This Book Sucks Blood

Chapter 11: Vampire!

Griffin's lips ached as he lay in his twin bed. Harrison had taken the top bunk for some inexplicable reason, his giant legs having to hang off the edge. And boy did he snore. The room was pitch black, giving Griffin's eyes nothing to focus on. He only knew about Harrison's legs because of the wind they made as they lolled lazily back and forth. It occurred to him, briefly, that there were no windows in their room. A single switch must control their only light. Weird.

He tried to close his eyes. He didn't know what time it was; the clock on the back wall was impossible to read in this darkness, but he guessed that it must be early morning from how late it was when they got to bed. He an had Harrison were the last to peel away from each other and return to the room.

It was a shocking kiss. An illicit kiss. And a long kiss. Nothing beyond that; they had wrapped their arms around each other like they never held another person before. And Harrison nuzzled his neck, giving light kisses as Griffin whispered the illegal information. He felt like a book that had been torn open, his text exposed for the world to see. "Original Astorians...can't see sunlight. Larkens and other off-wordlers built the biome. Even with their technology, it was hard. Most Astorians had children with the Larkens, because those children didn't have to drink blood."

"You can't be serious."

"Deadly."

Another kiss.

Here, Griffin's breath had hitched. "Your ancestor killed many Astorians. I thought it was his weapon that was the important piece. But if its allowed here, then it can't be."

Harrison softly cleared his throat. "You're risking a lot telling me this. Do you know how we can tell if someone's a vampire. Not just the folklore, but for real?"

"They appear in phones and other technology, but not actual mirrors. You'll notice that almost all expensive homes have digital mirrors. And they can't go out in the sun, but we have the biome. They can eat food but they have to drink about a pint of fresh blood once in a week. At least. I think."

He felt himself pull away. "These are just guesses from the books that I could get my hands on. So many were destroyed in the Great Fire. Some of them might be fiction. I try so hard, but I have no one to proofread after me. No relatives for me to interview. No--"

He didn't finish. Harrison pulled him in so tightly for another kiss, and he imagined that's how it felt to be lassoed. He read so much about old-world Lark. More than any one else he knew. For one, because his mother owned the library, and she always allowed him to read the locked-away tomes. The books spared from the fire. He would read voraciously, pieced theories together in his notebook, searching for answers.

And then he saw Harrison in the videos. A giant man with a happy little mustache and sideburns cut the way they were in the books' pictures. He remembered his fingers trailing the screen, his eyes frantically taking in the headwrap, the hat pulled down to hide such warm green eyes. And at night he would lie awake, thinking about the cowboy, watching the videos on loop. How he longed for that man.

And now that cowboy had wrapped him up tightly in his grasp, peppering him with kisses that he couldn't help but return with a sort of frantic desperation between factoids about vampires and snippets of stories of another world. The tunnels, draped in fine fabrics and dangling with glittering chandeliers. When he closed his eyes, Harrison's rough hands squeezing him tight, he could imagine he was one of them. Somewhere, far back in his bloodline, his ancestor had been one. He shivered, his heart beating fast as finally they turned off the water.

And the mirror had been shattered. An uncomfortable coincidence. He didn't want to talk about it to Harrison. They had shared glances, threw them back at the glass on the floor, and climbed into the two bunks left that were stacked on stop of each other. And Harrison was quickly snoring.