Infinite Days (18 page)

“Please?
Really
look.”

Justin sighed and turned away from the sword. He spun slowly and looked at the adornments of the room. My bedroom was behind him, and the door was wide open. A black comforter and simple wooden night table were in direct view. Then he turned toward the doorway and caught sight of the coffee table holding my sunglasses and car keys. He walked across the room and stopped at the bureau.

“You have a thing for old photography.” He bent over and picked up the photo of Rhode and me.

“Hey,” he said. “I’ve seen that guy before.”

Silence.

“…What?” I whispered, not believing what I was hearing.

“A few days before school started. He was walking around campus. How do you know him? Old boyfriend?”

“No. Well, sort of,” I said, unable to hide my disappointment that Justin hadn’t seen Rhode recently. Somehow, I still hadn’t given up a sliver of hope.

“Sort of?”

“He’s dead. Just keep looking, please,” I said.

He placed the photo down and started investigating the others. There were a couple of me alone, posing here and there around England. Then he picked up the one of the coven, the only one that existed. I wore a brilliant green gown (though the photo was black and white). Gavin and Heath stood on my right, Vicken and Song on my left. While Justin was examining the photo, I focused on Vicken’s face. His arm hung around my waist. It was just sunset, so the sky behind us was light gray and the castle decorated the back of the frame like a monster made of stone. I couldn’t stop staring at Vicken’s eyes. The strong cheekbones, the eyes that trusted me the night I took him in Scotland. Now, in my absence, he was preparing to scour the earth to find me.

“How did you get this photo taken? It’s not even a photo, it’s weird.”

“It’s called a daguerreotype. Earlier in history, pictures were made on glass plates. Around the turn of the century.”

“They’re all so real…”

I went for it: “That’s because they are.”

Justin turned to look at me. “Where did you find someone to take them? You look like a superhuman or something. Is that your family?” he asked, pointing at the coven.

“Those men are the closest thing I have to family. That’s my house in Hathersage.”

Justin examined the photo again. “Why not just take the picture with a real camera?”

“They didn’t exist back then.”

Justin’s expression was incredulous. “Exist?” he said. “Photography was invented, like, a hundred years ago.”

This was going to be harder than I thought.

“Those photos
are
from a hundred years ago,” I said gravely.

“That’s not possible,” Justin replied.

I stepped to the center of the room, breathing in and out, as steadily as I could. I pointed. “Look about you. Black curtains. Vintage decorations? Photos of me from a hundred years ago. Gothic art and portraits of me in my bedroom that are dated from the seventeen hundreds. Why aren’t you asking me what I think is going through your mind.”

“What is there to ask? I don’t know what’s going on.” Justin was starting to panic. In the past I would have been enthralled to make him feel such fear. Now, I just wanted to get to the point.

“Think. When we went snorkeling…why hadn’t I ever seen the light reflect on the ocean?”

Justin swallowed so hard that I could see the muscles next to his ear clench. “I don’t know. You’re sick? You have that weird disease where you can’t go out in the sun?”

“Is it so easy to make excuses for me?” I asked.

“Jesus, Lenah. What are you saying?” Justin’s naturally green eyes darkened.

“Those men,” I said, getting close to him. “Those men standing on either side of me and the man you saw before school started. Those men are vampires.”

Justin looked at the photos and then back at me. “No…,” he said. A general reaction, a common reaction. In fact, every human I ever told and then subsequently murdered had had the same exact reaction.

“Up until eight weeks ago I was a vampire. One of the oldest of my kind. Those men there are my coven.”

Justin placed a hand on top of the couch as though he needed it to support his weight. “Do you think I’m a freak? That I would believe—” Justin started to say.

“This is the truth,” I said. “You know me. You know I wouldn’t lie.”

“I thought I did, but I guess I don’t know anything because right now I’m supposed to believe that you were a vampire. A bloodsucking, immortal vampire. That you killed people. Did you kill people?” His tone was sarcastic, even a little mean.

I swallowed. “Thousands. I was the most powerful female of my kind. If you were to meet me as a vampire, I would not be myself as I am to you now. I would be ruthless. I would have used whatever tactics and means I had to hurt you. I was painfully sad about the life I lost. Rhode”—I gestured to the photo—“believed that the closer a vampire felt to her life before she died, the more evil she would be as a vampire. And I was horrible. Those men in my coven were specifically chosen. Boys, just like you. I picked them for their strength, speed, and ambition.”

“You found them? To, like, join you?” His sarcasm was painful.

“I wouldn’t say ‘found.’”

“What would you say?”

“I made them…into vampires.”

“This is crazy!” Justin was yelling now. “Why are you lying about this?”

I stalked over to the kitchen and took the tins out, opening the tops and showing him dried dandelion heads and the white petals of chamomile flowers sitting in the bottom of the tiny circular tins.

“How do you think I know so much about herbs? Or why I’m obsessed with medicinal healing. That I knew you could place that flower on your tongue and eat it.”

“I don’t know,” Justin said, and took a step back.

“Or why I have a real sword on my wall.”

I sighed and let my gaze fall from Justin’s. He wanted to lace me into this perfect, innocent idea. Lenah, from England. Lenah, who couldn’t drive. Lenah, who was falling for a boy who took her to unusual places so she could feel alive. I stalked over to the bureau and took the urn. I opened it, and a few pieces of glittering dust flew in the air.

