Lust for Life (25 page)

The door to the lounge jerks open and Elijah pounds up the stairs. “No sign of Shane
and the others on the security camera.”

My heart lurches. “They should’ve pulled into the driveway by now.” I jerk my hand
out of Monroe’s and rush for the door.

“They’re not answering their phones,” Elijah says as he follows. “Unless it’s a cloudy
day, they’re—”

I turn the key and yank open the door. The sky is perfectly clear, a gorgeous azure
blue.

I finish Elijah’s sentence in my head.
They’re screwed.

He puts his hand on my shoulder. “They still got time. And they can take that driveway
faster than we could. Control cars got cop shocks, cop suspension, cop—”

“Shut that door!” David orders. “Five minutes to twilight. I want all vampires downstairs
now.” He strides out of his office with a three-foot-high stack of dark material in
his arms. “Elijah, send Jeremy up. We’ll use these blackout curtains to get Shane
and the agents into the station when they pull up. The car’ll shelter them a little.
They’ll still burn, but not as fast.”

“There’s only two humans in the station right now, and three vampires that need covering.”
I curse Franklin for running away.

“
I’m
human,” my mom says.

“You can’t walk on that ankle, much less leap on a burning vampire.” My voice crushes
the last two words, thinking of them describing Shane.

“I’ll do it.”

Adrian’s standing at the top of the stairs to the lounge. He looks like he means it.
Would he really sacrifice his life?

“If you want to help,” I tell him, “carry my mom downstairs and . . . take care of
her.”

His eyes tell me he catches my meaning:
Console her if I die.

While Adrian carries away my protesting mother, Regina comes to stand behind me at
the door. I still haven’t closed it, despite David’s order. It feels too final.

“I want you to know,” she whispers, “I will knock you unconscious to keep you from
killing yourself.”

“Shane’s not yours to save anymore.”

“I’m his maker. He’ll always be mine.” She looks out into the front yard, where the
gravel reflects the pale blue glow of the lightening sky. “I’d last longer than you
in the sun.”

“Maybe five seconds longer.”

“Maybe that’s all we need.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this discussion.”

“You’re not.” Monroe steps between us. “Shane made me promise not to let anyone else
get hurt, not even to save him. So get yourselves down into that lounge right now.
Or I will carry you.”

Regina juts out her bottom lip. “I could take you if I wanted,” she grumbles as she
obeys.

I start to follow her, then wait with Monroe at the top of the stairs until she disappears.
“You’re lying,” I whisper to him. “You didn’t promise Shane anything. You’re just
saying that to protect us.”

“Maybe.” He opens his arm to gesture to the stairs. “Go on.”

I shake my head slowly. “Promise you won’t stop me.”

He takes a deep sigh and closes his eyes. “In all my years as a vampire, I ain’t never
had no one like you and Shane have each other. I can’t take that away from nobody.”

I put my hand on his arm. “If I burn, you’ll feel the pain. I’m sorry.”

He places his hand over mine. “I’ll be all right. You do what you gotta do.”

Shouting comes from the lounge. Jeremy opens the door and runs up the stairs. “Some
guys blocked off the Control agents’ car at the end of the driveway. Shane and them
got away, but they have to make a run for it.”

I put my hands to the sides of my head. Now they don’t even have the car to protect
them. Now there’s nothing but the trees on either side of the driveway, with their
leaves nearly gone. And once they get near the station, the trees end and the last
hundred yards are in the wide-open clearing.

Jeremy tugs my arm. “What can I do to help?”

“Get a blackout curtain from David. You’re saving a vampire from the sun.”

My phone rings again. It’s Shane.

“Ciara!” His voice is being forced out, and I hear
the pounding of feet. “They cut us off at the top of the driveway.”

“I know.” I look at the clock: 6:33 a.m. One minute past twilight. They must already
be heating up inside. “Come to the front door—and don’t talk, just run!”

His breath comes fast, from fear, not exertion. “Ciara . . . if I don’t make it—”

“You will! Now shut up and run.”

“I love you. I love you so much.”

“Hang up and run!”

“Okay.”

Except he doesn’t hang up. Maybe his finger missed the End Call button. But I can
still hear his feet strike the gravel, and I can hear his labored breath.

