Envious Of Fire (Kissing With Teeth #2)

37. Maybe Freedom, Maybe Hell.

The engine of the bus roars in Kyle’s ears.

Not unlike a lion.

His brother’s head is cradled in his lap, the rest of him stretched out on the seat with a jacket draped over his body.

Kyle stares ahead at the dark road, the vast emptiness of the night that surrounds them, stretching on forever. Even with Elias driving the shuttle bus as fast as he can, Kyle feels like it’s not fast enough. Until they’re back in Nowhere, until his Kaleb wakes up, until that protective barrier stands between them and the vampire world, nothing is okay.

“I still can’t believe it,” says Elias from the driver’s seat. “Your brother. This whole time. Alive. I just can’t wrap my head around that.” He peers partway over his shoulder, eyes still on the road. “You have to be feeling so many things right now.”

Kyle gazes down at his brother. With the bandages over his face, it’s easy to think this isn’t real, this isn’t him. Maybe a part of Kyle is still in denial any of this is happening at all.

“And Tristan,” sneers Elias, as if in response to a bad taste in his mouth. “Just one more reason on top of a mountain of reasons to despise that twisted fucker.”

Kyle can still see the tears in Tristan’s eyes. Hear the sound of Tristan’s voice—his real voice. Feel Tristan’s soft arms squeezing around him from behind, not wanting him to go, desperate for the good days they had together in that cabin …

All of those days, when Tristan secretly knew Kaleb was alive.

All of those kisses they shared, when Tristan knew Kaleb was rotting away in a cell, alone.

All of those years of life, decades that were stolen from Kaleb.

Because of Tristan.

“Once I’m home,” says Kyle, feeling as if his words are meant for Tristan, “I’ll never have to see or hear the likes of anyone from that place ever again.”

“Got that right.” After a second, Elias adds, “Well, assuming we get back in time. Fuck. I told them to wait on the spell,” he explains over his shoulder again, “but no one wanted to risk the vampires coming back in the meantime to finish the job. Cade and Layna, Chief Rojas … they were all so freaked-the-fuck-out.”

Kyle nods. “I understand.”

“I told Cade I was coming after you. She said she had some vision of fire and demise. It terrified her. I left anyway.”

As if Kyle needs any more proof of Cade’s abilities. Even still, he suffers the stench of smoke and fire on his skin, in his clothes. He could take ten showers and still reek of it. “You’ve always been reckless,” he says, distracting himself from the thought, “since the day I first laid eyes on you through a police station window.”

“Good thing I am.” Elias smirks. “I’m so reckless, I stole one of the hotel’s airport shuttles right out from under their noses.”

“Borrowed,” corrects Kyle, “and it’s a hotel your family owns. Let’s not pretend we’re committing grand theft auto here.”

“What? Can’t I be your badass boyfriend who just rescued you and a bunch of people from an evil vampire castle? Let me have my moment of unhinged heroism.” Elias puffs up, his grip on the wheel tightening. “Not gonna lie,” he adds with a smirk, “but I feel pretty fucking sexy right now.”

Kyle appreciates Elias’s energy. Elias likely senses the kind of night Kyle has had, yet can only begin to imagine the true terror of it, and is trying to lighten the mood.

It’s exactly what Kyle needs right now.

“We could’ve fit even more people,” points out Elias.

Kyle glances over his shoulder at the others. After securing the bus, a number of the survivors opted to find their own ways to safety, among them being the bigger guy who was hell-bent on going straight to the cops. Only ten of the humans chose to come along, including 4 and her boyfriend, two teen boys, the freckly guy, Doctor Mei, an older lady and her friend, and an elderly man who hasn’t stopped praying.

The tenth human passenger is Nico, who picked the seat directly across the aisle, staying close to Kaleb and appearing just as invested in his wellbeing as Kyle himself.

How can Kyle even begin to imagine the life his brother has lived over the past quarter of a century? The friends he may have made among the other prisoners? The battles he has had to take on by himself? Despite his academic accomplishments, Kyle always saw his brother as someone who was looked after at all times of the day, with hovering parents, involved instructors, and no freedoms of a typical teenager. Kyle figures a life spent in a harsh dungeon would have destroyed his brother.

