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The new kid took to flying like a duck to water, bobbing into the air before he’d especially worked out what he was doing, limbs everywhere, scrabbling at nothing with his big hands, panicked and paddling and then, abruptly, still—eyes huge, mouth open, looking around at the rest of them with awe and realization and no small amount of fear. Then his hands began to move again more slowly and his body turned as he felt out what he had to do to control his orientation and direction: a mind exercise more than anything; hands didn’t really come into it, it was just instincts that made people move like they were swimming at first.
For a minute Michael simply rose and sank like the liquid in a barometer. He stopped trying to keep himself upright with his hands, stopped kicking his feet like he was paddling upwards for air, then he reached for a metal railing ten feet across and twenty up and soared towards it, hand wrapping around the iron as Marko crowed congratulations. Michael’s expression was shocked and wondering. “I can fly,” he said, the words coming out as if he didn’t really believe them, as if he was trying to convince himself they were true.
David could have laughed aloud. He liked knowing he’d chosen right. The second he’d seen Michael, David had known: the kid needed to fly. He’d been gasping for it. Gravity was a muzzle over his jaw, a chain around his neck. He was an animal straining at the end of a short, tight leash; David could set him free. And he had.
Now he soared up towards him, slowing to a stop a few feet away. Michael watched him come, stared at him across the gap of empty air. “What did you do to me?”
David smiled. “I didn’t do anything yet, Michael,” he said. “You did all of this yourself. You drank with us, remember? You’re part of the family now.”
“The family,” Michael repeated quietly, looking lost and afraid, like a lamb too far from its ewe. David wanted to herd him back home, pen him up and sink his fingers in soft, clean wool. He drifted closer.
“You’re very good,” he said. “Not everybody gets it so quickly. Where do you want to go, Michael? Want to see the moon up close?” Without waiting for an answer David grabbed his wrist and willed himself upwards. He was braced for the jerk of resistance but it didn’t come: with no effort he was dragging Michael with him, speeding upwards into the empty night air. Michael yelled once, but with the air rushing past David’s ears he only barely heard it, and he didn’t hear anything else after that. They rocketed higher, leaving the others behind.
Santa Carla rushed downwards, becoming stamp-sized in seconds. For a moment they weren’t so high that they couldn’t still pick out people on the boardwalk—that long stretch of pier cluttered with spiderwebs of wooden-beamed rollercoasters and garish yellow contraptions designed to wrest money even from the deepest depths of carefully guarded pockets—then they were high enough that the people were indistinguishable from the streets they stood on and all David could see were the lights, become pinpricks outlining the town and shore from the surrounding darkness: the depths of pine forest on one side and the endless unforgiving ocean on the other. Soon David couldn’t smell the gas fumes of cars or the oil of the boardwalk machinery, then he couldn’t even smell the salt of the sea—just the slap of the cold and the white-metal sting of the stars on the inside of his nose. When he looked down, Michael’s face was turned away from him, towards the ground. Look up, he thought. Look up and see what I’ve given you.
The stars were out in all their glory and the moon barely a sliver. They were high enough now that the oxygen was too thin to breathe and David wondered if Michael would notice. The halfway point was a strange one: there were things you could do and things you didn’t have to do, but none of it felt natural—neither the flying nor allowing yourself not to breathe. David remembered that, vaguely, the way he used to remember his dreams. If you weren’t worried about oxygen, the air this high was a revelation: thin and cold and sharp as a dry Riesling wine, empty of everything but starlight and not so much of that, mostly rushing past as liquid, icy blackness. He wanted Michael to feel that—how clean everything was up here.
Below them the whole northern California coast was outlined in lights, brightest where San Francisco nestled, sparkling, in its bay; darkest where Big Sur loomed over the crashing waves of the Pacific. They were high enough now. David slowed, stopped, and let go of Michael’s wrist. Without the upward momentum Michael seemed about to panic, but when he realized he wasn’t going to fall—that he had control of his movement just as he had below—he calmed. David could hear his heart louder up here without the complicating beats of everyone else’s to get in the way. He could hear Michael’s breathing, too, and noticed he wasn’t gasping. Good. He was a natural, this kid.
“Did you kill me?” Michael shouted.