Then I hear his screams.

I shove the phone into Monroe’s chest. “Go downstairs. No vampire follows me.”

I don’t wait for his response. I grab the extra blackout curtain from David’s hands,
pull the key from my pocket, and dash for the exit before anyone can stop me.

The moment I open the door, the pale morning light singes me from the inside out.

I don’t care, because three flaming figures are running toward me. Shane is burning.
Dying.

I leap. Hoping to save him, but ready to join him.

24

Follow You Down

Our bodies meet in flame. I feel Shane’s disintegration, his agony, as much as my
own. The blackout curtain is a useless shield against such heat. We burn beneath it,
flesh becoming ash and smoke.

Shane groans, his mouth too melted to form words. I hold him close and tell him it’s
okay.

My last thought is:
I’ll never live without him.

25

Into the Mystic

It’s dark here. Not a tunnel, like when I died before. This darkness is a shapeless
void that stretches forever.

But I’m not alone. Shane’s here. I can’t feel my hand—or any other part of me—but
I know he’s holding it.

Was Shane right when he said he’d never be allowed into the light because he’d once
asked for death? If I can move into the light without him, will I?

No. I’d rather spend an eternity in darkness with him than in the light with the rest
of the universe. I won’t let him be alone.

I love you,
I try thinking at him.

I get a warm feeling in return, wordless but unmistakable.

A white light appears in the distance, a pinprick in black velvet, just like when
I died before. It comes closer, and I can feel Shane’s wonder and disbelief and resistance.
He thinks the light’s coming only for me.

I won’t let it.

This man and I are a package deal. Take me and you get him, too.

I imagine my soul wrapping itself around his until it’s as if the boundaries between
us never existed. Like Shane has never been Shane and I have never been me. We’ve
only ever been us.

As the light moves closer, the surrounding darkness sinks into me until I feel nothing
but . . . nothing. I claw and clamber at the void, wishing for pain, anguish, anything
to make me feel alive again.

That’s when I realize: Shane is gone.

The light comes faster. I try to run away, search the darkness for him.

Come back!
I plead.
I won’t go without you. I died to be with you, so don’t let me move on alone. Please . . .

The light is almost upon me. It reaches out with greedy tendrils, promising peace.
I push it away.

No surrender, not even to this. No surrender. The Bruce Springsteen song by that name
plays in my head, but I can’t remember any of the words, just the part where he and
Steven Van Zandt sing, “Lay lay lay lay lay lay laaaay, lay lay lay LAY LAY.”

The light hesitates, then pulls back in a great wave, like a tsunami before it crashes
onto shore.

I won’t go without him. Lay lay lay lay lay lay lay laaaay, lay lay lay LAY LAY.

The light shoots forward, pulling me under, drowning me in a peace I don’t want.

Shane!
I call out as the wave sweeps me into another realm.
I will find you. I promise.

•  •  •

Heaven—or whatever this is—has changed a bit from my first brief death. Now it has
furniture.

I’m in some kind of waiting room, like in a doctor’s office, but there are no magazines
and no receptionist pretending to file things so she doesn’t have to make eye contact.

The white walls don’t stand solid but rather pulse and sway like curtains. I’m made
of light, too, iridescent instead of white, as is the furniture beneath me.

The entire room zigzags in different colors and at different angles to form shapes.
It’s like “Laser Floyd” without the Pink Floyd music.

In fact, there’s no music at all. How can this be heaven?

“You can’t hear the music?” rasps a familiar voice.

I turn to see a woman lying on a bed, her bare feet pointed toward me. The bed’s legs
are the flimsy steel of a foldout couch, but at least they’re not made of light like
the thing I’m sitting—

Wait. I’m not sitting on anything now. The walls have gone wispy, and the only clear
thing is the bed and the woman with tawny hair. Her limbs stretch and shift like she’s
in pain.

She
is
in pain, as I recall.

“Hey.” I walk over and sit on the mattress next to a sweaty, red-faced, pustule-marked
version of myself. “You look like crap.”

She stares up at me with bleary blue eyes. Blood seeps from the side of her neck.
“Your highlights look amazing. New colorist?”

