When I flipped on my headlights, it only further illuminated the slick fluid covering Bo’s body. With trembling hands, I jammed the shifter into reverse and sped backward down his driveway and out into the street.
On the way home, my mind raced incoherently. By the time I arrived at my house, instead of being less freaked out, I’d worked myself up into a bigger tizzy. I was convinced that Bo was some kind of evil, blood-sucking mass murderer that was on a killing spree and would now be coming after me.
The strange thing is that, all the while I was concocting terrible back stories for Bo, my heart yearned for him, my body ached for him. I didn’t understand how my emotions and my body could be so disastrously disconnected from my head, from logic and rational thought.
Shouting a quick “I’m back” to Mom and Dad, I bypassed the living room and went straight to the bathroom. The mirror showed me that I’d cried on the way home. I hadn’t been aware of any tears falling, but my swollen eyes and red face promised me they had.
I splashed cold water over my eyes and cheeks, wishing it was cold enough to numb the growing devastation I felt.
When I walked into my bedroom and shut the door behind me, the first thing I noticed was that it smelled of Bo. I was instantaneously filled with trepidation. I reached back for the knob, starting to twist it and run. My body was wired and readied for escape when a voice broke the stillness. Despite my inner turmoil, it flowed over my frazzled nerves like raw silk.
“Ridley, please let me explain.”
Even in the darkness, I could plainly see him standing outside my open bedroom window, looking nothing like the person, the thing, I’d seen only minutes prior. Though he made no move toward me, I was still afraid of him. The screen was in place, but I knew it would provide very little protection if he decided to come in after me.
“If you don’t leave this very second, I swear I’ll go screaming out that door and call the police,” I said warningly. The slight waver of my voice gave me away, however, a blatant indication that my bravado was superficial at best.
“Just give me—”
“I mean it, Bo,” I declared, my voice rising as I pushed the words through my tight lips.
“Don’t you—”
“I’m going,” I said, turning to open the door.
“Wait, Ridley.”
“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.”
His next words caused my hand to still on the knob and my heart to constrict painfully inside my chest.
“I’m dying, Ridley.”
CHAPTER SIX
“What?”
I could eek out no more than a whisper. My throat and my lungs failed me. I thought, I prayed, that my ears had failed me, too. Deceived me. Although at the moment I was terrified and confused by what I’d seen, it hadn’t seemed to affect the way I felt about Bo deep down. Apparently, my heart hadn’t gotten the memo.
“I’m dying,” he repeated softly, sadly.
A crushing tide of devastation swept in to wash away the fear and disappointment I’d been feeling. Its violent current nearly erased all traces of the creature I’d seen only moments before, leaving only traces of a strange sickness that threatened the life of someone I didn’t want to live without.
Slowly, I turned to face him. On the one hand, I was hesitant to believe him, especially after having seen him drinking blood.
“You could be lying,” I pointed out.
“But I’m not.”
“But I wouldn’t know.”
“Yes, you would.”
On the other hand, I wanted desperately for it to be true, if for no other reason than that it meant he wasn’t a monster. It just wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be normal, to fall in love with a monster.
But if he wasn’t a monster, then that meant he was dying. As the room slanted this way and that, tilting all around me, I realized that it would be far better to fall in love with a monster than to lose Bo altogether.
Walking to the bed, I perched on the edge, staring down at my hands, wondering what I should do now, what I should say. Bo took care of that dilemma when he pushed on the screen until it popped out and then crawled carefully through my window.
He stopped just inside it and leaned up against the frame, sure to maintain a safe distance from me, one that wouldn’t make me feel threatened. Whether he knew it or not, his thoughtful consideration of my feelings put me at ease more than anything he could ever have said.
“You’re sick?”
I asked the question as gently as I could, as if speaking the words quietly would make them less true, less concrete.
“Can we turn on some music so that your parents won’t hear us talking?”
“Oh,” I said, getting up to dock my iPhone. “Good idea.”
I selected a random play list of soft music so that it would provide background noise, but not be annoying to us or to my parents. That would defeat the purpose entirely.
The first song to play was an old 80’s song, I Just Died in Your Arms by The Cutting Crew. Bo and I looked at each other, he on one side of the room, me on the other. I thought about changing it, but I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I just restarted the conversation.
“Are you really dying?”
I pushed decorum and tact aside in favor of getting answers, answers I needed more than I needed food or water.
Bo nodded. I felt the air close in around me like thick soup—too thick to breathe.
“What is it? I mean, what’s wrong?”
“Over the last few years, do you remember hearing about some of the victims in Southmoore that they thought were being attacked by animals, but then discovered it was a person doing it? The Southmoore Slayer?”
A leaden ball of dread began to swell in the pit of my stomach. “Yeah.”
“Well, that’s what happened to me.”
“You were attacked?”
“Yes.”
“When? Do you know who did it?”
“It’s been three years now,” Bo said.
“What happened?”
Moving from his position against the window, Bo walked to my desk and picked up a clear glass heart-shaped paperweight. He toyed with it, rolling it from one palm to the other and back again.
“My father and I were hunting at the edge of Arlisle Preserve. We’d just gone into the woods and it was still dark outside. I heard some noises and thought it might be a deer moving around.” He paused. “But it wasn’t.”