David threw back his head and laughed into the faces of constellations. Aquila burned bright above them and he laughed up at the eagle's starry beak. “No, Michael,” he shouted back. “I saved your life!”
“What am I?”
“If I tell you, you won’t remember tomorrow,” David said. The blood had an intoxicating effect, even only a few sips—Michael had the pretty red flush and glazed eyes of reeling drunkenness, and he would wake up tomorrow with a headache and little to no memory of the night. Tomorrow morning he would never forget. David remembered his own morning after like it had happened yesterday instead of a century ago: the hangover worse than any hangover he’d ever had before and only a fuzzy memory of following a man behind a bar, expecting something different than what he’d got— being handed the bottle of thick red liquid he’d assumed at first was wine. Nothing else. Later that night the man he’d used to call his father had found him again, showed him how to feed.
“Tell me anyway,” Michael was shouting. “Tell me what you are! Tell me what you did to me!”
David could move faster than Michael, and he guessed correctly that Michael wouldn’t flee even if David went for him; when David was close enough he wrapped his hand around Michael’s throat and yanked him forward. Michael sucked in a gasp of thin air, then went limp. He hung in black, velvet space from David’s hand and David stared at him, hearing his heartbeat race, feeling the jump of his pulse, watching the blood stain his cheeks red, then darker red, almost purple.
Finally David leaned even closer, saying his next words directly into Michael’s ear. “What do you think you are, Michael? What do you think I am?” He let his teeth extend so that when he leaned back, still grasping Michael by the neck, Michael could see the points of his incisors glinting in the light from the thin sliver of moon. “Can you say it yet?” He grinned, swayed his head slightly to let Michael see every angle of the long, vicious fangs. They weren’t stained with blood; too bad. Sometimes the timing was more important than anything else.
Michael was staring at David’s mouth; his own had fallen open. He didn’t say anything.
“I’m a vampire, Michael. So are the others. So is Star. And so, now, are you. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You already guessed. You can hear my blood.” He ran a finger down his own jugular, tilting his head so that Michael can watch his finger, which he does. “You can hear everyone’s blood.”
Michael shook his head once, but slowly. His eyes were locked on David’s throat.
“Wait until you taste it,” David said, leaning forward to murmur it against the soft, plump lobe of Michael’s right ear. There was wind up here—high altitude currents; the pull of stratospheric weather systems—but it was low, and David didn’t have to speak loudly. “It’s like nothing else. It’s like—life. It’s better than. It’s all there is.”
They were flush up against each other, so David felt it when Michael began to harden in his jeans. A thrill shot into him at the place of contact, quick and dangerous as a barbed arrow. God— he loved knowing he’d chosen right.
Poor Star, he thought, but he didn’t feel that bad. He felt like gloating. He felt like taking Michael out of his jeans right there, five miles in the air over the Santa Carla boardwalk, showing him what he had been missing all along.
But Michael wouldn’t remember, and David wanted him to remember.
His hand was still wrapped around David’s throat, although it had long since relaxed, barely gripping it. Now his hand tightened, and he forced David’s head back and to the side so that the long expanse of his throat was bared. The blood wouldn’t taste good but that wasn’t the point. David needed to know how far Michael was willing to let him go.
The skin was elastic: the first time David ran one of his fangs across Michael’s jumping pulse point it only scratched a thin white line. The second time, he broke through. A red welling of blood appeared and David’s breath caught at the same time Michael’s did. Then Michael let out a sound that was almost a moan.
“Good boy,” David breathed. “You’re one of us, Michael.” Then: “You’re mine.” He licked up the blood. He was right: it tasted bad. Metallic and tainted, half human, half himself. But it didn’t matter. Michael was no longer limp in his hand, he was thrumming with tension. He wanted this, and more. He wanted David to fuck him so badly David could practically see the video playing in his head; the want was written across his face as if he were his own marquee.
Humans, David thought, amused. So determined to deny themselves. David didn't miss that. He wondered if Michael would remember this when he woke up tomorrow morning. If not the flight, would he remember the want? Would he remember what it was he had wanted so badly? Probably not, but no matter. David would remind him.
He dropped his hand from Michael’s neck and moved away. Tomorrow they would have a conversation Michael would remember. Tomorrow David would explain all over again what Michael needed; what he could have; what was waiting for him when he let himself learn to fly.