Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions

  The rush of the night air through his hair and the glitter of city lights too far below made a dozen remembered human survival instincts get together and carol, Oh my God, oh my God, we are going to dieeeee—

  Then he landed, on one knee with his hand placed out in front of him, like a runner who was about to sprint.

  He was barely on his feet when one of the hotel staff came outside for a cigarette. The guy gave him a critical look, and Christian fiercely resisted the urge to zoom away at vampire speed. Faye would know then, and she would find him. He knew she would find him.

  Instead he tilted his head at the guy and tried to think of the least vampiric possible thing to say.

  He settled for “’Sup?”

  He could practically see the wheels turning in the man’s mind—That looks like and He is staying in—a dozen thoughts, all being steadily turned away by the insistent, prevailing conviction that a vampire would not be caught undead in flip-flops.

  “Hey,” he said eventually, his voice creaking with unease.

  “Nice night,” Christian dared to offer, and then he walked at a steady, human pace, in his flip-flops, around the corner to freedom.

  The house looked just like he remembered it. He would’ve thought it might seem smaller; that was what they said about coming back home and how you never really could. But it was the same size, the crazy paving forming the same pattern as it had when he had wound his way up it every day. All you had to do was follow it home.

  It was when he was home, when he knocked on the door and it was thrown wide, that everything went wrong.

  Rory answered the door. He was much taller than he had been: he was taller than Christian was, now.

  Christian had been expecting a hug—the kind they used to give each other when Rory’s football team won, thumping each other on the back hard and holding on.

  Rory moved awkwardly, clumsily, backward. As if he still wasn’t used to his new height, or he was scared.

  Christian panicked, and tried out his new not-really-a-vampire mantra. “’Sup?”

  “Mum!” Rory shouted, his voice cracking as he did so. “Mum! Christian’s here!”

  And maybe Christian wouldn’t keep insisting that was his name to Faye and the band. Not when he had to hear it spoken like this.

  They let him in, of course. Home was the place where when you came there, they had to let you in.

  That didn’t mean they wanted him there.

  “Sorry,” Mum said as soon as she gave Christian the cup of tea. She’d made it in jerky, slapping movements, like a tea-making robot, and she only seemed to think about what she had done once she had to be still.

  Christian curled his cold fingers around the hot mug anyway. “That’s okay, Mum. Thanks.”

  She hadn’t hugged him either.

  “We thought we’d see you at the concert tomorrow,” Mum told him abruptly. “Rory’s really been looking forward to it.”

  “Right.”

  “Not that it’s not lovely to see you now, Christian!” Mum told him hastily.

  He didn’t like the way his mother said his name any more than he liked the way his brother had said it.

  “Tell me,” his mother continued, fumbling. “Tell me about the boys in your band. I always like to hear stories about your friend Bradley. He’s a caution!” Her cheeks went pink. “Quite a good-looking boy too.”

  “Mum!” Christian exclaimed, scandalized.

  Just the same, he told her about the time girls had literally hacked through the walls of Bradley’s trailer with an ax, and as Mum refilled their cups of tea, she moved jerkily again and put her hot human hand against the angles of Christian’s cheek.

  It felt like she was sorry, then.

  He still didn’t belong there anymore. Rory still did not come down from his room. Nothing was the way it had been before, and it never would be again.

  The next day the band played to a packed house, and Mum and Rory and a bunch of Rory’s friends were in the front row, watching them with shining eyes, glitter and smoke in the air.

  Christian was far enough away then, something to admire and be proud of, but not to take home.

  This might be what Faye had meant. Nobody wanted the vampire for real.

  Someone had invented the myth that vampires had to be invited in, because people wanted vampires to stay out.

  Christian went into his dressing room, and thought, I could just go, now. They were just humans, they didn’t have to be people to him, like Lucille had said.

  He might as well go, because soon enough they would all be dead, but he was going to live forever.

