What Kills Me

  “I can’t believe Kinman would do that,” I said. “But I have to remember that my moral compass doesn’t apply anymore.”

  “I don’t know that he kills people. He might just frequent dens.”

  “What are dens?”

  “They’re like underground clubs for vampires. Humans who want to be fed on visit them.”

  “Really? I thought no one knew about vampires.”

  “There are small groups of humans who worship vampires and who serve vampires in hopes of becoming one.”

  “Vampire groupies,” I said with a sniff. “Must be nice to have food that begs to be eaten.”

  “No one forces them to be there.”

  “So do you go to these clubs?”

  “I have in the past but they’re not really my scene.”

  I was relieved and realized that I had felt jealous. Of strangers throwing themselves at him.

  “They’re mostly run by members of the rebellion,” he said.

  “Did you ever consider joining them? To be with Samira?”

  “I did. For a while I wanted to fight the Monarchy. To punish them for what they did to my family. But I needed to stay with my father.”

  “He wouldn’t have joined?”

  “No. He would never have put himself in direct battle against my brother. And maybe he thought that by making weapons for the Aramatta, he was somehow helping him.”

  “Taren,” I said softly. “That was his name?”

  Lucas stared into the steam swirling from the water and nodded. “He took great pleasure in training with the Aramatta and guarding the elders at court. I wasn’t even surprised when he chose to stay at the castle. But I was happy to leave. I hated being there, at the beck and call of the Monarchy. I hated the rules, the ceremony, the ostentation. But the first years away were hard. Without my siblings and Nuwa.”

  “Are you excited to see her?”

  He furrowed his brow and cocked his head as if confused. “I suppose I am,” he said, sounding surprised. “It’s been a long time.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I haven’t a clue. I’ll know when I say it.”

  We sat this way for a while without speaking. I leaned over, lowering my head until it rested on his shoulder. I felt his cheek against the top of my head and I closed my eyes.

  When we get to Nuwa’s, we can stop running.

  “Zee?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What does Axelia mean?”

  “It means ‘protector of mankind.’ Maybe my parents thought I’d grow up to be Superwoman.”

  “You do have superpowers.”

  “I don’t think this is what they had in mind.”

  A few birds twittered in the distance. He shifted so I sat up. “We should go inside. The sun will be up soon.”

  “You go first. I’m going to watch the sun come up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’ll be there shortly.”

  I patted his back and he pitched forward, his eyes wide, his hand reaching back for the edge of the pool. I gasped and tried to grab his arm but it was too late. He slipped into the pool. By the time he was halfway in, he had given up, sinking under the surface with a small splash. I burst out laughing.

  “Oh my God,” I said, pressing my hand over my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

  Lucas floated to the top. He was not smiling. “You did that on purpose.”

  “I swear I didn’t. Are you okay?” I pressed my lips together to hide my smile.

  “I’m fine,” he grumbled, swimming over to me.

  “I forgot that I have superpowers. I’m sorry. Here,” I said. I stood and reached my hand out to him.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “No, let me help you.”

  He gripped the edge with one hand and reached out with the other. We clasped hands. Then he yanked me toward him.

  “No!” I screamed, flying off my feet. I instinctively went to plug my nose. I hit the hot water, slapping it with my floundering limbs. It felt like I was swimming in bath water.

  “Aaaah,” I cried, coming to the surface. “It’s boiling in here.”

  Lucas’s laugh was low and throaty. It made me laugh as well. He orbited me, treading water as if he was walking. I dipped my head back to get the hair out of my face. “Put a couple of humans in here and you could have soup,” I said. That was a sick joke.

  “The humans like hot tubs,” he said.

  “I wasn’t that kind of girl.”

  “What kind of girl?”

  “The hot tub party girl,” I said. “I was the play Scrabble with my parents girl.”

  “Is that what you did for fun?”

