Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (6 page)

“
Abe? Chill, right?” Steve grins and jerks his elbow in the
direction of his friends by the door, both of whom have jaws
hanging wide enough to catch a swarm of flies. Whatever saw them to
dare Steve to fuck a gay vampire, they don’t seem to have expected
Steve to go about the kissing with quite that much enthusiasm. The
white blond rolls his eyes and slips the other a twenty-dollar
note; the black man in the flanno shirt grins and tucks it in his
pocket. “We’re cool on that. I don’t quite know how to put it, and
I’m sorry if this is going to offend you, but your mouth tasted
weird, just then.”

The depth of
Abe’s relief startles him so much that he sighs, more out of habit
rather than any need for oxygen. Force of habit, at least when it
comes to breathing, is a hard beast to conquer. “Bad?” He brushed
his teeth before going out, so it shouldn’t be the blood. Shouldn’t
be. In his childhood, though, Abe never failed to notice a
particular tang on Lizzie’s breath and skin; the fear of being the
same has made him even more particular about hygiene post-death.
What if he smells like a slaughterhouse and his co-workers don’t
say anything because nobody knows how to bring up such an awkward
topic?

“
Kind of like chicken salt.” Steve shakes his head and wraps
one arm around Abe’s shoulders, waving with the other arm as his
friends apparently declare the dare won and head, far too quickly,
up the steps—although the fisherman in flanno holds his phone out
towards Steve and taps his fingers on the screen as he leaves. “Not
bad, but it was there all of a sudden, and that was weird.
Sorry.”

 
Abe leans closer to him, rather enjoying the warmth of a
breather against his body while he ponders the best way of
explaining a taste to which he is now so accustomed he doesn’t even
notice it. “Venom, probably.” He pauses but can’t find a
non-frightening way of putting it. “Most of us tend to release a
little when we ... um, well, get excited? The one thing the media
kind of, well, gets right with the, uh,
biting-as-sex-metaphor.”

Steve raises
both eyebrows, but, like a true native of Port Carmila, doesn’t
freak over the prospect. “As long as it’s not enough to turn me,
we’re good. Sorry. I just—well, the other time I kissed a vampire,
the taste wasn’t nearly as strong.” A strange expression crosses
Steve’s face before he breaks into another grin. “We were in Grade
Two and one of the teachers caught us. I don’t even remember why we
were doing it, actually, just that the teacher was
pissed
.
Don’t worry—it wasn’t actually paedophilia, because the vampire had
only been about six-months turned.”

The absurd hope
that flowers from Steve’s words is almost enough to make a dead
heart beat. Abe doesn’t know every vampire in Port Carmila, true,
but people don’t tend to forget the rare child-turned vampire or
zombie, if only because it’s good for the locals to know that the
eight-year-old kissing an eighteen-year-old is in this one instance
a perfectly legitimate expression of sexuality. Abe’s fairly sure,
though, that the only child-bodied adult vampire of Steve’s age is
in fact one Shane Pike—and very much not a girl.

Of course,
whoever Steve kisses in primary school has no real bearing on his
sexuality as an adult. Right?

“
Not
even close,” Abe says once he realises that Steve has raised both
eyebrows at him. “I’ll, uh, have to actually bite you to do that.”
Abe meets Steve’s eyes, both as an attempt to make sure he
understands and because he likes looking at Steve’s face. “It’s
like a bee sting—only toxic, for most people, in large-enough
doses.”

“
Good to know.”

“
I
mean, some people can be all—” Abe stops only because Steve leans
in and presses his lips to Abe’s in a slow, leisurely kiss, and
then Abe doesn’t care about anything but the fact that Steve runs
the tip of his tongue over Abe’s teeth and fangs. Nothing but the
warmth of his breath and saliva, the flood of much-cooler venom
over Abe’s tongue and the realisation that doesn’t stop Steve at
all, and before Abe’s thought about what he should and shouldn’t be
doing with a straight man who’s probably just kissing Abe so his
dancing friends can confirm the dare, he’s sliding his tongue
between Steve’s teeth and deepening the kiss. Steve drags his chair
closer with a hip-rocking thrust, his chest only centimetres from
Abe’s own, his heart beating just a little faster. What would he
taste, now, if he let a drop of Steve’s blood roll over his
tongue?

