Mercer closed his eyes and prayed:let this not be a trap. He had been the one to propose it, he knew, but he also didn’t put it past William to twist the situation to his own benefit. What other choice did he have, though? He’d flipped through the news in between drafting his first email, just to be sure of himself.
The cycle alternated between the current war across the seas—the newest one, anyway—and whispers of a press release coming from Vitalis-Barron, alongside statements from Wesley Smith-Garcia’s lawyer—some woman named after a Greek hero, though Mercer could never remember which one—and the drabble of endless everyday life: gun violence and police violence. It hadn’t taken him long to find an article about a detective in Las Vegas who’d used holy silver to get a confession out of a vampire she’d arrested. The woman received a week of suspension; a week during which the vampire had died in a holding cell of causes reported to have nothing to do with the police who held the keys to his room.
The Lydia-sized child inside Mercer wanted more than anything to find someone to take over this situation and save the day, but if there were going to be heroes here, they would have to be himself—himself and Rahil, with the ghost of Leah’s genius guiding the vampire’s hands.
He forced his feet under him, his phone into his pocket, and his lungs to expand, then contract, expand, then contract. There was one more hurdle to climb before the Everest he’d be summiting at 8:30 tonight, this one a little bundle of sass with a beanie and probably a fresh bag of Cheetos. He paused in front of her door, just listening for a moment to her muffled motions, the occasional line from whatever teenage thriller-romance she was into and the grumbles of her protesting the character’s utterly baffling choices. Maybe someday she’d come back to watching quirky reality dating shows with him.
Or maybe, he’d ask if he could join in on her shows.
Maybe then, she’d even say yes.
Mercer closed his eyes, preparing himself for the worst. “Hey, Puck, can we talk?”
17
RAHIL
“Well, fuck.”
“Not again!”
Sheanna and Avery shouted in unison from opposite sides of the house as the lights all flickered off at once. Downstairs, Tim cursed.
It figured that the only functional part of the entire building would fail. Rahil rolled off his mattress with a grunt and trudged his way down the hall.
His usual fatigue was doubled by his lack of a recent blood meal, but he hadn’t felt up for asking his housemates for yet another feeding, especially when the thought of sinking his fangs into their skin made him yearn for Mercer instead. He was regretting letting his thirst grow like this now, though, the stairs creaking under his feet as he held onto the railing.
“Who forgot to pay?” he shouted, receiving two instantaneous responses of “Wasn’t me!” and Sheanna’s muffled groan.
“It was my turn? Fucking hell. I’m an ass. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
Rahil made a noncommittal sound. It wasn’t the first time, and if she stayed for another year, he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. “Fridge?” he called. There was hardly anything in ittospoil, but just in case.
“Already on it,” Avery replied through a mouthful of something.
Rahil grunted again. He fumbled through the closet for candles, his monochromatic night vision doing nothing for his tired limbs and groggy mind. He hadn’t even been playing the loneliest whale’s song, but he found it calling in his mind all the same. The lighter wouldn’t start. He flipped through two empty matchboxes—why were they even in there still?—before finding a half-full one.
“I’m going to the café,” Tim called.
Avery jogged down the hall after him. “Oh, can you drive me?”
“Me too,” Sheanna added. She popped her head around the corner. “Do you want to come?”
“Go on.” Rahil sighed, waving her off.
He felt too old for this. Too old, too worn, too many other things crowding for his attention. For a while, he’d assumed there was a point where things got easier—kids grew up, retirement money came in, life was more reward than burden—but that was the compensation for people who weren’t him. People with living families and rounded teeth, who knew how to fix their sons’ worst days and pull their spouses out of addictive spirals. People who did right by the ones they loved.
Instead, he was doing mediocre by the ones he’d kept at an arm’s length and wishing he could sleep through it all.
Rahil lit one of the candles.
It was useless to him now that he was alone, transforming his perfectly good night vision into an awkward mix of drained colors and shadowed edges, but the dancing flame gave him something to focus on. He cradled the little light between his palms. It too could so easily transition from a life-giving source to a deadly terror.
Suddenly, Rahil couldn’t stand to be there anymore, in the empty, crumbling space with only that tiny light as his companion. He put on his shoes and slipped out the backdoor, past the long, shallow pit dug for a future flowerbed and down his rock-lined path, holding his palm over the candlelight as it wavered. His legs kept moving, carrying him along a familiar—if infrequent—path, through the little forest that surrounded his house, down the adjacent street, another forested path, then a rabbit trail behind the back fence of a large house, a left and then another right, and up and over the wrought-iron fence.
He landed like a ghost between the graves. His candle flickered out.
Rahil’s vision quickly adjusted to the darkness, the outlines of modern headstones popping in monochromes, but he didn’t need sight to know where he had to go. He could feel their resting places like they were engraved into his heart, one searing coordinate after the other: Jonah’s headstone weathered on one side where Shefali would lay her head on it, plucking apart jasmine flower petals as she tearfully told him how his family was doing, and Shefali’s tall, proud gravemarker with her favorite Mary Oliver poem carved in tiny letters, and Matt’s, so fresh that it still felt like a foreign object, even if Rahil had, in many ways, lost his younger son years before his actual death.
