Walking to the bed, I perched on the edge, staring down at my hands, wondering what I should do now, what I should say. Bo took care of that dilemma when he pushed on the screen until it popped out and then crawled carefully through my window.
He stopped just inside it and leaned up against the frame, sure to maintain a safe distance from me, one that wouldn’t make me feel threatened. Whether he knew it or not, his thoughtful consideration of my feelings put me at ease more than anything he could ever have said.
“You’re sick?”
I asked the question as gently as I could, as if speaking the words quietly would make them less true, less concrete.
“Can we turn on some music so that your parents won’t hear us talking?”
“Oh,” I said, getting up to dock my iPhone. “Good idea.”
I selected a random play list of soft music so that it would provide background noise, but not be annoying to us or to my parents. That would defeat the purpose entirely.
The first song to play was an old 80’s song, I Just Died in Your Arms by The Cutting Crew. Bo and I looked at each other, he on one side of the room, me on the other. I thought about changing it, but I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I just restarted the conversation.
“Are you really dying?”
I pushed decorum and tact aside in favor of getting answers, answers I needed more than I needed food or water.
Bo nodded. I felt the air close in around me like thick soup—too thick to breathe.
“What is it? I mean, what’s wrong?”
“Over the last few years, do you remember hearing about some of the victims in Southmoore that they thought were being attacked by animals, but then discovered it was a person doing it? The Southmoore Slayer?”
A leaden ball of dread began to swell in the pit of my stomach. “Yeah.”
“Well, that’s what happened to me.”
“You were attacked?”
“Yes.”
“When? Do you know who did it?”
“It’s been three years now,” Bo said.
“What happened?”
Moving from his position against the window, Bo walked to my desk and picked up a clear glass heart-shaped paperweight. He toyed with it, rolling it from one palm to the other and back again.
“My father and I were hunting at the edge of Arlisle Preserve. We’d just gone into the woods and it was still dark outside. I heard some noises and thought it might be a deer moving around.” He paused. “But it wasn’t.”
“What was it?”
“Who,” he corrected.
“Who was it then?”
Bo looked at me intently for several seconds before turning his attention back to the heart. He answered me. “I don’t know, but I’m getting closer to finding out.”
I thought of the previous night, when Trent Long had come to visit. “Does it have anything to do with Trent Long?”
Bo’s head snapped up. “How did you know about him?”
“I saw him at your house then I saw his picture on the news. He’s dead,” I said swallowing. “Did you have something to do with that?”
“Ridley, you have to understand—”
“Ohmigod, you did!” I couldn’t help but take a step back, away from him, away from the truth, but the wall was behind me. There was nowhere to go.
“I think he killed my father,” Bo said, breaking into my rising panic.
“What?”
“Whoever attacked us killed my father and only managed to…infect me.”
“Infect you? Is it-is it contagious?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking.”
I shook my head, trying to focus on one thing at a time. “But you killed somebody, Bo,” I cried.
“He wasn’t human, Ridley. None of them are.”
Mouth agape, I stared at Bo in stunned confusion. “What are you saying?”
“They were—” Bo stopped suddenly, sighing. Palming the glass heart in one hand, he ran the other through his hair in frustrated indecision.
“They?” This was getting worse by the second. My mind scrambled for something safe and sane to latch onto, but it found nothing.
“Ridley, all I’ve done is rid the world of killers, cold-blooded killers. They were all- they were—”
He stopped again, as if still considering whether or not he wanted to tell me. I wondered, doubted, that I really wanted to know what he was going to say, but he’d already begun. I couldn’t let him change his mind now.
“Were what?”
“Ridley, they were vampires.” He paused. “Just like me.”
“They were what?”
My voice sounded shrill in the confines of my room.
“Vampires,” he repeated quietly.
“You think- you think you’re a vampire?”
Bo nodded.
“Bo, I hate to break it to you, but there are no such things as vampires.”
“That’s what I used to think, too.”
My mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. I had no idea what to say to that, but I thought it was probably a good time for him to leave.
“Maybe you should go,” I suggested as calmly as I could. I certainly didn’t want to make a crazy person angry.
“You don’t believe me,” he said, more a statement of fact than an accusation.
Duh was the first thing that came to mind, but I swallowed it. “Did you honestly expect me to believe something like that?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone before.”
All things considered, I thought it was pretty remarkable that he managed to make me feel guilty. But he did exactly that.
I relaxed a bit against the wall. My head was pounding, my pulse throbbing dully behind my eyes. I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed.
Maybe I should try a different tack, let him say what he needed to say and then pray that he left. I’d always heard that you shouldn’t try to talk an unbalanced person into reality. I’d heard that you should just go along with their delusions.
“Is that why you were so bloody tonight? You were- were…”