But what if the opposite is true? What if Kaleb has found a new strength inside of himself over the years? When he finally wakes up, will Kyle even recognize him?

“Can’t believe I’m sitting next to Kaleb’s real-life brother,” says Nico after a while. He and Kyle have already chatted quite a bit over the past hour they’ve been on the road. “This guy … there’s something special about him, real special. Kaleb and I are super tight. We had each other’s backs.”

Kyle glances at Nico. “You took good care of him?”

“Good care of him?” That makes Nico laugh. “He’s, like, almost forty. He’s the one who took care of me .” He looks Kyle over. “That makes it even stranger that you’re the older of you two. You look more my age.”

Kyle shrugs. “Side effect of immortality, I guess.”

“So you’re immortal?”

“Eventually,” answers Kyle.

Then he realizes that’s exactly how Tristan answered that, long ago, when Kyle was the one asking the questions.

Nico finds his answer funny. “Yeah,” he decides with a nod and a snap of his fingers, “I can see it. I see Kaleb in you. In the eyes, of course, but also in how you talk. Tell me …” He leans over the aisle, coming surprisingly close, demonstrating a level of trust Kyle wasn’t expecting. “Did he ever play violin for you? Like, as a kid? Was he always this cool?”

Kyle chuckles at the question. “Yeah,” he decides to say, despite all of the times Kaleb tramped into his bedroom griping about his lessons, hating the music and the tedium. He wonders about so many things himself, questions he wish he could ask Kaleb on this bus ride. Does he still love jewelry? Does he still like Kyle’s bad drawings of monsters? Would he want to see how much he has improved? “He’s always been … this cool.”

“I was gonna take him with me out to San Diego, get a job at my brother’s bakery. I sold him the life … hitting the beach, chilling out every day, scoping babes on the sand …” The way he stares ahead at the dark, open road, Kyle would think he’s seeing sunshine over gently rolling waves on the shore. “It was sharing dreams like that, man … that’s how we got by.”

Kyle listens with mounting fascination as Nico tells him all about their lives in the cells under the House of Vegasyn. How they had fun. Worked out together. Impromptu violin concerts in the commons. How he could always find Kaleb sitting at a desk surrounded by books in the library. Hearing about Kaleb’s life nearly brings Kyle to tears several times, amazed at how Kaleb’s spirit persisted through his time in the cells.

Nico also mentions the last time he saw Kaleb. “We were planning an escape. We made the attempt, at all costs. And the only one who was brave enough to speak up was this man right here.” Nico smiles proudly. His smile falters. “But if that night hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be here right now. He wouldn’t have a lion’s claws drawn across his face.”

“I might not have learned he’s alive,” Kyle points out.

“And he’d never know you were alive, either.” Nico stares ahead through the dark windshield. “Being brave has a price … Just wish he wasn’t the one to pay it.”

All of the human prisoners were either victims or witnesses of vampire activity, stashed away from society to help preserve the secret of their existence.

Kyle is sure it won’t remain a secret much longer.

Nico also explained how the humans donated blood based on their assigned number, which replaced the use of real names. What strikes Kyle as most interesting is that Kaleb was given such a high number, he never once donated blood. He can’t help but wonder if that was intentional somehow. Did Tristan have a part in deciding what number Kaleb received?

Was Tristan, in some twisted way, protecting Kaleb?

Raya has been pacing up and down the aisle with perfect balance, unaffected by the soaring speed of the bus, as graceful as a ballerina. “No, there isn’t much more to say about Mance,” she says when Kyle asks her once again if they have anything to worry about. “I’m quite sure his time has come to an end. Finally. He’s a dirty, washed-up pervert with an unfortunate power over the dead. A pervert Tristan both summoned and took care of, apparently.” She finally sits on the edge of the seat behind Nico, peering down at Kaleb, her eyes turning sad. “I still don’t know if this whole thing was part of some diabolical master plan of Tristan’s … or just absolute madness that turned out this way.”

Kyle sits with that thought. How much of his own life has been part of Tristan’s master plan, if any of it at all?

“Sorry, said his name again.” Raya sighs. “Your body keeps reacting. You’re too easily shaken by mention of him.”

Kyle snorts. “Can you blame me?”

“Of course not. But it doesn’t mean you can’t try.”