If Abe feels as
though he’s drowning in blood-warm, hair-gel-scented bathwater, he
can’t think of a better way to go.

Steve pulls
back, panting, but his grin is fearless. “Want to
dance?”

Dance? He wants
to sit there all night and breathe in this can’t-be-straight man,
but Steve is already jumping off his chair, so Abe nods, not caring
that he’s not really a dancer if it means he gets to be anywhere
close to Steve. “Uh, sure?”

Steve shrugs off
his blazer, gives Abe and the world a very good view of the chest
under that thin layer of T-shirt, swipes one hand at his eyes, and
leads the way to an empty spot on the floor, already swaying with a
confident grace. After one moment Abe doesn’t care about his own
dancing ability or the fact they’re no longer kissing: Steve
dancing is an eternal torment put on this earth to drive people
crazy. He doesn’t follow the beat of the music, but Steve doesn’t
so much dance as
flirt
—he knows how to hook Abe with just a
glance, how to bend and flex his body so that even a vampire can’t
help but ponder tearing off his clothes and throwing him over the
closest object. He dances around Abe, slides in and out of his
reach, twists and turns so that Abe can admire the entirety of his
lithe body, teases with just a brush of fingertips over a
shirtsleeve or half-shut, winking eyes, indifferent to anyone in
the room but Abe.

His blood and
breath sound amongst a song of passion-fuelled heartbeats, one note
in an intoxicating chorus of life. The two girls Steve spoke to
before approaching the bar—the butch breather and the antique
zombie, one with an excited pulse, the other a strange sense of
nothing to Abe’s blood-honed senses—grab each other and collapse in
a burst of strange, absurd giggles before slapping each other’s
hands and reaching for their phones even as they dance. Ares raises
his head, just for a moment, and stares at Steve, his blood thick
and cool and lacking the precise combination of hormones that makes
human life an intoxicating feast. Adam Swanston stares at Steve,
stares at Abe, stares at them both as though he can’t believe what
he’s seeing.

Steve’s eyes,
though, never drift away from Abe’s—not even when he throws out his
right arm and shoots Swanston the finger before grabbing Abe’s hand
and twirling into his arm.

Abe is his sole
focus of interest in that room, and he can’t imagine why, but he
doesn’t care. He just tries to keep up, and in this, at least, a
vampire body is ideal: he can dance, with enough blood, until the
end of time itself, and why not? Abe is never quite sure how long
they dance—two songs? Three? More?—before the temptation is too
much to resist. Abe places his hands on Steve’s hips and tugs him
closer, Steve’s hot skin pressed against his, groin brushing
against groin. Steve’s breaths are heavy against his ear, growing
heavier as Abe pulls him as close as he dares, as close as two men
can be in a gay club and not be fucking, and it is as wonderful as
Abe ever imagined, so wonderful he finds himself following Steve’s
lead without a thought for anyone watching, rocking and grinding
with gleeful, amazing abandon—

Steve jerks
away, shaking his head.

Abe stumbles,
lets go, stares.

Steve’s eyes are
wide in the reddish-black lighting; he rubs one hand against his
cheekbone. Like every other breather on the floor, sweat beads on a
flushed face, but there’s something in his expression Abe can only
read as terror, and he doesn’t understand why. “Can’t ... can’t ...
back in a sec...”

Abe is too taken
aback to know what to say or do, but Steve doesn’t wait for a
response: he tears out of Abe’s arms and towards the door, leaving
Abe—and most of the club—staring after him.

4: Breath

Just like that, the moment—and the
hope—is shattered. Idiot! How can Abe be so fucking stupid? Steve
has guts and balls and is a natural flirt besides, but that doesn’t
mean he’s prepared to be jammed up against a gay vampire who might
as well be poking his cock into Steve’s hip. He might not be aware
of just how much he flirts or how attractive he is, for that
matter; he might not expect a man to be as entranced as a woman by
his moves. How can he be in any way prepared? Abe swears—he only
vaguely notices that everyone else close by, everyone that is not
the cackling Adam Swanston, gives him sympathetic looks—and heads
up the steps for the door. He’ll apologise. Steve seems interested
as a friend, and if Abe hasn’t completely scared him off ... well,
he’ll have to settle for that. They barely know each other, after
all, and maybe once they get to know each other better, maybe once
Steve gets used to the idea, he might find Abe interesting in that
way in return. Steve kissed him, after all, and Abe didn’t feel any
reluctance in that kiss.

