Lust for Life (30 page)

I’ve just gotten under the covers when Shane enters. He spots the box of condoms on
the nightstand and shuts the door slowly behind him.

“I’m all nostalgic now.” He climbs into bed beside me. We face each other under the
covers, like soap opera characters.

I wonder if he feels insecure now that he won’t have supernatural potency and stamina.
I worry that, with his
decreased senses of touch and smell, my body won’t have the same appeal to him. Maybe
it’s too much pressure for our first night together as humans.

“We can wait,” I tell him. “If you’re tired, or if—”

He answers me with a deep, hard kiss. I give a low moan and pull him close to me,
every inch, not missing yesterday’s strength, in my body or his. This is still us.
His lips, his tongue, his hands, his thighs—all my favorite parts—are still Shane.

I slide my fingers inside the waistband of his boxers.

Oh. Wow. Yes. All my favorite parts indeed.

His breath catches and he lets out a groan, loud and raw.

“We should probably be quiet,” I whisper.

“No.” Shane claws at my silk nightshirt. “We’re alive.” He tears open the shirt, sending
buttons flying, then hurls back the covers. “Let’s live.”

If Shane’s insecure, he’s covering it well.

Naked, we kiss and grasp and feel every inch of each other. I savor each breath, filling
my lungs with his new yet familiar scent. We murmur our usual filthy words of encouragement,
stoking our desire to animalistic, pornographic heights. Shane covers my body with
his, holding me down and driving me crazy, tugging at my nipples with teeth and tongue,
spreading my legs with an exploring hand as I urge him on my with voice and fingers.

Then he stops.

Then I stop.

We stare at each other in the low lamplight.

“We did this before,” he says, “the night we got engaged.”

“Did what?”

“Planned to fuck mindlessly, to prove to ourselves that we were still young and crazy
and full of lust.” His hand drifts over my belly. “That a real commitment wouldn’t
change us.”

“But it did. And that night we decided not to go for the porn action right away. We
made love first. Even though it was kind of scary.”

“So the fact that we went straight to bow-chicka-bow tonight means we’re more afraid
than ever?”

“Shouldn’t we be?” I put my hand over his, wrapping his long, strong fingers around
my ribs. “Things are different.”

“And we’re pretending they’re not, at least in bed. We’re pretending we’re still two
animals, tooth and claw.”

“We can still be that sometimes.”

“But tonight, maybe we shouldn’t.” He rolls over, pulling me gently to lie against
him so we’re side by side, facing each other. “I don’t know what we should be now,
or what we should do.”

“First we need to forget the ‘shoulds.’ It’s not like we have some precedent to follow.
Let’s do what we want.”

“I just want to look at you.” He fingers the ends of a lock of my hair. “What do you
want, Ciara?”

“I want you to do something you haven’t done since you came back to life.” I touch
his throat with my first two fingertips. “Sing for me.”

“I don’t have my guitar.”

“You don’t need it.”

“I might be off-key.”

“I won’t notice.” I slide my fingers under his chin, then up to his lips. “Sing for
me, Shane.”

He starts off softly, eyes closed, crooning a song I’ve
never heard before, a song I could swear he’s writing even as it leaves his throat.
I have to remind myself to breathe.

His voice is more beautiful than ever. It skates over the middle-range notes, caresses
the lows, and lifts the highs with just enough effort to avoid sounding polished.

His words and melody tremble with the awe of being alive, and with the lingering fear
of a new kind of death. A human death of blood and weakness, where strength will drain
from us one day at a time. A death we won’t return from again.

The last verse counters it all, with a hope I’ve never heard before. In his new-old
human form, Shane is a little less lost, a little more certain of salvation. But as
bright as he becomes in the sun, he’ll never shed the darkness that outlines his soul.
If he did, he wouldn’t be Shane McAllister.

He stumbles over the final chorus, a lighter variation on the previous ones, as if
the new reality is a stranger to be let in only with caution. But he goes back and
repeats it, stronger and surer, and by the time it’s over, my face is soaked with
tears of joy.

“That bad, huh?”

“How is it possible?” I wipe my eyes with the edge of my thumb. “You sound even more
incredible now.”

“Nah, it’s just your weak human ears.”

