Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [79]
“Take him,” Joshua whispered.
The vampire turned its eyeless face toward him.
Joshua was smiling. “Take him,” he said again.
“You know I can’t,” it said, rage riding high in its voice. “Why the hell don’t you let me in!”
“That’s not the deal,” he said. “Afterward. Then you can come in. And you can have Tyler.”
He heard the front door open, and the voices moved inside. Mom and Tyler were in the living room, giggling and whispering. Half drunk already.
“He’s all I’ll need,” the vampire said. “Big country boy like that. Do me right up.”
Someone knocked on his bedroom door. His mother’s voice came through. “Josh? Are you on the phone in there? You’re supposed to be asleep!”
“Sorry, Mom,” he said over his shoulder.
He heard Tyler’s muffled voice, and his mother started laughing. “Shh!”
It made Joshua’s stomach turn. When he looked back outside, the vampire had already slid back under the house.
He sighed and leaned his head out, feeling the cool wind on his face. The night was vast above him. He imagined rising into it, through clouds piled like snowdrifts and into a wash of ice-crystal stars, waiting for its boundary but not finding one. Just rising higher and higher into the dark and the cold.
The school day passed in a long, punishing haze. His ability to concentrate was fading steadily. His body felt like it was made of lead. He’d never been so exhausted in his life, but every time he closed his eyes, he was overcome with a manic energy, making him fidget in his chair. It took the whole force of his will not to get up and start pacing the classroom.
A fever simmered in his brain. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead and was astonished by the heat. Sounds splintered in his ear, and the light coming through the windows was sharp edged. His gaze roved over the classroom, over his classmates hunched over their desks or whispering carelessly in the back rows or staring like farm animals into the empty air. He’d never been one of them, and that was okay. It was just how things were. He used to feel smaller than them, less significant, as if he’d been born without some essential gene to make him acceptable to other people.
But now he assessed them anew. They seemed different, suddenly. They looked like victims. Like little pink pigs, waiting for someone to slash their throats and fulfill their potential. He imagined the room bathed in blood, himself striding through it, a raven among the carcasses. Strutting like any carrion king.
He was halfway into the crawl space when nausea overwhelmed him and he dry heaved into the dirt, the muscles in his sides seizing in pain. He curled into a fetal position and pressed his face into the cool earth until it subsided, leaving him gasping in exhaustion. His throat was swollen and dry.
“I can’t sleep,” the vampire said from the shadows.
Joshua blinked and lifted his gaze, still not raising his head from the ground. He didn’t think he could summon the strength for it, even if he’d wanted to.
The vampire was somewhere in the far corner beneath the house, somewhere behind the bars of sunlight slanting through the latticework. “The light moves around too much down here,” it said, apparently oblivious to Joshua’s pain. “I can’t rest. I need to rest.”
Joshua was silent. He didn’t know what he was expected to say.
“Invite me in,” it said. “I can make it dark inside.”
“What’s happening to me?” Joshua asked. He had to force the air out of his lungs to speak. He could barely hear himself.
“You’re changing. You’re almost there.”
“I feel like I’m dying.”
“Heh, that’s funny.”
Joshua turned his face into the soil. He felt a small tickling movement crawling up his pant leg.
“I remember when I died. I was terrified. It’s okay to be scared, Joshua.”
That seemed like a funny thing to say. He blinked, staring into the place where the voice was coming from.
“I was in this barn. I was a hand on this farm that grew sugarcane. Me and a few others slept out there in