“Peter has some, I’m sure, and if you look through his books you’ll come across them. But there are many problems with a biology book about vampires. For one thing, autopsies are impossible.
Whatever kills a vampire tends to completely destroy everything inside him, making it impossible to really dissect it all and see how it differs from a human. But that’s only half the problem.”
“What’s the other half of the problem?”
“Have you heard about the bumblebee?” Ezra casually leaned back against the end of the Peter’s fourpost bed, crossing his feet over his ankles. He looked at me seriously, as if I would immediately grasp he correlation between bumblebees and vampires.
“What are you talking about?” I shook my head, confused by the abrupt subject change.
“According to an aerodynamic study done in the early 20th century, the bumblebee can’t possibly fly,” Ezra explained. “Its wings are much too small and can’t possibly beat fast enough to carry the weight of its body.”
“What?” I furrowed my brow in confusion and tried to figure out what he was saying. “So… What?
How do they get around then?” I decided that it was some kind of joke or riddle, and it would be better if I just played along with it.
“They fly, of course,” he smiled broadly at me.
“But you just said…:” I sighed and shook my head. “What does this have to do with vampire biology?”
“Nothing.” Ezra shrugged. “Science proved that it was impossible, even though they were seeing it with their own eyes. The bumblebee flies despite evidence to the contrary, much like myself.
Eventually, scientists managed to figure out they were looking at the wings wrong, and they work more like helicopter blades than bird wings, and they figured out the magic in the flight of the bumblebee.
“Unfortunately, science has yet to figure out the magic of us,” Ezra finished, looking apologetic.
“So you’re saying that nobody knows the answers to my questions?” I asked dully.
“Yes, and no.” He stood up, smiling softly. “You’ll find some things, but it’ll probably never be enough. Just the same, you can take a look through Peter’s books and see if you can come across anything that might help you feel better.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, unsure of how else to respond.
With that, Ezra nodded reassuringly at me and then strode out of the room. I sighed reflexively and listened closely for his departing footsteps, but there were none. The only sound I could really hear, the only one I ever really heard since Milo had started turning, was a soft music wafting from his room that sounded like Mozart. I knew that Jack had to be somewhere downstairs, doing the cleaning that Mae had been forced to ignore.
I settled back into the chair that Ezra had startled me from and opened the book where I had left off. As I read on, I found that the faded italics offered me very little in what I wanted, just as he had predicted. It was interesting just the same, telling the story of the unnamed author and his transformation into a vampire. He described it as intensely painful and excruciating, but in the end, very brief and hard to define what exactly had hurt so much. There was just pain, and then a thirst that was absolutely unquenchable.
There wasn’t much about turning that I didn’t already know. Of course it would be impossible for me to completely understand until I experienced it myself, but the book added very little to that.
The only real new information was that some vampires turned more than others. While most retained a sense of their humanity, some of them lost it entirely. They were nothing more than crazed bloodthirsty monsters, and usually, they didn’t live very long because the humans and even other vampires couldn’t stomach a creature like that.
I had just finished reading a passage about an encounter with one such beast when I heard a disgusted scoff at the door, frightening me so much I yelped. I half expected to find Milo standing there, with shiny new fangs dripping with blood and that animal look in his eyes the book described. Instead, it was just Jack, standing in the doorway and frowning darkly at me, his blue eyes filled with turmoil.
“You scared me!” I gasped, pointing out the obvious in an attempt to alleviate his glare.
“What are you doing in Peter’s room?” He was fighting to keep the edge of his voice, but he did a very poor job of it. The last time I’d been in this room, I’d almost died, and he had to strain to keep his eyes from staring at my dried blood on the rug.
“Reading.” I held up my book for him to see, but his expression never changed. “It’s a book about vampires. I figured that I better bone up since everybody around me seems to be one.”
“Why don’t you take the book and go somewhere else to read?” Jack meant to ask it, but it was more of a demand.
“Fine.” I could’ve argued with him, and I would’ve been perfectly justified in doing so. But it felt like too much work, and the scent of Peter was rather distracting anyway. Thoughts of him kept lurking in my head, keeping my mind in a kind of a fog.
