Noah left for camp on a Monday morning with a pack twice the size of him and a list of instructions from his Cub leader about socks that he recited back to me three times in the car, clearly delighted by the sheer authority of having socks be a matter of official concern.
“You’ll be okay?” he asked, at the gate, with a sudden gravity that had nothing to do with his usual bravado.
“I’ll be more than okay,” I told him, and meant it more than he could have known.
I called Damian that afternoon, my hand shaking only a little on the phone.
“I want to see you,” I said, before he’d even finished saying hello. “I want you to take me to your house. I’m ready to hear all of it.”
He was at my door within the hour, and there was something in his face when he saw me, relief so raw it looked almost like fear, that told me exactly how much that week of silence had cost him.
“You don’t have to be brave about this,” he said, in the car, watching the road instead of me, giving me room. “You can ask me to stop at any point. You can ask me to take you home.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m not planning on it.”
The house on the hill looked less like a haunted movie set today, though not by much. He made tea neither of us drank, and sat across from me at a table that had clearly never hosted a single ordinary meal, and told me, finally, the truth in full.
“When we’re turned,” he said, “something is scooped out of us. I don’t know a gentler way to describe it. There’s a hollow left where something used to sit, and it never fills on its own, not ever, not in five hundred years. Blood keeps the body going. It doesn’t touch the hollow at all.”
“Then what does?”
“Feeling does.” He turned his cup slowly on its saucer, not drinking, the way he never drank. “When we feed properly, from a person, not from an animal, we don’t just take blood. We take whatever’s sitting loudest in them at that moment. Grief. Joy. Rage. Whatever’s strongest floods into us along with everything else, and it fills the hollow, for a while, the way blood alone never can. It’s why feeding feels the way it does to the person underneath us. It isn’t only physical. It’s the closest thing to being emptied out that a human body can survive.”
“And after?”
“After, they’re missing it. Whatever we took, they don’t get it back. Not the memory of feeling it, just the feeling itself, gone, like a room in a house they can’t find the door to anymore.” His jaw tightened. “Happiness tastes sweetest. Cruel ones hunt for it deliberately, find the most contented people they can and empty them out on purpose, and leave them hollow the exact way we are.”
“And you?”
“I’ve never been able to stomach it. Taking joy from someone who has so little of it to spare felt like the worst thing I could do with what I am.” He looked at me then, steady, ashamed, honest. “So I hunted the opposite. People already drowning in something terrible. I’d take their grief, their fear, whatever was eating them alive, and leave them lighter instead of emptier. It’s weak blood. Bitter, most of the time. It barely fills anything at all. But it let me live with myself, which felt, most centuries, like the better trade.”
“Then what am I to you?” I made myself ask it, even though some part of me didn’t want the answer. “Am I just a very long, very patient feeding?”
“No.” He said it so fast, so certain, that I believed him before he’d even explained why. “Sarah, the day I caught that basketball, my hand closed around yours for less than a second, and something in me that had been starving for five hundred years came up out of the hollow all at once, full, before I had taken a single drop of anything from you. No bite. No blood. Just your hand in mine for half a second on a basketball court, and I was drowning in more feeling than I’d taken from anyone in a century.” He shook his head, like he still didn’t quite believe it himself, even now. “I don’t understand it. I’ve told you that already. But it wasn’t feeding. It was just you, existing, close enough to touch.”
“I need you to know something else too,” he said, quieter now, before I could speak. “In the beginning, when I first started finding excuses to be wherever you were, catching balls, catching you on stairs, some part of me was protecting my own fulfilment as much as protecting you. You filled the hollow without me having to feed on anyone to earn it, and I didn’t want to lose access to that. That’s the truth, and I won’t dress it up for you.”
“And now?”
“Now I would give up the fulfilment entirely and keep only you, if it ever came down to a choice.” His voice cracked on it, the first time I’d heard it crack since the terrace. “I have spent five hundred years believing, all the way down, that I was a monster wearing a man’s face. You are the only thing in five centuries that ever made me feel like the man was the real one and the monster was just something I carried. I love you, Sarah. Not what you fill in me. You. And I do not want to take one more thing from you than you have already chosen to give.”
“Tell me about her,” I said. “The girl from the alley. I want a name. I’m tired of calling her ’that girl’ in my own head.”
“Camille.” He said it like a wound he was pressing on deliberately, to see how much it still hurt. “She was nineteen. A student, the first year I enrolled somewhere just to watch the world change up close instead of from a distance. Her stepfather beat her. Her mother was gone most days on whatever she could find to smoke. Camille was carrying more grief than anyone I’d fed from in decades, and I offered her a deal. I’d take the worst of it from her, regularly, quietly, and in exchange she’d let me. No feelings involved. No names for what we were to each other beyond that one transaction.”
“What happened?”
“I kept taking her sorrow until there wasn’t as much of it left to take, and something grew in the space where it used to sit. She fell in love with me. Which was the one condition I’d set from the very beginning that couldn’t survive being broken, because loving me meant I could no longer feed on her without it feeling like a betrayal I wasn’t willing to commit. I told her I couldn’t see her anymore. I left the college. I left the country, eventually. I told myself I was protecting her from exactly this.”
“But she never stopped.”
“She’s spent fifteen years chasing a feeling I gave her exactly once, deliberately, and then took away.” His voice was very quiet now. “It does something to a person, being emptied and filled and emptied again by something that isn’t human. She’s spent a decade and a half addicted to a high I can’t legally call a drug because there’s no name for it in any medical text. That call in Rome. That was her, finding me again, threatening you and Noah both if I didn’t come back and give her what she’s spent fifteen years unable to live without.”
“And the alley.”
“She followed me to Glenfrost. I don’t know how, and I intend to find out. She found me the night you were with Grant and told me plainly she’d hurt Noah if I didn’t feed her, there, immediately, and I believed her enough that I didn’t have room to consider any other option.” He met my eyes fully then, for the first time since we’d sat down. “I would do it again tonight, Sarah, if it kept your son safe. I need you to understand that about me before you decide what to do with the rest of this. If anything ever actually happens to him, if it comes to that, I will become exactly the thing I’ve spent five hundred years trying not to be, and I will not feel sorry about it afterward.”
I sat with that for a long moment, the weight of it, the whole terrible shape of what he was and what he’d do and what he’d already done to keep my son breathing.
Then I got up, crossed the space between us, and kissed him like I meant to climb inside the hollow myself and fill it with everything I had.