Dreams for the Dead (26 page)

“A month.”

“A year,” she countered.

“Three months.”

“Eight.”

“Six.”

She nodded. “All right. Six months apart, and then …”

“Meet me somewhere.”

“Can you find me?” she asked. “Wherever I am?”

“I’ll come to you when it’s dark, exactly six months from now. Wherever you are.”

She hesitated. “If you’re not there …”

“Then we’ll know none of it meant anything. But,” he added, “I’ll be there.”

“So will I.” She paused. “I’m sorry.”

He made a dismissive sound. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

They gazed at each other for a long, solemn moment. Then she threw herself at him, lips smashing into his, arms locking around his neck in a passionate embrace that would only make it harder for them to leave each other. He lifted her by the waist, squeezing her against him, kissing her back like they were never going to see each other again.

Their ardor slowly languished as they remembered they didn’t have the night, and wouldn’t have one for what seemed an impossibly long time. They drew apart relu
ctantly.

“All right, then. I’ll see you soon. In six months.” Tristan’s voice was neutral, but his eyes were mournful.

“Yes.” She put a hand to his cheek. “I love you, Tristan. I do.”

“I love you, too,” he replied gravely. He walked backward for a few steps, as if memorizing how she looked in that moment, then turned abruptly and strode out the door, out of sight.

And just like that he was a stranger again.

S
eventeen

T
hirty-four
years. Twenty-six of them spent as a human. An additional eight as a vampire. That wasn’t so long, wasn’t so many years, and yet it felt like forever. Like so much more than enough.

But now the promise of unexpected relief danced within Tristan’s reach. He loved someone. He was in love with Dawn.

He’d never known what it was like to love someone who wasn’t his family, and he hadn’t really cared. Nola was probably the closest he’d ever been to love, but now he could see he hadn’t loved her like this. They’d been good together and they’d had a lot of fun, but they always left each other amicably when the fun was over. And that was it. He didn’t want to dwell on comparisons between her and Dawn. There were none to make.

At first the separation from Dawn had made Tristan incandescent with rage. The need to be with her oversha
dowed anything else, and without her he didn’t know what to do.

After a couple blood binges, the rage lessened and he understood the wisdom of spending time apart. He couldn’t be with her if he acted like a child whenever something made him unhappy. He couldn’t properly love her if he didn’t a
ccept himself, flawed past and all, the way she did.

Even after the rage faded, the separation was harder to endure than he’d antic
ipated. He’d always been lonely in some vague, unhappy way, but now his loneliness made him restless, like there was an itch he could never scratch. He also felt indescribably sad. He had this persistent ache in his chest being away from her. He drove himself mad with longing for the feel and smell of her skin. He hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on her presence, her availability to him. She’d been his undoing.

When girls approached him in bars he thought about fucking them—in the bathroom, in the a
lley, in his car. But even these idle thoughts filled him with deep revulsion and he began telling them to get lost more often than he bothered to take them out back to sip from their necks. He moped in the shadows, craving their blood anyway and wishing he could drown himself in alcohol. Out of all the faces swimming before him, he could see only one.

He got a portable record player and scoured record stores to replace his favorites of the ones he’d lost. For hours he mired himself in the sounds of Dead Moon and Hüsker Dü, loun
ging in the hotel room with the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, contemplating drinking the blood of housekeepers whenever he heard their cart out in the hall. Or the night clerk, or sleepy guests returning late to their rooms.

Several times he did drink from the hotel population, discreetly. But often he lay there on the still-made bed, co
nsumed with anxiety. He needed to see her. He
needed
her.

Angrily, he would often force himself to stare at his reflection in the mirror in the dark. He ima
gined punching the silvery glass until it splintered, punching until it shattered in a deafening shower around him. He imagined rolling naked in the slivers until they were embedded in every inch of his skin. The pain would lessen his anger and make his self-loathing easier to bear.

Instead, his hands gripped the counte
rtop until he heard it start to crack, and then he stepped away before he caused more damage.

Sometimes he wondered, in moments of extreme self-pity, if he’d ever be good enough for Dawn. It made him sick to think of the abysmal way he’d treated her. Even if he devoted the rest of his life to charitable pursuits and never killed another person, his sordid past was inesca
pable, a black cloud hanging over him.