“My weak human ears listened to you for three years.” I notice my unintentional rhyme
but don’t stop to admire it. “You never sounded this good. Were you like this before
you turned, and if so, why weren’t you a rock star?”

“I didn’t sound like this.” He rubs the spot where his collarbones meet. “It feels
different. Not easier or louder, just . . . I don’t know. Like something’s there that
wasn’t.”

“Nothing builds character and talent like dying, and now you’ve done it twice.”

“Seems like we should’ve come back with some sort of superpower to make it all worthwhile.”

“No.” I shake my head and run my hand down his arm, wondering where the freckles will
appear first. “This is enough.”

Shane inhales, soft as a cloud, then exhales, his eyes roaming my face like he’s seeing
me for the first time.

I draw my fingers over his brows, noticing a gray hair on the outermost edge of the
right one. A smile pops onto my face.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Finding hidden treasure in my own backyard.” I follow the new thin line that crosses
his forehead, like the Arctic Circle on a globe. Shane’s face could be my whole world
right now, or at least a hemisphere.

“I still can’t believe it,” he whispers. “We’re alive.”

I place my hand over his heart. “You’ve always been alive to me.”

He draws his thumb over my lips, first to trace them, then to part them. Slowly he
moves forward, slipping his tongue beside his thumb at the edge of my mouth, then
inside.

This time there’s no doubt or fear or anything to prove. Our bodies find each other
as they are, and it is perfect.

•  •  •

At 5:50 a.m. my phone rings. I grab it and answer blearily. “Mughrhh?”

“It’s Jeremy. Turn on WVMP. Make sure you’re both listening.” He hangs up.

I reach across Shane to switch on the clock radio on the guest room nightstand. He
murmurs my name and pulls me to his chest.

I snuggle close, caressing the smooth planes of his muscles and staring at the window.
I know it’s still dark out, but my body zings a bit with fear at the thought of the
coming sunrise. “We’re supposed to hear something.”

“Okay.” He strokes my hair with just his fingertips. “I woke up in the middle of the
night thinking of Jim. The look on his face when I killed him, and when we found him
in that place.”

“He forgave you. Maybe not in so many words, but he said he didn’t blame you.”

“I wish there was a way to know for sure if he’d changed.”

“Whatever the truth is, you did the right thing based on what you knew at the time.
You had every reason to think Jim was a threat.”

“I did. But now I don’t.”

Jeremy’s voice comes on the radio. “It’s five before the hour here at 94.3 WVMP-FM,
the Lifeblood of Rock ’n’ Roll. I don’t do many dedications here on my indie rock
show, on account of the fact that I don’t have many listeners.” He chuckles. “Anyway.
This song is from me, for two of my friends I love very much.” He pauses. “And always
will.”

The first acoustic guitar note makes my lids close
with sorrow. I cry every time I hear this song, thinking of me and Shane, or any couple
growing old together and, one day, one of them leaving the other behind.

“Listen to the lyrics,” I tell Shane.

Maybe in the last several years since this song came out, in the dozens of times I
heard it, it wormed its way into my soul and led me to make that leap from the radio
station with no hesitation. Maybe this Death Cab for Cutie song saved our lives.

Shane’s arms tighten around me after the first line. He hasn’t heard the chorus or
even the title, but he can already tell what it’s about. Refusing to lose someone
to death. Joining them instead.

“I’ll follow you into the dark again,” I tell him. “A million times.”

He swallows, the sound heavy near my ear. “And I’ll lead you out again, a million
times.”

31

Changes

Cruelly, we have to get up early for the Control car to pick us up at seven a.m. Our
examinations will take place at a secret facility an hour west of headquarters, since
our transformation is supposed to stay hush-hush until we’ve figured out what the
hell happened.

Shane stands at the stove, holding a frying pan and a can of cooking spray. “I forget
how to make eggs.”

“We have to fast before the blood tests, anyway, remember? I’ll get you a cookbook
for Christmas, since my breakfast-making skills pretty much began and ended with cereal,
not always in a bowl.”

