Envious Of Fire (Kissing With Teeth #2)

6. Your First Lesson.

—?—

As if through some deep, murky pool, Elias’s screams swim around the room, far away, dreamlike and unreal.

The weight of the being’s body, flattening to the wall, Kyle rests his chin on a granite-hard shoulder, as if being embraced, seeing stars through the dim light of the bedroom, circling.

Vampire, Lazarus had said.

Vampire. The word pulses in Kyle’s ears like Elias’s distant cries. A word Tristan never let fly from Kyle’s lips, a word that in some way felt locked up like a shameful secret, a terrible word.

Uttered so plainly, cleanly, in Lazarus’s deep, crystal voice.

Vampire.

It seems like a lifetime later when Kyle finds himself on the floor, back slumped against the wall, head drooped. Lazarus is a mountain over him, a web of blood drawn down his chalky white chin and chest. “I am just one,” he states clearly, “but there are hundreds of us, thousands perhaps, that the self-appointed, self-important ‘Lords’ of our kind can never control. We are bound by no one. Organized by no one. Truly free. The strength of gods in our teeth. Give me one night of your life,” he says with a lift of his bloodied chin, “and I will show you what you are.”

Kyle doesn’t even have the strength to lift an arm, to shift his cramping leg, to tilt his dizzy head. He just gazes upward at the being, eyes half open, jaw hanging, weak.

“I won’t drink it,” says Lazarus with a nod at the bed, “but not due to any respect for it. My actions are in respect to you and your claim over it and its blood.”

“I’m … I’m not …” Kyle can barely muster the strength for words. “I’ll never …”

“You need food.” Lazarus crouches down, brings his face close. “Let me teach you your first lesson.”

Lazarus bites his own hand until blood pools at his palm. Then he presses it over Kyle’s mouth with force.

At first, Kyle fights back, annoyed by the intrusion of the hand over his face. But his fight is pitiful, only a twitch of a leg, a flinch of his arm, a tug of his eyebrows to express anger.

Then his mouth fills with Lazarus’s blood.

A thirst takes him over like he has never known before.

An all-consuming, absolute, primal thirst.

He swallows, at first reluctantly, then deeper, until he finds himself holding Lazarus’s palm over his face and sucking for his life, gulping mouthful after mouthful, eyes wide and crazed.

Too soon, Lazarus pries his hand away. A ghost of a smile creases his powdery face. “Good,” he says simply, then rises.

Kyle’s legs are slow to respond, but he too rises, stumbles on his first step, then braces himself against the cracked wall. “I didn’t want that,” says Kyle, spits once, spits twice, two fireballs of blood spattered upon the bedroom floor. “I don’t want—”

“Yes, you did. And you want more.” Lazarus stops at the door. “Come and find me. All your questions will be answered with no words exchanged at all. Just see us with your own eyes. If you can’t find me with your vampire senses, then I will leave you my address.” His grey eyes tighten. “Run away from the sun. Find us hiding beyond a dark mouth, itself armed with teeth. Just one night of your life, that’s all we need.” He frowns at the bed where Elias has grown quiet, still trembling in fear.

A flash, like a train flying by, close enough to nip the nose.

And Lazarus is gone.

Kyle stumbles over to the bed, releases Elias’s ankles, then up to the headboard for his wrists. Elias rips off his blindfold, eyes wet with tears of panic as he takes in the sight of Kyle. “Oh shit, are you okay? Babe! There’s blood all over you!”

“And you,” says Kyle wearily, though he hasn’t even looked into a mirror yet.

“Don’t mind me, I-I’m—” Despite their mutually bloodied state, Elias embraces him so tightly that Kyle grunts. “I’m just relieved you’re okay, so relieved. I was scared for you. I thought he was gonna …” He lets out a shivery sigh. “I don’t even know what the fuck he was doing, what was going on …”

Still embracing, Kyle stares over Elias’s shoulder at the wall where Lazarus’s hands thrust into, the lightning-like fissures of plaster that run as high as the ceiling, as low as the baseboards, and the dust on the floor from where the ceiling above cracked.

