He nods, a wistful look on his face. “I miss food. I sometimes eat a little minced beef. Raw.”
I shudder again and wrinkle my nose. “No more chocolate, no more pizza.”
They were the only things I was good at doing with my magic. My magic. “I’m not a witch anymore?”
“No. You’re just a vampire now.”
My heart sinks to my boots, and I touch a hand to my chest. My un-beating heart sinks to my boots. I cry again, my sobs shaking my entire body.
John holds onto me. “Are you angry with me? With Fletcher?”
I shrug. I suppose I’m not. Better a vampire than dead. And then I let out a wail of pure misery. My family. I will stay seventeen, and my family will keep growing. Isaac will overtake me. They can’t know I’m a vampire... which means they can’t know me. Not anymore. “My family...”
I feel his arms pull tighter around me. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. That’s the worst thing. The very worst thing.”
“And the agreeable things?”
He cannot answer me which says it all, so I allow myself to cry and him to comfort me, the only person I have ever met who knows what it is to be me. A freshly hatched vampire.
There’s a tentative knock at the door and I’m growling again, hungry again. “I’ll just leave it here.”
John opens the door and there’s nobody there, just a jug of red stuff. A jug of blood. My new beverage of choice. Yuk!
He passes it to me and although I am disgusted and although I wish I could eat some chocolate, a thirst comes over me I have no control of. It’s instinctual, it’s survival, it’s base. I have to eat. And the only thing I can eat is blood.
I chug it down and then wipe my mouth on my sleeve and then shiver when I look at the smear of red on my clothes. “How do you control it? How do you not kill the people you love, or the people you hate, or just random people you see on the street who look so delicious?”
He smiles and wipes a trickle of blood from my mouth. “Will power. Practice. I don’t even know. Sometimes I have had to leave a room, count to a million. Hey – you’ll be fast.”
I shake my head, a frown on my face. “What?”
“An agreeable thing. I was trying to think of a good thing about being a vampire. To cheer you up. You’ll go everywhere you ever want and learn everything you ever want and read every book that’s ever written. You’ll see a zillion sunsets and sunrises...” He trails off having a hard time connecting with what a teenager would think was good about living forever, while everyone they know and love dies.
“Doesn’t the sun kill me?”
“Maybe it used to years ago, but we’ve evolved. You can go outside in the day or night. You can run super fast...” He gives up and just holds my hand. One vampire to another.
“Can I come in?” Fletcher. I shrug at John. I don’t feel hungry anymore. I just feel numb. All I can think about are the things I have lost.
He pushes open the door and I can see from his tear-stained face and stricken expression that he’s heartbroken about what he’s done. He hovers in the doorway, and I stand up and open my arms. He falls into them, and I get a tiny pull of hunger, but I dismiss it. I’ve just fed. I pull back. “Whose blood did I just drink?”
“Just some chickens,” Fletcher says almost apologetically.
I nod. Chickens are okay. A bit gross if you stop to think about it, but I won’t.
“Can you forgive me?”
I nod. There’s a bit of me that wants to give him a hard time, throw the weight of my fury around and sulk for a bit too, but what would be the point. It’s done. It can’t be undone. “It can’t be undone, can it?” John shakes his head, no.
It can’t be undone. And I’m not dead.
I’m a vampire.
“I’m a vampire.” I whisper the words; they seem as unreal as when I suddenly became a witch.
“I know. And I’m sorry. But I couldn’t let you die, I had to save you and it was the only way. We had a doctor here. There was nothing he could do. We tried magic... We think Sadie did something, double crossed you with her magic.”
I shake my head. Time to confess. “No, when I talked to Sadie, the only way she would alter her magic was if I agreed to die. If I would sacrifice myself to save everybody else, she would change the magic.”
“So you agreed?”
I nod. Both he and John are looking at me with something like awe on their faces. I like it.
He hugs me, and John pats my back. “So you knew you would die?”
I nod.
“You’re amazing.” They both say it at the same time.
And I nod.
“And you forgive me?”
I nod. “There’ll be days when I hate you, I know. Like when I think about my family.” He can’t look at me. “When I think about being seventeen and awkward as hell for ever. When I think about the people I love growing old without me, dying, leaving me alone.”
It’s the one thought I haven’t voiced yet. Fletcher. If I am a vampire and Fletcher is a witch, then he will die, and I will live.
He takes my hands. “I won’t leave you. John, I want you to turn me.”
John holds up his hands as though to ward off Fletcher’s request. My eyes are full of tears. If he wants to turn, it means he wants to be with me as much as I want to be with him.
There’s a knock at the door.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Fletcher says.
17
“Can we come in?” Elodie pushes open the door just enough to see into the room. Fletcher looks at Ellis, who nods, and then he lets
