“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…”
Bo nodded. “There was someone I had to take care of.”
“Because this person was a vampire.”
Bo nodded again.
“And you think you’re a vampire.”
Again, a nod.
“Alright, so you say you are, in fact, a vampire. Let’s just go with that for a minute. If I’m not mistaken, vampires are dead. Yet you told me not five minutes ago that you’re dying. How do you explain that?”
“Well, first of all vampires aren’t technically dead right from the start. We can ‘die’,” he said, using air quotes. “But we can only die the same way once. The venom, it mutates our cells, our DNA, causing us to regenerate very quickly. When we do, we’re sort of immune to whatever harmed or killed us. We can no longer be killed that way, not again.”
“So these people that you killed, you think they’ll…come back?”
“Oh, no. They’re very much dead.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, shaking my head. “Then how did you kill Trent Long? I’m confused. ”
“The only way you can actually, truly kill a vampire. I destroyed his heart.”
“Well, if that’s the case then what do you mean when you say you’re dying?”
Bo returned his attention to the heart in his hand. He leaned back against the desk and held it up to the moonlight pouring through the window, peering through the thick bubbles of heart-shaped glass. He didn’t speak until he lowered it.
“I know I’m dying because I’m killing myself.”
My heart lurched in my chest. I wasn’t expecting that.
“What? Why?”
“The very last blood that pours from a vampire’s heart contains memories of his life, his knowledge, his experiences. But it’s toxic. Very toxic. These men that I hunt, one of them will lead me to the person behind my father’s murder, but to learn that, I have to drain them before I kill them.”
Out of all that, out of all the questions that his explanation generated, the only thing I could think of was that he was killing himself. For a moment, I was drawn into his world of make believe.
“So you’re killing yourself to learn who killed your father?”
“Yes.”
“Your life is worth so little to you that you’d just throw it away for revenge?” That hurt more than I was ready to acknowledge.
Bo looked up at me, his eyes meeting mine in the low light of the room. As they did the first time I saw him, they burned into me, searing me all the way to my soul.
“I had nothing to live for until I met you.”