Page 179 of Envious Of Fire
Then the vampire lifts his foot, places it on Kyle’s chest, gives a delicate shove that might be described as gentle.
Kyle flies back as if he was just rammed by a rhinoceros.
Out of breath, Kyle tries picking himself up, fails, drops back to the floor. “Don’t you have …” Kyle can barely hear himself, his words swallowed in the screaming turmoil of sand. “Don’t you have someoneyoulove? A family? Anyone?”
La-La’s foot returns to Kyle’s chest, but only the tips of his toes, pinning him almost daintily to the floor. “Everyone I have ever loved,” he says through his incessant giggles, still grinning, lips never quite closing between his words, his sword still held straight up into the air, “I have killed by my own hands. It is so, so exciting to me. The betrayal on their faces. Tears. All of the delicious begging. To feel the pain they feel in their hearts. To live it, one agonizing moment at a time … I hurt as they hurt. I feel it, too … and I crave more … the sadness, the regret, I love how it tickles. And oh, the despair … I taste their despair in the same way I taste their blood. Would you like to try it?”
Kyle can’t shake La-La’s foot off of his chest, even while he grips it. “Get off of me!”
“Someone you love is here …” sings La-La playfully.
Kyle’s heart thrashes wildly as he fights to get out from underneath La-La’s foot. “Please!”
La-La turns it into a little song. “Someone you love … yes, someone you love, love, love … is here, here, here … I will find them, yes, yes, yes, I will find them, too …”
Kyle’s heart pounds with intensifying despair at his words. There is no negotiating with La-La. No reasoning. His mind is so detached from reality, Kyle wonders if the vampire is even aware of what he’s doing, of who he hurts, if he even cares. Like a force of nature itself. Does anyone blame the tornado when it levels a house? Or the hurricane when it drowns a city?
Or a fire when it burns?
“Has anyone ever told you,” comes Raya’s voice, entirely unimpressed, “how desperately you could use a singing lesson?”
Kyle twists his head to discover Raya standing behind him, whose dress has torn in a few places from all the activity, the fabric thrashing in the wind of the storm like crazed tentacles.
La-La peels his eyes from Kyle, appears to delight in seeing Raya. “My sword’s name is Thirst,” he states happily.
Raya yawns.
The reaction only seems to inspire more manic giggling from La-La. Then he grows quiet—deathly quiet. “And do you know what Thirst is made of?”
“What?” asks Raya dryly, bored. “Your baby sister’s teeth? Your mother’s bones? Oh, what a shocker, we’re all so shocked, shocked by your whole shocking act.” She takes a step forward, her sleeves billowing in the wind, flapping everywhere. “If you want to feel true despair, go stand in the desert somewhere and wait for the morning sunrise. You’ll feel all the delicious despair you desire as you turn into cigarette butts in the wind.”
“I just noticed something,” says La-La, tilting his head, all his thrashing white hair twisting in the wind. “You’re missing half of an arm.”
For a flicker of an instant, Raya feels a stab of humility.
Kyle’s Reach feels it, too.
La-La’s grin returns as he leans forward, the tips of his toes digging deeper into Kyle, causing him to grunt in discomfort as the vampire’s face draws closer to Raya. “I want to know how ithappened. Tell me. How you lost it. How you lost a part of you forever. Did you even get to tell it goodbye?”
“Fuck you very much,” says Raya.
“Tell me how deeply it hurts your soul. Tell me how much you miss your arm. Would you like me to take your other one?” La-La’s throat bubbles up with laughter again. “I would like so very much to cut you into many pieces. You are so proud right now. That delicious, breakable pride … It will be so beautiful to watch you shatter before my eyes.”
Raya, for the first time since confronting La-La, feels fear. True fear. Kyle picks it up at once. Raya steps back, shaking.
That single step back causes La-La to cackle with delight.
Kyle has only one weapon left. It’s not the scalpel he still grips in his hand, which would be just as effective as a toothpick against a vampire. It’s a weapon everyone else on the bus has, too, only no one would dare brandish it intentionally.
Kyle lifts the scalpel to his own palm—then slices. His skin is strong. It takes several attempts before at last yielding blood.
La-La’s eyes drop to the bleeding wound at once.
Utterly fascinated.
“I killed my family, too,” hisses Kyle, extending his sliced-open palm as if meaning to give the vampire a high-five. “Taste it. Real despair. It was my fault. I killed them. All of them. My vampire lover and I … We drank my whole family dry.” Tears spill out without meaning to. “I-I’m the reason they’re dead. You can taste all of that. Right here. Take a drink from my body and taste my fucking despair.”
La-La takes hold of Kyle’s wrist with surprising gentleness.
