Page 71 of Afflicted

“Exactly like that. Except when you wake up, the kick is that you’re immortal and thirsty as fuck for everything you can imagine.” I smile over at her. “Everything. You want to drink and fuck and tear down a wall.”

She smiles shyly. “Well that sounds pretty crazy. You die and then straight away want to do… that?”

“It’s overwhelming, that’s for sure.” I look back out the windshield as we drive past the remnants of another abandoned town, its name long since lost as the sign is faded and cracked.

“Is that how you got big?” She reaches out and runs a hand down my bicep, and my cock fucking twitches again.

I clear my throat. “Yeah. Margot was old, turned during the French Revolution, so she passed those powers on to me. I was pretty scrawny from, well, poor life choices. But I woke up like this.”

“No wonder she wanted to fuck you.”

I nod, laughing. “Well, thanks. She did. For three days.”

“Threedays?” Juliet slumps back against the seat. “Jesus.”

“It was like a fever dream. And then it sort of dawned on me, what it all meant.” The deep feeling of dread sinks into my stomach, even all these years later. Juliet waits patiently for me to go on, gazing over at me as the breeze continues to snatch up strands of her golden hair and fling them about her freckled face. “I lost it. I ran away and hid in my flat for a week. Didn’t see anyone or talk to anybody. It was stupid, Margot knew where I was the whole time.”

“But she gave you space?”

“She did. She understood, I suppose.”

“Did you, I mean, sorry if this is insensitive to ask.” Juliet fidgets with her fingers. “Did you go through withdrawal? From the drugs?”

I exhale heavily, taking a gentle turn in the road as we pass a yellowing patch of forest. “It was odd. When you become a vamp, you sort of withdraw from everything. You get used to not needing food, and as much sleep, even air. I had the desire to shoot up, just to feel human, just to do something that made sense.”

“I guess it didn’t work?”

“Nope.” I gaze over at her, those grey eyes looking at me with softness and understanding. “Eventually I ended up going home to my parents. I wanted to show them I was clean, and that maybe being a vamp was a good thing.”

“How’d that go?”

I swallow hard, my throat feeling tight. “Bad.”

She reaches over and threads her fingers through mine. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.” I gently remove my hand from hers, not because I don’t want to hold it anymore, but because the touch of that warm skin is too much. Feeling her pulse against my fingers - fuck.

“So then what happened?” She asks, wrapping her arms back around her legs.

I shrug, pushing down the visor as we change direction and the sun shines in my face. “I tried to be human. I met a girl, this cute little goth who worked in a record store in London. Vampires were slowly becoming public knowledge in some circles, and she was into it.”

“What was her name?”

“Vivien.”

“And what happened to her?”

I chew on the inside of my cheek for a second. “I killed her.”

Juliet falls into silence, and it takes me a beat to get up the courage to look over at her. Her eyes are a little wide, filled with a mixture of fear and curiosity.

“It was an accident.” The sick feeling of that night washes over me. “We were… we were having sex, and I bit her, just as I finished. That was a mistake.”

“You took too much blood?” Juliet asks in a small voice.

I ripped her fucking throat out. “Something like that.” I can’t tell her the truth. It would horrify her. It still horrifies me, all these years later. There was so much blood… I blink away the image and the terror. “After that, I had to admit to myself that things weren’t going to go back to the way they were. I wasn’t the same person anymore. That life was over. So I went back to Margot.”

We lapse into silence for a while, both caught up in our own thoughts. I think back on that day, when I went back to her. Her face when I walked in, the utter joy, love and concern in her eyes. She’d run me a bath, washed my hair, and held me as I mourned my old life.

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