Kissing Corpses (14 page)

Rawdon looked around in the dark. I realized that even though I could only see what was cast in the light from the dimming flashlight on the stone floor, Rawdon could see everything. He seemed satisfied that Gilchrist wasn't waiting for him because he turned around and pulled me into his arms.

It might have been hot, if he hadn't tried to kill me two nights before. He pulled me against his body and kissed me hard. His cold lips were not as off-putting as they had been before, only because I was more worried about his fangs grazing my lip and the blood on his clothes. I wanted to stop him and ask if Cody was alive, but I knew that our plan hinged on Rawdon being allowed to believe his fantasy that I was wholly devoted to him. Concern for my ex-boyfriend would tip him off.

Rawdon kissed me for a long time. My lips felt cottoney. I lost track of how long it really was that I moved my lips on autopilot. He broke away, tugging my bottom lip with his teeth and scratching it with his fangs. He looked me in the eyes as he peeled the bandage away from my neck. I looked back at him, unable to mimick the look of love. Fear radiated through every cell of my body, the most primal warning of danger. The sensible me was screaming “run!” in the back of my mind. It was too late to run. There was no running from Rawdon Hale. He was going to have me. And then without a single shift from those hypnotic eyes, something changed in me. The fight went away. I had resigned myself to the idea that he would kill me. I deserved it, after what I had let happen to Cody.

His head snapped forward like a cobra, and his teeth sank into my neck, reopening the wounds of two night ago, or rather making new ones on top of them. I imagined the horrible scar I would bear for the rest of my life, four large puncture wounds.

It hurt a lot less than the first time, but it is worth noting that by now I was completely hopped up on Oxycontin. I was high. My neck burnt as he sucked the blood to the surface and out of my body. I gripped his arms, holding on tight because I thought that my knees might buckle and drop me to the cold, moldy ground. He wrapped his arms around me like it was nothing more than a passionate kiss.

Under my fingers I felt his collarbone straighten and mend. His hands in my hair, with their fingertips grazing the back of my neck, felt warmer. I was getting colder, too.

I tapped on his arm. I was tapping out. I was done. He had drank plenty from me. But Rawdon didn't stop. His fingers dug in, and he squeezed his body against mine. I was horrified to realize, as I pushed and twisted and tried to get away from his bite, that his erection was pressed against my hip.

My body was held in a vice. There was no direction in which I could thrash that would free me from his grasp. My limbs started to feel cold and tingly, and then they didn't feel at all. There were tears pouring down my face, but I was too weak to sob. I fell still. Rawdon withdrew his fangs and lowered me to the slick, mildewed stone floor. He propped me up against the equally decaying wall.

The room was fuzzy. My senses were dull. With no sense of the room around me or even my own limbs, I was lost. I doubted my own existence. Was I dead? I was near to it.

Rawdon touched his lips. “My love,” he said. “That's not concussion. You've been drugged.” He chuckled, the low, uncontrolled giggle of an intoxicated man. “It's alright,” he whispered, warm in my icy ear. “You can be mine forever.”

He raised his wrist to his lips. I heard the crunch and squish of breaking skin. I realized that he was about to feed me his own blood and I resolved myself to squeeze my lips tight. I had the will, but not the way. There was no fight left in my body. I was dying. He placed his thumb on my chin and opened my jaw. Hot blood trickled onto my tongue. He closed my mouth and rubbed my throat to make me swallow, as if he feeding a pill to a dog.

The room was getting darker. Had the flashlight gone out? Rawdon's pale face looked down on me, cheeks rosy from the fresh feeding. He was alive by my blood, now. “One, exsanguination,” Gilchrist said in my head. “Two, blood.”

I tried to wiggle my fingers. I didn't know if they moved or not. That was probably a bad sign.

“Three,” I remembered, “Covenant.” You could not be made a vampire against your will. Was my heart totally against it. It had no fighting strength in my body, but I was determined to fight with heart. I didn't want to be a vampire. I didn't want to spend eternity pretending to love Rawdon. I needed to be free of him. I was going to die, but I'd be free of him. As the lights went out of my eyes, I remember my last conscious thought. I didn't want to die. And then I did.

When I woke up, my body felt like ice. Rawdon was sitting, propped up on one hand, stroking my face with the other. My eyes flicked open, revealing the inside of the tunnel, as bright as day. My vision had never been so clear.

“No,” I said. “Wait.” I didn't want this. I didn't want to be trapped with him. I sat up fast. I was hungry.

“Shh, it's okay,” Rawdon said, wearing a dopey grin. The effects of the drug were gone from my bloodless body. For Rawdon, however, he was in the pique of it. “Whatever he gave you is good.”

I could see every detail of the tunnel we were in. The mildewing smell was stronger, but somehow it wasn't as offensive as it had been before. I was dead. Mold and mildew were just trappings of that fact. I walked along the wall, examining the structure, a mixture of stone and brick. They were sealed, but the clay used to do the job had white growth on it. Bugs made tunnels through the material, which could never properly dry-out in the damp, dark corridor.

My nose prickled. I caught the scent of copper, sweet and tangy. It was coming from the floor. I crouched down and noticed a splash of blood. It wasn't my own. It was Gilchrist's.

Rawdon sat, propped against the foul wall. His shirt couldn't get any worse, what with the holes and the dried blood. Even Cody's blood had started to dry and turn to the color of rust. How long had it been? How long had I stayed down? Rawdon smiled at me and held out a hand, beckoning me to join him.

“Come, my love,” he said. “Come sit with me.”

I stopped, standing at his side and crinkled my nose at the wet ground below. Rawdon patted it with a pale hand. “You'll get used to dirt. We'll have to spend some time below ground before we can find a new lair.”

