villain façade and looks like any other sad, vulnerable young man who’s lost the most important person in the world.

  “But Jim didn’t have that beauty for just one moment. Six months he lived with wood inside him. It was agony, he said in his letters. Every time his heart beat, he’d feel the press of the earth’s life.”

  His words weave a sticky web of melancholy around my mind, like an early Leonard Cohen album played on repeat.

  “One other thing you don’t know.” Kashmir turns the pencil over and over in his fingers. “That life and pain in his heart changed him. It changed him for good.”

  23

  No Sunlight

  A chill runs over my entire body, like someone’s drawing a chalk outline around my corpse. “ ‘Changed him’?”

  “Not metaphysically. It’s not as if he became alive and human again. But it made him what you would call a better man.”

  “What are you talking about?” Shane says, low and threatening. The vampires holding him tighten their grips.

  “Adrian told me you wondered how Jim escaped a maximum-security facility. You thought someone in the Control must have helped us get him out. Adrian didn’t have the heart to tell you the truth.” Kashmir twirls the pencil among his fingers as he speaks, faster and faster. “Jim was still in custody as punishment for what he’d done to you, Ciara. But he was making progress. He’d earned his way to minimum security. Breaking him out was a piece of cake.”

  “Are you saying Jim was being rehabilitated? That when he got out, he wasn’t coming for us?”

  “Oh, he was coming for you, all right. To make amends.” He says the last word with a curl in his lips. “Rather weak of him, if you ask me. Between your stupid radio station and his time with the Control, he’d become a shadow of himself. But your boyfriend didn’t save you by killing Jim. He didn’t save anything at all.”

  His eyes slide over to meet Shane’s, and they share a long look of grief. Then Kashmir’s harden to flint. In a flash he flings the pencil across the room. My strangled shriek mixes with my mom’s.

  Shane gapes down at his chest, where the pencil protrudes just below his collarbone. Too high.

  Kashmir opens the drawer wider and withdraws an entire handful of pencils. “Maybe I’ll take better aim this time.” He throws another pencil, plunging the orange spear two inches deep into the flesh near Shane’s armpit. “Or the next.”

  Shane grunts as each pencil strikes his chest. When it’s all over, they form a heart-shaped ring around his heart. From here I can’t tell if any struck home.

  Kashmir turns to the wide, empty table beside him, its surface made of metal rollers instead of flat wood. A blue steel beam arches over the table, leaving a clearance of at least a foot, enough room for a headstone to lie underneath. An object extends from the beam, covered by a dust-resistant tarp.

  “As I was saying before, graphite is soft, a one or a two on the hardness scale. But its chemical twin, the diamond, is a ten. Diamonds are the only stone that can cut every other stone.” He switches on a work light above the machine, then gently takes off the cover to reveal what looks like a rotary saw. The teeth of its blade glisten in the light. “Diamond can cut granite, marble, slate. Even vampire flesh, which sometimes feels as tough as stone.”

  He reaches for the machine’s switch. The blade shrieks to life. Kashmir grips the handle and looks at my mother.

  “No!” I slam my heel into Billy’s shin and twist my body. He curses in pain, almost letting go. To my left, my mother screams, and to my right, Shane shouts and curses, held tight by Bruce and Leon.

  Billy secures his grip again and walks me forward toward Kashmir. He forces me to my knees in front of the table, then grasps my wrist and extends my right arm. I gasp with relief when I realize it’s me who’ll get cut and not Mom, and it’ll be my hand instead of my head. For now, at least.

  Kashmir takes my hand in his, binding my four fingers together. “You’d be better off holding still.”

  “Mom, don’t look!” I slam my own eyes shut as she screams.

  “Nooooooooo!”

  The blade is so sharp, I don’t feel it sever my thumb. There’s just a slight tug, then the splatter of blood on my forehead and the bridge of my nose. Shane’s roar of anger turns to a gurgle as someone chokes him.

  Mom shrieks and bangs her feet against the chair. Kashmir holds up my hand for her to see. A few seconds later, when my blood stops flowing and the skin heals over my wound, she goes deathly silent. There’s no sound but the whir of the diamond-bladed stonecutter as she looks at my hand, then at me.

  “Ciara?”

  She faints, thankfully, before he starts on my other fingers. Before my endorphin rush expends itself and the bone-rippling pain sets in. Before I start to scream.

