Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [97]
They walked a few blocks in silence before he lit a joint. By the look of the darkened houses they’d passed, it was late enough that no one was going to be sitting on their stoop or out with kids. Even if they did look, they wouldn’t know for sure if it was a cigarette—and since Gregory didn’t often smoke, there was no telltale passing it back and forth to clue anyone in.
“Headaches that make a person miss hours can’t be”—she inhaled, pulling the lovely numbing smoke into her throat and lungs—“normal. That doctor”—she exhaled—“is a joke.”
Gregory slid his arm around her low back. “Hours?”
She nodded. Her doctor had given her a suspicious look and asked about drugs when she’d mentioned that she felt like she was missing time, but then she could honestly say that she hadn’t taken drugs. The drugs came after the doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong. She tried the over-the-counter stuff, cutting out soda, eating different foods. The headaches and the bruises weren’t changed at all. Neither is the time thing.
“Maybe you just need to, you know, de-stress.” Gregory kissed her throat.
Eliana didn’t roll her eyes. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t looking for a soul mate. They didn’t discuss it, but it was a pretty straightforward deal they had going. He had medicine that took away her headaches better than anything else had, and she did the girlfriend bit. She got the better part of the deal—meds and entry into every party. Headaches had taken her from stay-at-home book geek to party regular in a couple months.
“We’re here,” he murmured.
She took another hit at the gates of Saint Bartholomew’s.
“Come on, El.” Gregory let go of her long enough to push open the cemetery gate. It should’ve been locked, but the padlock was more decoration than anything. She was glad: Crawling over the fence, especially in a skirt, sounded more daunting than she was up for tonight.
After he pushed the gate shut and adjusted the lock so it looked like it was closed, Gregory took her hand.
She imagined herself with a long cigarette holder in a smoky club. He’d be wearing something classy, and she’d have on a funky flapper dress. Maybe he rescued her from a lame job, and she was his moll. They partied like crazy because he’d just pulled a bank job and—
“Come on.” He pulled her toward the slope of the hill near the older mausoleums.
The grass was slick with dewdrops that sparkled in the moonlight, but she forced herself to focus on her feet. The world spun just this side of too much as the combined headache cures blended. At the top, she stopped and pulled a long drag into her lungs. There were times when she could swear she could feel the smoke curling over her tongue, could feel the whispery form of it caught in the force of her inhalation.
Gregory slipped a cold hand under her shirt, and she closed her eyes. The hard press of the gravestone behind her was all that held her up. Stones to hold me down and smoke to lift me up.
“Come on, Eliana,” he mumbled against her throat. “I need you.”
Eliana concentrated on the weight of the smoke in her lungs, the lingering taste of cheap liquor on her lips, the pleasant hum of everything in her skin. If Gregory stopped talking, stopped breathing, if . . . If he was someone else, she admitted. Something else.
His breath was warm on her throat.
She imagined that his breath was warm because he’d drained the life out of someone, because he’d just come from taking the final drops of life out of some horrible person. A bad person who—the thought of that was ruining her buzz, though, so she concentrated on the other parts of the fantasy: He only killed bad people, and he had just rescued her from something awful. Now, she was going to show him that she was grateful.