The Eternal Kiss: Vampire Tales of Blood and Desire

her.

“I write poetry,” said Laura.

“I’d like to read some.”

“I write poems about … the night. And death.”

“Um,” said Christian. His own death hadn’t been particularly poetic, but deaths probably varied. “Okay.”

“I never let anybody read them,” Laura continued. “But I would. I think I could let you.”

She gave him that look again, as if he was a shining hero. It warmed Christian through and through.

“Yeah?” he asked. “Thanks.”

She swung his hand a bit, companionably, and he wasn’t a shining hero—they just seemed like an ordinary boy and girl alone together. That was better.

When they reached the tree at the end of the road, she stopped and looked up at him.

“I saw your picture in Bubbly,” she said. “It was an interview with the band. You were wearing a dark-green cloak with a sort of metal clasp at the throat.”

Christian remembered that Faye had stabbed it into his throat when she was putting the cloak on. He still wasn’t convinced that had been an accident: she’d been very annoyed with him for rebelling against the public- relations orders she’d given and showing up in jeans and a football shirt.

That was the last day he’d ever seen his hoodie, too.

“I was wondering,” Laura said. “How were you feeling that day?”

He’d felt like a total idiot. He was living in a house with strangers, he hadn’t understood at the time that Bradley was a moron (he’d seemed golden and perfect, able to answer every question the interviewer fired), or that Pez wasn’t constantly mocking him. He had understood that Josh—shy, nerdy Josh—the boy who was most like him, and who he would have chosen for a friend out of them all, was so scared of him that he felt sick every time they were in a room together.

“Lonely,” said Christian.

“That’s what I thought,” Laura told him, hushed. “I could just tell.”

“Really?”

“I came to the concert to see you,” Laura continued, looking up into his eyes.

A cold breeze cut through the dead leaves over their heads. Laura shivered and Christian drew off his cape, using his vampire strength as sneakily as he could to break the thread that Faye had used to sew the ends of the cape to his sleeves. He wrapped Laura in his cape, tilting up her face to tie the ribbons under her soft chin.

“Well,” said Christian. “You’re seeing me.”

Her heart was beating too fast again. Christian could hear it, warm and pounding fast, over all the distant noises of the night.

“This is going to sound silly,” Laura whispered. “But I think I knew then, when I saw the picture. That we’d meet. That we’d be … together.”

“Here we are,” said Christian.

She was standing very close. He didn’t think she was scared.

He leaned in a little, and Laura reached up to sweep his stupid black bangs (that Faye had insisted on) out of his eyes with a small, gentle hand.

That was a good sign, he thought, and he leaned in closer to catch her soft lips with his, her breath in his mouth strange and sweet. He drew his arm around her and held her more carefully than he had ever held anything. She shut her eyes and kissed him back. For a while, it felt like he was breathing too.

When her breath stuttered against his lips, he stopped. He didn’t want to hurt her.

She didn’t live far away. He walked her to her door, one of many similar doors in a trim little suburban street. There were begonias in her front garden. His mother had grown roses along a crazy-paving path just like the one he walked Laura down. They said good night, and she went inside.

Christian knew it was wrong and intrusive and incredibly creepy, but being a vampire meant you kind of lost touch with boundaries. Super senses meant he knew whenever Bradley and Faye were kissing in the kitchen even if he was clear across the house. He knew when Josh was about to have an asthma attack before Josh did, though the last time he’d handed him his inhaler, Josh had screamed and dived under the table. So, although looking up at a lit window was a perfectly normal thing to do, with vampire vision it meant he could see right through the gauzy curtains to Laura’s pink-decorated bedroom which had a poster of …

Christian cut his eyes away from the horrifying vision of himself on the poster, wearing the terrible green cloak, and instead looked to Laura’s full bookshelves and then to Laura herself, spinning in the center of the room.

She looked happy and beautiful, skirt flaring around her like a flower. She must have spun until she was dizzy, because just then she collapsed backward onto her bed with hands clasped over her heart.

Outside in the darkness, Christian smiled.

* * *

He woke up the next evening to the sound of Bradley singing off-key in the kitchen, an annoying sound that brought his head up so sharply that he thumped it on his coffin lid.

He threw the now-dented lid off, said a word his mum would not have liked, and stormed up the basement stairs to the kitchen.

“I know you can sing in tune because that’s your job!” Christian called as he came toward the kitchen.

Bradley was filling mugs of tea.

“Not my whole job,” he said calmly. “There’s also my fantastic dance moves, and being dead sexy.”

“I think you take my point.”

“Well, I like variety, it appeals to my artistic soul,” Bradley said. “Sometimes I dance badly too. Can’t seem to do anything about the sexy. Nothing puts a dent in that.”

Christian was tempted to bash his own head against the cupboard, but he already had a headache and besides that his pamphlet said that wanton destruction of property was socially irresponsible.

“Augh,” he said instead.

“You’re cranky when you get up,” Bradley observed and winked. “How was the groupie?”

“Her name is Laura,” Christian said coldly. “And she’s not a groupie.”

Bradley waved a kitchen mitt at him in what seemed to be an entirely random gesture. Christian stared, and then Bradley grinned.

“She came to your concert and threw herself at you because you’re famous. Kind of the working definition of a groupie, dude. Your first one. Nice.”

“She did not throw herself at me!”

She understands me, Christian wanted to say. She knew from seeing a stupid picture that I was lonely. But he wasn’t going to tell Bradley that.

“Okay, Chris,” Bradley said, rolling his eyes. “You’ll learn to be at peace with your new undead-stud identity in time. There’ll be more groupies at the party later.”

“I invited Laura to the party,” Christian informed him stiffly.

“Aw,” Bradley said. “Aw, man.”

Christian raised a sardonic eyebrow.

“I’m not really cut out to be a mentor,” Bradley said. “Charismatic leader, yes. Idol of millions and object of crazed lust, sure. But Josh is a baby, and Pez is a registered citizen of la-la land, so that leaves me, and I thought you were older and we had an understanding.”

“An understanding?” Christian echoed. “Bradley, I hate you.”

“Yeah,” Bradley said. “That’s our thing.”

“No, Bradley, I actually hate you.”

“Mmm, sure,” said Bradley dismissively. “The thing is, you’re kind of a baby, too, aren’t you? New to the business. These girls, right, they all want to have a special connection with you, but that doesn’t mean they do, you get me? This girl doesn’t know you. You don’t know her. There’s no way to get to know each other either. There’s this great big technicolor picture of your, like, image in between you. You’re better off sticking with your band-mates. We’ve got each others’ backs, know what I mean?”

He punched Christian and his fist rebounded off Christian’s arm. Bradley stared at his hand for a moment and then shrugged philosophically.