Page 74 of Envious Of Fire
Then, a distant hiss of words: “What the fuck, Drake?”
Kyle turns toward the sound, hurries across the grass, stops at the front of the building. Lazarus stands there, jaw clenched, as he towers over a young human male who looks less terrified of Lazarus and more entirely amused by his presence. Blond hair tinged with pink highlights, like a half-assed dye job that has faded over weeks, uneven, short in places, messy in others, buzzed up the sides, yet with some bangs tucked behind the ear. Slender build, head cocked, mellow eyes lined with dark black eyeliner and a stud piercing over one eyebrow. He leans against the doorframe to the dormitory building with his arms crossed wearing a denim jacket, the collar popped over the back of his neck, with several colorful patches spread across the shoulders and back, as well as a prominent purple skull and crossbones on the chest. His toned legs fill out a mismatched pair of distressed denim jeans, his look completed with a set of high-top sneakers, shoelaces undone. Kyle’s first impression of Drake is that he’s never seen anyone like him before—a total one-of-a-kind.
Drake’s playful eyes flick to Kyle at once. “Laz, you made a new friend?” He nods approvingly. “Honestly didn’t think you were still capable. Not a bad one, either. Cute face.”
“It’s nearly morning,” clips Lazarus like a scolding father.
“What’s your name?” Drake saunters over to Kyle, much to Lazarus’s chagrin. “I’m Drake. Real name, not a stage name. People always think I’m in a band or something.”
“Everyone is waiting,” states Lazarus from the door. “You were supposed to have returned with dinner hours ago.”
“I guess I spent too much time chatting with our dinner,” says Drake, his eyes still on Kyle, taking him in. His smile gives an impression of both sweetness and cunning, lips curled at one corner, even when straight-faced, like he’s always hiding some inner joke. “They’re all liberal arts majors, and boy, can those freaksparty. Expected them to pass out hours ago after we gothome from the bar, but then one of them slips amolly…”
Lazarus is not impressed. “If we don’t head back now—”
“I’m not that big a fan of casual drug use per se, but when a hot college boy kisses you and tongues a tiny colorful pill past your lips and you find yourself halfway to paradise …” Drake lets out a giggly sigh, shakes his head, runs a hand through his hair. Then he winks. “Ever been halfway to paradise, doll?”
“His name’s Kyle,” says Lazarus, “and I didn’t bring him here to be flirted with. I brought him here to—”
“—teach him our ways?” finishes Drake, then leans toward Kyle, voice lowered, lips curled cutely. “Is it working? Are you, like, totally drinking the vampire Kool-Aid?”
The next instant, Drake is slammed against the wall, with a maddened Lazarus upon him, fingers digging into his denim jacket. “I will ask one more time. Is our dinner secured? Or do I have to again return home empty-handed because my brother can’t do hisonefucking job?”
Drake, entirely unfazed by the show of aggression, turns his bored gaze back onto Kyle. “Has Laz been treating you better than he treats me?”
Kyle blinks, peering back and forth between them in shock. “You two are brothers? Like,actualbrothers?”
“Can you not tell?” asks Drake with humor. “Practically mirror images … except for his generallyhorrifyingappearance. He’s the total life of the party every Halloween.” Lazarus grips his jacket tighter. Drake frowns. “Hey, hey, I got this at a thrift store in town, it’s a one-of-a-kind, watch it!”
Lazarus nearly growls. “Dinner, Drake. Where is dinner?”
“I think you and your felloworgyentouragecan skip a night or two, can’t you? I’m lucky to drink a single person’s worth of blood a week, if that, and I look fine. About the same as your new friend here, judging by his humanlike appearance. By the way,” he asks as he glances at Kyle again, “are you single?”
Lazarus’s fury grows as he lifts Drake off the ground, still pressed to the wall, like it is now he who weighs nothing at all. “Go back inside now,” demands Lazarus, “and handle your four newliberal artsfriends before that sun rises.”
“That’s so rude. Don’t you want to get to know them first? One’s Maya Patel and she’s—get this—a cultural anthropology major who is a competitive gamer.” Lazarus grips him tighter, growling. “Then there’s Alex Nguyen, a philosophy and ethics major who was just telling me at the bar earlier how his shelves are filled with works by Camus, Kant, and Nietzsche …”
“And my mouth is about to be filled with its blood,” snaps Lazarus, baring his fangs—a sight that even causes Kyle to step back, “regardless of its fucking major or its fucking name.”
“Federico studies linguistics,” Drake carries on underneath Lazarus’s threat, “which you can greatly benefit from to expand your vocabulary beyond words like ‘fucking’ this and ‘fucking’ that. Also, he’s shockingly well-endowed for a guy with braces and no social game. He let me cop a feel. I did ask first.”
Lazarus drops his brother at once and steps back, changing his tack. “Just get the blood,” he states as Drake smoothes out his clothes, “and we can make it back before sunrise.”
“But you could use a tan,” says Drake. His brother doesn’t indulge him with a response. After one last sigh and a glance at Kyle, Drake finally gives in. “So how about it, hot stuff? Wanna come inside for a quick phlebotomy study sesh?”
Kyle dreads learning what such a “study sesh” entails.
But after Drake turns to head back inside, Lazarus gestures at Kyle to follow him, then heads off himself, perhaps to hide his inhuman appearance among the trees again. Kyle thrusts his hands into his pockets and follows Drake into the building. He passes through a lobby, into a smaller lounge, then down a long and brightly-lit hallway to a dorm room with its door propped open. It’s inside that Kyle places names to faces—Alex, Maya,Federico, and a fourth whose name wasn’t shared. All four have since passed out, two of them on a bed, one on the floor next to them, and the fourth halfway to the closet, body lying akimbo on the rough, unpleasant carpet.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter what their names and majors are. To Lazarus and the others at the Devil’s Mouth, these are just food, these are just blood, these are justits.
“Which one should I do first?” asks Drake. “Any will do.”
Kyle glances at him. “What?”
“We’ll start with Federico.” He steps over Maya, crouches down in front of the one Kyle figures is the linguistics major, lets out a weary sigh. Then he fetches a backpack from nearby, presumably his own, and peels it open. But it isn’t schoolbooks he pulls out—it’s a bunch of medical supplies, including tubes, needles, and rubber gloves, a set of which he calmly puts on. “On a normal night, I’d bring these four lucky blood donors with me so they can be fed on directly by my thirsty aunts and uncles, then returned back here long before they wake. No, the folk you likely met back in our cozy cave arenotmy actual aunts and uncles, I’m just being sentimental.” Drake pushes up one of the sleeves of Federico’s shirt, fastens a rubbery strap around the student’s upper arm forming a tourniquet. “But seeing as we’reoutof night, I gotta do it another way: extracting their alcohol-filled blood and bringing it back with me like it was my plan all along. Call me Nurse Drake. Just kidding, don’t.” He produces a double-ended needle, jabs one end into the rubber stopper of a collection tube, gently taps on the student’s arm to find the vein. “Not my aunts’ and uncles’ preferred method to feast, since most are hundreds of years old and used to the old way: straight from the jugular and sucking out more than a fair share, then disposing of the body. But I find my methods to be humane. Also, no one dies. That’s a plus.” He rubs an alcohol swab over the vein, then inserts the needle with a sigh, rolls his eyes over toKyle. “Whenever I do it this way, they say I’m ‘bringing home the special red wine’, like I’m a delivery bartender, it’s a whole thing, a whole shtick.”
Drake fills one vial, replaces it with another, continues to draw blood. Each filled vial goes into a small cooler by his side, nestled into his backpack. Kyle watches, absentminded. “I’m a bartender,” he murmurs.