“To what? Feel nothing?” He could almost laugh. “He led me to believe my brother was dead, all this time. Kept me and my brother apart. Ended my mortal life as I knew it.”

“We all have dark beginnings,” states Raya impatiently. “If you had a day and a night to listen to mine, you’d be through the floor. Dead and through the floor. Halfway to Hell.” She makes a swatting gesture with her hand, as if to flick away the memory. “I’ll give you the same advice I gave Kaleb. You must become stronger than your feelings. One day, maybe not so far from now, your life may depend on how you react to them.”

Kyle peers down at his sleeping, bandaged-up brother, the gauze covering most of his face, his limp arms. “You … gave my brother advice?”

“Yes. Unsolicited, albeit, but I believed he needed it.” Raya gazes at him. Something soft touches her eyes. “Or maybe … I needed him just when he and his music came into my life not long ago. I’m not usually so taken by mortals. But Kaleb …” She peers at Kyle now. “I think you should know I … only just found out who he is. Mere nights ago. I didn’t understand the extent of what Tristan had done. Learning about it … is what recently ended our lifelong friendship.”

That brings Kyle’s eyes fully to hers, solemn and silent.

Raya places a hand on Kaleb’s head, fingers brushing through his exposed hair. “Keeping you and your brother apart all those years … that’s just the start of the horrors Tristan has done.”

“Just the start?”

“I feel like I’ve lost Tristan to … something. Something dark. This plot he concocted with Mance, it may have been to satisfy some bigger, secret purpose I wasn’t aware of … a bigger purpose I’m still not fully aware of. I suspect everything that has happened tonight … was intended to happen.”

Kyle peers back down at his brother.

The way he almost looks like he’s sleeping. The gauze, the bandages, they’re just bed sheets over his face, one eye peeping out, peaceful. His breathing, the pattern of it, the rhythm and cadence, even that’s the same as it used to be.

Kyle doesn’t want to think about ulterior purposes. Doesn’t want to think about other horrors Tristan has done, nor what his brother went through over the years. He just wants to bask in this inexplicably warm and comforting feeling right now.

This feeling that no matter where he is, as long as Kaleb is by his side, Kyle feels at home.

A feeling Kyle hasn’t known in decades, since the night his family was lost, that night when his life was turned into a living nightmare of blood, fire, and running away.

With Kaleb in his arms again, there is no more running.

His family is back.

Then: boom.

The bus lurches, swerves. Elias grips the wheel, corrects it. “What the fuck was that—?” he starts.

Another loud boom, a heavy thump, overhead.

Kyle looks up, gripping his brother tighter. His Reach casts out automatically, senses nothing.

Nothing …

“Vampires,” murmurs Kyle, realizing. “They followed us.”

“You kidding me?” blurts Elias from the front. “You sure I didn’t just hit something on the road?”

Raya rises, stares upward, perhaps picking up on something of her own. “Only one,” she reports, eyes fixed to the ceiling. “I can hear them. Their heart is like a … a fluttering bug .”

“Wait, what?” exclaims one of the mortals, shaking. “They found us?” 4 clutches the seat in front of her, eyes wide. “Fuck no,” whimpers one of the teenage boys. “No, no, no,” moans the other teenager, his eyes welling up with tears.

Another loud slam against the ceiling.

The humans shout out, flinching away from the noise.

The whole bus veers right, then left, until Elias straightens it out again. “How the fuck are they doing that??” he shouts.

“Secure the windows!” cries the freckly one. “And doors!”

“It won’t make a difference,” says Raya calmly, staring up at the ceiling, as if seeing something no one else can. “The Feral can enter the bus whenever they please. They choose not to.”

“Why?” asks 4.

“Playing with their food?” suggests Raya too flippantly.

Kyle peers down at his brother, astonished he’s still asleep through all of this. The medication must be keeping him deeply sedated. If he was awake, how would he be reacting right now? Would he be strong? Unafraid? Even trapped in a cage with a lion, Kaleb’s first instinct was to approach it. He is brave. He is a new man born out of the timid boy Kyle once knew.

It wasn’t enough to break Kaleb free from the House of Vegasyn. Kyle has to see it through to the end, to ensure Kaleb stays alive, gets healthy, and becomes himself again. This long and trying night can’t be for nothing.

