Afterlife Read Free

go someplace better, more familiar. Vic’s house, I
decided. We’d hidden out there for the past month or so this summer, while Vic’s
family vacationed in Italy. Our little makeshift apartment in the wine cellar Wouldn’t
be that much more comforting — it was where I had died just the day before — but
maybe we could remain there until we figured out what to do.
    “Come on.” I took one of his hands in mine. The coral
bracelet he’d given me for my last birthday jangled at my wrist. “They’re
waiting for us outside.”
    “Who’s waiting for us?” Lucas couldn’t seem to focus; it was
like he was listening to a cell phone at the same time he was trying to listen
to me. Not in a rude way; he just couldn’t help it, which was worse.
    “Balthazar — and Vic and Ranulf, too. They came back from
Italy after you e-mailed them. Remember?”
    Lucas nodded. His hand tightened around mine, so hard it nearly
hurt. Lucas didn’t seem to have any way to judge his new strength — and this
despite the fact that he already had enhanced power from having been bitten. He
worked his jaw, as if practicing biting down, over and over.
    If he needed me to be the steady one, I would be. Of course
I was better at being dead, I decided; I’d had a whole day’s practice. It had
taken me a few hours to get the hang of being noncorporeal. So no wonder it
would take him a while to deal with becoming a vampire.
    We left the projection room and walked out through the
abandoned theater. The scene in the lobby wasn’t pretty: Beheaded vampires lay
crumpled on the floor, and I tried not to look at any of the abandoned heads.
Vampires didn’t bleed much after death — no heartbeat to pump out the blood — but
I noticed Lucas looking hungrily at the few droplets on the floor.
    “I know You’re hungry,” I said, trying to comfort him.
    “You don’t know. You can’t know. There’s nothing like this.”
Lucas’s grimace revealed his fangs. Just the sight of blood had brought them
out again. When I had been alive, part vampire, I had experienced the desperate
yearning for blood, but I suspected Lucas was right: The craving he felt now
had intensified beyond anything I’d ever known.
    We walked outside to see Balthazar, alone, leaning on his
car in the otherwise empty parking lot. His shadow stretched out, long and
broad, in the beam of the nearby streetlamp. Balthazar spoke to me first. “Vic
was hanging around out front. The only way Ranulf could get him to leave was to
go along.”
    “Okay,” I said as we reached him. “Let’s just get out of
here. I never want to see this place again.”
    Balthazar didn’t move; he and Lucas just stared at each
other. For years, they’d loathed one another; only in the aftermath of my death
had they been able to work together. Now, though, what I saw between them was
total understanding.
    “I’m sorry.” Lucas’s voice was rough. “Some of the stuff I said
to you — about choices, being a vampire, and everything like that — Jesus. I
get it now.”
    “I wish you didn’t. I wish you’d never had to understand.”
Balthazar closed his eyes for a second, maybe remembering his own
transformation centuries ago. “Come on. We’ll get you something to drink.”
    With a pang, I realized that Lucas and Balthazar understood
each other now on a level that I would never fully grasp. For some reason, it
felt like a loss. Or maybe in that moment, with Lucas seemingly so far from me
in spirit, everything felt like a loss.
    Balthazar drove us back toward the nicer neighborhood in
Philadelphia where Vic lived. Lucas and l sat together in the backseat, his
hand gripping mine tightly, his gaze focused in the distance beyond the
windshield. Sometimes he frowned and closed his eyes like a person in the
throes of a migraine; his feet moved restlessly against the floorboards, as
though he were pushing back, or attempting to push through. He didn’t want to
be here, to be contained — everything