A Night Without Stars (21 page)

 I bit my bottom lip. It wasn’t a provocative gesture, merely a nervous one. When his gaze lowered to my mouth I sucked in a startled breath of air. My eyes felt too big for my face and my heart was beating like a drum inside my chest. I’d never felt this way with a boy before. Not with Travis. Certainly not with Everett.

I wanted to say something witty, but my tongue was refusing to cooperate. Where was the girl who’d stared a drinker down and all but dared him to do his worst? Hiding, that’s where. Hiding behind a tongue-tied nervous twit who wouldn’t have been able to string a complete sentence together if her life depended on it. “I… Uh… The thing is…”

“I’m not going to kiss you.”

Well then.

“Who said I wanted you to?” I snapped, even though my burning face said otherwise. My fingers dug into the mattress, anchoring me to the bed.

“I want to,” he said quietly. In the shifting light his eyes were silver, the pupils dark and dilated, and even though he’d said he wasn’t going to kiss me (rude) he didn’t step back. His expression may have been calm, even a little cocky, but the muscles in the arm he had propped against the headrest were hard as stone, bulging out beneath the sleeve of his black t-shirt. When had he taken off his jacket? I didn’t have the faintest idea. “I want to kiss you more than I’ve ever wanted anything else.”

Goosebumps broke out on my arms and my shiver had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. “Then why… why don’t you?” I’d meant to come across as bold, but my damn tongue twisted up again and I sounded hesitant. Even a little afraid.

Maximus lifted his hand off the headrest and skimmed his fingers through my hair. They caught on a tangle and I held my breath as he slowly worked it out, taking care not to yank. Even when the snarl was gone his fingers lingered in the dark curls and when he spoke his voice was whisper soft. “Because wanting is a weakness I can’t afford. You’re a distraction, Lola. A dangerous one.”

I had to swallow twice before I could say, “I’m not trying to distract you.”

“I know.” He smiled and stepped back. I felt a faint tug as he slipped his hand out of my hair and then there was nothing connecting us except a whole lot of chemistry. “That’s what makes you dangerous.”

We stared at silently at each other. I didn’t know what to say, what to think. The world as I knew it was crashing down around me but in that one moment none of it mattered because my world revolved around one boy.

“Maximus, I—”

“Holy smokes that water is cold!” Travis came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white towel. Even with the lack of light I could see his skin was scrubbed pink, and I quickly averted my eyes.

“Geez,” I complained, holding up a hand. “Get some clothes on, please. No one wants to see that.”

“I left my bag out here.” He started to walk across the room and stopped abruptly in the middle. “Were you guys, uh, busy or something?”

I looked up. Maximus was once again leaning against the bureau, but there was no denying the tension that still crackled in the air. “I, er…”

“I was just telling Lola what I knew about the drinkers,” Maximus interceded smoothly.

“Great!” Travis said with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. The cold shower must have bolstered his spirits. “We should learn everything we can about them.”

“Clothes now,” I ordered. “Talk after.”

Grumbling under his breath Travis pulled a long sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts out of his bag. Maximus and I waited without talking while he banged around in the bathroom, and I couldn’t help but smile when I heard a muffled curse through the door. “See?” I told Maximus, lifting my eyebrows. “Not so tough.”

When Travis came back out his hair was sticking up in bright orange tufts and he was nursing his right elbow. “Hit it off the counter,” he explained with a grimace.

“Sit next to me,” I said, patting the mattress, “before you kill yourself.”

“So what were you guys talking about?” Travis asked once he was settled in beside me. If I weren’t so comfortable with him it probably would have been a bit weird to be sharing a bed in the dark with a boy, but since Travis was, well,
Travis
, it felt like second nature to tousle his hair and flick his ear.

I could feel Maximus watching me and even though it was stupid and girlish and totally immature, I liked the idea that I was (possibly) making him a tiny bit jealous.

“I was explaining to Lola how the drinkers hunt,” Maximus said.

“How’s that?” Travis asked.

“They prefer to go out alone, but every drinker belongs to a larger group called a hive. Within the hive there is a hierarchy. A leader, usually the eldest male, decides when and where the hive will attack. They are called a Vladar.”