Kyle decides in this very moment, staring at those cracks in the wall, that he never wishes to see Lazarus again.

Nor any other creature of the night, of which he still won’t say that bitter word. They don’t need identifying. Kyle wants absolutely nothing to do with Them .

He wants no answers. Only peace.

These are his thoughts when he takes a shower, and Elias joins him. They wash each other’s blood away, caringly, quietly. Kyle stares at the blank tiled wall of the shower and a dark spot in the grout that looks like three tiny eyes, surprised that the spot seems to become more and more detailed the longer he looks at it, as if his eyes are slowly becoming microscopes. Is it the blood he drank from Lazarus? Elias plays the role of the unshakable, protective boyfriend, whispering sweet words of comfort as he washes Kyle off. “It’s okay … it’s all gonna be okay, babe … I’ve got you …” over and over.

But threaded between Elias’s words, Kyle picks up his fear. Pressed between every heartbeat, Kyle feels his desperate effort to hide how truly shaken this past hour has made him.

In fact, Kyle hears every throb and pulse and twitch of each and every muscle and vein in Elias’s body. Every single pop of the soapsuds. Every droplet of water as it flees the showerhead, cuts through the air, explodes against their skin or the floor.

It’s mesmerizing, like a strange dream, all these extra pieces of information Kyle is suddenly acutely aware of.

While Elias checks the windows and the doors of the house for the fifth time, locking, securing, closing curtains, Kyle takes clippers to his fingernails, a simple post-shower human activity to calm his mind and feel a little normal again. But as he presses the clippers to the nail of his thumb, he finds himself grunting as he squeezes harder, then harder, until at last the fingernail clips away. Each nail seems more difficult than the last, tiring him quickly. Is he weak? Or are his nails stronger?

Kyle stares at himself in the mirror. Is it Lazarus’s blood?

“Little Lion’s fine,” says Elias as he joins Kyle on the bed in the darkness with a relieved sigh, “though maybe next time she does something totally out of character, such as meowing cutely, we should probably pay attention. She was warning us.”

“Warning us,” agrees Kyle absently, staring at the ceiling and the crack Lazarus left there. His eyes pick up so many more details, the tiny cracks embedded in the larger ones, perfectly visible even from the bed. Lazarus nearly broke the wall in half, could have torn the house in half. He was so stunningly strong.

Did he underestimate all this time the power of blood?

How much did Tristan not tell him about their kind?

“Do we need some real talk?” asks Elias. “To help get out our thoughts? Even the uncomfortable ones?”

Kyle studies the fractures in the wall like a map. Is Elias creating the opportunity to let out his fears? “Sure.”

“Tell me what’s on your mind.”

Kyle had assumed Elias would go first. “Well … I guess I just feel like I was being … na?ve … to think it was over with.”

Elias slowly rubs Kyle’s chest. “You experienced a lot back in Vegas. We both did. Babe, it was literally just days ago.”

“I know.”

“You lost a friend. I almost lost you.”

Kyle pauses. “It’s … more than just what we went through. I think about what else Tristan might not have told me. It’s this feeling there’s a bigger picture … a picture I’m not seeing … a picture I can’t see because I’m too fucking small. I’m small and stuck out here in this town, in Nowhere, unable to see how—”

“Stuck?”

Kyle peels his eyes from the wall, turns to Elias. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said ‘stuck’. I’m happy here. I love our life. I just feel—” He shakes his head. “I feel like I’m missing something.”

“It’s okay if you feel like a prisoner.”

