Blood Like Poison (18 page)

“I’m going,” I said, turning to open the door.

“Wait, Ridley.”

“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.”

His next words caused my hand to still on the knob and my heart to constrict painfully inside my chest. 

“I’m dying, Ridley.”

CHAPTER SIX

“What?”

I could eek out no more than a whisper.  My throat and my lungs failed me.  I thought, I
prayed,
that my ears had failed me, too.  Deceived me.  Although at the moment I was terrified and confused by what I’d seen, it hadn’t seemed to affect the way I felt about Bo deep down.  Apparently, my heart hadn’t gotten the memo.

“I’m dying,” he repeated softly, sadly.

A crushing tide of devastation swept in to wash away the fear and disappointment I’d been feeling.  Its violent current nearly erased all traces of the creature I’d seen only moments before, leaving only traces of a strange sickness that threatened the life of someone I didn’t want to live without.    

Slowly, I turned to face him.  On the one hand, I was hesitant to believe him, especially after having seen him drinking blood. 

“You could be lying,” I pointed out.

“But I’m not.”

“But I wouldn’t know.”

“Yes, you would.”

On the other hand, I wanted desperately for it to be true, if for no other reason than that it meant he wasn’t a monster.  It just wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be
normal,
to fall in love with a monster. 

But if he wasn’t a monster, then that meant he was dying.  As the room slanted this way and that, tilting all around me, I realized that it would be far better to fall in love with a monster than to lose Bo altogether.

Walking to the bed, I perched on the edge, staring down at my hands, wondering what I should do now, what I should say.  Bo took care of that dilemma when he pushed on the screen until it popped out and then crawled carefully through my window. 

He stopped just inside it and leaned up against the frame, sure to maintain a safe distance from me, one that wouldn’t make me feel threatened.  Whether he knew it or not, his thoughtful consideration of my feelings put me at ease more than anything he could ever have said.

“You’re sick?”

I asked the question as gently as I could, as if speaking the words quietly would make them less true, less concrete.

“Can we turn on some music so that your parents won’t hear us talking?”

“Oh,” I said, getting up to dock my iPhone.  “Good idea.”

I selected a random play list of soft music so that it would provide background noise, but not be annoying to us or to my parents.  That would defeat the purpose entirely. 

The first song to play was an old 80’s song,
I Just Died in Your Arms
by The Cutting Crew.  Bo and I looked at each other, he on one side of the room, me on the other.  I thought about changing it, but I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I just restarted the conversation.

“Are you really dying?” 

I pushed decorum and tact aside in favor of getting answers, answers I needed more than I needed food or water.

Bo nodded.  I felt the air close in around me like thick soup—too thick to breathe.

“What is it?  I mean, what’s wrong?”

“Over the last few years, do you remember hearing about some of the victims in Southmoore that they thought were being attacked by animals, but then discovered it was a person doing it?  The Southmoore Slayer?”

A leaden ball of dread began to swell in the pit of my stomach.  “Yeah.”

“Well, that’s what happened to me.”

“You were attacked?”

“Yes.”

“When?  Do you know who did it?”

“It’s been three years now,” Bo said. 

“What happened?”

Moving from his position against the window, Bo walked to my desk and picked up a clear glass heart-shaped paperweight.  He toyed with it, rolling it from one palm to the other and back again.

“My father and I were hunting at the edge of Arlisle Preserve.  We’d just gone into the woods and it was still dark outside.  I heard some noises and thought it might be a deer moving around.”  He paused.  “But it wasn’t.”

“What was it?”

“Who,” he corrected.

“Who was it then?”

Bo looked at me intently for several seconds before turning his attention back to the heart.  He answered me.  “I don’t know, but I’m getting closer to finding out.”

I thought of the previous night, when Trent Long had come to visit.  “Does it have anything to do with Trent Long?”

Bo’s head snapped up.  “How did you know about him?”

“I saw him at your house then I saw his picture on the news.  He’s dead,” I said swallowing.  “Did you have something to do with that?”

“Ridley, you have to understand—”

“Ohmigod, you did!”  I couldn’t help but take a step back, away from him, away from the truth, but the wall was behind me.  There was nowhere to go.

“I think he killed my father,” Bo said, breaking into my rising panic.

“What?”