Jack stood just outside the doorway, very purposefully refusing to step inside. We had never really talked about it, but I knew that finding me dying in Peter’s arms had almost been more than he could bear. Seeing me in his room must’ve resurfaced some of the memories because he was rattled with fear and revulsion. When I walked over to him and started to slide past him out the door, he finally started to relax a bit.
“What do you have?” Jack touched my book, not taking it out of my head but just moving it so he could read the title. Immediately, he let go of the book, and he rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“What?” I looked down at the cover, trying to figure out what displeased him so. It was a nondescript leather cover with the words A Brief History of Vampyres emblazed in the cover, and from what I had read on the inside, there didn’t seem to be anything offensive about it. “It’s just a book.”
“It’s Peter’s book,” Jack grunted.
“Yeah, but you knew that when I was in his room.” I gestured back to the bookcases in his room and gave Jack a peculiar look. “Just because Peter owns something doesn’t-”
“No, no, he doesn’t just own it,” Jack corrected me. “He wrote it. That’s his biography.”
“What are you talking about?” I flipped open the book, looking for some mention of the author, but then I found a clue that contradicted it completely in the foreword. “No, it says right here the author is very old when he wrote this, and the book itself is incredibly old, and Peter isn’t even
200 years old.”
“Yeah, he wrote it when he’d been turned for like twenty years, but he didn’t think anyone would think anything of it if they knew how young he was. That’s why it doesn’t mention who he is or how old he is exactly.”
“But…” I stumbled helplessly, trying to think of something to counter it with it, but I didn’t even know why it was so important to me that I counter his argument at all.
“Was that the first book you picked up?” Jack narrowed his eyes slightly, and his tone had taken an entirely different turn. He was vaguely jealous, but mostly, he was completely sick of the whole vampire bonding thing. My blood, Peter’s blood, they only seemed to exist to drive Jack insane.
“It’s just a book!” I exclaimed, but in truth, I felt the same way as he did. I hated that my pulse quickened just at the memory of Peter, or that I was automatically drawn to his book. Any connection I felt to Peter felt like a betrayal, and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Whatever.” Jack shook his head and shut Peter’s bedroom door. I opened my mouth to protest further, but when he looked back at me, he had wrinkled his nose. “You smell like him.”
“Sorry,” I offered.
“Have you eaten today?” He abruptly changed the subject, but he had softened considerably. “I can order you a pizza or something.”
“I’m okay,” I shook my head. “I had a bagel earlier.”
“Right.” Jack stood awkwardly in front of me for a moment, wiggling his hands in his pockets, and then stepped away from me. “I’m gonna go check on your brother.”
“Good idea. Tell him I say hi.”
He nodded and walked to the end of the hall, into the room I couldn’t go. I was alone in the hall, holding Peter’s book, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to read it or not. Part of me wanted to read it even more now that I knew it was the story of Peter. Anything to get a better understanding of him would be amazing. But the rest of me knew it was a path I didn’t want to go down anymore. After he tried to kill me, a choice had been made, and he was no longer an option for me. My life was going to be something else.
While Jack hadn’t specifically requested it, I knew that a shower would fare better with him then if I didn’t. I went into his room and discarded the book on his bed before picking out a change of clothes. For now, getting clean and worrying about Milo’s condition were enough. I would decide what to do about the book later.
The curtains that layered the windows were so thick that sun never stood chance. No matter the time of day, the house was completely shrouded in darkness. Since my vision wasn’t quite as advanced as theirs, Jack had rather smartly put a night light in the bathroom that adjoined his room, so when I got up to use the bathroom I didn’t tumble down the stairs or smack into a wall.
I heard a rustling, and that must’ve been what awoke me from my sleep. My cell phone was on my night stand, and I clumsily reached out for it, nearly knocking it to the floor. The clock on it said that was only two in the afternoon, so I couldn’t imagine that anyone would be awake.
Personally, I hadn’t gone to bed until seven in the morning, and Jack had still been awake playing Halo. I rolled back over, burying myself in the thick blankets of Jack’s bed. His pillows smelled sweetly of him, and while that wasn’t as good as sleeping with him, it was the next best thing.