You would rather have a life of endless misery, knowing the sweetness you once had is ash? Its voice was coming at me from all angles now, swirling around me like a swarm of flies. I could help you be normal, Jack. Together, we could walk during the day. Men and women would fight to be at our side—and then fight for us. You and I could raise up armies.

  I had a sudden and frightful vision of an entire alternate reality, where somehow we—this evil thing and I—were in control, and the world was at our feet.

  I knew I wanted no part of it.

  “Not interested.”

  Your small mind cannot even comprehend what you’re denying.

  “Oh yeah, it can. You—you want to be worshipped. Like some kind of god.”

  It is what everyone secretly longs for.

  “Not me.” All I wanted was the love of a few people who were important to me. But I could handle that on my own—or not. It was still better than what this thing was asking for.

  Jack, the creature said slowly, and I felt the weight of its infinite disappointment. This is a limited-time opportunity.

  “Well—I don’t want any, like I said. So just go away.”

  Either you relinquish control of your body to me, and I do as I please with the woman—and it gave me a crisp and revolting image of what it would do to Sam the second I let it feed, turning her practically inside out—or you lie here and she kills you, because of her principles.

  I could tell by the way he said it, even with his weird-as-shit-bug voice, that he was amused with the premise.

  And do you know what will happen then, Jack?

  I didn’t, so I kept my mouth shut.

  The second before she kills you, I’ll just flow into her. She’s a human; controlling her will be easy. Blood is blood, and a pact’s a pact.

  I’ll have to suffer living in a slightly less strong vessel, but her magics are still powerful, and the end result will be the same.

  Her life will still be destroyed, and you’ll be dead.

  I tensed in horror. Sphincters I didn’t even know I had tightened.

  That’s right, Jack.

  No matter what you do, I’ll win.

  You have no way out.

  She’s on her way over now.

  So you’d better make your choice.

  I’ll even let you listen, it said, and then I heard the nervous sound of Sam’s rough breathing, along with her soft footsteps.

  I knew she’d reached the door between us when I heard the rusty squeak of her undoing the gate’s latch.

  And then after that, she had to be on my side of the cage, with me, and it was like I was trapped, paralyzed in my own body, like those horrible times when you’re awake but you can’t make yourself move in bed, no matter how much you want to.

  She’s got the latch in her hand, Jack.

  She’s going to stake you with it.

  It was like being in a horror movie and screaming at myself to do something. I had to stop her, before she made a terrible mistake, but it was like all the best tropes wrapped into one: like the hallway was I was running down was endless, or the thunder was too loud for her to hear me shout. It didn’t matter what I did or how hard I thought—it was like I was in a goddamned Edgar Allan Poe story being bricked into a wall and—

  I heard her gasp.

  What had happened?

  Did she step on a rock?

  Then I heard her whisper, so quietly I would’ve never heard it, except for the fact that we were underground:

  “Jack loves Paco.”

  It was the extra bit I’d etched into the ground beside me.

  I’d done it in cursive tattoo font, only instead of the word “loves” I’d carved a tiny heart, like I was marking us on a schoolyard tree.

  I didn’t think Paco would ever get the chance to see it. I assumed when I’d done it my body was going to be down here for good.

  I’d given Sam a message from a dead man once—I just hoped she would give Paco mine, from me.

  She is about to stab you, foolish vampire.

  Take these last few seconds to despair.

  But as much as I was wracked with the need to cry and couldn’t—the thing that’d taken me over didn’t really know me at all.

  Why would I waste the last few shreds of my life being frightened? When I had so many better things to think about?

  I summoned up every good memory I had instead, and they answered me.

  Me, finding Thea again on a stage after all those years, getting to live out every teenaged boy’s fantasy. Bumping into Angela in that bar and somehow not only getting a boss, but a true love, and a friend for life. Running into Zach in my apartment complex’s silly little laundry center and holding the sweetness he’d let blossom.

  And then Paco, my beloved Paco, who was always my shore when I was out at sea.

  My throat choked at the thought of losing him, how sorry he’d be at my dying—maybe not for a while, but I knew the echoes of the love we’d shared would come back and he would feel them.

  Nothing about the manner of my death here would change it.

  Just like goodness didn’t exist in a vacuum, like Sam had said—love didn’t either—and his love had tethered me. Far before our current bonds of blood, and not in the least like a leash. No, our love had been like a silver string, running taut between our hearts, creating an instrument that only the two of us knew how to strum.

  I might die—for all I knew of my physical form I was dying, already—but it would neither erase the past, nor change the song.

  Everything that I had had with him was real, even if it wasn’t permanent.

  But what in life ever was?

  I was suffused by a gentle heat.

  Like a soft caress, and then a hug.

  Like maybe Paco was there.

  “Bring it, you fucking monster,” I taunted the creature. “You can kill me, and for all I know, you can destroy the future. But you can’t take what I’ve had away from me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Jack

  I woke to the taste of metal—not because I’d drank anyone’s blood, but because there was a rusty piece of iron shoved sideways into my mouth, keeping my jaw open, and my head ruthlessly pressed to a cold dirt floor.