I remembered when Angelique left me. Before she ran back inside the house she said
he’s
going to be so angry. It must have been her so-called ‘Vladar’. And I’d thought Angelique was badass. I shuddered to think of what the drinker in charge of her was like.

“The first drinker Travis and I met was a big guy,” I said. “Like, huge. But when Travis went inside the house and I told him to come out and get me he couldn’t step through the door. Why not?”

The sound of Maximus gritting his teeth was like nails on a chalkboard. “You told a drinker to come out and get you?”

“Lola’s kind of crazy,” Travis explained.

I elbowed him in the ribs. “Am not. Besides at the time I didn’t
know
he was a drinker. I figured it out after.”

“So you are in the habit of inviting strange men to attack you?”

“That’s nothing,” Travis snorted. “The only reason we were at that house in the first place was to steal a car.”

Another elbow to the ribs, harder this time. “Shut
up
,” I hissed.

“Why? If Maximus is going to be helping us he should at least know that you’re a little nuts. It’s okay. It’s what I like about you. She’s the nuttiest girl I’ve ever met,” he said, speaking directly to Maximus, “but in a good way. A brave way. And in kind of a I’ll-kick-your-ass-if-you-piss-me-off way too.”

I raised my fist to thump him in the thigh. Reconsidered. “That’s actually the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“I know.”

“Can we get back to the subject at hand?” Maximus’ tone was cold. “If the drinker could not come outside, then he must have been given a direct order by his master to remain in the house. Orders such as those are very difficult for drinkers to break. If he could have come after you he would have. Of this I have no doubt.”

“You speak, like, really well,” Travis said.

“He’s Canadian,” I supplied.

“Really? That’s cool. So how often do they need to… you know…feed?”

“Once a week would be ideal, but a drinker can gorge itself on upwards of two hundred people per year.”

I did the math quickly in my head and immediately wished that I hadn’t. Two hundred people a year… That was only one hundred and sixty-five shy of one person a
day
.

“Do they get all the nutrients they need from the blood or do they have to eat other parts of the body too?”

I made a face. “Ew, Travis. That’s disgusting.”

Something flickered in Maximus’ eyes. Something I couldn’t quite make out in the dark. Comprehension? It was impossible to tell. “The blood will suffice, but on occasion one will develop a taste for human flesh. Skin. Bones. Some even eat the hair.”

As if sucking blood out of a human’s neck wasn’t gross enough. “And you said to kill them you have to hit them in the head and the chest.”

Maximus nodded. “You must pierce the brain and the heart. A gun is the most practical weapon, but a knife will do as well.”

Or a horseshoe
, I thought silently. Of course, that had only wounded Angelique, not killed her. Although looking back now it’d been well worth the effort.

“What about cutting off their heads?” Travis asked. “Will that work?”

“It will remove the brain from the body, but you are still left with the heart.”

“So they run around all zombie like?” Travis’ eyes widened. “Neat.”

“
Neat
is not how I would describe a drinker in a mindless rage ripping people limb from limb,” Maximus said coolly.

“I only meant—”

“I will return in the morning,” Maximus interrupted. “Stay in the room. Do not leave until the sun has fully risen.”

The slam of the door echoed in the sudden silence, and I flicked Travis’ ear extra hard. “Nice work, genius. You pissed off the only guy who knows what’s going on.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Travis said defensively. “He’s just really touchy.”

“He’s something,” I agreed.

Travis rubbed his ear. “He’s a little more than that, Lola. Are you sure we can trust him? I mean, he knows lots of stuff, but how do we know for sure he’s not a drinker himself?”

The idea was so preposterous I laughed. “He’s not a drinker, Travis. Get real.”

“But how do we know for certain? He could be. Or maybe he’s working for them.”

“He’s not,” I said shortly.

“But how do you
know
?”

“Because he killed one of them right in front of me.”

Travis’ mouth dropped open. “He did?”

“He did,” I confirmed. “Shot him in the head and the heart and the drinker went
poof
. Just vanished, like it was never there to begin with.”

“Weird.”

