One of the headaches she’d been having almost every day the past couple months played at the edge of her eye. The doctor said they were migraines or stress headaches or maybe a PMS thing. She didn’t care what they were, just that they stop, but the pills he gave her didn’t help that much—and were more money than her aunt felt like paying for all the good they did.
On to Plan B: self-medicate.
She tucked up her skirt so it didn’t drag in the mud, propped her boots on the end of the kiddie pool, and noticed another bruise on her calf. The bruises and the headaches scared her, made her worry that there was something really wrong with her, but no one else seemed to think it was a big deal.
She closed her eyes and waited for her medicine to arrive.
“Why are you sleeping out here?” Gregory glanced back at her empty front porch. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” She blinked a few times and looked at him. “Just another headache. What time is it?”
“I’m late, but”—he took her hands and pulled her to her feet—“I’ll make it up to you. I have a surprise.”
He’d slid a pill into her hand. She didn’t bother asking what it was; it didn’t matter. She popped it into her mouth and held out her hand. He offered her a soda bottle, and she washed the pill taste out of her mouth with whatever mix of liquor he’d had in with the cola. Unlike pills and other things, good liquor was more of a challenge to get.
They walked a few blocks in silence before he lit a joint. By the look of the darkened houses they’d passed, it was late enough that no one was going to be sitting on their stoop or out with kids. Even if they did look, they wouldn’t know for sure if it was a cigarette—and since Gregory didn’t often smoke, there was no telltale passing it back and forth to clue anyone in.
“Headaches that make a person miss hours can’t be”—she inhaled, pulling the lovely numbing smoke into her throat and lungs—“normal. That doctor”—she exhaled—“is a joke.”
Gregory slid his arm around her low back. “Hours?”
She nodded. Her doctor had given her a suspicious look and asked about drugs when she’d mentioned that she felt like she was missing time, but then she could honestly say that she hadn’t taken drugs. The drugs came after the doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong. She tried the over-the-counter stuff, cutting out soda, eating different foods. The headaches and the bruises weren’t changed at all. Neither is the time thing.
“Maybe you just need to, you know, de-stress.” Gregory kissed her throat.
Eliana didn’t roll her eyes. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t looking for a soul mate. They didn’t discuss it, but it was a pretty straightforward deal they had going. He had medicine that took away her headaches better than anything else had, and she did the girlfriend bit. She got the better part of the deal—meds and entry into every party. Headaches had taken her from stay-at-home book geek to party regular in a couple months.
“We’re here,” he murmured.
She took another hit at the gates of Saint Bartholomew’s.
“Come on, El.” Gregory let go of her long enough to push open the cemetery gate. It should’ve been locked, but the padlock was more decoration than anything. She was glad: crawling over the fence, especially in a skirt, sounded more daunting than she was up for tonight.
After he pushed the gate shut and adjusted the lock so it looked like it was closed, Gregory took her hand.
She imagined herself with a long cigarette holder in a smoky club. He’d be wearing something classy, and she’d have on a funky flapper dress. Maybe he’d rescued her from a lame job, and she was his moll. They partied like crazy because he’d just pulled a bank job and—
“Come on.” He pulled her toward the slope of the hill near the older mausoleums.
The grass was slick with dewdrops that sparkled in the moonlight, but she forced herself to focus on her feet. The world spun just this side of too much as the combined headache cures blended. At the top, she stopped and pulled a long drag into her lungs. There were times when she could swear she could feel the smoke curling over her tongue, could feel the whispery form of it caught in the force of her inhalation.
Gregory slipped a cold hand under her shirt, and she closed her eyes. The hard press of the gravestone behind her was all that held her up. Stones to hold me down and smoke to lift me up.
“Come on, Eliana,” he mumbled against her throat. “I need you.”
Eliana concentrated on the weight of the smoke in her lungs, the lingering taste of cheap liquor on her lips, the pleasant hum of everything in her skin. If Gregory stopped talking, stopped breathing, if … If he was someone else, she admitted. Something else.
His breath was warm on her throat.
She imagined that his breath was warm because he’d drained the life out of someone, because he’d just come from taking the final drops of life out of some horrible person. A bad person who—the thought of that was ruining her buzz, though, so she concentrated on the other parts of the fantasy: he only killed bad people, and he had just rescued her from something awful. Now, she was going to show him that she was grateful.
“Right here,” she whispered. She lowered herself to the ground and looked up at him.
“Out in the open?”
“Yes.” She leaned back against a stone, tilted her head, and pushed her hair over her shoulder so her throat was bared to him.
Permission to sink your fangs into me …. He asked. He always asked first.
Gregory knelt in front of her and kissed her throat. He had no fangs, though. He had a thudding pulse and a warm body. He was nothing like the stories, the characters she read about before she fell asleep at night, the vague face in her fantasies. Gregory was here; that was enough.
She moved to the side a little so she could lie back in the grass.
Gregory was still kissing her throat, her shoulder, the small bit of skin bared above her bra line. It wasn’t what she wanted. He wasn’t what she wanted.
“Bite me.”
He pulled back and stared at her. “Elia—”
“Bite me,” she repeated.
He bit her, gently, and she turned her head toward the gravestone. She traced the words: THERE IS NO DEATH, WHAT SEEMETH SO IS TRANSITION.
“Transition,” she whispered. That was what she wanted, a transition to something new. Instead she was stretched out in the dew-wet grass staring at the wingless angel crouched on the crypt behind Gregory. It was centered over the lintel of a mausoleum door almost as if it was watching her.
She shivered and licked her lips.
Gregory was pulling up her shirt. Eliana sighed, and he took it for encouragement. It wasn’t for him, though: it was for a fantasy that she’d been having every night.
Eliana couldn’t see the face of the monster. He’d found her again, though, offered her whispered promises and sharp
