Page 100 of The Last Vampire
It’s the photo of William and me at the Halloween ball. He must have taken it from the school’s display, but he didn’t destroy it.He kept it.
What does that mean—?
“What the fuck is this?”
I gasp and spin around, aiming my phone’s flashlight at my best friend’s face.
Salma’s light is on me, too, then it bounces around the rest of the room. She’s in her coat, so she must’ve seen me putting mine on. She followed me here.
“Lorena.” Her phone’s beam lands on me again. “What is this?”
“It’s… William’s room.”
“Howis this his room?” she asks, hugging her torso for warmth. “It’s freezing and falling apart and doesn’t have a single piece of fucking furniture.”
“I can explain,” I say, “but let’s go somewhere warmer first—”
“No! Explain it now. This whole time, I’ve felt like you were hiding something. You’ve gone from never having a crush to being inseparable from this guy whoisn’tyour boyfriend and barely talks to the rest of us, and now you’re going to tell me what the hell is going on.”
She seems to say it all in one long breath because it takes her a few inhales to replenish her oxygen.
“The night we found the LUB,” I say, and each word dehydrates me more, until my mouth feels like cotton. “Remember how the coffin moved?”
She nods slowly.
“I lied.”
Salma just stares at me, withholding her reaction.
“Someone was inside, and he attacked me.”
“What?”Her expression cracks with outrage and concern. “Are you okay? Did you report him—?”
“It was William.” I whisper the name, but I know she heard me.
Salma goes back to her blank stare, giving nothing away.
“He’s not…human,Sal.”
Her expression looks stuck, like a laptop that won’t boot up.
“He’s a—a vampire.”
The word feels ridiculous, even now. Hanging in the air, without further explanation, it sounds not like the punch line to a joke but the setup. So I plunge into the full story of how that first night went and everything that has happened since.
I tell her how he’s been hibernating since the 1700s, and I explain that vampires used to coexist with humans, and they were only kept in check by a group called the Legion of Fire. “On the Harvard campus, I went with him to Massachusetts Hall, where he had buried a time capsule that proves his story is true,” I say, describing how he used his powers of compulsion to make Minaro accept him as a waitlisted applicant and organize the impromptu field trip.
“Apparently, only one bloodline—called theStokers,believe it or not—has the power to turn people into vampires. William isn’t one of them.”
Lastly, I tell her how he met a couple of vampires in Hanover and isn’t coming back.
What greets me is more silence.
“I know this sounds unbelievable, but I swear it’s the truth. I can show you a—”
“I believe you,” says Salma, and the wordvideodies in my throat. “I believe that for months you’ve known that we were friends with a vampire, and you didn’t tell me. Even though I’ve spent years trying to convince you this stuff is real.”
She speaks in a quiet voice that’s worse than yelling.