  He went. He went outside, and Faye’s assistants ushered Mum, Rory, and his friends backstage, and he introduced them around. He was careful not to touch Rory, and Rory sent him a grin, shy and pleased and still a little nervous, before resuming his intense conversation with Josh about lighting and acoustics.

  “Chris never told me he had such a—and I use this term advisedly—hot mama,” said Bradley, leering and kissing her hand.

  Christian’s mum looked absolutely delighted. Christian smacked Bradley in the head.

  Later Mum and Rory went home. Christian did not suggest accompanying them. He went back to the hotel with his band-mates, and Josh was a little more friendly to him than usual, as if it was a revelation to him that Christian had a family and might love them—that Christian could still be that much of a person.

  Not enough of a person for his family.

  Just before dawn, there was a knock on his door. Bradley stood on the threshold looking as subdued as he ever was, which for Bradley meant he was wearing very subtle glitter.

  “I wanted to check if you were all right,” he said, and Christian wondered how much Bradley had seen and understood about his mother and Rory.

  He’d never heard Bradley talk about a family of his own.

  “I’m getting by,” Christian told him.

  When Christian’s coffin lurched and hit something, he assumed Bradley had got bored of playing knock-knock jokes and had decided to use Christian’s coffin as an indoor surfboard in some sort of misguided band-bonding exercise.

  He snapped awake and yelled, “Cut it out!”

  Christian eased the coffin lid up with care, in case one of the band was actually stupid enough to be on top of it and, when nobody was, he tossed it aside and sat up.

  Then he looked around at the dim, gray cell. Josh and Bradley were sitting close together, obviously having a heated discussion. Pez was sitting up by the coffin and rubbing his head.

  “Are you hurt?” Christian asked him.

  “Not really,” Pez answered, with a grimace. “Our coffee was drugged. It knocked the other two out, but the guy who came inside the tour bus once they were down had to knock me out.”

  “You didn’t drink the coffee?”

  “No, I drank it,” Pez said. “Found it quite soothing.”

  “You found the knockout drops quite soothing,” Christian repeated.

  “Sort of a mellow buzz,” Pez told him earnestly.

  At that point Bradley turned around and said, “Oh good, Chris, you’re awake. We’ve been kidnapped.”

  “You sound extremely calm about this!” Christian exclaimed. He was not feeling terribly calm about it himself.

  “That’s right. I want everyone to stay calm,” Bradley said. “It’s fine. Someone will just want us to play a song just for them, or hold us for ransom, or want to marry one of us. Or all of us. I don’t know and I don’t judge; it takes all sorts in this beautiful world. Nobody panic.”

  So soothing was Bradley’s voice, despite the completely lunatic content of what he was actually saying, that nobody did panic until several hours later when they all noticed that Josh had scuttled, crablike, while still sitting down, through the gray dust on the floor and into the farthest corner of the room. He sat there, tense and trembling as a child being punished, until the combined weight of all their questioning stares pressed a cry from
him.

  “Have you noticed there’s food for us?”

  “Excellent, Josh, look on the bright side,” Bradley said, with a beam of approval. For once Josh did not smile back.

  “No,” he said, his voice shaky. “Have you noticed there’s food for us, but there’s no food for him?”

  Everyone looked at Christian, and it was as simple as that: the divide between “us” and “him,” so neatly made.

  “We’re trapped in here with a vampire,” Josh said slowly, as if this needed spelling out. “Exactly how long do you think it will take for him to start seeing us as juice boxes?”

  There was a silence. Pez was glancing cagily, back and forth, between Bradley and Christian.

  Eventually, Pez said, “Look, I’m really sorry, but I’ve forgotten: which of you is the vampire again?”

  Josh looked despairing, but it made Bradley laugh, and once Bradley had laughed, apparently he thought he was in control of the universe again.

  “This isn’t a problem,” he declared. “It won’t be long before Faye comes to save us, right? And we all trust Chris.”