“I don’t. I didn’t mean—”

Elias continues to rub Kyle’s chest, though his hand slows. “Y’know, I’m no stranger to feeling like a prisoner, even if it’s allegedly for my own good. Gave my mom a lot of hell growing up … I was not an easy kid.” Elias chuckles at something. Kyle feels a happy memory, something fluttery and fun. Then it goes away. “But I’m here with you, whether this is a prison, or our home, or just an old town that’s lost its real name to the history books. There’s no bigger picture, babe. You don’t need all the answers. You don’t need Tristan. Fuck that Lazarus guy, too.”

Kyle looks away, troubled.

“He won’t return, you’re safe,” he adds softly.

Kyle wonders if he’s saying that more to comfort himself, considering there’s no way he can possibly guarantee Lazarus won’t return.

“I’ll stay awake until you go to sleep, alright?” says Elias, and again, Kyle suspects it’s because Elias is too afraid to sleep. He needs his time to stay awake, to watch the windows, to stare at the door until the sun rises and they can truly feel safe. “You must be so tired. It’s gonna be dawn in another hour.”

Kyle closes his eyes while Elias strokes his hair. He tries to obey, to let himself drift off, to find that peace he so needs.

It’s half an hour later that Kyle lies there still awake, and it is Elias instead who is cuddled to his side like a baby, head on his chest, snoring with impressive, deep, dragon-like resonance.

Somehow, the noise is more comforting than the silence.

Run away from the sun, Lazarus had said. Find us hiding beyond a dark mouth, itself armed with teeth.

“I’m nothing like you,” says Kyle when morning glows in the thickly-curtained window. “We’re nothing alike. Stay away from me, away from Elias … away from Nowhere, forever.”

Soon, it is anger and resentment that fills Kyle. Betrayal. That Tristan and all of the powers of the Vegasyn domain did nothing to prevent this from happening. That something like Lazarus is even able to come here. Despite all the reassurances made, they’re apparently still as vulnerable as they were before.

The raging ocean of resentment soon evaporates, leaving the dry salt of reality. Somehow, the arrival and swift departure of Lazarus has made it even more apparent how different Kyle is. The only one of his kind in this town. Cade and Jeremy and all of the others at the bar may see Kyle as a friend, but Leland clinging to him in the alleyway at the smallest of sounds is just one example of how scared they must truly be beneath the laughter and smiling. Is Kyle’s Reach not picking up that fear? Is it so well-hidden? Is Chief Rojas the only one brave enough to say what is on everyone’s minds?—that they would be better off if Kyle was far away, attracting no more matters of terror and danger upon the people of Nowhere?

Thousands of them out there, Lazarus had said, thousands that don’t heed the likes of Lord Markadian or his authority. Is that true? Even hundreds is a terrifying number. Even a dozen.

Even one.

Was Tristan’s warning about drinking blood true? If Kyle drinks enough, will he become one of Them —like this Lazarus? Is he already becoming like one of them, with just a drink from the vampire’s hand?

Kyle spent decades barely tasting a drop. Now he drinks every day. And Elias’s masochistic thirst for being bitten grows just as recklessly as Kyle’s thirst for blood. They’re like children given deadly toys, experimenting with dark forces they cannot begin to understand, playing with dangerous appetites.

It all leads Kyle right back to that terrible question that so plagued him the day Tristan faked his death and vanished from his life in a mound of ash. The question of Kyle’s purpose on this planet—What the fuck is it?

“Babe?”

Kyle hadn’t noticed the snoring stopped. He rubs Elias, his arm still wrapped around him. “Go back to sleep,” he whispers.

“You alright? Sun’s up.”

“Everything’s fine,” says Kyle, kisses the top of Elias’s head with a smile. “Back to sleep, I’m right behind you.”

Elias closes his eyes. Kyle does, too.

When the knock comes at the front door, the two of them wake with a start. Kyle checks his phone. No texts, zero missed calls. He lifts a hand and squints at the window curtains, still aglow with daylight. For one, no one ever knocks on their door. Secondly, anyone who would knock knows what Kyle is—and the danger daylight brings.

“I’ll get it,” says Elias, slipping out of bed in his boxers.

