Must Love Fangs

He swore. “I’m sorry—I’m done here. I can’t win this one, and you won’t talk to me, so have a nice life, Marie Bellavance. I’m sure you’ll find just the right vampire, since only a vampire will do.”

He opened the door.

Panic flared in my chest. He was going to walk away. Forever. If he left now, it was for keeps. “Josh—I’m dying.”

He slowly turned. He stared at me. After a long, tense moment, he said, “What did you just say?”

I felt naked, laid open in a way that I was unused to. Josh was the first one I’d shared this with. “I’m . . . dying.” To my horror, my voice broke a little on the last word. “I probably have six months to a year before . . . the end.”

Which wouldn’t be pretty. And I’d be a mess long before then, completely out of my mind and unable to function.

He quietly shut the door and leaned against it, staring at me as if unable to grasp what I was telling him. “I . . . Marie, I didn’t know.”

“Well, of course you didn’t,” I told him, forcing my tone to be light and wry, as if my world hadn’t been falling apart right then. “I haven’t told anyone except you.”

“Is it cancer?”

I wish. The thought came immediately, and I began to laugh hysterically, because the thought was absurd. God, that was fucked-up.

“No,” I said. “It’s not cancer. It’s something called fatal familial insomnia.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s very rare. My mother had it. Died from it ten years ago. I inherited the gene. It’s not supposed to kick in until I’m forty or so, but it hit early.”

He shook his head, moving closer, and reached out toward me. “Marie—”

I moved away before he could touch me, hugging my arms to my chest, feeling sick. Admitting it to another person meant that it existed. It meant really, really acknowledging it. I was flat-out panicking, and I felt the absurd urge to cry.

He followed me as I walked away. “Do you . . . do you want to talk about it?”

Another hysterical laugh bubbled in my throat. “No, I don’t want to talk about it. I just . . . ” I sighed, staring at my blank walls. I suddenly felt exhausted. “I want to take a freaking nap.”

“Fatal . . . insomnia,” Josh repeated. “And that means you can’t sleep?”

I pushed forward, suddenly desperate to show him what it meant to not sleep. To have someone else get it. I opened my closet door. Hundreds of boxes were crammed in there, neatly stacked on shelves that I’d built to hold them all. “I do puzzles when I can’t sleep. I’ve done every single one of these,” I told him. “Some, even twice.”

He said nothing, simply looked at the puzzles, then back to me.

“And here,” I said, racing across the apartment to my small bathroom. I went to the counter and threw open the medicine cabinet. I grabbed boxes of over-the-counter sleep aids, prescription bottles, and shoved them all at him. “I tried taking all of these. None of them work. Nothing works. I close my eyes, but I can’t sleep. Maybe ten minutes, if I’m lucky, but after that, nothing. My brain can’t shut off, and I’m so tired that I could just collapse. Except when I collapse, I still can’t sleep.”

He remained silent, his eyes dark as he watched me.

“Do you know what it’s like?” My hands clenched into fists as my frustration and helplessness built inside me. I wanted to scream, but I forced my voice to be calm. “Imagine being hungry all the time, yet you can’t eat. You just can’t. For no good reason at all. I go through that every single fucking night. And it’s going to kill me.

“There are four stages of the disease. When I was eighteen, my mother stopped sleeping. Then she started getting panic attacks, kind of like I’m having right now,” I said, feeling my pulse flutter wildly in my chest.

“Marie—”

“I need to get all of this out while I can.” I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm a little. “It starts with the inability to sleep. Next you have panic attacks. Then paranoia. Then, you start to hallucinate. The insomnia continues to get worse, and toward the end you become completely out of your mind from the lack of sleep. And then you die. It’s horrible, Josh. Absolutely horrible. My mother . . . she was beautiful. French-Canadian. Long, dark, curly hair and the happiest smile. I miss her every day,” I said softly.

“What about a doctor?”

I shook my head. “They can’t help. I’ve tried pills of every kind. I’ve tried therapy. Hypnosis. I’ve seen specialists. They all want to run tests on me, and if they discover the cause, then the experimental treatments will begin. I’ll spend the next six months being monitored and drugged and poked and prodded, and none of it will do a bit of good, because no one knows how to fix it. I’m better off spending those six months actually doing something about my disease.”

“And this is why you want a vampire,” he said quietly.

I nodded. “I thought of it a few weeks ago. That I could get someone to turn me. Sara said that diseases skate right off shifters. And vampires, well, they’re already undead. I have all these resources in the agency, right? So why not use them?”

He reached for my hands and tugged them into his own. “Why not a shifter, then? I can change you.”

“No, you can’t,” I said quietly. “You’re Beau’s brother. He’s trying to hold the Alliance together with the force of his will alone. Everyone’s freaking out over that tiger clan incident. They exiled that tiger couple, and exile is permanent. For a shifter, I imagine it’s close to death. You’re so close to your family—I won’t have you living in exile just to turn me. Not when there’s a perfectly good vampire around—they don’t have to follow all of the Alliance rules.”

“But vampires don’t turn just whoever they want and then walk away. There’s commitment involved.”

“I know. I just have to take that chance. Maybe I’ll be lucky and find a nice vampire to spend eternity with.”

Josh gave me a flat, emotionless look. “So I’m off the table because I can’t turn you. But I’m perfectly fine for a one-night stand?”

I bit my lip. “I shouldn’t want to sleep with you, but I do.”

“Damn, Marie,” he said, yanking his cap off and raking his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what to say.”

I twisted my fingers. “I know it’s complicated.”

He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Yeah, I’ll say. Call me crazy, but it doesn’t sit quite right with me to sleep with you and then turn you over to the next vampire in the hopes that he’s the one for you.”

It didn’t sound right to me, either, but I didn’t know what else to do. “You said yourself that you weren’t big on commitment. I’m the ultimate in noncommitment relationships.”

“That is not a selling point.”

“You could always wait until I’m turned,” I said softly. “Maybe we could always give . . . you and me . . . a try after I’m turned.”

He shook his head. “Marie, if a vampire turns you, he’s going to want you to be his blood partner. That’s a mate for life. It’s taken very seriously. If you get turned, you’re off-limits. Jesus,” he swore. “This is a hell of a plan.”

So I could have hot Josh and an early tombstone, or I could have a cold vampire and eternity. “I’m not changing my mind,” I said quietly. “Not when I’m this close to getting someone to turn me.”

Not when I was hallucinating at least once a day now. My disease was accelerating at a rapid pace.

He stared at me for so long that I felt uncomfortable. “Marie . . . I need time to think about all of this. I don’t know that I can keep helping you. I just . . . I don’t know.”

I was guessing that the one-night stand was off the table now, too. I felt a flash of bitterness at that, but I wasn’t surprised. Finding out that someone was dying totally changed the dynamic. It was hard to nail and bail on a dying girl, after all.

“I’m telling you this because you’re my friend, Josh,” I said. “Not because I want more than you’ve already given me.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and kissed my forehead. And then sighed. “I have to go. I need some time to think about all of this.”