Page 46 of Bound in Blood
Somewhere in the next room, the shower cut off. Bare feet hit tile floor, and Mateo relaxed just the tiniest bit.
“It’ll be worth it, though,” he said, looking back up at the ceiling.
He didn’t even have to glance over to know Marco agreed.
* Literally translates to ‘God is a pig/swine’ but used like how an English speaker might say ‘God damn’. Except much more vulgar. Don’t say this in mixed company, kids!
* God help us
Chapter
Sixteen
NEW YORK, NEW YEARS EVE, 1944
MARCO
The rooftop was near silent, save for the distant hum of the city twenty floors below. It was cold, not quite spilling into freezing territory but just towing the line. The air was full of that not-quite-icy mist that accompanied these in-between days, but Marco was relatively unaffected by the weather lately. He wore a coat, but it did little to affect his internal temperature, which remained the same. A reminder that his body no longer followed human rules. No shivers, no breath fogging in the air, no warmth stolen by cold weather.
Next to him, one of the others that had taken he and Mateo in (vampires, they called themselves), Jiro, was going over a grammar book designed for children in red pen. His brows furrowed in concentration as he crossed out another one of Marco’s mistakes.
Speaking English, Marco was learning, was not an easy task. The rules made no sense, and Americans talkedso fast, and they had no shortage of names to call you if you asked them to slow down. The community of vampires he was living with refused to allow him or Mateo to speak Italian to them, even though Isabella, Eleanor, and Alexei all could speak it. Isabella said theonly way to learn a new language was to be submerged in it, and Marco definitely felt ‘submerged.’
Drowningwas probably the better term.
The city was alive below Marco, in a way it only ever could be on New Year’s Eve. New York never really slept, but tonight it thrummed with something else entirely. Excitement, celebration, anticipation. Marco was told that there would be a ball dropped at midnight, something that hadn’t happened in two years because of the war, so the humans were extra excited. How big could this ball be if the entirety of the city was going to see it? He’d wanted to venture out to sate his curiosity, but Isabella had informed him that most people began lining up for it during the day, and Marco, of course, wasn’t able to do that.
He exhaled sharply through his nose as he watched the humans below, their movements blurring together as they all made their way toward Times Square. While a lot of Marco’s humanity was slowly slipping through his fingers as the years passed, he certainly could hold onto their emotions.Jealousy,mostly.
Jiro crossed out and corrected another mistake, his neat and careful handwriting a stark contrast to Marco’s chicken scratch. “You keep sighing.”
Marco barely glanced at him, hypnotized by the crowd below. “No, I don’t.”
Jiro hummed noncommittally, the closest he ever gave to an argument.
Silence stretched between them, interrupted only by the sound of pen on paper and the pedestrians below, but Marco didn’t mind it. Out of the entire group, Jiro was the one Marco liked best. He was quiet, unlike Eleanor and Alexei, who spoke too often and too fast for Marco’s liking. He didn’t force Marco to speak, and he never pushed Marco to do anything he wasn’t ready for. Most of the time, they would sit in companionablesilence, either reading or doing English lessons, like today. Jiro never had a problem slowing down his English so Marco could understand, and never made Marco feel dumb for not picking up on the language as fast as Mateo had.
Mateo, who started with English swearing, and had made his way from there. He’d made fast friends with Alexei, if ‘friend’ was the word you could use. Mostly, they would go to the bar together. He still never smiled, but Eleanor was determined to get at least one out of him. Marco had never felt so distant from his brother in his entire life. Mateo seemed more relaxed, however, so Marco kept his thoughts to himself.
Jiro tapped the pen against the grammar book, drawing Marco’s gaze away from the crowd and his attention out of his thoughts. He handed Marco back the grammar book, which was covered in red ink.
“Better,” he offered. “Try the next page.”
Marco frowned at the page, and the childish drawings that accompanied it. An American ten-year-old had better grammar than he did, and it was embarrassing. Why did English put the nouns after the adjectives? They talked so fast but took forever to get to the point.
“Alwaysbetter.Nevergood,”Marco huffed, shooting Jiro a sideways glance.
Jiro’s mouth twitched in a way that Marco was learning was his way of showing that something had amused him. “When it is good, I’ll tell you.”
Marco scoffed but didn’t argue. He wouldn’t get any pushback, even if he did. Jiro wasn’t one to fight back, not really. Jiro rarely said something definitively unless he knew he was right, and you’d argue yourself exhausted before he’d engage.
So, Marco focused back on his book, flipping to the next page. A short story about a boy and his dog, if the pictures gave any indication.The boy and the dog run. The dog fetches the redball. The quick, brown dog runs with the boy. They ran all day.Simple, but unnatural on his tongue.
He tried his best to work out what the book was asking of him. Find the adjectives, use these words in a sentence, what was happening in the picture, but his eyes kept drifting to the city below. A new year still meant something to these people. Marco wanted to scream.
“You want to go down there,” Jiro said, more observation than question.
Marco didn’t answer right away, butGod, yes,of course he did. He wanted to stand in the crowd without the desire to harm the humans in it. He wanted to feel the warmth of thousands of people pushing around him. He wanted to be a part of something.
