The Thirst Within (12 page)

I knew it. It was too good to be true.

I don’t want to believe my eyes, but that’s
Thierry with his arms wrapped around a dude. It could’ve been a guy or girl—it
doesn’t matter to me his choice of betrayal. What matters is, I can’t be with
him if he’s already with someone else. And this is pretty intimate as embraces
go. My blood runs cold and I want to go back down to cry. But I can’t move.

As I keep watching, I notice there’s something
odd about the embrace. I can see Thierry’s head moving slightly over the man’s
neck, but the man is not moving. He’s completely limp. What the…?

I haven’t made a noise, but in a flash Thierry
lifts his head off the man’s neck and looks directly at me.

And at first I think it’s some joke.

His face is flushed beautifully, that I can
somehow see plainly in the low light. But what I don’t understand is that it
looks like he’s wearing bright red lipstick on his upper lip.

Then I see the man’s neck where Thierry’s lips
were, and I see it’s covered in blood. Like an open wound.

And I recognize the source of the redness on
Thierry’s lips.

My mouth opens but I don’t make a sound. My
eyes are locked with Thierry’s and for a moment nothing happens as we each
process the scene before us. We are both frozen. He looks shocked that I’m
here. I’m shocked at the whole spectacle. But most specifically, at the blood
on Thierry’s lips.

I can’t move because I suddenly understand.

That he’s a…. That he’s a what?

Vampire
.

My brain provides the name right away. Thierry
is a
vampire
. Vampires are real, and Thierry is one. Holy shit.
Thierry
is a vampire
.

It becomes truer and truer as I repeat it in my
mind.

He straightens up, slowly, and I know he’s
afraid. I’m the one who should be afraid, because Thierry is not twenty feet
away from me, and he’s drinking another man’s blood.

He slowly lets the man drop to the floor, never
turning his eyes away from me. The man’s arms fall off to the side lifelessly.
I look at them, and I then can’t look away. I notice what looks like a trap
door on the roof behind him. It’s just an access door leading somewhere below.
I force myself to look anywhere but up. I can’t look at Thierry again. I’m
finally afraid, but I’m not afraid for my life. I’m afraid of his caution.

I’m afraid he’ll shun me, and keep me away.
Because I found out his secret. Because he may think I’m afraid of what he is.

“Tori,” he says softly. I look up at him, and
notice his lips are no longer red. They are flushed with color but there’s no
blood on them anymore. He must’ve wiped them clean.

I can’t answer, but I take a step towards him.
He immediately steps over the man on the floor and puts his arms slightly out to
his sides as if to block me from seeing the body.

The body? No. The man isn’t dead. He’s probably
alive…. I have no grounds to lean one way or the other, except that I
want
to believe he’s alive. That Thierry was just taking a little bit.

Was he?

“Is he alive?” Is the first thing I say, and my
voice sounds weak and unused. I clear my throat, and take a few more steps
towards him.

“Tori,” Thierry repeats, and he’s pleading with
his voice for me to stop. He hasn’t moved; only one of his arms moved forward,
to keep me away, while the other one remains to the side sort of shielding the
guy.

“Thierry, it’s okay,” I say, and now I put my
own arms up in a sign of acceptance, to keep him from bolting. “I’m just
curious. It’s okay if he isn’t.” And abruptly, I believe it. I don’t care if
the guy is dead.

“Tori, stop. Stop, please.”

“No, it’s okay,” I insist. I don’t stop, and
I’m now so close to him I can almost see the guy’s face behind him.

I feel a pressure hit me, and I’m grabbed and
transported backwards and down the stairs, and around the closet. I’m moving
faster than I’ve ever had in my life, and it’s a little nauseating. I don’t
even see the bathroom, but I’m assuming I went through it because when I stop,
I’m lying on a bed—Thierry’s, presumably—staring at the ceiling, and at
Thierry’s face off to the side. He’s standing next to the bed.

My heart is beating fast from the shock of the
ride, but I’m otherwise calm.

“I’m sorry about that,” Thierry says, but I
can’t tell if he’s talking about the inhumanely fast trip downstairs against my
will, or the maybe-dead guy.

I raise a hand to touch his face, but he recoils
back. I frown and move to sit up.

“Whoa,” I say. My head swims. I’m instantly
steadied by his arms on my shoulders.

“Tori, please, you have to stop. Let me explain.
You don’t know what’s going on.”

“You’re a vampire,” I say, and my voice sounds
tiny and disbelieving. I don’t know why, because I really do believe it. I
guess it just sounds bizarre saying it out loud.

“I’m….” His eyes close, and he hangs his head
as if debating to tell me or not.

I don’t say anything, but wait for him to tell
me.

