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mind.”
    “Jared…” I wanted to reach out and touch his arm, but I kept my hands still.
    He took my hand as if it were a piece of sculpture or a scientific experiment, turned it, examined the skin, ran a finger along one visible vein.
    “I know what you are,” he finally said.
    I pulled my hand away and stood up.
    The warmth continued to move through my body. I couldn’t have explained it then, but instead of anxiety I felt a sense of relief. No one had ever understood before. Somehow it seemed that Jared had figured it out. I felt less alone in that moment. Even Emily hadn’t known what I was. Only Jared. But how could he know? In any case, I couldn’t let him see how his accusation was affecting me.
    “Oh, really? And who is that? I mean, what is that?I’m noticing you called me a what,” I bantered, trying to gather myself.
    He looked away, and for a moment I felt I had gained the upper hand in spite of what he had charged me with.
    “Don’t make me say it,” he mumbled.
    “Why? Are you afraid to sound ridiculous?” I poured myself more wine and sat in a chair across from him.
    “All I know is that I don’t want to be here this way. Without her. It sucked enough before. This whole fucking planet. Without her I can’t do it. I need your help. No one else can help me.”
    “How?” I asked softly.
    “I know what you are,” he said again.
    I took a long sip of wine. It was real wine, not the cow blood I usually drank.
    “Just say it, then.”
    “Fuck! Okay. You want me to say it? The walking dead? Child of the night? Night angel? Bloodsucker?Daughter of Dracula? You choose.”
    “I actually prefer the V word,” I said. “It sounds awful, but it has a lot of power. Come to think of it, that applies to both V words.”
    Jared’s body jolted forward as if someone had jerked his invisible marionette strings. “Make me one!”
    I knew better than to make a joke about the second V word at that moment. But I honestly wished he was asking me for that instead. Human girls don’t have it easy in a culture that makes their beautiful burgeoning sexuality sound ugly and taboo, but at least they don’t have to go through this. I finished my wine to the dregs. A queer dizziness came over me.
    “Let’s just say I am one. Why would you want me to change you? You’d have to live without Emily forever.” I looked out the windows. Fires were raging in the distance. Just a few weeks before, I would have felt the heat and heard the crackle as if I had been standing in the center of the flames, but I would have been immune to even the sensation of smoke in my lungs and throat.
    “So it’s true.”
    “I never said that.”
    “I know it’s true. Emily told me things.”
    “Like what?” I wanted more wine.
    “She said you had about a million bottles of sunscreen, that you were fanatic about using it.”
    “I have sensitive skin. Besides, I heard that V words can’t be out in the sun at all.”
    “She said you talked about death all the time. And you had clothes, old clothes that fit you perfectly, like they’d been made for you a hundred years ago.”
    “What can I say? I have a good tailor. This is ridiculous.”
    “Then once she sipped that wine you kept for yourself. You’d never let her have any; you said it wasn’t as good as what you gave her. And it tasted thick and salty and not like wine at all.”
    “See?” I said. “I was telling the truth. It wasn’t as good. It sucks, actually. Not even human blood; it’s from cows. I get it from a black market dealer namedTolstoy, and he knows he can charge me whatever he wants.”
    Jared jumped to his feet. He looked as if he’d lost weight in the last few days, so that his body seemed to dangle from his broad shoulders like the plastic skeleton decorating my neighbor’s door. His face was as pale as mine.
    “So it is true!”
    “I was just joking.” (I wasn’t. Tolstoy is a thief, but I hadn’t called him since Emily died over a week ago.