Kyle stands in the hall behind when Elias cracks open the door. “I’m so sorry, sir,” comes a woman’s voice, melodic, soft, “I didn’t mean to disturb you so early in the day. I was just—”

“Can I help you?” returns Elias with a note of suspicion in his voice, speaking through the mere inch or two he’s allowed the door to open.

“I’m sorry, again, I’m just … well, how do I put this?” The sound of her shuffling her feet touches Kyle’s ears. “I’m looking for someone. My husband, to be precise. I think he may have … well, I know , actually, that he passed by here a few nights ago.”

At once, like the gift itself has just now woken up too, Kyle feels the woman’s swirls of hope and anxiety inside her, twisting and untwisting, a pair of weathered ropes, full of friction, heat.

“Well, according to the app on his phone, or his truck,” she adds tiredly, “I’m not sure which. There’s so much he doesn’t tell me. Sorry, I’m oversharing.” She lets out a sigh that turns into something of a manic squeak of laughter, indicating all her exhaustion, both mental and physical. “His name is Brock. My husband, the man I’m looking for. Do you know him?”

Elias stares back at her, frozen to the spot, rendered silent by the uttering of that name.

Kyle, rather belatedly, realizes exactly who she is.

“I’m Jessica,” she says. “Jessica Hastings. Have you, um … seen him? Do you know him? He stopped by here, like I said.”

“I …” Elias’s voice is dry when he speaks. His lips smack. His throat is closed. “I, um … I don’t know if …”

“Let her in,” says Kyle from the hallway.

Elias turns, surprised, then faces her, slightly flustered. “I, uh, I’m gonna let you in … apparently.” He steps back, allows the door to open just enough.

When Jessica enters, she comes bathed in daylight. A dress with bright green and white floral patterns, blindingly blonde hair to her shoulders, makeup exquisite, except for a stray mark of mascara to the side of her right eye, something she may have overlooked, or perhaps from wiping away a tear, who knows. And upon her feet, a pair of sneakers that go with literally none of her outfit, not even matching her white beaded bracelets or earrings, perhaps an afterthought, or a choice to make walking around in these desert towns tracking down her husband more comfortable, and perhaps for the long drive, too.

As she comes to a stop just inside the house, her big eyes fall upon Kyle and grow even bigger. She lets in the slightest of gasps, then remains there, speechless, a pale green wallet purse clutched to her waist by her long fingers, nails painted pink.

“Hi, Jessica,” says Kyle, breaking the silence.

She blinks. “No,” she mutters to herself, head shaking.

“Yep, it’s me.”

She continues to stare, continues to not believe, continues to remain by the door, should she suddenly chase an instinct to run the fuck away. But something keeps her there, staring at the teenager she went to high school with, staring at that teenager who stares back at her.

Suddenly she lets out a crazed laugh, slaps a hand over her mouth, laughter choked to silence, then through her fingers she says again, “No … no, it can’t be you. Is it?”

“Long time,” says Kyle with a wry smile. “Want to come in and have some tea? Bottled water? The tap is just … awful.”

“Oh.” She peers back at the door, as if debating even still if this was a terrible idea to come. Then, as softly as if to herself, she says, “I … I thought Brock was crazy, when he said … when he saw what he saw on our son’s laptop, the video, that disturbing video, and then … then …” She brings her eyes back to Kyle. “You’re really alive. All of this time. It’s true. A-And you …” She blinks. “You look exactly the same as I remember. Exactly.”

Jessica does not. She is thinner. More athletic. Perhaps she goes on neighborhood walks with her congregation, with other mothers she’s befriended, takes Pilates classes, researches health foods and owns a treadmill and counts her carbohydrates and wears hydrating face masks at night and fights with all her might against the indifferent passage of time.

She offers an unexpected smile, as if surrendering. “Well, Kyle, darling, you’re gonna have to seriously tell me all ‘bout your skincare regimen, because it’s done you wonders .”