Blood Sacraments (5 page)

Imagine my relief the next day when Kells missed the team bus. He didn’t make it to the game either. He had us so convinced that we couldn’t survive without him that we were barely in the first half of the game. Somehow we came back to life, though, and won.

Later, when the cops asked us who had seen Kells last, I let someone else pretend they had. I never mentioned the woman. Believe me when I say that it never occurred to me that he could be in real trouble. He was Kells, the chosen one, the golden child. He’d turn up eventually with some wild tale that left us crazy with envy.

So a week after that, days before graduation, it seemed fated when I ran into him. It was late. I took the shortcut through the deserted business park, the kind of place where body shops and printers worked. It gave me the creeps when I sensed someone lurking nearby, so I walked faster. When Kells slithered out of a shadow, I was surprised but relieved.

His jeans and T-shirt were smeared with dried dirt. “Hey! Want-ta-knob-me,” he called out.

Shit. The fag jokes were starting already. “People are looking for you,” I mumbled.

“Fuck ’em.”

I almost asked, “Where’d you go?” but I didn’t want him to think that it mattered to me. By sunrise, everyone in school would know without a doubt that I was queer, so I kept walking. Knowing that he’d betray me, my cock still wanted him; my brain was a little more wary.

“Wanna suck it?”

That stopped me. Rather than look at him, I stared down at the metallic rainbow of an oil slick floating on top of a shit-brown puddle. Chunks of the asphalt road crumbled at my feet. Blocks away, cars rushed across the bridges, fleeing because the sun was down and somehow that made the city more dangerous.

“You know you want it.” He moved faster than I expected and suddenly he was wagging his limp dick at me. His giggle was high-pitched and his eyes were glazed as if he were on something. “I’ll let you have my cock if you let me have some of your blood.”

As strange as it sounds, even though I realized right away what he’d become, I wasn’t scared of him. I should have been scared of me, because I wanted him so bad that I didn’t even think about running away. Instead, I got on my knees. Kells smelled funky, like stale sex and earth. It almost made me gag. I’d never given a blow job before I gulped Kells’s limp dick into my mouth. When I fantasized about him in my sweat-drenched bed, he always had a hard-on for me, but in reality, his dick only moved when I pushed it around my mouth with my tongue. Still, as the blond curls of his pubes mashed against my nose and I smelled that boy funk on him, it nearly made me shoot in my jeans.

After half an hour of fruitless licking and stroking, he smacked me, sending me flying. “What kind of faggot can’t give head?” he shouted.

When I rose from the ground, blood trickled out of my nose. I wiped away the gush with the back of my hand. He stared at me the way he did in my wet dreams.

“I’m thirsty, Kobi,” Kells whined. Suddenly his old confident self, he flashed his white teeth at me. I was a goner. “Now it’s my turn. Come here.”

There’s no explaining why I went to him. He draped his arm over my shoulder, pushed aside my hair, and gnawed at my neck. My feet went cold first, then my hands. I was freezing and his hands were colder. I shivered. Lights flashed in the darkness behind my eyelids. My hands were prickly numb but I tried to wrap one around his neck in an embrace.

Kells made growling sounds as he chewed the tendons of my neck and God help me, it got me stone hard. My brain went foggy, and then light, and then it hurt, and the lights flashed faster behind my eyes and I wanted to groan but couldn’t. My tongue felt too big and the little blood I had left was froth. I opened my eyes. Kell’s head was so close, bent over me. I wanted to say “I love you,” but couldn’t, and later was glad I didn’t, but my heart pounded loud in my hollow chest while emotions overwhelmed me.

I tried to stroke his sun-kissed skin but couldn’t lift my arm. Man he was hot, so damn perfect in every way, and I was close enough to kiss him. Close. My lips brushed his hair. Oh fuck, his eyelashes teased my throat. Even with my eyes open, lights flickered and flashed behind them. My brain was drowning in death. I saw black and oblivion. Oh God—Kells. My balls squeezed and warm jizz bathed my cock.