Another slam, from ahead.

Everyone turns forward, breathless.

On the windshield is the unmistakable figure of a vampire in a raspberry catsuit—La-La—his giddy eyes and grin in the center of a wind-tousled explosion of long white hair. One arm clings effortlessly to the glass somehow. The other is extended with his katana blade shimmering in the starlight.

Even with his hair flying in all directions, La-La’s beauty is mesmerizing, his face like the finely-sculpted work of a revered artist, impossibly smooth, unblemished, a perfect balance of features that draw the eye and inspire boundless intrigue.

But none of that beauty distracts from how dangerous Kyle knows La-La to be.

Elias, never having laid eyes upon this vampire before, lets out a holler of surprise. “What the fuck!” Then he starts to swing the wheel left to right in zigzags down the highway. “Off of the glass! Off, you fucker!”

Kyle knows better. La-La can’t just be shaken off the bus. He clings to it with ease, laughing. This is a game to him. A tornado would be a better match, if even that.

Kyle slides his brother’s head from his lap to the seat as he stands up. It’s then he realizes La-La is only looking at him, no one else. The twisted grin persists, dark raspberry eyes fixated on Kyle with a deep and unshakable obsession.

Through the glass, in a voice carried away by the wind and the roar of the engine, La-La says, “I once took seventeen days to drink a boy dry. I like my screaming snacks to last.”

Kyle hears every word.

So does Raya. “Who is this buffoon?” she asks indignantly. “Do you know this individual, Kyle?”

“La-La,” Kyle answers with no further explanation.

The very next instant, La-La takes flight, vanishing from the windshield. Kyle and Raya turn, eyes on the windows. The humans had also witnessed La-La’s departure, jumping out of their seats and looking warily in every direction for his return.

When there’s a slam from the side, everyone shouts, turns, and it’s at the sliding handicap door that La-La now clings outside with a manic grin and giddy eyes. “The final sip of the boy was the tastiest,” he says, nose pressed to the glass, “when the blood was sweetened with the relief of knowing the end was finally near.”

Raya struts up to the side door. “Are you quite done?” she asks La-La through the glass. “You do realize no one in this bus except for me and Kyle can hear you, right?”

Wildly flying white hair frames La-La’s delicate face as he erupts into hysterical laughter.

Then once again vanishes from sight.

“It’s our exit!” shouts Elias. “We’re almost there!”

Nico comes to the front. “Aren’t we just leading this crazy fucking vampire straight to your home? How’s that helping?”

“A pair of witches I know are conjuring an evil-repelling barrier around the town!” Elias shouts back. “We all should be safe once we’re within it!”

Nico appears unable to process any part of that sentence.

Raya, unusually flustered, is back to pacing the aisle, eyes darting everywhere as she listens for the vampire. “I cannot believe I am saying this, but what I wouldn’t do to have Mance here right now …”

“Do you see that??” shouts 4 from one of the windows.

Her boyfriend, less brave, joins her side. “Are those …?”

“Birds!” shouts Elias from the driver’s seat—and sounding unexpectedly happy about it. “A fuck lot of birds! It has to be a sign of Cade and Layna’s power working! Kyle, look!”

Kyle has seen it firsthand, though he isn’t as confident that it’s a good sign. “Keep your eyes on the road. Anything can still happen.”

“I’m not letting anything happen,” Elias insists, ecstatic. “No, sir. Layna’s crazy army of birds are here to guide us!”

Then all visibility is stolen away from out of nowhere as a raging whirlwind of sand engulfs the bus from front to back in the space of seconds. The bus rumbles and trembles as Elias plunges onward, assaulted by sand that whips by, scratching the windows, scraping over the roof. The humans shout, clinging to the seats and the walls, cowering while the bus continues to shake all over as it battles its way through the storm.

With the blasting sand, birds slam against the windows, the windshield, the roof. They appear and vanish so fast, there’s no telling if these birds are alive or dead, if the sandstorm is made entirely of carcasses or is heralded by the birds themselves. And with the furious storm comes an unfathomable volume of noise, drowning out everything.