  He fixed both Pez and Josh with an imperious stare. Pez looked blank, and Josh’s mouth was a hard line. Christian remembered how Josh and Rory had got along, heads bent together in perfect understanding.

  Josh was never going to trust Christian, or forgive him for being what he was.

  “I wouldn’t,” Christian said quietly. “I would never—”

  “And I’m totally happy to donate a little blood to keep him going,” Bradley said.

  Everyone else in the small cell went still, and that actually made Christian feel a little more kinship with the others. Now the line was not between the humans and the vampire, but between the sane and the crazed.

  Bradley the lunatic rose from his lotus position with all the easy grace of someone who could do seventeen pop-and-locks in a row.

  Christian shot backward with vampire speed, and hit the wall. “No!”

  “Aw, Chris,” Bradley said, and sounded very disappointed in him.

  “I am not going to feed from a human being.”

  “Chris, this is really no time to be a fussy eater,” Bradley told him, and advanced, holding up one arm. But not to protect himself from the vampire, no, that would be too sane for Bradley. “Here comes the vein train,” Bradley coaxed. “Choo-choo!”

  “Bradley, stop it.”

  “I see the problem,” Bradley told him, and nodded. “You’ve never done this before. You have performance anxiety.”

  Christian covered his face and said, “Oh my God, I hate you so much.”

  “But that’s okay, I can help! There’s something you guys don’t know about me,” Bradley said. “After I got bored with my modeling career, and before I joined the band, I dabbled in a little bit of acting.”

  Bradley struck a dramatic pose, sniffing the air, and then drew his own wrist close to his mouth.

  “Ah,” he murmured passionately. To his own wrist. “The blood is the life! The blood is the life!”

  Even Pez was starting to look a little embarrassed by Bradley at this point.

  Christian stood up, not like a dancer who could pop and lock, but like a vampire, like a storm coming in fast and relentless and inescapable. He seized Bradley’s wrist, and slammed it up against the wall.

  “I know you’re trying to help,” he said, fangs bared. “But don’t.”

  He retreated then, back over the invisible line drawn between him and humanity. He sat against the wall and stared, knowing what they saw when they looked back at him: the vampire, alone and hungry, and no way to keep him out.

  He couldn’t continue to watch them. He didn’t want to see their fear, not when he could already hear the pulsing, beckoning beat of their hearts.

  Not when he was too hungry already.

  For the humans, the days and nights bled into one another in that gray cell.

  It was different for him.

  There were no windows there, but Christian could feel the time changing, his body responding to the sun’s coming and going. For the first two days, he put himself in the coffin and closed the lid over his face.

  As the third night drew to a close, he realized he really didn’t have the strength to get back into his coffin. He lay in his corner, in the gray dust, and felt the rise of the sun he could not see affect every molecule of his body. It felt like he was drying out, becoming something so dry that a single spark would set him on fire, turn him into a blaze of hungry, lunging flame, with no purpose but to be quenched or destroy everything in his path.

  He could hear the others talking about him, their voices soft and worried and soothing. Even Josh sounded concerned for him rather than about him, so he knew he must look terrible.

  A fuzzy halo of dreadlocks obscured his vision at one point. He mentally searched for a name, and found it: Pez.

  “Hey,” Pez murmured. “Hey. Look. I’ve already been bitten by one vampire, right? And it wasn’t so bad. Besides, you’re my pal.”

  Christian felt his dry lips split as he spoke. “Get away.”

  He had never been able to imagine it before, biting another person. It had been as alien to him as the thing he’d compared it to as a human, going down into a field and sinking his blunt human teeth into a cow.

  Starvation made even humans wild.

  Real vampires are scary, said Faye’s voice, soft and imaginary in his ear. We don’t want that.

  He could picture doing it now, doing what had always repelled him before. He saw why vampires back in the old days had been thought of as savage beasts, before it was possible to keep the beast fed and trained, make the dangerous stay safe.

  He could almost feel the slide of his teeth against a neck, the breaking skin and the warm sweet flow of blood in his mouth, penetrating every parched cell of him.