His eyes open again, and they are unhappy, but
determined. “I’m what you’d call a vampire, yes.” His voice is clear, his words
deliberate.

“And you drink human blood.”

“Yes,” he admits.

“That guy upstairs,” I begin. “He had it
coming, didn’t he?”

“Tori, can we not talk about this now?”

“No, Thierry, I want to. Last week you said
you’d explain. I’ve been waiting for so long to hear the truth. And it doesn’t
scare me.” I edge closer to him, and I put my hands on his cheeks.

He lets me, and slowly places his own hands
over mine. “You’ve been waiting for a week, Tori. A
week
. That’s not
‘for so long.’”

I’m not sure what he means, but likely it’s a
vampire thing. He’s probably immortal and a week means nothing to him. “Hey,
I’m the human here,” I say. “A week is a long time.”

“Tori,” he says, clearly at a loss of what to
do.

He removes my hands from his face, and moves
away from me. He paces up and down his room.

“So,” I insist, “he deserved it, didn’t he?”
Thierry’s a nice guy. He wouldn’t kill anyone just like that. This guy was
probably a criminal.

“He….” He looks up as if he could look through
the ceiling. His gaze hardens. “He did.”

“And he’s dead.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Can you drink from dead people?”

He flinches somewhat at my direct questioning,
but sighs wearily. “I drink… fresh blood. Like you eat fresh bread. But you
could eat stale bread if you had nothing else and were really hungry.”

“Do you get hungry or thirsty?”

At this he laughs shortly, and stops pacing for
a second. “I say hungry. To me it feels like I’m empty, and I feel it
everywhere in my body. Other people say thirsty, because they feel more like a
burning in their throats.”

“By other people you mean other vampires,” I
say.

“Yes.”

“Like Corben?”

“
Tori
,” he complains. He’s gotten good
at using my name to complain.

“What? He’s a vampire too, isn’t he? And he’s probably
the one that made you.”

He looks at me and narrows his eyes, like he’s
trying to read my mind.
Can
he read my mind?

“Can you read minds?” I ask abruptly.

He exhales in defeat. That lines up my next
question, does he breathe?

“No everyone’s, but yes, plenty of people’s,”
he answers. “Not yours. I wish I could. What made you think that Corben is my
maker?”

I smile.
Maker
. He’s using vampire lingo
with me. “Oh, c’mon. You act so weird around him. Like you respect him more
than you would a little brother. That’s clear as day.”

He’s speechless for a moment. Then he does a
little shake of his head.

“The person upstairs. I have to get rid of
him,” he says, choosing to ignore my Corben comment.

“How? What do you normally do?”

“Not tonight, Tori,” he warns me. His tone is
getting more and more serious. “I may tell you some other day. But first I have
to call Corben.”

I immediately become nervous. “Call Corben?
Why?”

“Well, as you so cleverly guessed, he
is
my maker. I’ll have to tell him that you… that you know. And then I have to
deal with the guy upstairs. Can you please stay here for twenty minutes?
Please?”

“If you kiss me,” I say bravely. Bravely not
for facing a vampire, but for facing rejection. I feel like he doesn’t
want
to kiss me. Like something’s changed between us.

He just looks at me.

“You’ve kissed me before,” I remind him.

“Tori, it’s not safe,” he says.

“What do you mean, it’s not safe? If it’s
dangerous how come you’ve kissed me before?”

“Before, you didn’t know. Now you’re all, ‘
it’s
okay that you’re a vampire
,’” he says, in one of his bad imitations of me.
“So I’m afraid you’ll want to jump on me and, and…. I need a minute. Please? It’s
just so… strange.” He grumbles when I don’t say anything and just sit there. I
think I’m smiling at him. “You’re supposed to run away screaming and praying to
Jesus to save you. I don’t understand you.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh. “Is that what your ex-girlfriends
did?”

“Girlfriends? No. People. Men and women I knew
that eventually found out what I am. Most of them people I interacted with
daily for a few years. Classmates, coworkers. And… well, yeah, there was a
girlfriend.”

Oh. This bothers me a little bit. However, I
try to pretend that it doesn’t. “It never occurred to her that you were
different for a reason?” I ask him, lightly.

“What do you mean? You knew I was different?” he
asks, a little surprised.

“Well, yeah, Thierry. You’re something else. I
knew that when I met you.” It’s true. He was too perfect, and interested in me.
Two concepts that don’t go hand in hand, unless there’s something supernatural
going on.

“But you didn’t know until today?”

“I didn’t know you were a vampire until today,
yes. But regardless, she should’ve known you were different.”

“But I wasn’t. This girl I dated before I changed.
She ran away screaming when I told her. I was a fool…. I thought that she’d be
okay with this kind of life.”