“Put down the pan,” David says as he enters the kitchen, damp-haired and barefoot
but otherwise dressed for work. “The smell of eggs makes Lori barf.” He takes the
coffee I offer him with a nod of thanks. He goes to sip, then looks at the clock.
His mug stops halfway to his mouth. “I just realized I don’t need to tell you to go
home or hide in the basement before sunrise.”

“Sunrise.” Shane turns to me. “We’ll be able to see it.”

“It should come up while we’re in the car on the
way.” I bite my lip in excitement. “It’ll rise over the mountains.”

I cross the room and let him envelop me in his arms. He winces, then covers the hiss
of pain with a cough.

“You okay?” I ask him.

He lets go of me. “Yeah, my back’s a little stiff.”

“Sorry about the mattress,” David says. “It’s pretty old. And since it’s usually vampires
with tough skeletal systems sleeping there—” He cuts himself off and looks away in
discomfort.

“You can comment on our being human, David. We promise not to take offense. Right,
Shane?”

“Hmm?” He frowns at the toaster as he lifts it with one hand. Then he sets it down
and picks up the base of the blender, which Lori leaves on the counter, since fruit
smoothies are one of the few foods she can stomach. “Huh.”

David and I watch in silence as Shane circles the kitchen and the adjoining dining
room, picking up random objects, then putting them down.

Finally he lowers the corner of the dining room table with a thunk. “I’m weak now.
I’ll suck as an Enforcement agent.”

“Plenty of them are human,” David points out. “I was.”

“When you were, what, twenty-one? That’s half my age.”

“You have the experience. Nothing can take that away.”

I hide a smile, remembering I said the very same thing about Shane and sex yesterday.
It turned out to be true.

David lifts his mug. “And how many Enforcement
agents are ex-vampires? You’ll have valuable insights your comrades won’t.”

“True. I just—it was weird waking up this morning and . . . well, it was weird waking
up in the morning, period.” Shane gives a nervous chuckle as he glances between us.
Then his gaze rests on David. “I don’t know how to be middle-aged.”

And that is my cue to go take a shower. David’s only thirty-five, but he’s still got
eight years on me. Plus, he’s a guy, and a former Enforcement agent. He might be the
best anchor for Shane on this crazy new ship.

I spent most of my life learning how not to need others. It’s a trick I had to unlearn
when I became a vampire. I vow not to relearn it now.

•  •  •

Shane and I spend the morning subjecting ourselves to every medical examination, head
to toe and all parts in between, inside and out. We leave behind every kind of bodily
fluid.

Well, not every kind. The fertility tests will have to wait, since Shane was supposed
to abstain from sex for two days before taking it. As for me, they have to draw blood
on a certain day of my cycle—another thing I haven’t had for over six months. So it
could be weeks before we know if both of us can have kids.

The rest of our results won’t be in until late this afternoon, so we meet Colonel
Lanham for lunch. Luckily for our new human taste buds, this secret Control facility
has an amazing food court, much better than the cafeteria at headquarters.

“I want to start by saying that none of this discussion
will go beyond this table,” Lanham says as he sets down his tray of spinach quiche
(Shane says that “real men don’t care whether real men eat quiche,” but I have no
idea what that’s a reference to).

“But it’s obvious we’re no longer vampires. Will people need a top-secret security
clearance just to talk to us?”

“Yeah, won’t the rest of the agency want to know how we became human again?” Shane
asks.

“Obviously we’re playing this as we go along,” Colonel Lanham says. “This is unprecedented.”

“But I’ve done something no one’s ever done before, right?” When he nods, I continue.
“And I bet a huge contingent of the Control would like to harness my power to unmake
other vampires.”

“That’s impossible,” Shane says. “To unmake us, you had to (a) be a vampire, (b) die,
and (c) come back to life.”

“Exactly. And I don’t think what I did was a power. It was a unique situation.” I
explain to Lanham the sequence of the void, the light, and the dark. “I couldn’t have
made it out of the darkness without Shane.”

“And I couldn’t have made it without her,” Shane adds. “Sir.”

“Fascinating.” Lanham spears a piece of butternut squash with his fork. “My theory
is that at the heart of this transformation is Agent Griffin’s anti-magic essence.
Your body and soul resisted the idea that you could be destroyed by sunlight. You
were able to transfer this notion to Agent McAllister.”