“It was definitely pretty weird.” I huffed out a breath and stared up at the ceiling. “All of this is weird.”

“Makes our lives from before seem pretty easy, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, even though I’d never thought of Travis’ life as being hard to begin with. What did he have to complain about? I mean, he wasn’t going to be Prom King or anything, but he was the smartest kid in our class with a full scholarship all but guaranteed. He had a mom who gave a shit. A dad who remembered his birthday. What more could you want?

“I know you think I had it pretty easy,” he continued as though reading my mind. “And I did, compared to what you had to go through with your mom and sister and stuff, but… No one’s life is perfect, Lola.”

The unfamiliar edge in his voice had me looking at him in surprise and, if I were being honest with myself, a little bit of annoyance. “Your mom makes pasta from scratch. From
scratch
,” I emphasized. “Whose mom does that? I know your parents are divorced, but at least your dad didn’t take off to California with some floozy.”

Travis was quiet for a moment. “Lola?”

I huffed out a breath. “What?”

“Sometimes you make stuff all about you and it’s not, you know? Not always.”

I opened my mouth to argue but the words weren’t there because I knew Travis was right. I
did
make things all about me. Well, at least some of the time. It was kind of funny, actually. You’d think that regular teenage problems would go by the wayside when crazy bloodsucking monsters showed up, but problems were problems, monsters or not.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

Travis looked away. “Talk about what?” he muttered.

“Why your life sucks so bad.”

“I didn’t say my life sucks.”

I waited patiently. I knew this game. I’d played it myself a hundred times. If Travis wanted to talk about it he would. If not, well… no amount of goading on my part would make a difference.

“It’s just that… my dad has a new girlfriend, you know?” he said after a long pause.

I blinked. No, I most certainly
didn’t
know. My first instinct was to make some crack about her having a funky mustache, but then I would be making it all about me again. Damn it. Travis definitely hit the nail on the head with that one. “That… must be weird,” I said carefully.

He scratched his neck. “Super weird. I mean, my mom and dad got divorced three years ago so I guess it’s normal but I always thought…”

“You always thought they might get back together,” I finished when he trailed off.

“Stupid, right?”

“When my mom left I used to wait by the door every night, thinking she’d come back. It’s not stupid, Travis. It’s human nature to want things to stay the same.”

“That’s pretty insightful.”

I shrugged. “It’s just something my shrink used to say.”

“I never knew you saw a shrink.”

“See?” I elbowed him lightly in the ribs. “I don’t make
everything
about me.”

“Do you still go?”

“To therapy?”

Travis nodded.

“No. We went to a few sessions before my mom left. It was… interesting,” I decided. “The woman was nice and all that, but I think for those kinds of things to work you have to be willing to put in the effort, and my parents were past caring at that point.”

I still couldn’t put on a finger on the exact moment Mom and Dad’s marriage dissolved. Maybe that’s because it wasn’t one big moment but a thousand little ones. I knew my sister and I hadn’t made it easy, but I also knew it wasn’t completely our fault. Or at least a part of me did.

“You know how older people always come up to you and say stuff like ‘enjoy high school while it lasts’ and ‘it doesn’t get any better than this’?” Travis said.

I snorted. Did I ever. “They’re so annoying.”

“I think they’ve just forgotten how hard it is to be a teenager. In their minds it was awesome because everything always seems awesome looking back, but it wasn’t then and it isn’t now.”

“And they didn’t even have to deal with vampires. Do you think… do you think they used to be people, like us?” It was a question that had been lingering at the back of my mind since I’d seen the glimmer of empathy in the eyes of drinker Maximus had killed. I had meant to ask him, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready for the answer. Not the real one, anyways.

“Maybe,” Travis said after a long pause, although he didn’t sound very convinced. “I mean, a long time ago or something. People don’t do this to other people, Lola.”

“People kill each other all the time,” I argued.

“Not like this.”

“No.” I closed my eyes and saw the woman covered in blood slumped against her gate. The man lying out across the hood of his truck with glass sticking out of his face. The child facedown on the sidewalk. The guy with his fingers chewed off at the knuckles. “Not like this.”