Real Vampires Don't Sparkle (61 page)

“Mattias?”

“Don’t turn on the light!”

Fletcher’s steps faltered. The door stood open, the light from the hall slipping beneath Matheus’ eyelids. He locked both arms across his eyes, pressing hard enough to draw glowing strands and spheres in the darkness.

“What is it?” Fletcher asked. “What’s happened?”

“Go away,” Matheus said. He rocked back and forth. Movement helped distract him from the pain. His muscles ached with the constant effort. He moaned at the flick of the light switch.

“Oh my God.” Fletcher spoke in a whisper. “Oh my God. Mattias, what have you done?”

“Turn off the light!” Matheus shouted.

“You’re hurt.” Fletcher knelt in front of him, brushing her fingertips over the long gouges crisscrossing his arms. Strips of flesh dangled loose, a macabre fringe.

“Please.” Fresh shards of pain stung out every time Matheus moved his mouth. He’d chewed through his lower lip, leaving a raw, shapeless mess. Cool blood had mingled with saliva, coating his chin and pooling on his chest.

“I don’t understand,” said Fletcher. “What is happening?”

Matheus couldn’t hold up his arms any longer. He let them drop to his sides, fingers twitching to some uncontrollable impulse.

“What are you doing to Quin?” he asked. Droplets of blood sprayed outward as he talked.

Fletcher flinched. A drop hit her cheek and she dashed it away, then scrubbed her hand over the carpet.

“I’ll get a doctor,” she said, standing, nearly sprinting toward the door.

“Don’t bother,” said Matheus. “Unless you want me to eat him.” He gave a bubbling snort, then slumped forward, forehead hitting the floor with a dull thud.

“Turn off the light,” he mumbled.

The door to the hall swung shut. Darkness swamped the room. Matheus let out a long exhale of air. Muscles trembling, he rolled onto his back, then lay gasping at the effort.

“I don’t understand,” Fletcher repeated. Her voice came from the doorway. She sounded younger than she had before, more like the girl Matheus had left behind. “Did you do this to yourself? Why? What’s wrong?”

“It’s Quin,” said Matheus. He’d drained even the energy for tiny movements. No more distractions from the scouring pain, chewing away at his veins, digesting him in deliberate bits. Every second, another piece of Matheus consumed, until only a hollow shell remained, containing only the buzzing, burning, blinding pain within.

“He’s doing this to you? How?”

“No. God.” A tremor arced up Matheus’ spine, warping the vertebra. Matheus dug his teeth into the bloody mess that remained of his lip, but a high, keening note still escaped. His feet kicked, heels banging into the wall. After a moment that lasted a century, the tremor ceased. Matheus dissolved into the carpet. He floated for a breath, before his body dragged him back.

“Mattias?” A little closer this time, still hesitant, still a young girl worried about her big brother.

“Someone is hurting Quin,” Matheus said. “I can’t make it stop. You have to do it. You have to make them stop.”

“But—”

“Make them stop. Have to make them stop.”

“Yes, okay, I’m going. Don’t…. I’ll be right back.”

Matheus heard the door open and close. Three nights since anyone visited him; three nights of steadily increasing hell. The initial attack after the dream had lasted an hour or so, before subsiding into the familiar buzzing. Matheus assumed someone had staked Quin. He’d spent the rest of the night alternating between circling the room and attempting to beat down the door. The buzzing doubled the second night. The faintest of light left behind blurred afterimages, head throbbing with the migraine of the decade. Matheus had knocked his head against the wall, the external pain comforting compared to the agony from within. By sunrise, he’d torn at his arms, desperate to find the source of the buzzing. The third night brought the unrelenting pain of the first, with no relief from a stake.

Whoever invented this bonding thing was a fucking sadist. How did sharing pain help anyone? Matheus couldn’t rescue a piece of string from a kitten. The intensification of the buzzing made sense. The bond didn’t want to be ignored. But the hunters had beat up Quin before, and Matheus hadn’t felt those injuries. Leave it to his father to find new and exciting ways of causing him pain.

Matheus groaned. He tried to calculate how long since Fletcher had left. Three minutes to get to the fourth floor, two to walk down the hall. Did she have the authority to order the experiments halted? How much longer, if she had to go through their father?
Hours,
Matheus thought. If she succeeded at all. His father probably considered this some kind of divine retribution for being such a shitty son.

The pain cut off, so abruptly Matheus felt as though he’d been punched in the solar plexus. He passed out, still stretched over the floor.

Matheus woke up to the sharp smell of disinfectant. A cool, damp cloth covered his eyes. Drawing the cloth away, Matheus saw Fletcher kneeling beside him, soaking a cotton ball in iodine. He hissed as she swabbed at the gouges on his arms.

“That hurts,” he said.

Fletcher looked at him through the screen of her hair.

“How are your eyes?” she asked.

“Better,” said Matheus. He pushed himself up onto his elbows. His arms shook, and gave out after a handful of seconds.

“Just lie still,” said Fletcher. She readied another swab.

“Fletch, I’m dead. Infections aren’t really a problem anymore.” The fresh scabs around Matheus’ mouth cracked and pulled as he spoke. He ran his tongue over his lower lip, tasting rotten blood, saliva stinging.

Fletcher sat back on her heels.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. She looked at the cotton ball still in her hand, then set it aside. “What do you need?”