  My hands appeared to be tied, and Sam was looming over me, her dark skin casting a shadow inside her own magic light. “Are you awake?” she demanded, and as my eyes opened, she grunted, “Good.”

  I tried to say something around the metal bar, but couldn’t.

  “If you bite me now, Jack, I’m going to be so fucking pissed.”

  I shrugged, helplessly, but otherwise did my best to seem innocuous, because I could hear the sound of a drill grinding on stone.

  “Hear that?” she asked. I attempted to nod, and she dared to smile. “We’re about to get rescued.”

  There was more to it than that—it took several more hours. But right before morning came, the back wall of her cage crumbled, and she looked down at me.

  “Can I trust you?” she asked. Her entire face was lit up, not just with the excitement she felt from our oncoming freedom, but because it felt like I could see every red cell in her body, and each of them glowing like a neon sign. She looked like an angel made out of blood to me.

  I shook my head, grinding my teeth against the bar slightly.

  She nodded, and started shouting “Blood! I need blood!” back to where the people coming in could hear. There were shouts past that, and the first people in the room were wearing medical gear.

  That didn’t stop them from running up to us both and pointing guns at my face.

  “Don’t shoot!” she chastised them. “The blood’s for him!”

  I heard a scuffle, Sam say “Give me that,” and then felt her yank the metal bar out of my mouth only to replace it with cold plastic.

  I bit down and tasted life.

  My hands reached up, still tied, and squeezed the blood bag she’d given me, then I started gnawing on the plastic like some kind of rabid animal, trying to get out every drop.

  “More!” Sam demanded, and another blood bag was tossed onto my chest, rather like a grenade, from a safe distance.

  And by the time I was done with that one—I could speak. “Make it like that scene from Flashdance—no, Carrie.”

  Sam laughed, and stood nearby. “Can we get out of here?”

  “Yeah,” I said, slowly nodding my head against the ground.

  She knelt down and she offered me her arm.

  I sucked on a third blood bag like it was a Capri Sun, leaning against Sam as we made our way up the tunnel her people had bored. I was tucked against her for several reasons: it was going to take me a long while to replenish myself, so I was weak, the fact that it was almost dawn wasn’t helping, and I needed to be inside her envelope of protective magical light for safekeeping. All she’d needed to do was mutter the phrase “potential for friendly fire,” and I lost all my pride.

  It didn’t matter anyhow.

  I was alive.

  And when we walked into the desert night together, coming up a ramp of construction debris her people had created, making their hole in the ground, the night air had never smelled so good to me.

  It didn’t matter that there were three rows of people with assorted weaponry and magics aimed in my direction.

  “He’s safe!” Sam shouted. “We’re okay!”

  And then there was a somewhat familiar roar from my right as a man I recognized lunged forward.

  Sam cranked up her shield another notch, just in time to deflect someone’s panicked blast from her team’s side.

  “We’re fine!” she shouted, only this time with more irritation—as Paco picked me up and spun me.

  I threw my arms around his neck, just breathing him.

  “I thought you were dead!” he said when he finally released me.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  There was some other conversation happening behind us, between Sam and her people—someone was shouting at her to step away, but I couldn’t be bothered to care.

  I set my forehead against his. “I fucking love you,” I said, then put my hand over his mouth before he could say anything back—I needed to say my piece, first.

  “When you were human, Paco—you had everything you needed but me. Now you have me . . . but don’t have anything else. I can’t tell you if that trade-off was worth it. I fucking hope so, because I know I didn’t give you any other choice. But I couldn’t just watch you die.” He started nodding halfway through, tears streaming down his face—and I knew I was crying too. “I know some part of you always wondered if I could truly have feelings for you, as a vampire. Well, now that you are one, can’t you tell?” I asked and slowly pulled my hand away.

  “I love you,” he whispered—and his mouth came for mine. Our lips met, and I had never had a kiss so sweet—and it wasn’t just that I could still taste blood.

  It was that this was, quite literally, the first kiss of the rest of my life.

  With him.

  Then I heard Sam yelling—and I realized that maybe I should be concerned and pulled back some.

  “If you all don’t get back right now I am going to start indiscriminately strangling!” she shouted.

  A man I recognized pushed through the militarized ranks. “Samantha. Gentlemen,” he said curtly.

  “Nilesh?” I said aloud, placing him. I tried to draw Paco protectively behind me, which went about as well as moving a tank.

  “I had hoped to do this debriefing elsewhere, but seeing as time is of the essence,” he said, jerking his head at the upcoming dawn. “Which one of you is harboring the creature?”

  I closed my eyes. “Oh, fuck.” I’d almost forgotten everything that’d happened before—it was like that Jack was a different Jack—because he was.

  Whereas this Jack was holding hands with Paco.

  “I take it that’s a confession?” he asked, one eyebrow high.

  “Yes,” I said. “I didn’t let it do anything, though.” I looked between Sam, and Nilesh, and then back at Paco. “It wanted me to kill you,” I told Sam. “And then if I didn’t, it said you were going to kill me—so it’d just take control of you when you did. But I didn’t, and you didn’t, and we’re both here—so can I just go the fuck home already?”