  At least we were right: he wanted to torture us first. He wouldn’t give us the mercy
of a quick death like Shane gave Jim last week. Though even that may not have been mercy. If Kashmir was telling the truth, Shane killed a repentant man.

  Through the red haze of agony I see a shadow move over the floor of the back room. Under the shouts of Shane, I hear the click of a loaded crossbow.

  Kashmir hears it, too, but too late.

  An arrow whistles above my head, shot by Agent Rosso from the rear doorway. Billy seizes and shudders, then drops my arm. When he falls beside me, I yank the arrow from his chest with my left hand. I don’t wait to see if he’s been hit in the heart but instead launch to my feet, flinging blood over the machine and Kashmir and the wall behind him.

  Elijah picks up my unconscious mother, chair and all. “Come on, Griffin.”

  Kashmir jumps between us, but Elijah shoves him away with the legs of Mom’s chair. Her limbs flop at the impact, but she seems otherwise unharmed.

  Henley has reached Shane already, and the two of them are fighting with Bruce and Leon.

  “Griffin, move out!” Agent Rosso holds Kashmir at bay with a holy-water pistol. “You and Fox take your mom. We’ll follow!”

  I can’t bear to leave Shane, but Kashmir’s severed all but my pinky from my right hand. I can’t hold a weapon, much less throw a punch.

  I lurch out the door after Elijah, then pass him on the walkway, leaping over headstones like hurdles so I can get to the car first and open the back door for him.

  Somehow he angles Mom’s chair to fit her in. The sky is getting scary light now.

  I point to it with my intact left hand. “What do we do?”

  He checks his watch as he opens the driver’s-side door. “Plenty of time to get to the station. Too dangerous to stay here.”

  We climb into the car, which still has the keys in the ignition, and peel out of the parking lot. I feel like I’m leaving my own heart behind with Shane, but we have to save my mom.

  I watch Crosetti’s Monuments disappear in my side-view mirror, then awkwardly pull my cell phone out of my right jacket pocket with my left hand. “Come on, baby. Call me.”

  “He will.”

  “If he’s alive.”

  “Henley and Rosso got it in hand. Speaking of which . . .” He nods at the bloody mess at the end of my right wrist. “How’s that feel?”

  “Better than it did a few minutes ago, when I thought I’d lose all ten.” The adrenaline surge is starting to fade, and the chills are beginning. “I guess you know how it feels, after that zombie ripped your arm off.”

  My mother moans in the backseat, tipped over on her side. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that in front of her.

  “Mom, just hang in there. We’ll untie you when we get to the station.”

  “Are you okay, honey?”

  “I’m fine. Ish. Fine-ish.” I wipe as much blood as I can from my hand, but smearing it on my jeans doesn’t help my claims of fine-ishness.

  Just as our car turns onto the long gravel driveway to the station, my phone rings. Shane’s number.

  Please be him and not Kashmir calling to gloat over his death. “Shane?”

  “We made it.”

  “Oh, thank God.” I put the phone to my chest and yell at Elijah. “Slow down! If you go too fast on this driveway, you’ll break the car and we’ll be stuck.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I put the phone back to my ear. “All three of you are safe?”

  “Yeah,” Shane pants. “But dammit, we were only able to stake Bruce. Kashmir and Leon got away with Billy. It looked like his wound wasn’t fatal.”

  “What about yours? The pencils in your chest?”

  “Gone. Hurt like a motherfucker, but they all missed. On purpose, I guess. Anyway, I gotta drive. I’ll see you in a minute.”

  We hang up. After a moment of no sound but the gravel banging on the undercarriage and the squeak of shock absorbers, my mother says one word softly.

  “Surprise.”

  • • •

  A few minutes later, we’re safely indoors with my mother untied. David’s applying an ice pack to her swollen, bruised ankle, while Monroe wraps my disaster of a hand with a bandage. Regina’s pacing by the front door, muttering, “Drive faster, Shane.”

  I wonder how many months or years it’ll take for my fingers to grow back. At least they left me the hand that holds my engagement ring, and someday soon a wedding band. Assuming Shane survives the next ten minutes.

  “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” Marjorie yells.

  “Mom, I promise I’ll explain everything once we get past this. But the short version is, everyone in this room except David is a vampire, including me.”

  Her jaw looks permanently agape. “Which one is David again?”

  The door to the lounge jerks open and Elijah pounds up the stairs. “No sign of Shane and the others on the security camera.”

  My heart lurches. “They should’ve pulled into the driveway by now.” I jerk my hand out of Monroe’s and rush for the door.

