Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #25)(66)

It didn’t make much sense for me to go to him. In a lot of ways, even Lara or Niamh would’ve been more appropriate, because at least we were on speaking terms. But he’d met Aunt Linda, and knew just how sick she was, and had listened to me night after night in the summer whispering into the darkness how scared I was she might die.

I just had to see him.



Will’s house was no less intimidating in the daytime than it’d been on Thanksgiving. I pulled up, stared at it, and swallowed, heart pounding. There was no sense turning back now, though. It wasn’t exactly a small trip.

I just wasn’t quite brave enough to go up to the door. So I called him.

“Are you at home right now?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“I’m outside.”

“You’re … hold on.”

He hung up on me. Then the front door swung open, and Will emerged from the house and started down the driveway. I got out of the car in a daze and stood by it, hugging myself until Will reached me.

I think he knew as soon as he saw my face. “Ollie,” he breathed, holding out his arms. I launched myself into them like this wasn’t weird, and we hadn’t spent the last few weeks pretending each other didn’t exist. As soon as I felt his hands on my back I burst into sobs. “Oh, Ollie, no. I’m so sorry.”

He led me, crying and coughing and shaking, straight through to his room without even bringing me past his parents to say hi. Mom and Dad would’ve disowned me if they’d known I’d been so rude, but at that moment I honestly couldn’t have cared less. He left me there for a minute or two while he went down and explained to his parents, then he came back upstairs and sat with me in silence.

When I finally calmed down enough to speak, Will and I had been sitting on his bed for about fifteen minutes. He hadn’t tried to push me into talking, at any point. He’d just sat, his shoulder pressing against mine, with his hands in his lap.

“I just don’t know what to do,” I said. “What do you do when this happens? My parents are acting like everything’s fine, and they wanted to go get dinner, and Mom put on home movies—”

“Movies?”

“Movies of Aunt Linda! Isn’t that the most fucked-up thing you’ve ever heard?”

Will clasped his hands together soberly. “That’s pretty ridiculous.”

“It just doesn’t feel real, Will. Everything is really distant, and blurry, and it’s like I’m dreaming but I don’t think I am. Am I? I’m definitely not dreaming, right?”

“You’re definitely not dreaming,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s fine. But also, it’s not okay, because she’s dead, and that’s real. That’s real life. It’s real life from now on, too. For every day, from now until forever, she’s still going to be dead when I wake up every morning. How do I do this? I don’t know what to do.”

I was crying again now, and Will put his arm around me to pull me into him. Not in a romantic way, just comforting. The way I’d really wanted my parents to comfort me.

“What do I do?” I asked again. Like Will somehow had a magical solution to all of this.

“Whatever you need to,” he said quietly.

I rested my head on his shoulder. I hadn’t realized how heavy it felt until then. My jaw was aching, too. From crying? Had I been gritting my teeth? I used to do that a lot when I was younger, until I’d chipped a tooth and the dentist made me sleep with a mouth guard. “It was just out of nowhere, you know? I mean, it wasn’t totally unexpected, but I thought we’d have more warning. I thought she’d start looking really, really sick, and we’d know it was coming. I can’t even remember the last conversation we had. I think it was about spoiled milk.”

I sobbed all the way through the last sentence, so hard I could barely stammer the words out.

“It’s not fair,” Will said.

“No, it’s not fair.”

“No.”

And in the weirdest way, even though I felt like I was being buried alive by grief, it was the tiniest bit more bearable now. Just having Will back me up, and agree with me, and not try to make me look at the bright side, or remember the nice times, made me feel less like I was alone in this. Even though Will barely knew Aunt Linda, I felt like he was right there with me in the darkness. Waiting with me for as long as I needed to be there.

Eventually, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and sat up. “I’m sorry. I just came over here out of nowhere, and you probably have a ton of homework, and you haven’t even had dinner—”

“It’s—”

“I should’ve at least texted, or—”

“Ollie.” He grabbed my hand, and I looked down at it, startled. “It’s fine. I’m glad you came. You can stay as long as you want.”

I nodded, and gently took my hand away. “Thank you. I should get home, though.”

He walked me through to the living room, where his parents were watching Inception. They’d reached the scene where everyone was banging around upside down in the corridor, but they paused it when they noticed us.

“Hi, Ollie,” Mrs. Tavares said. “Will told me about your aunt. I’m so sorry to hear. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do.”