Kyle finds Nico standing over the still-incapacitated Kaleb, covering him. Ahead, Elias blindly steers through the madness with no sight of the road, all his previous happiness traded for terror. His speed has dropped dramatically, the debris and sand pulling heavily on the bus.

The noise is so deafening and the storm so thick, Kyle’s senses are rendered useless. He doubts Raya can hear La-La’s movements any better than he can sense them now.

In a window, a flash of La-La’s grin.

The moment Kyle spots it, it’s gone.

Kyle hurries now from window to window, pushing down the panic and bile rising up from his stomach. La-La appears again, and again is gone the moment Kyle spots his face. Then at another window, La-La cackling hysterically, tongue pressed to the sandy glass, and just as quickly, whipped away by the wind, out of sight. Somehow, the vampire’s beauty makes his twisted expressions and behavior all the more disturbing.

Kyle can’t keep up, finding himself standing in the aisle, surrounded by flashes of La-La’s face at any random window, even the back door and the windshield, everywhere in the blink of an eye. He moves too fast.

Suddenly the vampire’s face is gone from every window. Kyle turns, looking for him again, unsettled. Raya is at the side door staring out, eyes wide and full of tension as the sandstorm screams past the glass.

Boom —another crash on top of the bus.

Everyone looks up.

“Down!” hollers out 4’s boyfriend as he covers her with his arms, shaking, his fear-ridden eyes twisted up to the ceiling.

The blade of a long sword pierces the roof.

And the boyfriend’s head.

4’s screams are lost to the raging storm as she collapses to the floor of the bus, cowering.

When the sword is pulled out of the roof, up the boyfriend goes with it, his head attached for half a second, until the sword is freed and his limp body drops down.

His head, split open by the blade.

Blood pouring over the seat.

Kyle slaps a hand to his mouth, paralyzed, stopping himself from retching at the sight.

Mayhem breaks out as the humans, now screaming and in a full panic, flatten to the ground or scramble to get away, a woman wailing hysterically, the elderly man shouting his prayers. Raya is backing away in horror, her poise gone, choking on her breaths.

4’s screams persist as the sword strikes down elsewhere, now covered in her boyfriend’s blood and brain matter, closer to the back of the bus, then gone again. Strikes again, too close to Raya’s head, causing her to quickly duck and take position on the floor. The sword pulls out again and strikes in a new place, over and over it goes. Wind squeals wildly through the holes left by the blade. Each time, La-La’s hysterical peals of laughter puncture before the sword does.

Panic and dread consume Kyle’s system, compounded by the flood of terror radiating out of every human in the bus that his Reach unhelpfully absorbs. It takes an insurmountable deal of willpower to fight through it and make his limbs move, as he pushes himself down the aisle, following La-La’s movements, desperate to think of some way to thwart the vampire.

Kyle turns to the front of the bus. Nico remains crouched over Kaleb protectively, staring back, teeth bared. It is amazing to Kyle, how Nico’s fragile, human eyes are so full of courage in this moment, ready to fight La-La head-on if he has to, not a bone in his body quivering.

It’s more than just a show.

The young man is fearless.

Before another thought enters Kyle’s mind, the back half of the roof rips open like the lid of a can.

The only screams that are heard now are those of the storm itself, sand slicing into the bus, cutting and biting and stinging with its furious power.

Above, the shape of La-La eclipses the gaping hole in the sky filled with violent wind, grinning madly. When he jumps down, he lands so close, Kyle falls back. La-La’s raspberry eyes are wet with laughter. Lips parted, his grin never abating in the slightest, his teeth shiny, his bloodied sword scraping the floor.

Kyle kicks away, pushing down the aisle. He glances to his side, spots 4 hiding under the body of her dead boyfriend. By his limp hand on the floor, a scalpel.

Kyle snatches it at once, out of breath, then scrambles to his feet as nimbly as he can, brandishing it.

La-La’s beady, raspberry eyes drop to Kyle’s weapon. “My blade is longer than yours.”

“Tell me what you want,” pleads Kyle.

La-La seems to catch the giggles as he slowly advances, throat dancing with his excited titters as Kyle backs away.

“Drake is your nephew, isn’t he?” Kyle will say anything to reach the vampire, to connect to him somehow. “He called you Uncle La-La. I’m Drake’s friend. That makes me a friend of the family. Why would you hurt a friend of the family?”