When I woke, I was in a drawer in the morgue. Kells didn’t come for me. He probably thought I was dead, but he should have known I’d survived. After all, he did too.

It took me about three days to find him. He was still hanging around the business park. He didn’t look surprised or upset or even happy to see me, but he let me tag along with him. All night, he went on about his lair, so when dawn came, I followed him down into the culverts under the city that were used to drain rainwater into the bay. He had a place set up in a side channel that was blocked off, but calling it a lair was a bit dramatic.

Later that week, Kells found a coffin to sleep in even though he didn’t need it. It’s not as if we died during the day like I thought we would. It was more like being a nocturnal animal that stayed in a state of semi-slumber, although I figured out quickly that the part about sunlight was mostly true.

He kept dragging weird shit home until our hidden apartment began to look like the set of a low-budget horror flick. He could spend hours drifting his hand through the flame of one of the many candles he kept burning, but couldn’t seem to rouse himself for anything fun. I couldn’t talk him into moonlit soccer games, movies, or even dancing at clubs. Worse, he started dressing in velvet and shirts with lacy collars —and he called me the faggot?

The only time he wanted to go out was when we got the thirst and went up to street level to find prey. With all that athletic skill, he couldn’t manage hunting without fucking it up.

Impatient with him one night, I left him lurking in the parking lot of a grocery store. My path took me to a deserted boulevard. Broken brown glass and discarded cigarette butts were pushed into drifts along the uneven pavement. I kicked a can a couple feet ahead of me across the sidewalk. Occasionally, I’d send the can hurtling against the metal grates covering windows and shop doors. As they rattled, I lifted my arms in victory and shouted “Goooooooal!”

While I was doing my victory dance, a piece-of-shit car made a U-turn and paced along behind me. I glanced over my shoulder at the driver. He had a hairy face and lips that were too wet. Security lights sent strange gold halos reflecting off his eyes, like a wolf or something, but I was no lamb. He opened the door. I got in. A couple blocks later, I was face-down in his crotch. His dick was huge. It was my first time going down on a real hard-on. What got me off was the smell of his blood under his skin, so I shoved his flabby thighs apart and pierced him with my teeth. His screams brought Kells running.

After that, Kells didn’t even bother to hunt for himself. As the months passed, I was going out more on my own, so I was a little surprised when he started following me. He whined the whole time, but I tried to keep it friendly, as if he were invited along.

“Let’s go dancing. I know a club I can get into.” I couldn’t get enough of the heat and the pounding of human hearts. Sweat-slicked boys grinding to techno drove me nearly mad with bloodlust, but it was so beautiful, that kind of pain. I rarely fed on the dancers, though. I only wanted to be with them, feel their bodies writhing near mine, listen to the surge of blood, smell their arousal, taste their skin. Killing those boys would be like murdering fireflies.

“I told you, I don’t like those fag bars.”

I punctured my tongue with my fangs. One day soon, it would be bitter words instead of bitter blood in my mouth. “I know a place that’s straight. DJ sucks, though. You want a girl?”

Kells spat. To my knowledge, he’d never been able to get it up after his death. He always blamed me, of course, but I would have been able to smell his cum on the girls he lured into the cars I stole for him. They weren’t able to get him off either.

As dull as it was, that was my life. Then the cops decided to push the sex trade into a new neighborhood, seeing as how all these upstanding citizens were turning up dead with their pants around their ankles on our streets. I shadowed the other rent boys—the breathers, I called them—at their new hangouts, but I wasn’t comfortable off my turf.

The first night in the new territory, I picked a corner near a board shop. Ignoring the men who cruised me, I stood illuminated in neon pink and stared at the snowboards and gear displayed in the window. It made me sad to think of the shit I’d never get to do now that I was dead. Even if I could get the money together and figure out how to travel though, Kells would ruin it for me somehow.

The big dude who managed the store opened the door and asked me to trick in front of someone else’s place until they closed for the night, but he said it in a nice, gruff kind of way, so I moved on. Every night, after the shop closed, I went back to press my nose against the glass and figure out which skateboard I’d buy when I got some money together, until some guy would pull to the curb and call me over to his car.