  “You . . . refused it?” Nilesh said, tilting his head like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right.

  “It didn’t have anything I wanted.”

  And when he looked to her, Sam gave Nilesh a tough look and shrugged. “I didn’t stake him because I figured I was going to die. Didn’t want to pollute the air around me.”

  I snorted. “Gee. Thanks.”

  Nilesh made a thoughtful sound. “All right, then. Stand up straight, vampire, and don’t hold your breath.”

  I turned toward him. “Why?”

  Rather than answer, he punched me. But not physically—like, psychically or metaphorically—I didn’t know what the fuck, just all of a sudden his fist was inside my stomach but I wasn’t dusting, and then he yanked something black and disgusting and with too many legs free, pulling it out to throw on the ground, where it wriggled, glistening wetly.

  “Holy shit,” Paco said.

  “Nothing holy about it,” Nilesh said, bringing his boot down on its head with a crunch.

  The four of us took a moment, watching it struggle and then die.

  “Is that it?” I asked, before looking up and around. “Are we done? Can I go home?” I asked as Paco put his arms around me. Sam dared to dim her light—and beyond her, the first row of Faithful lowered their weapons or put out their magics, though the second row didn’t seem fully convinced.

  “Yes,” Nilesh said, slowly nodding his head. “I think so.”

  “Hooray? Right?” I said, standing a little taller.

  “Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Hooray,” she said, and laughed.

  “Then—do you guys have anything else I could drink?”

  “We’re probably good for a few more bags,” she said, grinning.

  “You had better be!” Luna said, storming up.

  “She bit me! I’m sullied!” someone shouted out from behind her.

  She put her hands on her hips and whirled to shout back. “I’m still a human, you asshole! I just needed you to let me go!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Luna

  The Faithful were a little uncertain about what to do next, seeing as Jack hadn’t started World War Three, and, as usual, my boss had no idea about the true scope of the situation.

  “They were just going to kill you! No matter what!” I said, truly pissed off at one of them in particular. I hauled back and slapped Nilesh’s face, again. “That’s for tying me up without permission!”

  He stood there and took it, then cupped his cheek. “You are really good at that.”

  “It’s because I enjoy it,” I said, shaking my hand now that it stung. “Stupid angel jaw.”

  “Luna, let the nice man be—wait, what?” Jack asked, his head whipping toward me.

  “Yeah, you missed some things,” I cut him off, then turned back to Nilesh. “If you’re going to kill him, you’re going to have to kill me, and I’m still human, despite what the idiots in the back there think—”

  “No one’s killing anyone anymore,” Nilesh said, batting his hands down, and I heard the sound of guns being reholstered.

  “Okay, then, good, because they need to get to sleep pronto—”

  “Is she always this bossy?” Paco asked Jack.

  “One hundred percent,” Jack told him.

  “We’re taking your van back to Vegas,” I told Nilesh, ignoring the other men. “I’m commandeering it. You can have it back tonight. Give me the keys.” Nilesh fished in his pocket, held them out. I took them from him, and started walking to where the van was. “We’re done here,” I announced, then flagged the two vampires who were lagging behind. “I didn’t save the both of you so you could be comingled dust!”

  And at that, Jack started laughing, and so did Paco. I raced on ahead—Zach had already done what I’d told him to do—he was sitting inside the van’s cab, just waiting for me.

  “I’m not entirely sure how to drive this, Luna,” he began.

  “You’ll figure it out,” I said, but he wasn’t listening—he was looking to where I’d come from, and the at the two vampires walking up behind me.

  “Sunshine?” Jack asked, bounding up to stand on the ledge outside the driver’s door and peer inside—some Faithful had given him another blood bag, which he’d bitten his way into, it was spattered on his chin and across his dusty chest. “Who talked you into this?” he asked, then realized his current state. “Oh God, I’m sorry—”

  Zach’s eyes were wide, but when he smiled it was steady. “Don’t be—”

  “I threatened his life,” I said, pulling Jack down from his perch, and shoving him into Paco’s arms again, so the other vampire could direct him to the sunless safety of the back of the van.

  Once I’d heard the door click, I rounded to the van’s other side and stepped up and into the cab, tossing Zach the keys.

  “But you didn’t threaten my life,” he said, after he got the engine to start.

  “Doesn’t matter. I have a rep to maintain,” I said, and clicked my seatbelt.

  Zach drove all morning, and it was a good thing we had Paco’s credit cards, because it ran through gas like a motherfucker—and at the end, when we’d gotten back into town, Zach had the good idea to park it someplace shady, which we did, and then took turns getting out and walking around to stretch, pee, and eat.

  Then, when the sun started to go down, we made our way back to Jack’s little apartment complex.

  Zach looked to me and gasped. “Oh my God, Luna—Sugar—”

  “Don’t worry. I left her out a whole bag of cat food and a ton of dishes of water.”

  He sighed with relief. “But—we’ve been out there for days. How did you know what to do?”

  “My recent whole life has revolved around knowing what carnivores need,” I told him. “Not that I’m looking forward to that cat box.”

 

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