La-La raises his sword up like a lightning rod, still giggling. With it held in the air, the blade sings as sand whips past it.

“Talk to me,” pleads Kyle, though it comes out more like a demand. The more he backs away, the closer he brings La-La to the front where his injured brother is. There is only so much aisle left. “Everyone wants something. What do you want?”

La-La’s mane of white hair flies wildly in the wind. “Is one of these people … someone you love …?”

Kyle’s heart grows cold at the words.

Then the vampire lifts his foot, places it on Kyle’s chest, gives a delicate shove that might be described as gentle.

Kyle flies back as if he was just rammed by a rhinoceros.

Out of breath, Kyle tries picking himself up, fails, drops back to the floor. “Don’t you have …” Kyle can barely hear himself, his words swallowed in the screaming turmoil of sand. “Don’t you have someone you love? A family? Anyone?”

La-La’s foot returns to Kyle’s chest, but only the tips of his toes, pinning him almost daintily to the floor. “Everyone I have ever loved,” he says through his incessant giggles, still grinning, lips never quite closing between his words, his sword still held straight up into the air, “I have killed by my own hands. It is so, so exciting to me. The betrayal on their faces. Tears. All of the delicious begging. To feel the pain they feel in their hearts. To live it, one agonizing moment at a time … I hurt as they hurt. I feel it, too … and I crave more … the sadness, the regret, I love how it tickles. And oh, the despair … I taste their despair in the same way I taste their blood. Would you like to try it?”

Kyle can’t shake La-La’s foot off of his chest, even while he grips it. “Get off of me!”

“Someone you love is here …” sings La-La playfully.

Kyle’s heart thrashes wildly as he fights to get out from underneath La-La’s foot. “Please!”

La-La turns it into a little song. “Someone you love … yes, someone you love, love, love … is here, here, here … I will find them, yes, yes, yes, I will find them, too …”

Kyle’s heart pounds with intensifying despair at his words. There is no negotiating with La-La. No reasoning. His mind is so detached from reality, Kyle wonders if the vampire is even aware of what he’s doing, of who he hurts, if he even cares. Like a force of nature itself. Does anyone blame the tornado when it levels a house? Or the hurricane when it drowns a city?

Or a fire when it burns?

“Has anyone ever told you,” comes Raya’s voice, entirely unimpressed, “how desperately you could use a singing lesson?”

Kyle twists his head to discover Raya standing behind him, whose dress has torn in a few places from all the activity, the fabric thrashing in the wind of the storm like crazed tentacles.

La-La peels his eyes from Kyle, appears to delight in seeing Raya. “My sword’s name is Thirst,” he states happily.

Raya yawns.

The reaction only seems to inspire more manic giggling from La-La. Then he grows quiet—deathly quiet. “And do you know what Thirst is made of?”

“What?” asks Raya dryly, bored. “Your baby sister’s teeth? Your mother’s bones? Oh, what a shocker, we’re all so shocked, shocked by your whole shocking act.” She takes a step forward, her sleeves billowing in the wind, flapping everywhere. “If you want to feel true despair, go stand in the desert somewhere and wait for the morning sunrise. You’ll feel all the delicious despair you desire as you turn into cigarette butts in the wind.”

“I just noticed something,” says La-La, tilting his head, all his thrashing white hair twisting in the wind. “You’re missing half of an arm.”

For a flicker of an instant, Raya feels a stab of humility.

Kyle’s Reach feels it, too.

La-La’s grin returns as he leans forward, the tips of his toes digging deeper into Kyle, causing him to grunt in discomfort as the vampire’s face draws closer to Raya. “I want to know how it happened. Tell me. How you lost it. How you lost a part of you forever. Did you even get to tell it goodbye?”

“Fuck you very much,” says Raya.

“Tell me how deeply it hurts your soul. Tell me how much you miss your arm. Would you like me to take your other one?” La-La’s throat bubbles up with laughter again. “I would like so very much to cut you into many pieces. You are so proud right now. That delicious, breakable pride … It will be so beautiful to watch you shatter before my eyes.”

Raya, for the first time since confronting La-La, feels fear. True fear. Kyle picks it up at once. Raya steps back, shaking.