“No, I’m a—we’re a—we were a vampire.”

Human Ciara gives me a weak smile. “It worked, then.”

“Sort of.”

Her brows dip in confusion, but then weakness overtakes her and she lets her eyes
close. I realize that I
can
hear music now, soft as if it’s coming from a distance. It’s Shane on the guitar.
But no words, only the chords of Luka Bloom’s “Ciara,” the song he played as I died.
I look past the bed for Shane or Spencer or anyone else who was in the room at the
time, but the bed meets the mist of the white wall a few feet away.

Her breathing turns shallow and pained, like the air is full of daggers. “Now what?”

“No clue. Have you seen Shane? We sort of came here together, but I lost him.”

She nods without opening her eyes. “He’s right here.”

The mist on one side dissolves into another room adjoining this one. It’s darker there,
and instead of “Ciara” a desolate old Cure tune is playing. An empty bottle of whiskey
sits on the nightstand.

Shane lies on his back, eyes vacant. Blood soaks the pillow and sheets.

I utter his name and crawl over Human Ciara’s body to enter the other room.

“Take me with you,” she says.

I stop, one hand in his world and the rest of me in hers. “Fine, come on.” I reach
back my other hand.

With her fingers an inch from mine, she says, “Do you know what this means?”

“Not really. I’m fumbling my way through and hoping for the best.”

Human Ciara smiles. Her feverish fingers grasp mine, and she and her world disappear.

I’m on Shane’s bed now, where the walls aren’t misty
white but an inky black. Under the bloodstained sheet, his body is pale and so, so
thin. I listen as the breath rattles in his lungs, uneven and slowing.

I reach to swipe the limp hair off his forehead, but something stops my hand. It’s
not time yet.

So I lie next to him, as close as I can get without touching, while the blackness
presses in. The pupils in his pale-blue eyes expand with each blink.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whisper, “but I know who I am. And I know I’m not
leaving without you.”

His next blink lasts an eternity, and when his lashes part, that’s exactly what I
see. Forever. It’s dark there—the blue of his irises has been swallowed by a black
mirror—but I’m not alone.

It’s time.

I touch his cheek, turn his head, and bring my burning mouth to his freezing one.

The light of this world dies with us.

•  •  •

Before my eyes open, I hear a distant voice, more familiar and intimate than a DJ’s
or a lover’s or even a mother’s. A voice I’ve heard in headphones and earbuds my whole
life.

Jim Morrison wants us to break on through.

It’s nighttime here, and down the hill, even the stage is shrouded in darkness, broken
only by the flash of camera bulbs from an invisible audience. We’re at the Isle of
Wight Festival, the English Woodstock of August 1970. Among the tents surrounding
us, blankets are spread and bottles are strewn, but I see only one person, lying on
the ground between me and Shane.

Shane kneels next to his former friend. Jim’s naked body bleeds from three wounds
where his arm, thigh, and neck have been bitten. No, four wounds. The blood on his
mouth comes from his lower lip pierced with fangs.

But his chest is whole and clean. No stake wounds, no pencil wounds.

Where Shane’s pale eyes were full of darkness, Jim’s dark eyes are full of light.
He’s blissed-out, from drugs or music or death or all three.

But he blinks and focuses on Shane. “Hey, man.” His voice is casual, like they just
ran into each other at the 7-Eleven. “What’s up?”

“We’re dead, all of us. Like, really dead.”

“Besides that, what’s up?”

“I’m sorry I killed you.”

Jim twitches his shoulder in a semi-shrug. “Can’t say I blame you.”

I kneel on his other side. “Kashmir said you rehabilitated yourself in jail. The wood
stuck inside your heart made you good?” It sounds ridiculous out of my mouth.

Jim chuckles. “Babe, nothing could ever make me good. But it hurt like hell, and it
made me think of all the pain I’d caused. You and Jeremy and Deirdre. Everyone.” He
swipes a languorous hand over his neck, looks at the blood. “Hey, whatever happened
to your cousin? That blond chick?”

“Cass. She’s fine, I guess. She left town when she got out of the hospital. She was
pissed I didn’t tell her about you killing her mom and stepdad.”