The idea of buying a house, painting the windows black, and moving in with Rawdon like a happy family was one that I couldn't swallow. If Rawdon and I made it out of this tunnel, I would be resigned to a life drinking blood out of plastic bags and sleeping in a basement all day. I would be stuck with him.

I had loved Cody. He was the most sane human being I had ever met. He was sweet and intelligent and good to me. The sex had been fantastic. I had run scared at the idea of spending a normal human lifespan with Cody, and now I was trapped for eternity with Rawdon.

I needed to find Gilchrist.

Rawdon had other ideas. I had never seen him this way, but then again, I had only met him eleven nights ago. Talk about a quick rush into a long commitment. Gilchrist's plan to drug the vampire had worked. He reached over and pressed his hand into my thigh. I pushed him away. “I'm hungry,” I said. “I need food.”

“You need blood,” he corrected.

“I need blood, and I need to get out of this tunnel,” I said. “We can celebrate later.” At least I had my focus back, even if I had a much, much bigger problem now.

“Kendall,” he said, whining like a horny teenager. “Show me how much you love me.”

“Later,” I said. I took a deep breath to steel myself, and then realized that it was useless now. I would never need to breathe again. “Right now, we need to solve our Gilchrist problem, before he gets away. Or,” I added, “Would you prefer he stumbles upon us and stakes us while we're compromised?”

Rawdon smiled, “The risk might be thrilling.”

“What are you, sixteen?” I asked. I stood up. The temptation to go lick the blood off of the floor was surprisingly strong. I supposed it wouldn't be so bad, eating off of this horrid floor. At least I couldn't get sick from it.

“Fine,” Rawdon said. “We'll kill Gilchrist, and you can have his blood. I'm full, anyway.”

Yeah, of my blood. I looked ahead down the tunnel, but there was no sign of my ally. How far in had he hidden?

“You know what we should do after we kill him?”

“I know what you're going to say.”

“We should fuck on his corpse.”

It turned out, I didn't know what he was going to say. I stared at him, unblinking, wondering how I ever could have found him attractive. My knowledge of him had transformed him from a handsome man into a monster in under two weeks. I was never going to be like that, I decided. Rawdon was evil.

“Let's just find him first. We can decide the rest later.” The idea of drinking Gilchrist's blood was starting to appeal to me, but I knew it couldn't happen. He was a blunt asshole, sure, but he was the only one who could save me from Rawdon. I was a fledgling vampire. I had no idea of my own strength yet, or how to use it. I wondered how fast I could run.

Rawdon started off down the tunnel. His gait was relaxed as he lead the way. “Use your nose, Kendall,” he said. “Follow the scent of blood.”

It was surprisingly easy to pick up even the smallest traces of blood in the tunnel. It was like my nose was callibrated to its coppery twinge. I walked quietly after Rawdon, my eyes focused on his back, directing my hatred towards him. He had killed me. He had actually killed me, and he thought of it as an act of love. There was still a large hole in the back of his shirt. The edges of that hole were crusted in black blood, but the skin revealed behind it was flawless. My death had healed his wounds.

We walked for a long time in silence. I noticed, as we continued further down the tunnel, that his gait became more steady. The drug was wearing off. I stewed in my hatred for him, wishing he had passed by me that night as I was held at gunpoint. I might have survived that. I could have parted with my iPhone and my car more easily than my life.

“Oh... your brother, Noah, called,” he said, not looking back over his shoulder.

“Noah,” I repeated. “Did you speak to him?”

“You didn't tell me that your brother's a Mandrake.”

“A what?”

“Gay,” he said. “Though I can't blame you. In my time, it was something to be hidden. The fact that they flaunt it now is shameful.”

I bit down on my tongue. Telling Rawdon that he came from a backwards time was not going to help Noah, and it certainly wouldn't help me.

“I told him you were sleeping. He asked who I was.”

“What, exactly, did you tell him?”

“That I was taking you away. He kept calling back, so I decided to turn off your phone.”

“Oh,” I said. Maybe I could sneak a text and find out if Cody was alive. “Can I have my phone?” I asked.

Rawdon stopped and turned back. He handed my iPhone back to me. The screen was fractured, like something had struck the middle. “What happened to it?”

“I couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so I broke it.” He smiled. “Twenty-first century technology. Not all of it's as user-friendly as it should be.” He turned back and kept walking.

I tried to turn the phone on, to see if it would work despite the cracked display. He must have pushed so hard that he damaged the chip set inside. I shoved it in my pocket, murmuring swears, and kept walking. Now I understood the situation perfectly. Even if I thought my family would understand my new condition, he wasn't going to let me see them again.

“You should have waited,” I finally said. Neither of us stopped walking. Rawdon didn't look back. “If you left me human, I could have made it much easier to relocate. I could drive by daylight, shop for a house, and then when we were settled you could turn me.”

“I had to be sure you wouldn't change your mind,” he said. “I wasn't given the chance to have doubts. This gift was given to me by force.”

“You used to talk about it like it was unwanted.”

“Only because I thought it would stop me from being with you.”

Of course. Typical. He had said just what was necessary to get in my pants.

“I've really have had quite a spectacular life, Kendall. And now you can be part of it.” He walked on, telling me about feeding off of the already dying men on the battlefields of the Great War, about the parties of the roaring twenties, and about getting to witness the great change in the art world with the birth of the avante garde.

“I've lived through some of the most important changes in history. I've witnessed them first-hand. Did you know that when I was born, we didn't even have a term for a scientist? And now mankind can go to the moon and send cameras to Mars. Just think of all of the things we'll see. We'll see them together.”