“This is an urn filled with dust. The remains of a dead vampire. Why do I have this if I’m lying?”

“Why are you doing this?” Justin yelled.

“I’m trying to protect you!” I yelled back, throwing my arms out. The urn fell to the floor, hitting the ground with a thud, scattering Rhode’s beautiful ashes in a pile on the floor. At the same time, my pinkie finger hit the side of the sword. There was a searing
zing.
I screeched and fell to my knees. Pain—glorious, murderous, shocking pain. It had been 592 years since I last felt mortal pain.

I turned my palm over. There was a hot, pulsating feeling. I had sliced my fingertip. The cut was tiny, but the blood oozed out. The flow was harmless, but there it was, the proof that I was human inside.

Justin stood across me and came down to his knees. Together we kneeled in Rhode’s remains. I stared down at the tiny cut and did what I most desired—I brought my hand up to my lips, licked the blood, and closed my eyes. Before, it had been the taste of satisfaction—one of the only flavors in my life. I leaned my head back and sighed, relishing the wonderful duality in the moment. I hated the rust, metallic flavor but I loved that I remembered it so well.

I opened my eyes, sharing the silence with Justin. I looked at the blood, now just barely coming through, and then up at Justin’s gorgeous face.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It tastes different,” I whispered. The taste of the blood now, in this life, was just a momentary curiosity and a surge of familiarity. The relief dissipated into small waves of memories—barely making an impact on the person I was now. The vampire was gone. She had dissolved with the ritual.

“Different?” Justin asked.

“It tasted better before.”

Justin reached out for my hand and as I snatched it away, my blood smeared on the inside of his wrist. Just a small, rust-colored line that ran from one end of the wrist to the other. Then, in that moment, as my eyes lost their focus on Justin’s skin, Rhode’s voice echoed in my ears.

You cannot see what you have done!

Then Vicken came next.

Your features, lassie, are not of these parts.

Then came my own impassioned voice, which I recognized from the day out on the peaks.

God help me, Rhode, because if you don’t, I will walk out into sunlight until it scorches me to flames.

Then Justin, although he was sitting in front of me, spoke to me in my head.

Everyone you love is dead. That must be lonely.

How many memories can come through at once before they are just jumbled words and faces mixed together by years of pain?

The night, the night I took Vicken, I was transfixed by his happiness. Just as I was transfixed by Justin’s happiness. I refocused on his wrist and my blood smeared across his skin. There, under the smear, was his vein, a bright blue vein.

“You would have been perfect,” I said. I ran my thumb over and across the blood. It was still sticky. “I would have stalked you, watched you breathe with such specificity I could have timed the seconds between each inhalation. Even now, I do these things.”

I looked up into Justin’s eyes. His gaze was fixed, his body unmoving. His large hands lay still in my grasp.

“Even now, I know you cross your ankles one over the other when you’re relaxed. That it gives you a feeling of power. That the vein on the right side of your wrist on your right hand snakes out and then runs deep down your arm. It takes you two and a half seconds between each breath. Precisely. I know all of these things and thousands more. I would have killed you with pleasure. I would have killed you and then taken you with me.”

I looked to the floor, but I knew that Justin had stood up. He said things like, “Got to go, talk later,” and other assorted, useless comments. All I knew for sure was that the door slammed behind him.

Justin left sometime in the early afternoon but it was four thirty when I finally looked up from the floor. I rubbed at my lower back muscles, craned my neck, and stretched my arms out. I pushed the curtain aside and walked out onto the porch. The sky was starting to head toward sunset, and I again thought of Suleen’s warning.

The hunt for you has begun….

So I would face the coven and die alone. I was prepared for that. It was just a matter of when. I leaned against the ledge and watched so many of Wickham’s students enjoying the afternoon. I hoped I would see Tony walk by and that I could call out to him, but I knew that he would be avoiding my porch. In fact, I only saw him in anatomy class. And then, he only talked about the in-class experiments. Whenever I attempted to say anything different, he would get up and go to the bathroom or make some snide comment about me being a lemming and the ringleader of the Three-Piece. I shook my head and refocused on the trees. Either way, I missed him.

“You’re leaving?” I said…only these words were a memory resurfacing in my mind. I wasn’t actually speaking them out loud.

HATHERSAGE, ENGLAND—THE DAYS OF KING GEORGE II
1740

“You are reckless,” Rhode hissed. He was walking away from the house and toward the endless sweeping hills. It was when I lost interest in anything but the “perfect” existence that I started to lose control of my mind. I became obsessed, a one-track mind. I concentrated on the perfection when the pain became too much. It was the only way I could distract myself. What did perfect mean? Blood only of humans, no animals. Only strength.

“I know what I am doing,” I said, bringing my feet together and raising my chin up.

“Do you? Last night”—Rhode moved closer toward me so he was an inch away from my face. He whispered so his fangs bared at me—“you murdered a child. A
child
, Lenah.”

“You always said that infant blood was the sweetest. Most pure.”

Rhode was horror stricken. His jaw actually dropped. He backed away from me, “I said it as fact, not as an invitation. You are not the same girl. You are not the girl on your father’s vineyard in the white nightgown.”