“It did. And this… How’d you find this place?”
She grinned. “Are you trying to tell me you always stay on the human paths when you come here?”
“Fair point.” He squeezed her hand. “It’s beautiful. It’s like…like this place has its own music. I can hear the melody in myhead that matches”—he gestured to the entire panorama—“all of this.”
“Will you play it for me sometime?” she said.
“I’d like that a lot.” He drew a deep breath and let it out. This time, unlike his attempt at the café, the breath seemed to lift a weight from his back. “I think I can say the rest now.”
Twenty
Claire kept her hand on his thigh and curved her fingers around his. “You’ve been alone with it too long, Tai.”
His hand clenched around hers for a moment, then loosened again. “I want to tell it here, surrounded by all of this. To tell the trees and the mountains and the sky. And you.”
“Well, I’m listening,” she said. “I can’t speak for the trees or the mountains or the sky.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes. A mockingbird perched in a tree nearby and showed off a repertoire that included a tree frog, a seagull, and a crow among countless other bird songs. They laughed at the squawk of the crow, and the mockingbird flew away as if offended.
Tai said, “A year after my mom died, my vampire traits began emerging.”
Claire squeezed his hand and listened. She hoped her listening would be a gift to him. His story was certainly a gift to her, however hard it was about to get.
“Three months after I began needing to slake, I was at school, and… A few friends had to tackle me, pile on, to keep me fromgoing after a classmate. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I lost my ability to think, to choose. I fought back, trying to get at this human kid, nothing in my head but the prey drive. The thirst was…” He cleared his throat as if feeling a phantom there even now. “Teachers intervened, of course. In the nurse’s office, I was allowed to slake, and I could think again, remember what I’d just done. I came out of the bloodfiend attack and plunged straight into a panic attack. Begged Nurse Lori to tell me what was wrong with me.”
“Did she know?” Claire whispered when he paused.
Tai nodded. “She was a vampire. I’ll always be grateful to her. She was so kind, Claire. She told me what she knew about hematorexia, which wasn’t a lot, but it was something to hold onto. She talked to—to my father when he—when he came to pick me up.”
His words stalled again. Claire held onto his hands and waited for him.
“He…um. He…took me home, and…”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Physically? No. I got the belt, of course, but that was just what I deserved.”
Claire wrapped her arm around his back and rested her head on his shoulder. “Tai, do you understand that counts as physically hurting you?”
“Oh. I guess. I just meant, nothing out of the ordinary.”
She couldn’t begin to tackle that one today. “Do you understand that you didn’t deserve punishment for having an attack?”
He pressed his face to her hair, breathed in her scent for a long moment. “You know, I really didn’t. Everything Peter said today… I haven’t thought about that day in years, but it feels different now. It feels like it wasn’t really my fault.”
It was a step. She tried to focus on that and not the fact he’d carried the punishment for years as something he did deserve.
“After he got me home and…and all that. He told me I had five years to get my crap together. On my eighteenth birthday, I wouldn’t be a bloodfiend anymore. Period.”
“What?” She drew back reflexively, stared up at him, sure she’d heard wrong. “It doesn’t work like that!”
“He would disagree.”
“Well, then he doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Icy rage coursed up and down her arms. What sort of father didn’t learn all he could about his son’s experience, instead pronounced an ultimatum the very day his own child experienced something so traumatic for the first time?Oh, Tai.
“He believes bloodfiends can beat the condition if they really want to by putting principles above selfish desires—and, you know, with sheer willpower.”
She had to work to process the gross absurdity of those words. She tried to keep her voice level. “There aremultiplethings wrong with that sentence.”