  “Well, I hung out with my best friend, Ryka. And I loved taking photos. On the weekends, I’d spend hours hiking with my camera. My idea of excitement was getting the perfect shot of a ladybug on a leaf. Now I’m getting into car chases and sword fights. And I’m in a hot tub with a boy.”

  “You’re in a hot tub with a vampire,” he said. He hit the surface with the heel of his hand, splashing me in the face.

  “You didn’t just do that,” I said. He dived and I chased him eight feet under, until the bottom was against my belly. He swam with his hands at his sides, twisting and curling his body to avoid me. When we surfaced, I grabbed his shoulders and pushed his head under. We sank down together and bobbed up, laughing. I slung my arm around his shoulders and the side of my body was pressed against his. Beneath his soft skin his muscles were hard, like stone. Our laughter trailed away. I felt his hand on my waist. His legs brushed mine as we treaded water. I searched his face. His expression was undecipherable. He just looked into my eyes, clenched his jaw, and swallowed. I looked at his lips. They gleamed from the water, the steam. I thought he might kiss me. I wanted him to.

  He put his other hand on my waist and gently moved me away. My arm slid off of his cool shoulder into the hot water. I sank, as did my heart; I let my face disappear under, as if to wash away my feelings. I felt confused by the urge to kiss him and embarrassed that he didn’t return the feeling. I blame the hot tub. It makes people wild.

  He swam to the shallow end and leaped out of the water, landing poolside. His black clothing clung to his sinewy body and appeared to be dripping off like oil. I tried not to stare.

  “Hey, hot tub party girl. Don’t stay out too long,” he said. “We’re heading out at nightfall. Into the mountains to find Nuwa.”

  I glanced at the rocky peaks in the distance—a red glow radiated along their edges—and when I looked back, he was gone.

  ***

  “How much further?” I said, clinging to the side of a rock face.

  “Stop asking that,” Lucas said.

  He was several feet above me and pebbles were tumbling down the escarpment, hitting me in the forehead.

  “Grab that hold there and swing up to this one,” he said. “Hurry, but be careful!”

  When he said “into the mountains,” he wasn’t kidding.

  The climbing part wasn’t difficult but the height made me queasy. “Remember, don’t look down,” he said, as if reading my mind.

  We had left the resort at sunset and had spent hours hiking through the mountains. We loped across valleys, plowing through grass that was taller than us. We leaped up boulders as if they were stairs and launched ourselves from cliffs, snagging faraway ledges. I imagined my fingers walking across a map, and that was how fast we must have been traveling and how much land we were covering.

  Lucas helped me onto a landing place. I shifted the rope across my chest that fastened my sword to my back. Having recovered my senses following the hot tub incident, I felt normal around him again. And having him scold me for the entire evening had helped.

  “Hey, what if she doesn’t like me?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “What if Nuwa doesn’t like me?”

  “Why are you talking nonsense?”

  “I know I sound like we’r
e dating and you’re bringing me home to your mother and that’s ridiculous because we’re just friends but I still feel nervous…”

  He put his hand up. “Stop it. She is going to like you. She is going to help us.”

  I nodded.

  “And if she doesn’t like you, she will grow to like you,” he added.

  “That’s comforting.”

  “Hey, I didn’t like you when we met.”

  “That’s fine because I didn’t like you either. I thought you were a jerk.”

  Lucas crouched down and sprang up thirty feet. He landed on the side of the cliff, like a fly landing on a wall, his hands holding the edge of a deep crack in the rock face. By this point, I knew to just follow.

  “That’s fair. I can be a jerk sometimes,” he said, once I landed near his feet.

  “It’s okay. Sometimes it’s warranted.”

  He pushed off, flying horizontally, and grabbed another ledge. I looked over my shoulder. Below us, the clouds looked like a frothy ocean from which the mountaintops emerged. I wished I had a camera.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  “You coming?”

  “Yeah.”

  I jumped up to meet him. I grabbed the ledge but the rock disintegrated like soil in my hands. I gasped. I groped the air and started to fall.

