“Caesar, bring her stuff from your house,” Rowan finished.
“I…I shouldn’t be yelling or crying. I need to have better responses to terrible things. I’m sorry.”
Ace kissed my cheek. “It’s okay. We’ve all yelled and cried over this. Trust me on this, I want to scream right now, and I’ve known about all this since I was old enough to know. I can’t believe he dragged you into this. I absolutely should have seen it coming. We all should have, but we didn’t. This is on us.”
Caesar and Tanner both smiled at me—sad attempts, but attempts nonetheless—on their way out the door.
“I know something terrible is happening to you, to all of you. I’m sorry if I just made it all about me.” I shouldn’t have done that. They needed to know. “I’m just so confused and…”
Ace placed his hand on my wrist. “It’s okay. We’re not any worse off than we’ve always been. Your life just went haywire. Forgive us, if you can. Please?”
With that spoken, my sushi date left with the guy I’d slept next to the night before. Griffin, the valedictorian, followed them, and Ace, who had promised me dinner tonight, went last, finally leaving me with the guy who had just watched me get bitten.
All of this was just too much. “Rowan?”
He sank down on the floor. “Come sit with me? I promise I have no descending fangs. Nothing I can do can hurt you, nor would I if I could.”
I did need to sit. I might even fall over if I didn’t. I sank down next to him. “Your room is nice.”
“Thanks. I spend a lot of time in here alone, so…I do tend to try to make it stuff I want to look at.”
I pointed at the picture of Tokyo. “Been there?”
“Oh no. I’ve never been anywhere. This is it for me, and probably all there will be. You see, I was born to be a vampire. Well, sort of. I was born a human. My mother was human when she had me. My father a vampire. The logistics of how that can happen are pretty simple. Vampires can have sex just like humans. Female vampires, of which there are not a lot of them, can’t have kids. But vampires can breed with human females.”
I couldn’t imagine it. “Really? I mean…a non-vampire woman signs up to participate?”
He laughed. “A lot of them, actually. Remember that addiction thing? Yeah… so some women want the bite. They want it bad. Your teacher, Mrs. Reemus, begged for it for years, even though she’s married. Anyway, most of the time, the women who participate in the breeding, they want to be vampires. That’s the deal—they breed, and then they’re made vampires.”
“Oh, I see. That’s why you’re not a vampire now. You have to be made into one.” I’d seen that in movies.
“No, actually. Sorry, it’s a mess of complications.” He sighed. “Female vampires are made. Male vampires are born. Sort of. Or reborn? We’re born human. We grow up. Then we die and are reborn vampires.” He rose. “I just made you sit, but come with me. I’ll show you.”
Show me? I followed him from the room and outside onto his lawn. His backyard was huge, and there were small cabins everywhere leading down a hill past where I could see. The property had to be immense. The afternoon had gotten later, and it was almost that moment when night breathed in to take over. I stopped walking. “Are we safe out here? It’s almost dark.”
“You’re safe. You’re with me—they wouldn’t dare touch me—and Dad marked you today. For now, you can walk safely unmolested by vampires. That might not always be true, but today it is.” He pointed left. “We’re going that way.”
One of the cabins turned out to be our destination. Outside, two very tall men side-eyed us when we approached. They were pale, and I bet if I touched them, they’d be cold. I was new to this, but it was a pretty good guess that they were also vampires.
“Dad said to show her. Let us in.” Rowan wasn’t afraid of the men, and they stood aside to let us inside. I shivered as they stared at me. Did they want to bite me, suck my blood, and addict me to the need for them?
I wasn’t great with bodily fluids to begin with.
This was going to take a lot of getting used to.
“Don’t take too long in there. They’re going to emerge soon. Probably tomorrow or the next day, but if one of them is early, you don’t want to get caught.”
Rowan nodded. “Fair enough.”
Inside the large room, five coffins were laid out around the edges and one in the center. Scratching noises, like there were rats somewhere, caught my ears, and I winced. First blood and saliva, now vermin.
“Inside those coffins are five people who used to be alive. Like me, they were born, and like I will do next week,” he choked on the words, “they were sealed inside of those boxes where they died. They stayed that way for most of this year. Now they have been reborn as vampires. When they manage to break themselves out of the boxes, they will be among the vampires living here. We’ve gotten pretty good at telling when that will happen, so we think tomorrow or soon after. They’ll be new vampires. Crazy. Blood sucking. Rabid. They will have no control and will be locked away in another cabin, where they will be brought people to feed on until they are under control. That takes as long as it takes. Most of their victims will die. Those that don’t might become servants.” He walked over and touched the coffin in the middle. “This will be where mine is put. A position of honor. Because my father is the big dick in charge. Sorry, the leader of our clan.”
My mouth fell open and coldness seeped into my veins. “Rowan.”
“I know. It’s just about as bad as you can picture, right?” He shook his head. “That is what they want us to do graduation night. We requested they wait till August. I mean, how fucking dare we?” He stalked to the wall and pounded his fist against it. “So, for recompense, they took you and… well, you were there. You know what happened.”
I ran over to him, wrapping my arms around his waist. “Rowan, no. You can’t do that. You can’t climb in there, and what? Starve to death?”
“Suffocate.” He shook his head. “Takes about five hours. More, if you panic. They drug us into submission, so there is no panic, but sometimes it can even take just a little bit longer than the five hours.”
I pressed my head into his shoulder, and he hugged me tightly. “We’ll run away. Right now. The six of us. We’ll just go. Fuck graduation. We will run to the sunniest spot on the planet and hide.”
“I am so crazy about you, and you just said the best thing.” He laughed, but it was more of a groan. “There is nowhere we can go where they won’t find us, and then they’ll make it even more painful. We will have shamed them with disgrace. If I thought it would work, I’d run forever.”
I could hardly think. “Rowan, I have so many questions.”
“Let’s walk. More to show you, and like the guard said, we don’t want to be here when they wake up.”
I let him take my arm, and I leaned against him, walking slowly together. “This just can’t be.”
“Yet it is.” He shrugged like it didn’t matter, but boy did it, and I could see how he covered his emotions in that single movement. “What are your questions?”