If he couldn’t escape it and couldn’t erase it, he finally reasoned there was nothing to do but live with it, and in doing so create a new life—a better life. One that wouldn’t make him ashamed or de
sperate for death.

Not killing people was a good start, he thought, even if he did need to drink their blood. But he’d forgotten how to be good. It had been so long. It was probably futile to try to become so. Fucking pointless, like everything else.

Then he remembered it wasn’t just for himself he needed to change—it was for Dawn. And he would do anything for her, the least of which was try to be a decent person. A decent vampire, if there was such a thing.

I don’t kill anymore. I’ve never raped.
But the absence of such depravity didn’t make him worthy.
I have to be good for her. I have to be good
to
her.

He managed to persuade himself into a job at a shitty motel doing maintenance on the night shift. They kept a room for him, new and yet familiar: dingy yellow light, sunken bed, the occasional roach, invasion of outside noises. The job paid cash under the table, which was necessary, since he didn’t even know his own social sec
urity number. Surely he had one, but some day, if he lived long enough, it would be useless to him anyway. It was easier to exist on the fringes, he imagined, than it would be to bother changing identities once he’d outlasted a lifetime.

So he worked. He didn’t know how to fix individual A/C units or mini fridges, but he figured it out somehow, after denting the walls with one or two tools first. In his downtime he’d stand on the sidewalk outside the motel, smoking and watching tra
ffic rush past on Boulder Highway. He drank blood. He slept. He faded under the lights and melted into the blur of night.

Though he could have easily found them—and they him—Tristan hadn’t seen Augusta or Fallon since the night of the fire. He worked all night and slept all day. He didn’t have time to hunt them down. They’d turn up eventually, he e
xpected, together or separately. In their absence, nobody was around to remind him of the things he’d done, though. Tristan had killed them all.

They came to him in dreams—Loftus, Branek, and Jared—to hold him accountable for what he’d done. He would wake in the dimmed glow of his room in the afternoon, A/C rattling on high, and push his face into the flat pillow to shout until the tears stopped coming. He fucking missed them, his family. He hadn’t meant to kill them. He’d never set out to do that.
Nobody can touch us.
He’d ended them with barely a second thought. And now he regretted the hell out of it.

“I’m sorry,” he growled, voice muffled in the pillow. “I had to do it. I
had
to. You
fucked
with me. You had to die.” He exhaled a long, weary sigh and whispered, “We were all fucked anyway.”

They’d been too full of poison to live.

That was what he told himself whenever the pain of guilt became too great. He was poisonous too, only there was no one left to judge him.

He wouldn’t much care, if only Dawn would forgive him. If only she’d be there to love him, and let him love her. Let him make her happy.

Six months, he thought. The words were like a prison sentence. But he tried to be optimistic for perhaps the first time in his life. Six months wasn’t so long when he had nothing but forever.

~

It was weeks of adjusting to life alone as a vampire, months of life without Tristan. There were nights, lonely and bleak, spent weeping into her pillow, and when she slept there were dreams of severed hands and bad-angel boys. She dreamed of blood and the copper tang of it filling her mouth.

She dreamed of Tristan, and thought constantly of him whenever she was awake.

Every night she stalked alone beneath the moon and streetlights looking for prey, but often she found none, or was too afraid to sink her teeth into a stranger’s neck. Sometimes she was so skittish, starting at every ordinary sound—the wind moving tree limbs, a car door slamming, a neighborhood cat bursting from the bushes. She felt exposed whenever a car passed by, headlights slipping over her. When the headlights faded, she felt much more at ease. Darkness was her shelter now.

Too often she returned home in the quietest hours of night, starving, and hated he
rself for not having satisfied her craving.

Her longing for Tristan was a shadow clinging to her every action. It stemmed piercingly from her core and tore her grand notions of self-worth asunder. Unceasing whispered accusations of
murderer, murderer
haunted her thoughts infernally, and she did not know how to reconcile rationality with desire. Everything she had told him was true, and yet she didn’t deal easily with his absence.

