“There’s no point. I’m dying. Nothing can change that. If I give up now, it will all be for nothing,” he said, pushing himself off the wall and stepping toward me. “My death and the life I’ll never have with you will have been for nothing.”
My chest squeezed painfully. I couldn’t bear to think about it, much less talk about Bo dying.
As I looked into his eyes, I could see that demons were eating away at him on the inside, and I doubted things were going to get any better. He’d started down a path that he couldn’t come back from. He’d chosen a fate that he was locked into—no way out, no going back. And now, like it or not, I was traveling that road with him. My fate was going to be just as ugly, at least for my heart. I could see that our epic love story was going to end badly. And there was nothing I could do about it.
In an effort to avoid bursting into tears like an emotionally unstable psychopath, I looked back to the framed pictures dotting the shelf to my right. I saw the smiling, happy faces of Bo’s parents.
“What does your mom think about all this?”
Bo shrugged. “She’s devastated, of course. But even though she’s not at all pleased with my choice, she understands it. She’s tried to help me as much as she can. She gets me bagged blood to help me keep my strength. She’s been taking samples of my blood to the lab, trying to find a cure, or at least a way to slow the effects of the poison. She’s been great.”
A cure? My eyes darted back to him. I latched on to the mere suggestion of hope with both hands and I held on tight. “Has she found anything?”
Bo shook his head in defeat. “No. And I don’t think she will. Not in time anyway.”
“Is that why she seemed kind of…sad to meet me?”
Bo’s grin had a hint of irony behind it. “Yeah. In school, I guess I was a pretty typical guy. You know, string of semi-serious girlfriends, lots of texts from lots of different people in between, all that. She was always after me to settle on one.”
He chuckled at some memory. “She used to complain and say I left a trail of broken hearts that she had to clean up. They’d all call and cry on her shoulder.”
When Bo looked at me, his expression changed. The look on my face must’ve plainly indicated my displeasure. I wasn’t liking the Bo I was hearing about, the one I hadn’t met, and I doubted very much that I would’ve wanted to know him.
“In that way, what’s happened to me hasn’t been all bad. I met you,” he said, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Being…this has changed me in ways that I can’t describe, but not all of them are bad.”
Needing to hear something positive, I asked, “Like what? What good has come of it?”
“You,” he said, as if that was enough.
“What else?”
“Besides you?”
I nodded.
“I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. I don’t need much sleep. I heal almost instantly. I can hear and smell and see things a thousand times more clearly and farther away. I can run fast, jump high, move more quickly than human eyes can see. I can be invisible if I need to be,” he said, adding that last with a sardonic smirk.
“Huh,” I said, at a loss as to how to respond to that. Tossing my hair over my shoulder dramatically, I said, “Well, little did you know, but I can do all of those things, too.”
Bo’s grin widened and he reached out and set his hands at my waist.
“Is that right?”
“Oh, yeah. You didn’t know I have super powers?”
“Oh, trust me. I knew you had some kind of power.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I’ll bet.”
“What about aging. Do you age?”
“Not really. You?”
I pursed my lips. “Occasionally.”
Getting into the spirit, he countered, “Can you grow limbs?”
“No, but my sister’s pet lizard could drop his tail off and grow a new one.”
He smiled at that. “Touché.”
“See, you’re not so special.”
“Well, do you have venom that can kill a bear and turn a human into a vampire?”
I wrinkled my nose. “Surely you’re not counting that as a positive.”
“Only if one of us is getting mauled by a bear.”
“So what about all that stuff you see in the movies, like garlic and sunlight and crosses? Is any of that true?”
“Only the part about a stake through the heart. Anything through the heart would kill me, just like it would a human.”
His venture into the subject of his “abilities” had me thinking. “So, if you bit me, would I turn into what you are?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Well, I’m old enough now to where I have pretty good control over my fangs and how much, if any, venom I excrete with a bite.”
“These others, the ones you’ve been…taking care of, have they turned humans?”
A guarded look came over Bo’s face, like a thick curtain dropping down into place behind his eyes.
“Some, yes.”
“But why? Why would they want to do that?”
“That’s another question I’m trying to get an answer to.”
“Would you ever consider turning someone?”
“Never,” Bo declared with a resolute shake of his head.
Even though it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen—and if it could, I wasn’t even sure I’d want it—I was curious about one thing.
“So if you weren’t dying and I wanted you to turn me, you still wouldn’t?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Bo stepped back and pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “The venom, it does something to you. It makes you crave things, think things, things that aren’t good, aren’t right.”
“But you’re fine.”
“I’m living with the pain and the constant reminder of what someone like me did to my father. If it weren’t for that—for that consuming vision of them tearing his throat out—I don’t know what I would focus all this energy, all this hunger and thirst on.” He paused, looking away from me, toward the dying light that was streaming through the door. “But I’m afraid it wouldn’t be good. And I could never subject another person to that. It would be like issuing a death sentence to possibly hundreds of people, potential victims.”