“Whoever attacked us killed my father and only managed to…
infect
me.”

“Infect you?  Is it-is it contagious?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking.”

I shook my head, trying to focus on one thing at a time.  “But you killed somebody, Bo,” I cried.

“He wasn’t human, Ridley.  None of them are.”

Mouth agape, I stared at Bo in stunned confusion.  “What are you saying?”

“They were—” Bo stopped suddenly, sighing.  Palming the glass heart in one hand, he ran the other through his hair in frustrated indecision.

“They?”  This was getting worse by the second.  My mind scrambled for something safe and sane to latch onto, but it found nothing.

“Ridley, all I’ve done is rid the world of killers, cold-blooded killers.  They were all- they were—”

 He stopped again, as if still considering whether or not he wanted to tell me.  I wondered, doubted, that I really wanted to know what he was going to say, but he’d already begun.  I couldn’t let him change his mind now.

“Were what?”

“Ridley, they were vampires.”  He paused.  “Just like me.”

“They were
what?”

My voice sounded shrill in the confines of my room.

“Vampires,” he repeated quietly.

“You think- you think you’re a vampire?”

Bo nodded.

“Bo, I hate to break it to you, but there are no such things as vampires.”

“That’s what I used to think, too.”

My mouth opened and closed like a fish’s.  I had no idea what to say to that, but I thought it was probably a good time for him to leave.

“Maybe you should go,” I suggested as calmly as I could.  I certainly didn’t want to make a crazy person angry.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, more a statement of fact than an accusation.

Duh
was the first thing that came to mind, but I swallowed it.  “Did you honestly expect me to believe something like that?”

He shrugged.  “I don’t know.  I’ve never told anyone before.”

All things considered, I thought it was pretty remarkable that he managed to make me feel guilty.  But he did exactly that. 

I relaxed a bit against the wall.  My head was pounding, my pulse throbbing dully behind my eyes.  I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. 

Maybe I should try a different tack, let him say what he needed to say and then pray that he left.  I’d always heard that you shouldn’t try to talk an unbalanced person into reality.  I’d heard that you should just go along with their delusions.

“Is that why you were so bloody tonight?  You were- were…”

Bo nodded.  “There was someone I had to take care of.”

“Because this person was a vampire.”

Bo nodded again.

“And you think you’re a vampire.”

Again, a nod.

“Alright, so you say you are, in fact, a vampire.  Let’s just go with that for a minute.  If I’m not mistaken, vampires are dead.  Yet you told me not five minutes ago that you’re dying.  How do you explain that?”

“Well, first of all vampires aren’t technically dead right from the start.  We can ‘die’,” he said, using air quotes.  “But we can only die the same way once.  The venom, it mutates our cells, our DNA, causing us to regenerate very quickly.  When we do, we’re sort of immune to whatever harmed or killed us.  We can no longer be killed that way, not again.”

“So these people that you killed, you think they’ll…come back?”

“Oh, no.  They’re very much dead.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, shaking my head.  “Then how did you kill Trent Long?  I’m confused. ”

“The only way you can actually,
truly
kill a vampire.  I destroyed his heart.”

“Well, if that’s the case then what do you mean when you say you’re dying?”

Bo returned his attention to the heart in his hand.  He leaned back against the desk and held it up to the moonlight pouring through the window, peering through the thick bubbles of heart-shaped glass.  He didn’t speak until he lowered it.

“I know I’m dying because I’m killing myself.”

My heart lurched in my chest.  I wasn’t expecting that.

“What?  Why?”

“The very last blood that pours from a vampire’s heart contains memories of his life, his knowledge, his experiences.  But it’s toxic.  Very toxic.  These men that I hunt, one of them will lead me to the person behind my father’s murder, but to learn that, I have to drain them before I kill them.”

Out of all that, out of all the questions that his explanation generated, the only thing I could think of was that he was killing himself.  For a moment, I was drawn into his world of make believe.

“So you’re killing yourself to learn who killed your father?”

“Yes.”

“Your life is worth so little to you that you’d just throw it away for revenge?”  That hurt more than I was ready to acknowledge.

Bo looked up at me, his eyes meeting mine in the low light of the room.  As they did the first time I saw him, they burned into me, searing me all the way to my soul.

“I had nothing to live for until I met you.”