Hunting wasn’t as glamorous as you’d think. Really, they came to me. I had eternal youth, the kind that called like a siren’s song to the lowlifes. They seemed to assume that because I was part Asian, I would be easy to smack around. A couple of real scummy guys even tried to kill me. Weird as it seemed, I got off on that. Nothing was better than whisky breath covering my face or an ashtray tongue licking the inside of my mouth. I loved cars that stank of day-old burgers and floorboards that were carpeted in fast food trash. I jonesed for whip-skinny white weasels, those mean motherfuckers with greasy hair and fuzzy tattoos who pursed their pale, thin lips while they decided that I was young enough for them. I needed the hurt they dished out, because it made it easier to believe they were the monsters.

Yeah, I was jaded as hell. At the top of the food chain, there wasn’t much to be had in the way of thrills. I’d even started exposing my hands and feet to pinpricks of sunlight to create sun tattoos. At first they were more like prison tats, small and crude, simple shit like teardrops. After a while, I got into designs like the henna stuff women from India put on their hands. I had to work the older, smaller scars into the bigger designs, but I liked the effect. It hurt like hell, of course, but I had to push the limits of my existence to keep from going insane from the monotony.

Yet some part of me stayed tender for Kells, or at least the version of Kells I had a crush on. The real Kells was beginning to get on my nerves. I avoided him more and more, but I guess he was afraid his meal ticket would disappear, so suddenly he decided we were best buddies and followed me up into the city. He wanted to grab a car and cruise.

“I want something cool, Kobi. No shitty Hondas.” He shoved at my back. “Get me something fast and I’ll let you suck my cock.” That was always the bribe. When he wanted something, he whipped out his dick.

Mist glinted in the security lights like static in the air. Water trickled down my neck, soaking the T-shirt I’d lifted from some place in the mall. The clothes I died in went out of fashion a couple years back and I had to have the right look to bait my traps.

“The BMW will do.” Kells nodded at a white car slowly prowling near us.

Anyone who regularly paid for sex knew the trade had moved three miles away, so the guy in the BMW was new to it. It would make it easier for me to pick him up, though. No competition from the breathers.

I was about to step out into the light when the hair went stiff at the nape of my neck. Crouching suddenly, I fought the low rumbling at the back of my throat. My keen sense of smell caught something out of place. My head whipped around as I searched the metal gates of the closed shops on the boulevard.

“Only a 300, man. Cheap-ass bastard. At least it’s a convertible.” Kells sneered at the make of the car as he whisked water droplets off his velvet cloak.

“Something is here,” I warned Kells in a barely audible voice, not even daring to move my lips. “Something.” I smelled musk and earth and death.

Kells pushed me out of our shadow. Since I couldn’t be bothered with a kill right then, I gave the BMW driver a look that made him shit, or come. Either way, he was done for the night. He gunned the engine and sped past us.

“Ah fuck it!” Kells screamed at me.

I scanned the roofs. Something was lingering on the edge of perception. I took a step toward the alleyway but Kells clamped his hand on my arm. My skin stopped prickling, but electricity washed through me. I felt on edge like I hadn’t in a long time.

“I want that car, Kobi.”

I yanked away from Kells’s pale hand. “Get it yourself.”

Lately, I hadn’t felt like putting up with his shit. Lately, I made trouble over sharing my kills. Lately, I figured I had outgrown him and those stupid velvet costumes.

The BMW driver actually stopped at the sign at the end of the block. What a good citizen. So law abiding. His red brake lights reflected as red smears on the wet asphalt.

“Kobi,” Kells whined, dragging my name out. “I’m thirsty.”

In that moment, I knew I was over Kells. I couldn’t remember the last time I ached for his friendship, his approval, his body, his limp cock. He had me numb with familiarity.

Something moved in the dark near us. “I have business to take care of,” I told him.

“You fucking faggot.” He ran down the street, black cape flapping behind him.