Page 177 of Envious Of Fire
Elias, never having laid eyes upon this vampire before, lets out a holler of surprise. “What the fuck!” Then he starts to swing the wheel left to right in zigzags down the highway. “Off of the glass! Off, you fucker!”
Kyle knows better. La-La can’t just be shaken off the bus. He clings to it with ease, laughing. This is a game to him. A tornado would be a better match, if even that.
Kyle slides his brother’s head from his lap to the seat as he stands up. It’s then he realizes La-La is only looking at him, no one else. The twisted grin persists, dark raspberry eyes fixated on Kyle with a deep and unshakable obsession.
Through the glass, in a voice carried away by the wind and the roar of the engine, La-La says, “I once took seventeen days to drink a boy dry. I like my screaming snacks to last.”
Kyle hears every word.
So does Raya. “Who is this buffoon?” she asks indignantly. “Do you know this individual, Kyle?”
“La-La,” Kyle answers with no further explanation.
The very next instant, La-La takes flight, vanishing from the windshield. Kyle and Raya turn, eyes on the windows. The humans had also witnessed La-La’s departure, jumping out of their seats and looking warily in every direction for his return.
When there’s a slam from the side, everyone shouts, turns, and it’s at the sliding handicap door that La-La now clings outside with a manic grin and giddy eyes. “The final sip of the boy was the tastiest,” he says, nose pressed to the glass, “when the blood was sweetened with the relief of knowing the end was finally near.”
Raya struts up to the side door. “Are you quite done?” she asks La-La through the glass. “You do realize no one in this bus except for me and Kyle can hear you, right?”
Wildly flying white hair frames La-La’s delicate face as he erupts into hysterical laughter.
Then once again vanishes from sight.
“It’s our exit!” shouts Elias. “We’re almost there!”
Nico comes to the front. “Aren’t we just leading this crazy fucking vampire straight to your home? How’s that helping?”
“A pair of witches I know are conjuring an evil-repelling barrier around the town!” Elias shouts back. “We all should be safe once we’re within it!”
Nico appears unable to process any part of that sentence.
Raya, unusually flustered, is back to pacing the aisle, eyes darting everywhere as she listens for the vampire. “I cannot believe I am saying this, but what I wouldn’t do to have Mance here right now …”
“Do you see that??” shouts 4 from one of the windows.
Her boyfriend, less brave, joins her side. “Are those …?”
“Birds!” shouts Elias from the driver’s seat—and sounding unexpectedly happy about it. “A fuck lot of birds! It has to be a sign of Cade and Layna’s power working! Kyle, look!”
Kyle has seen it firsthand, though he isn’t as confident that it’s a good sign. “Keep your eyes on the road. Anything can still happen.”
“I’m not letting anything happen,” Elias insists, ecstatic. “No, sir. Layna’s crazy army of birds are here to guide us!”
Then all visibility is stolen away from out of nowhere as a raging whirlwind of sand engulfs the bus from front to back in the space of seconds. The bus rumbles and trembles as Elias plunges onward, assaulted by sand that whips by, scratching the windows, scraping over the roof. The humans shout, clinging to the seats and the walls, cowering while the bus continues toshake all over as it battles its way through the storm.
With the blasting sand, birds slam against the windows, the windshield, the roof. They appear and vanish so fast, there’s no telling if these birds are alive or dead, if the sandstorm is made entirely of carcasses or is heralded by the birds themselves. And with the furious storm comes an unfathomable volume of noise, drowning out everything.
Kyle finds Nico standing over the still-incapacitated Kaleb, covering him. Ahead, Elias blindly steers through the madness with no sight of the road, all his previous happiness traded for terror. His speed has dropped dramatically, the debris and sand pulling heavily on the bus.
The noise is so deafening and the storm so thick, Kyle’s senses are rendered useless. He doubts Raya can hear La-La’s movements any better than he can sense them now.
In a window, a flash of La-La’s grin.
The moment Kyle spots it, it’s gone.
Kyle hurries now from window to window, pushing down the panic and bile rising up from his stomach. La-La appears again, and again is gone the moment Kyle spots his face. Then at another window, La-La cackling hysterically, tongue pressed to the sandy glass, and just as quickly, whipped away by the wind, out of sight. Somehow, the vampire’s beauty makes his twisted expressions and behavior all the more disturbing.
Kyle can’t keep up, finding himself standing in the aisle, surrounded by flashes of La-La’s face at any random window, even the back door and the windshield, everywhere in the blink of an eye. He moves too fast.