So he hasn’t dated anyone since he was human? Something
about his manner of speaking, or the faraway look in his eyes, suggests to me
that this happened a while ago.
How
long ago? For some reason—actually, for
no reason at all—I assumed he’s only been a vampire for a few years and he’s
really in his twenties. “Um, when did you change?”

He does another one of those exasperated sighs
and I remember I haven’t asked him if he needs to breathe. “About one hundred
and eighty years ago.”

Jesus Christ.
“How old were you?”

“I was twenty-six when I finally turned.”

“Twenty-
six
? Gross!”

“What’s wrong with that? I’m two hundred and
eight years old today. That’s how old I really am.”

“Yeah, but you’re stuck in twenty-six. That’s
so old. That’s nine more than I am.”

“No… I’m
one hundred and ninety-one
more
than you,” he says pointedly.

“I meant the age at which you’re stuck!”

“Look at me, Tori,” he says unnecessarily,
since I’m staring anyway. “You believed me when I told you I was twenty-one. I
just happen to look younger, because the condition makes us firmer, inside and
out. Our skin becomes smoother. And there’s not that much difference between twenty
and twenty-six, once your skin looks younger.”

“But telling me you’re twenty-one…. You lied to
me.”

“No,” he says defiantly. “I told you the age I
tell everyone. That’s what it says in my current driver’s license. When I get a
new one, I usually get it pretending I’m nineteen or twenty, so that I don’t
have to change them as often. I’ll need a new one once I turn thirty. By then,
I look too young.”

“Yeah, I guess you don’t look twenty-six,” I
agree. How he could wait until he’s thirty to change it is beyond me. I guess
plain old denial, denial, denial. “I can’t believe you lied to me.”

“Tori, we don’t go around saying we’re
vampires!”

“Not that! I mean about your age. Twenty-one.
Yeah right.” Of all the things that can bother me, this is the one that stings.

“Are you okay?” he asks, sounding concerned.

“Actually, I don’t feel so well.”

He places a hand over my forehead.

“Your temperature’s fine; just a little cold. Come
here,” he says, and with that he scoops me up tenderly and takes me to his
bathroom. While he holds me up with one arm he fumbles with the bathtub faucet
with the other. I hear water running.

“Do you even use the bathroom?” I ask him.

“You’re delirious,” he says, and he laughs
quietly.

“I’m serious,” I say, but now I notice that I
do sound weird. Like I’m in shock, and I didn’t even know I was.

“Yes, Tori, I use the restroom. I wash my hands
and brush my teeth. I shower. When I’m feeling spontaneous I take a bubble
bath. And I use the toilet.”

“What? The toilet?” I say, and start laughing.
“Do you eat?”

“Not food. I consume blood. Where do you think
it goes?”

“Absorbed in your… body?”

“I digest the plasma. And like every other
living thing in the planet, I get rid of what’s already been processed.”

Ew. I frown a little. “But how come? If you live
off just blood? No solids?”

“All that babies drink is milk, and they still go,
don’t they?”

“Gross!”

“I’m going to set you down, now, Tori.”

“Okay,” I say. He gingerly sets me down on my
feet, but keeps his arms on my hips, holding me so that I don’t fall. I
feel
like I would fall if he lets me go.

“You’re going to take a bath while I take care
of my friend upstairs.”

“You already took care of him,” I say, and I slide
the edge of my flat palm over my neck in a sign of slicing someone’s throat. Or
decapitation.

“I really don’t know what to do with you,” he
says, shaking his head. He guides me to the toilet and sets me on top of the
closed lid. “Sit here while I prepare your bath.”

“Okay,” I say obediently. “Do you breathe?”

He tests the water temperature in the tub, and
then he’s in and out of the linen-slash-secret door closet, carrying some sort
of pearly beads. He throws these in the tub as it fills up. The bathroom is
imbued with a sweet floral scent, like roses and something else. Lavender and
mint, perhaps.

He takes a deep breath. “I do breathe. I’m not
sure how much oxygen I need, because I can hold my breath for a long, long
time. But I breathe normally, I mean like you do, because I do use my sense of
smell. Now please get undressed and get in the bathtub.” He reaches in and
shuts off the water.

“Undressed?” I’m bashful at last. He refuses to
kiss me and yet he wants me to undress?

“
After
I leave, Tori. I’ll be nearby,
and I’ll be listening in. I didn’t fill the water all the way up, so that you
don’t pass out and drown on me.”

“Okay, Thierry.”

“Promise me you won’t fill it up.”

“I promise.” I lift my hand solemnly over my
heart.

“Thanks,” he says as he winks. He moves as if
to leave, but stops. “Tori?”