Christian stood up, not like a dancer who could pop and lock, but like a vampire, like a storm coming in fast and relentless and inescapable. He seized Bradley’s wrist, and slammed it up against the wall.
“I know you’re trying to help,” he said, fangs bared. “But don’t.”
He retreated then, back over the invisible line drawn between him and humanity. He sat against the wall and stared, knowing what they saw when they looked back at him: the vampire, alone and hungry, and no way to keep him out.
He couldn’t continue to watch them. He didn’t want to see their fear, not when he could already hear the pulsing, beckoning beat of their hearts.
Not when he was too hungry already.
For the humans, the days and nights bled into one another in that gray cell.
It was different for him.
There were no windows there, but Christian could feel the time changing, his body responding to the sun’s coming and going. For the first two days, he put himself in the coffin and closed the lid over his face.
As the third night drew to a close, he realized he really didn’t have the strength to get back into his coffin. He lay in his corner, in the gray dust, and felt the rise of the sun he could not see affect every molecule of his body. It felt like he was drying out, becoming something so dry that a single spark would set him on fire, turn him into a blaze of hungry, lunging flame, with no purpose but to be quenched or destroy everything in his path.
He could hear the others talking about him, their voices soft and worried and soothing. Even Josh sounded concerned for him rather than about him, so he knew he must look terrible.
A fuzzy halo of dreadlocks obscured his vision at one point. He mentally searched for a name, and found it: Pez.
“Hey,” Pez murmured. “Hey. Look. I’ve already been bitten by one vampire, right? And it wasn’t so bad. Besides, you’re my pal.”
Christian felt his dry lips split as he spoke. “Get away.”
He had never been able to imagine it before, biting another person. It had been as alien to him as the thing he’d compared it to as a human, going down into a field and sinking his blunt human teeth into a cow.
Starvation made even humans wild.
Real vampires are scary, said Faye’s voice, soft and imaginary in his ear. We don’t want that.
He could picture doing it now, doing what had always repelled him before. He saw why vampires back in the old days had been thought of as savage beasts, before it was possible to keep the beast fed and trained, make the dangerous stay safe.
He could almost feel the slide of his teeth against a neck, the breaking skin and the warm sweet flow of blood in his mouth, penetrating every parched cell of him.
They were just two idiots and a coward who had always hated him.
Bradley was the stupidest man in the world. He spent all his time learning to pop and lock and bestowing his radiant handsomeness on the world, and he’d taken an actual vampire under his wing despite all of Christian’s efforts not to be so taken. Nobody that stupid deserved to live.
And Pez let every passing vampire snack on him and forgot sometimes what their job was, but remembered to thank Christian for buying the groceries.
Then there was Josh, Christian thought. Josh had never liked him, had always feared him. Josh would not even be surprised if Christian attacked him. He had been expecting Christian to act like a monster from the moment they met. Christian had never been able to prove him wrong.
Maybe it was time to prove him right.
As if Christian’s thoughts had summoned him, there was Josh, hovering over him. The wire-rimmed glasses Faye had assured him were the height of geek chic gleamed.
“Chris,” he whispered. “Chris. I can see you’re really trying, and I know—I know drinking from Pez made that girl act awfully weird, and I know you don’t like Bradley. I know you’re the one who keeps spare inhalers for me in the tour bus. If you really have to, if you have to . . . you can.”
Christian’s ears were filled with the anxious, alluring beat of Josh’s heart.
He turned his face away, the gray dust bitter between his lips, and waited for Josh to go away.
But Josh didn’t go away.
He reached out, as Rory hadn’t, at the door of the place that had once been Christian’s home. Christian felt the inside of Josh’s wrist, skin stretched thin over the vein, brush his mouth.
Christian reared up, sent Josh flying backward, and was on him before Josh hit the ground.