  Chapter 30

  I kicked against the air. I reached for Lucas. He was half turned, looking at me over his shoulder, his nostrils flaring. I thought I heard him say my name but his mouth barely moved.

  I shrieked.

  Lucas’s face came toward me. He snatched my wrist and the two of us came to a jarring halt in mid air. I stared up into his wide eyes and waited. Waited to keep falling or for something I understood to happen.

  “Are…are you flying?” I asked. I tried to still my dangling feet so I would not swing. We seemed to be frozen in the air, mirror images of each other, connected at the hands.

  “No. Vampires can’t fly.”

  “Did you dive off the ledge to grab me?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you doing this?”

  “I’m hanging by my toes,” he said. “Can we have this conversation later?”

  “Yes please.”

  With one yank he pulled me up, throwing me up to catch the ledge. I scrambled up onto the rocky landing and saw that he was indeed hanging off the lip by his toes. It looked as if someone had left their shoes on the edge. Reaching down, I grabbed the waistband of his pants and pulled him up beside me. Lucas fell back against the rock and closed his eyes for a moment. I peered over the edge and shivered. There was no bottom. Just thick white mist, like a bed of fluffy snow.

  “That was insane,” was all I could muster.

  I tried to suck in air to flush away the nausea but it had no effect. I forgot I didn’t breathe.

  “You have to be mindful of your strength,” he said. “You grabbed the rock too hard.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “And thank you.”

  There was no time to recuperate. He rose with a sigh and kept climbing. In a few minutes we had made it to the other side of the mountain and started to descend.

  “Do you ever get tired being a hero?” I asked.

  “Do you ever get tired of being a troublemaker?”

  “What if I had fallen?” I asked.

  “By the time that I climbed down to get you, you would have been fully healed and then we’d just start back up again.”

  “Hmm. So instead of plummeting to my death, I would have just cost us maybe an hour of travel.”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Yes, but you would have been in excruciating pain so I wouldn’t try it.”

  “Oh, that’s not something I want to try. Trust me.”

  The wind brought the scent of trees and flowers. Soon we were wading through bushes, my fingers brushing their soft leaves and folded, sleeping blooms. Lucas abruptly stopped and I walked into his back.

  “What?” I asked.

  “There, look,” he said.

  In the distance, a white pointed roof poked out of the thick mass of green, like the edge of a card in a bouquet. It was the top tier of a temple that seemed to sit on the mountain’s shoulder, and in the heavy haze it would have been easy to miss. I felt a quiver of excitement in my chest and looked at Lucas. His eyes darted across the terrain, marking the quickest path.

  Watching him, I was aware of the wistful smile on my face. The glimmer of anticipation I felt became a dull pain. His impending reunion made me hope for one with my family. I had never been separated from my parents for this long.

  Meanwhile Lucas had not seen Nuwa in hundreds of years.

  “Let’s go,” I said, swallowing the ache.

  He took off first and because he didn’t look back, I tried to concentrate on shadowing him to avoid a misstep. We tore across the woody landscape. Surrounded by trees I lost sight of the temple. He stopped in front of a three-story wall of green. Ropy trees had grown against the barrier, leaning on the wall for support and then spreading their arms to hold hands. I reached out and my hands slipped through the leaves and the vines to the cool stone underneath.

  “The temple is just on the other side of this wall,” Lucas said in a whisper. “I’m going to go over first. Just to make sure it’s safe. Wait for me to call you before you follow.”

  “Be careful.”

  He leaped up into the trees. I searched the lush forest for movement and listened for his voice—or barking Dobermans. I was distracted by a whistling cricket dancing on a nearby tree trunk, its wings vibrating with every chirp.

  “Shh,” I said.

  “Zee,” Lucas hissed.

  Coming.

  I jumped up, breaking a few stems with my head before grabbing a thicker branch and swinging over the wall. On the other side there were more trees and I snapped several branches before hitting the ground.