  “They’re not answering their phones,” Elijah says as he follows. “Unless it’s a cloudy day, they’re—”

  I turn the key and yank open the door. The sky is perfectly clear, a gorgeous azure blue.

  I finish Elijah’s sentence in my head. They’re screwed.

  He puts his hand on my shoulder. “They still got time. And they can take that driveway faster than we could. Control cars got cop shocks, cop suspension, cop—”

  “Shut that door!” David orders. “Five minutes to twilight. I want all vampires downstairs now.” He strides out of his office with a three-foot-high stack of dark material in his arms. “Elijah, send Jeremy up. We’ll use these blackout curtains to get Shane and the agents into the station when they pull up. The car’ll shelter them a little. They’ll still burn, but not as fast.”

  “There’s only two humans in the station right now, and three vampires that need covering.” I curse Franklin for running away.

  “I’m human,” my mom says.

  “You can’t walk on that ankle, much less leap on a burning vampire.” My voice crushes the last two words, thinking of them describing Shane.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Adrian’s standing at the top of the stairs to the lounge. He looks like he means it. Would he really sacrifice his life?

  “If you want to help,” I tell him, “carry my mom downstairs and . . . take care of her.”

  His eyes tell me he catches my meaning: Console her if I die.

  While Adrian carries away my protesting mother, Regina comes to stand behind me at the door. I still haven’t closed it, despite David’s order. It feels too final.

  “I want you to know,” she whispers, “I will knock you unconscious to keep you from killing yourself.”

  “Shane’s not yours to save anymore.”

  “I’m his maker. He’ll always be mine.” She looks out into the front yard, where the gravel reflects the pale blue glow of the lightening sky. “I’d last longer than you in the sun.”

  “Maybe five seconds longer.”

  “Maybe that’s all we need.”

  “I can’t believe we’re having this discussion.”

  “You’re not.” Monroe steps between us. “Shane made me promise not to let anyone else get hurt, not even to save him. So get yourselves down into that lounge right now. Or I will carry you.”

  Regina juts out her bottom lip. “I could take you if I wanted,” she grumbles as she obeys.

  I start to follow her, then wait with Monroe at the top of the stairs until she disappears. “You’re lying,” I whisper to him. “You didn’t promise Shane anything. You’re just saying that to protect us.”

  “Maybe.” He opens his arm to gesture to the stairs. “Go on.”

  I shake my head slowly. “Promise you won’t stop me.”

  He takes a deep sigh and closes his eyes. “In all my years as a vampire, I ain’t never had no one like you and Shane have each other. I can’t take that away from no
body.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “If I burn, you’ll feel the pain. I’m sorry.”

  He places his hand over mine. “I’ll be all right. You do what you gotta do.”

  Shouting comes from the lounge. Jeremy opens the door and runs up the stairs. “Some guys blocked off the Control agents’ car at the end of the driveway. Shane and them got away, but they have to make a run for it.”

  I put my hands to the sides of my head. Now they don’t even have the car to protect them. Now there’s nothing but the trees on either side of the driveway, with their leaves nearly gone. And once they get near the station, the trees end and the last hundred yards are in the wide-open clearing.

  Jeremy tugs my arm. “What can I do to help?”

  “Get a blackout curtain from David. You’re saving a vampire from the sun.”

  My phone rings again. It’s Shane.

  “Ciara!” His voice is being forced out, and I hear the pounding of feet. “They cut us off at the top of the driveway.”

  “I know.” I look at the clock: 6:33 a.m. One minute past twilight. They must already be heating up inside. “Come to the front door—and don’t talk, just run!”

  His breath comes fast, from fear, not exertion. “Ciara . . . if I don’t make it—”

  “You will! Now shut up and run.”

  “I love you. I love you so much.”

  “Hang up and run!”

  “Okay.”

  Except he doesn’t hang up. Maybe his finger missed the End Call button. But I can still hear his feet strike the gravel, and I can hear his labored breath.

  Then I hear his screams.

  I shove the phone into Monroe’s chest. “Go downstairs. No vampire follows me.”

  I don’t wait for his response. I grab the extra blackout curtain from David’s hands, pull the key from my pocket, and dash for the exit before anyone can stop me.

  The moment I open the door, the pale morning light singes me from the inside out.

  I don’t care, because three flaming figures are running toward me. Shane is burning. Dying.

  I leap. Hoping to save him, but ready to join him.