  They were just two idiots and a coward who had always hated him.

  Bradley was the stupidest man in the world. He spent all his time learning to pop and lock and bestowing his radiant handsomeness on the world, and he’d taken an actual vampire under his wing despite all of Christian’s efforts not to be so taken. Nobody that stupid deserved to live.

  And Pez let every passing vampire snack on him and forgot sometimes what their job was, but remembered to thank Christian for buying the groceries.

  Then there was Josh, Christian thought. Josh had never liked him, had always feared him. Josh would not even be surprised if Christian attacked him. He had been expecting Christian to act like a monster from the moment they met. Christian had never been able to prove him wrong.

  Maybe it was time to prove him right.

  As if Christian’s thoughts had summoned him, there was Josh, hovering over him. The wire-rimmed glasses Faye had assured him were the height of geek chic gleamed.

  “Chris,” he whispered. “Chris. I can see you’re really trying, and I know—I know drinking from Pez made that girl act awfully weird, and I know you don’t like Bradley. I know you’re the one who keeps spare inhalers for me in the tour bus. If you really have to, if you have to . . . you can.”

  Christian’s ears were filled with the anxious, alluring beat of Josh’s heart.

  He turned his face away, the gray dust bitter between his lips, and waited for Josh to go away.

  But Josh didn’t go away.

  He reached out, as Rory hadn’t, at the door of the place that had once been Christian’s home. Christian felt the inside of Josh’s wrist, skin stretched thin over the vein, brush his mouth.

  Christian reared up, sent Josh flying backward, and was on him before Josh hit the ground.

  He could hear the hiss of breath from everyone in their little cell who could breathe. He could hear the thump of Josh’s heart, clearer than ever, as he drew the collar of Josh’s button-down shirt away from his throat and saw the darker thread of a vein against his pale skin.

  Christian bowed his head to that tracing, like a line on a map leading Christian to life
, and bit.

  Blood filled his mouth and then was gone. He gulped again, heat running down his throat, lacing its way through and through his body. His skin was tingling, waking back up, and all he wanted was more.

  Then he felt Bradley’s hands on his arm, on the back of his neck, tugging gently. Bradley was so warm it burned.

  “Chris,” he whispered. “Oh, Christian. Come on, please. Let go.”

  That vampire Lucille drank from humans. She couldn’t go a year without killing one.

  Christian swallowed one last hot, sweet mouthful of blood— not enough—and let Bradley pull him back.

  “Get your hands off me,” Christian whispered, “or I’ll kill you.”

  It was strange to say something like that, to be something like this, and to mean every word.

  He retreated from them all, watching them, drawing the line between him and them for their own protection. Bradley looked ready to advance and comfort him at any time. Pez was frowning worriedly. Even Josh was sitting up, glasses askew, and squinting at him in what looked like concern. There were two small holes on his throat, but they were barely bleeding; Christian listened to his heartbeat, and it was strong.

  He’d bitten one of them, and it almost seemed as if they understood.

  But he knew he would need blood again, and he had to protect them from that.

  “Thank you,” he said, and shut his eyes.

  “Maybe they left us down here with Chris on purpose,” Josh whispered, some time later. “Maybe they’re some sort of anti-vampire hate group, and they want us all dead and for Chris to get the blame.”

  “Well, Chris hasn’t hurt us,” Bradley said sharply.

  “I know,” Josh whispered back, to Christian’s faint surprise. “But what will they do to us, when they see he hasn’t?”

  Pez spoke, in an unexpectedly clear voice. “I calculate that our chances of dying are approximately ninety-eight percent,” he said, and then, “What? Sometimes I like to do mathematics in my head for fun. I find statistics fascinating.”

  “No you don’t, you eat dishwasher powder,” Josh said.

  Pez asked, “I can’t have depths?”

  Everyone was lying flat on their backs in the dust, telling secrets. Christian thought vaguely that it was supposed to be a show of solidarity for him.