That single step back causes La-La to cackle with delight.

Kyle has only one weapon left. It’s not the scalpel he still grips in his hand, which would be just as effective as a toothpick against a vampire. It’s a weapon everyone else on the bus has, too, only no one would dare brandish it intentionally.

Kyle lifts the scalpel to his own palm—then slices. His skin is strong. It takes several attempts before at last yielding blood.

La-La’s eyes drop to the bleeding wound at once.

Utterly fascinated.

“I killed my family, too,” hisses Kyle, extending his sliced-open palm as if meaning to give the vampire a high-five. “Taste it. Real despair. It was my fault. I killed them. All of them. My vampire lover and I … We drank my whole family dry.” Tears spill out without meaning to. “I-I’m the reason they’re dead. You can taste all of that. Right here. Take a drink from my body and taste my fucking despair.”

La-La takes hold of Kyle’s wrist with surprising gentleness.

Lowers his face to it. Inspects closely.

That’s when Kyle feels a chill, from far away.

Icy, desolate, stinging.

A familiar chill that has nothing to do with La-La.

A familiar chill from his Reach.

He listens. The sensation he picks up is painfully cold and sticky, like a warm tongue to a frozen pole. The closer it grows, the farther away Kyle wants to get from it. But unlike all of the other times when he uses his Reach, he isn’t the one doing the reaching. It feels as if the frigid fingers are reaching for him instead, hunting him through the blinding storm.

Then it makes contact.

Kyle loses his breath.

He knows exactly who it is. He knows this terrible feeling. He made the excruciating mistake of Reaching for it once when it was just a shadowy figure in the alleyway behind his bar in Nowhere.

Only this time, Kyle senses that the cold presence isn’t here to threaten him.

It’s here to help.

But how?

That’s when Kyle gazes past La-La’s mesmerized eyes, past his own blood-dripping palm, up to the hole in the sky.

A shape emerges through the screaming sands.

A man, leaping into the bus from the roof.

A man covered completely in blood.

He slams down, shakes the floor as if weighing twice what the bus does, an earthquake from his landing.

La-La spins around, long white hair whipping, as the man’s bloodied arms close around him like a muscular red cage snapping shut, with a barbarous roar that combats the storm.

Rips La-La away like he weighs nothing.

Kyle sits up and watches as the man backs away with La-La trapped in his arms—La-La, who has given in to another bout of hysterical cackling. “I want despair!” he cries through his laughter. “I want to taste it! Feel it! The sadness and the longing! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt true despair? Since I’ve felt anything—” His cackling reaches a new, shrill, blood- freezing height. “—anything at all?”

Through the wildly thrashing curtain of La-La’s long white hair, the man’s bloodied face appears.

And through the curtain of blood, a familiar handsomeness.

Bright, familiar eyes in a sea of red.

Kyle recognizes it.

Recognizes him.

Then the red face is lost again behind La-La’s white hair and the toiling sand as the two plummet backwards, crashing through the back door of the bus.

But La-La flings out a hand, grabs the edge of the door, as if refusing to be finished with Kyle just yet, the vampire’s wild eyes affixed to him—his yearning, murderous, unblinking eyes.

Kyle stares back, shaken by the vampire’s words. Is that the truth? What La-La has wanted all along? Just to feel something? Is that why he craves making people hurt? Because he relishes in feeling anything at all, even pain, even villainy, even hatred?

Those thoughts are, perhaps, what inspire Kyle’s Reach to do something he has never felt it do before.

It reaches toward the vampire not just to read his emotions.

But to offer some.

A taste of Kyle’s real despair. Grief from the night he lost his family. Anguish from the loss of believing Tristan died in a pile of ashes a year ago. And the freshest agony of his childhood friend Brock being murdered before his eyes.

Brock, the bloodied face behind La-La’s fiery white hair.

The one who perhaps drew out every one of these feelings.

These feelings, offered to La-La like a gift upon the bleeding palm of Kyle’s Reach.

La-La, who tastes the offering with something other than his teeth, who suddenly finds himself flooded by secondhand misery, drowning in the sadness, consumed by the grief.

And being moved to tears.

“It’s so … p-p-pretty …” the vampire whispers in fascination, his laughter gone entirely, just a ghost of his grin stretched over his pale, beautiful face, tears falling.