  “I called you a few times,” he said, pulling a few twigs from my hair.

  “Sorry, there was a…” I didn’t finish.

  I was in awe. The temple stood at the base of a slope, surrounded by a lake and gardens. We descended a path marked by flat, oval stones. The shrubs were shaped into perfect globes, and short trees held clumps of foliage like they were balancing green plates on taut, outstretched fingers. The edge of the lake was lined with boulders, statues of mini temples, and sprigs of white and fuchsia flowers.

  “This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” I mumbled.

  I lingered on a footbridge to watch huge white and orange koi wriggling in the shallow, clear pond beneath us. One stuck his whiskered face out of the water above a cluster of lily pads, and his silver forehead glimmered in the moonlight. I wished my father could see the size of them.

  Lucas passed between two marble lion statues and started up a flight of stone stairs to the entrance of the temple. A light wind disturbed the red cylindrical lanterns hanging along the edge of the roof. I leaned on one of the temple’s stone columns, my fingers touching a carving of a dragon’s head. Lucas paused at the red doors and nodded once at me.

  I wondered what Nuwa would be like after so many years of isolation. Could vampires go insane? Paolo was psychotic, so perhaps yes.

  I thought he would knock but Lucas pulled on the iron handles, opening the doors. I sidled up to him as we walked into a darkened room and were faced with another set of open doors. Through that entranceway we saw a rock garden. Swirly patterns had been raked into the sand, and the stones were smooth and charcoal colored.

  We stepped outside onto the veranda, and on the far side of the garden, beside a tree blooming with white petals, stood a figure. A small woman with a cape of shiny black hair. She had her back to us, her knees bent, her arms extended. A tiny hand emerged from the gaping sleeve of her white, silky shirt as she scooped the air and folded it over. She leaned forward and pressed an imaginary wall with her palms and then, as she leaned back, she turned her head to
us.

  A gentle, knowing smile spread across her beautiful face. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. I felt my shoulders sag and I wasn’t sure why but I wanted to cry.

  At last.

  Chapter 31

  I had pictured Nuwa differently. In my mind, I saw her as Lucas’s mother and imagined her to be older. She had the softest facial features, smooth and rounded like the stones in her garden. She had small black eyes and a heart-shaped, peach-colored mouth. She looked anywhere from sixteen to twenty-nine.

  We walked along the edge of the garden to meet her, careful not to disturb the designs on the ground. I glanced at Lucas’s face. It was rigid. He was impossible to read. We stopped in front of her and he surprised me by dropping down onto one knee, his hand on his chest, his head lowered. I took a step back, unsure if I should kneel.

  Nuwa placed a hand over her heart. Then she knelt, put her hands on either side of his shoulders, and guided him to his feet. I couldn’t see his face. For a moment no one spoke.

  “My child,” she said. Her feminine voice was full of warmth.

  “Obaia,” he said.

  “You’ve returned to me,” she said, still holding his arms. “I’m so pleased to see you.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “It’s all right, my child.”

  “Noel’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “And I wanted to see you.”

  “I always knew that we would be together again.”

  She peered around his shoulder at me. “And you’ve brought home company. Who is this?”

  I bowed my head.

  “Obaia, this is Axelia.”

  When I looked up, she was smiling. Her long hair undulated in the wind around her oval face. “It’s a pleasure. I am Nuwa.”

  “It’s so nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Come sit.”

  She said something in Mandarin and led us onto a terrace with a round stone table and four cylindrical seats. The garden was bordered on three sides by the temple, but at the edge of the terrace the ground dropped away. Beyond, there was nothing but fuzzy green peaks and misty sky.

  We sat down and a vampire in a burgundy tunic shuffled out of a nearby door with a tray. She set the tray down on the table and set out three small teacups and a pot; a jade bangle on her wrist clinked against the porcelain. Without looking at us she poured a stream of blood out into the cups.