“Blood.” Matheus let out a wheezing laugh at Fletcher’s expression. “You asked.”

“Perhaps I can find a butcher—”

Matheus shook his head.

“Has to be human.”

“I can’t,” said Fletcher.

“I know,” Matheus said. “It’s okay.”

He sat up, locking his elbows as they wobbled. His head dipped and bobbed like a dinghy swept into the ocean. He closed his eyes, but the sensation only increased. He opened his eyes and stared at the wall instead, willing his mind as smooth and flat.

“I still don’t understand what happened,” said Fletcher. She had dark circles under her eyes, and a soft fizz marred her sleek hairstyle. Four hours to sunrise, Matheus thought.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

Fletcher frowned at him. “We work late hours,” she said. “Experimenting with the subjects in the daylight caused a number of incidents.”

“Let some people get extra crispy, huh?”

“Well. Yes. There are other considerations, though. Apart from the sun effect, they seem to react as regular corpses during the day. In order to get results, testing must be done after dark.” Fletcher tucked her hair behind her ears. “We’re still not sure why. There are a few theories, of course, but none with overwhelming evidence behind it. One of our scientists is doing exciting work with artificial sunlight. Apparently it causes a weaker reaction, blistering, sunburn, lassitude, but the effects are reversed immediately after the light is removed.”

“Fascinating,” said Matheus. “Behold the wonders of science.”

“We’re trying to help people,” said Fletcher. “The more we understand, the more information we gather, the better equipped we are to fight this disease.”

“So you think it’s a disease.”

“For lack of a more accurate term.”

“That’s not what Father would call it.”

“It doesn’t matter what he calls it. Curse, disease, they’re just different words for the same thing.”

“Yeah,” said Matheus. “Right.” His arms shook. Any other time, he’d be up for an argument about the importance of semantics, and word choice, and the implications behind vocabulary, but at the moment, he only wanted to lie down.

“Can you help me to the bed?”

Fletcher staggered under Matheus’ weight. With a grunt, she heaved him toward the mattress. Matheus hit the bed face first, lying perpendicular to the frame. Fletcher grabbed his ankles and dragged him around, helping him turn onto his back. She sat on the edge of the bed, her legs crossed and foot bouncing, as Matheus pulled up the blankets. The fabric caught on the raw wounds covering his skin, but the mattress enveloped him in the physical embodiment of heavenly bliss. Matheus half-expected a choir of angels, complete with halos and harps, to appear. His eyes drifted closed.

“Are you going to sleep?” Fletcher asked.

“I don’t sleep,” said Matheus.

“Oh, yes. Of course.”

“You don’t have to stay. I’m all right now.”

“I still want to know what happened. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“I’m bonded to Quin. He calls it a claim. If he’s hurt, I feel it.”

“What does that mean, bonded?”

Matheus shrugged and wished he hadn’t.

“How does it work? Is there a ritual of some kind? How is the connection formed?” Fletcher asked, mattress shifting as she leaned toward him.

“I don’t know, Fletch. I was dying at the time. I was a little distracted.”

“Does a…bond…” Fletcher paused over the unfamiliar term, “arise naturally between sire and offspring?”

“Oh, God, do not refer to me as Quin’s offspring,” said Matheus, his eyes flipping open. “That’s just wrong.”

“Hmm,” said Fletcher. “Do you feel everything it—he feels?”

“You mean emotions? No. Only if he’s hurt.”

“How is the pain transmitted? Does the effect have a distance limit?”

“Jesus, I don’t know.” Matheus groaned, pulling the blanket over his head. “Can we play Twenty Questions later?”

“This bond, can you get out of it?”

“No,” Matheus said through a mouthful of blanket.

The mattress bounced. He pictured Fletcher swinging her leg, the way she always did when a problem occupied her mind.

“We can have it disposed of,” she said. “It’s a wonderful specimen, but it’s useless if we can’t run our experiments.”

Matheus jerked the blanket down.

“You mean kill Quin?” he asked. “Have you fully descended into lunacy? Look what happened when you hurt him. Imagine what killing him would do.”

“But—”

“Just keep him in the cell. I’m fine if you leave him alone.”

Fletcher stood up, her arms held across her chest. She walked away from the bed, the clean lines of her pantsuit wrinkled beyond recognition. The fuchsia scarf around her throat had slipped out of place, one end trailing down her back. She paused by the door for a second before turning around.

“Is this a trick?” she asked.

Matheus held up an arm.

“Does this look like a trick?”

“You’re quite stubborn,” Fletcher said, her voice vague. She looked beyond Matheus.

He squirmed, unable to shake the sensation of being stared at through history.

“You think I did this on purpose?” Matheus asked.

“I don’t think Mattias would have,” Fletcher’s gaze returned to the present. “But I’m not sure exactly what you would do now.”

“I can’t deal with this,” Matheus muttered. He rolled onto his side, tucking his arm beneath his head. The long scabs scraped against his cheek. Four hours until sunrise; Matheus didn’t plan to move for any of them.

“Kill him,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just go insane. Can’t be any worse than how things are now.”

Fletcher exhaled. “We’ll stop the experiments,” she said. “For now.”

The door opened and closed, the bolts sliding home.

Matheus felt some of the iron bars running across his shoulders lift.

“Thank you,” he said to the empty air.