Page 180 of Envious Of Fire
Lowers his face to it. Inspects closely.
That’s when Kyle feels a chill, from far away.
Icy, desolate, stinging.
A familiar chill that has nothing to do with La-La.
A familiar chill from his Reach.
He listens. The sensation he picks up is painfully cold and sticky, like a warm tongue to a frozen pole. The closer it grows, the farther away Kyle wants to get from it. But unlike all of the other times when he uses his Reach, he isn’t the one doing the reaching. It feels as if the frigid fingers are reaching for him instead, hunting him through the blinding storm.
Then it makes contact.
Kyle loses his breath.
He knows exactly who it is. He knows this terrible feeling. He made the excruciating mistake of Reaching for it once when it was just a shadowy figure in the alleyway behind his bar in Nowhere.
Only this time, Kyle senses that the cold presence isn’t here to threaten him.
It’s here to help.
But how?
That’s when Kyle gazes past La-La’s mesmerized eyes, past his own blood-dripping palm, up to the hole in the sky.
A shape emerges through the screaming sands.
A man, leaping into the bus from the roof.
A man covered completely in blood.
He slams down, shakes the floor as if weighing twice what the bus does, an earthquake from his landing.
La-La spins around, long white hair whipping, as the man’s bloodied arms close around him like a muscular red cage snapping shut, with a barbarous roar that combats the storm.
Rips La-La away like he weighs nothing.
Kyle sits up and watches as the man backs away with La-La trapped in his arms—La-La, who has given in to another bout of hysterical cackling. “I want despair!” he cries through his laughter. “I want to taste it! Feel it! The sadness and the longing! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt true despair? Since I’ve felt anything—” His cackling reaches a new, shrill, blood-freezing height. “—anything at all?”
Through the wildly thrashing curtain of La-La’s long white hair, the man’s bloodied face appears.
And through the curtain of blood, a familiar handsomeness.
Bright, familiar eyes in a sea of red.
Kyle recognizes it.
Recognizes him.
Then the red face is lost again behind La-La’s white hair and the toiling sand as the two plummet backwards, crashing through the back door of the bus.
But La-La flings out a hand, grabs the edge of the door, as if refusing to be finished with Kyle just yet, the vampire’s wild eyes affixed to him—his yearning, murderous, unblinking eyes.
Kyle stares back, shaken by the vampire’s words. Is that the truth? What La-La has wanted all along? Just to feel something? Is that why he craves making people hurt? Because he relishes in feeling anything at all, even pain, even villainy, even hatred?
Those thoughts are, perhaps, what inspire Kyle’s Reach to do something he has never felt it do before.
It reaches toward the vampire not just to read his emotions.