Tears, falling.

From a vampire with nothing left inside to feel.

Then La-La lets go, and the vampire and the bloody man are gone, the storm swallowing them up at last.

Still sitting on the floor, astounded at what he’s done, Kyle brings his bleeding hand to his own face, finds it wet with tears.

What the hell just happened?

Did his Reach just work in reverse?

Has it been capable of such a thing all along?

Raya stands next to Kyle, towering over him, her face stern yet vulnerable, still wounded by the vampire’s cruel words to her. “I do not wish to see that one ever again,” she decides grimly.

Kyle’s gaze is lost to the racing sands through that ripped-open back door, wondering about the bloody face he saw.

It looked so much like him …

Like Brock.

But Brock is dead. How could a dead man drop out of the sky at exactly the time Kyle needed him to, saving him, with such impossible strength that rivaled a full-blooded vampire?

And how did Kyle sense Wendy at first? That cold, terrible abyss of nothingness his Reach found, Wendy, whom he swore he would never Reach for again?

Then something comes whirling back out of the storm.

Long and sharp.

Grazes his ear, inches from impaling his face.

He bends away with a shout.

It pierces Raya through her stomach, throws her backwards down the aisle.

Kyle slaps a hand to his sliced ear, turns. “Raya!”

For a second, she is perfectly still, clutching seats on either side of her, balanced in the aisle. Slowly, she peers down at what impaled her—the decorative hilt of La-La’s sword, protruding from her, the entirety of the long, curved blade penetrating her body clean through.

“What’s Thirst made of …?” asks Raya, a rhetorical note of humor in her voice. “A high-carbon steel, most likely,” she then answers herself. “But … I sense that this particular blade … may be lined with silver. However …” She grimaces. “I happen to be one of the few of us not allergic to it … Lucky me. A fact not even Tristan knows. I guess we all keep secrets.” She takes hold of the hilt. “But … it does still hurt like a motherfucker, and so …”

She begins to pull the sword out.

That’s when, with a sickening start, she discovers someone else skewered through it, behind her.

“Fuck me,” Nico groans, coughs blood onto Raya’s back, then falls against her, the blade still inside him. “Please don’t, urgh , move it, fuck …”

Raya’s face blanches with horror. “Oh god …”

Kyle moves to their side, stares down at the blade that joins the pair of them. For a moment, he can’t speak, all his words swallowed up in fear. “D-Doctor Mei??” he calls out, then realizes he can’t be heard over the storm, nor does he know where she is, or if she herself is okay, or even alive. “Doctor!!” he screams.

“Leave it in,” groans Nico, clutching Raya’s stiff back. “Fuck. Just … w-wrap it or … or something. Wrap me up b-before I …”

Kyle glances behind Nico.

Kaleb is on the seat behind him, his own bandaged face mere inches from the end of the blade.

This wasn’t an accident. La-La’s intended target was his brother. The violinist. He knew all along. This was the finale of the vampire’s sick game, starting back at the banquet hall when he took his place in front of Kyle’s chair, likely having watched with dark fascination as Kyle screamed for his brother through the bars of the cage, a game to orchestrate the end of the tragedy here on this bus—and it would have played out perfectly, had brave Nico not stood in the way.

Kyle peels off his vest, then his shirt, and starts wrapping the blade at the front and back of Nico’s wound. “Ooh, fuck, gentle, urgh ,” groans Nico, “please, please, fuck …”

“Kyle …” comes Raya’s voice, worried.

Abruptly, the sandstorm abates, falling away like a curtain, leaving only birds circling in the night sky. The sounds of the humans whimpering and crying replaces the storm, along with the roaring hum of the bus’s engine, chugging along with significantly more trouble than it was previously. “I can see it!” shouts Elias from the front, voice hoarse and weary. “The town! Guys, we’re there, we’re almost there!”

“Stay still,” Kyle tells Nico. “Just breathe. You’re gonna be okay. Just stay with me …”

Nico clings tighter to Raya. “I … I don’t care what happens to me. Get Kaleb to safety. Get that man the life he … he deserves. I’m gonna … I’m just gonna rest my head here, right here on this brave lady’s back, just for a minute …” Then Nico closes his eyes.