Maybe, just
maybe, there’s something worth salvaging.

The salt-tinged
air is much colder out on the street. Louis, king of the fang,
waves at Abe as he passes the bouncers, but Abe tosses a hand in
his direction and scans the street for a flash of red. No, nothing:
just a few girls in miniskirts and heels heading up the road
towards the Broken Post—and then he sees a shadow slumped by the
edge of the building, facing the crossroad to the
breakwater.

He expected,
maybe, to find Steve getting a breath, talking on the phone,
texting, heading down the road after his friends.

Abe runs, his
feet slamming against the concrete footpath in a way that would
have caused stress fractures had he been human—and still does, as a
vampire. Tissue tears, accompanied with spikes of pain he ignores:
vampirism doesn’t wholly dull pain, but at long last Abe has
learned to accept it as something that no longer indicates damage,
the signals of a nervous system that doesn’t realise its messages
are irrelevant and outdated. There’s no answering spike of
adrenaline: his fear is strange, intellectual, unwedded to the body
in which he dwells. A glass of blood and it doesn’t matter: the
damage vanishes as if it never existed.

He will outlast
breathers because he can push his body beyond human endurance, but
Valentine will always beat him in a sprint, always punch him in the
face before Abe can finish bringing up a hand to defend
himself—because Valentine’s body is a glorious cocktail of irisin
and testosterone and sundry other hormonal and nervous system
responses that make him move and think more quickly than he can
when not aroused, responses that are muted in Abe’s undead
body.

He spins around
the corner and comes to a staggering halt with enough force to tear
the ligaments in his ankles and knees.

Steve half lies,
half sits on the ground, his one hand clenched around the front of
his T-shirt, the other around his smartphone. He doesn’t tap the
screen; he just holds the phone, all the while breathing heavily,
unevenly, like a guy that had just been winded and couldn’t fill
his lungs.

The street is
much brighter than the dance floor, lit by traffic lights and the
streetlights above, and under the fall of the steady, yellow light,
what looked like the human flush of exertion in the club seems a
mottled, reddish rash spread over his face, neck and
forearms.

For a second Abe
just stares.

“
It’s okay,” he says without thinking. “Steve, it’s okay.” He
crouches down beside him and takes Steve’s phone-holding hand in
his right, scrambling at his jeans pockets with the other hand, but
he finds nothing more than the bulky leather outline of a wallet.
No pouch at his belt. A brush over his legs finds nothing hidden
under his jeans. Abe almost swears, but then he notices the way
Steve’s red T-shirt rides up the back, and, without apologising for
the manhandling, he reaches underneath and tugs free a small
leather holster.

“
Zombie?” Steve says in a choking rasp, his brow furrowed, but
he turns his head to look over Abe’s shoulder. “Where?”

Abe lowers the
thing to the ground in hands that almost shake. The idiot goes to a
club with a fucking
handgun
—and he’s not going to think
about dancing with an armed man
at all
—but doesn’t think to
take his fucking meds? Is there a brain at all inside that cute
head? “Steve. Do you have an inhaler? An EpiPen? Any medicine you
take for asthma or allergies?”

The blazer,
maybe, lying tossed over the chair at the bar. Isn’t he supposed to
not
stash things in the pockets of removable clothes just to
avoid this problem?

Steve jerks his
head upright before slumping further to the ground. His eyelids
flutter closed for a moment before opening them again. Is it a
trick of the light, or does his face seem swollen? “I ... I’m
not...” His eyes widen further, but whatever he would have said is
lost in a struggle for air, his limbs and hands as tense as strung
fencing wire. His breaths come in and out in a series of frantic,
panicked whistles, and he can scarcely manage the next two words:
“I ... don’t...”