She knew letting him go was the best thing she could have done, for both of them. It felt like the worst. Six months was not long enough, but it was forever.

“Get out of the apartment,” Leila would say, angry and hurt. “Get of
bed
, at least. Don’t you have things to
do
?” Dawn would often respond with a grunt, if she responded at all. “Fine!” Leila would shout, and whirl out of the room. The next day she would try again.

Weeks passed where Dawn didn’t leave her room if she could help it. She only stalked the streets at night, taking easy prey if she could find it. But by day she slept and cried and stared into space, and performed only the most essential functions. Nothing she told herself made her believe she didn’t need him.

And then one day she woke and noticed the morning sunlight filtering softly through the sheer purple curtains of her bedroom window. It had been a long time since she’d woken so early. She stared at the gauzy curtains until her eyelids stopped drooping like dew-heavy petals. Awake, she stayed in bed a few languid moments, listening to her fingers whisk across the crispness of her yellow sheets, the occasional sounds of tires on the pavement outside the window.

For the first time she realized how foolish she had been acting. If she continued in this mela
ncholy stasis, her life would collapse. They were going to meet again in five months anyway. So she got up, showered, and dressed. She made coffee out of habit, liking the way the rich smell filled the apartment. She was going to look for work. Vampires had rent and expenses. Vampires had to have a job like everyone else.

“I’m seeking employment,” she announced grandly when Leila woke up.

Leila rubbed her eyes and squinted sleepily at Dawn. “What? Okay. Finally. Did you make coffee?”

“Is the sky blue?”

“I don’t know. Is it even morning?”

The sky
was
blue that day, a pure, rich blue, arcing cloudless over the mountains. But the haze of air hovering over the Strip was brown, the blue tinged with smog and dust.

Pollution-blue, Dawn thought as she stepped out into the sorely brilliant morning.

It was hard feigning optimism when she really felt miserable. She drove around thinking of places to apply. A coffee shop. The library. A tailor’s, because she sort of knew how to sew. The rock shop, where she bought all her crystals. The daytime hours of these places didn’t appeal. A fucking hotel was a distinct possibility. She shuddered. God, no.

In the end there wasn’t anything she wanted more than her old job, so she went to Endpapers. The hours suited her as a vampire, and she loved books, and it was familiar. She hoped she hadn’t waited too long to return.

Roy sat at her old spot behind the register. At the sound of the bells on the door, he hastily paused his laptop and looked up. “Hey!” he said, surprised.

“W-what’s that you’re watching?” she asked, taking a hesitant step toward him.

“
Strange Days
,” he said, a hint of suspicion in his voice. “An underrated classic.”

“Oh.” Dawn paused awkwardly and then burst out, “Please tell me I can have my job back!
Please
, Roy, I need it. I’m so sorry. My life’s been so fucked up— You have no idea—”

“Um … you don’t have to beg,” he interrupted quietly, embarrassed by her display of emotion. “I haven’t hired anyone. I thought I could save money by doing it myself. Which I did. But it’s boring, and I don’t have as much time to watch movies.”

“Thank you,” Dawn gushed. “I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to barge in here like this.”

“Stop apologizing. I’m not giving you overtime to make up for the days you lost. Just come in tonight and work your regular hours, okay?”

“Okay.”

She fell into something close to her old rhythm, only now she slept late and wandered the streets after wande
ring the towering aisles at work. Sometimes she drank blood, but not every day. It wasn’t always convenient, though she always craved it with her parched mouth, her burning gut, her aching fangs. Her hands trembled if she went too long without it.

On weekends she began to go out with Leila.
That
was a convenient way to get blood, Dawn quickly discovered. Leila had a lot of friends at school and they liked to get together at bars. Under cover of darkened artificial lights and the upbeat sounds of a local band, Dawn would flirt and tease and draw college boys away from their friends. She would bite them between parked cars or behind the stairs or in the women’s bathroom.

Sometimes Leila would catch her eye as she returned and Dawn, both disgusted and sated by boozy blood, would feel ashamed. But Leila never said anything. Leila didn’t understand, not fully, but she tried not to judge.