Free Vigil by Z. A. Maxfield Page A

his surprised gasp as his heart seemed to
    burst from his chest.
    “ Voglio restare per sempre con te, caro, almeno puoi pensarci?”
    I want to be with you forever, will you think about it ? Adin squeezed
    his eyes shut and clung.
    60 Z.A. Maxfield
    Adin woke briefly to see Donte slip out of their room. He
    didn’t need the windows of the room unobstructed to know that
    it was night. Donte hadn’t fed from him since the day before, and
    he was no doubt going out to find sustenance. Adin rolled over,
    content to rest, to let the languor of their lovemaking and his
    sorrow at their inability to find common ground with regard to
    immortality, drag him back for some much needed sleep.
    “I never could understand why these numbskulls swim here at this time
    of day,” Adin’s father said as he set up the tripod. “Think we’ll get lucky?”
    “This fog should burn off.” Adin had been more interested in the coffee
    his father bought him, even though he’d filled it with cream and sugar so
    he could drink it without making faces, than the photography part of the
    outing. “What is it with you and that boat? We’ve been here every weekend
    this summer and you still don’t have the picture you want.”
    “Mind your manners Adin. The lady is a ship ,” Keene Tredeger teased.
    “I freely admit I’m obsessed by it.”
    The Tredegers, father and son, peered through the fog at the Balclutha,
    the three-masted, full-rigged beauty that was part of the Maritime Museum’s
    collection. If the moisture burned off enough, his father would try to get a
    picture of her, caressed just so by the early morning sunlight. As if the sun
    would ever shine over San Francisco Bay in the morning. He said he knew
    what that picture would look like when he got it and until that day, their
    Saturday mornings would be spent in the aquatic park trying. Adin went
    with him, mostly for the coffee.
    Adin shivered from what seemed like glacially cold, damp air that lay on
    them like a blanket. San Francisco was like London, only without the charm
    of age and the patina of empire to hold his interest and get him past it.
    “I do not know what you see in this place.”
    “That’s because you’re a snob, Adin.” Keene’s voice was amused. The
    elder Tredeger practically threw Adin a treat whenever he exhibited his
    disdain for the commonplace, so naturally, he’d grown to be a quirky little
    thing. “Your mother loves it here. I’ve never seen her so happy. It makes me
    a spectacular hero in her eyes to have brought her home to stay. Your sister
    Vigil 61
    loves her new school, you are doing well, given that you’re unhappy to be here,
    and I have the Balclutha, 301 feet, 2,650 tons of emotional satisfaction. I
    have never loved anything non-human this way. It’s positively obscene. I’m
    assuming it’s a midlife crisis and someday soon we’ll grow apart.”
    Adin said nothing.
    “You do like your school don’t you?” When Adin grimaced, his father’s
    eyes twinkled. “Middle school has to be one of Dante’s levels of hell. Level
    8, I think, the Malebolgia. But you seem to have achieved a singular level
    of mediocrity in your first quarter grades. Perfectly suitable for a boy in the
    pit of despair.”
    “Actually, middle school is more like Delacroix’s painting The Barque
    of Dante, a horrible boat, ferrying you between elementary and high school,”
    Adin muttered. “Complete with shit that tries to drown you, and the floating
    bloated corpses of those who have gone before.”
    Keene frowned. “Adin.”
    “It’s not that it’s not a good school,” Adin muttered. “I get okay grades,
    people are nice.”
    “But you don’t fit in?”
    Adin closed his eyes and shook his head. “Not really.”
    “You miss Edward?” Keene asked. “You two were thick in London. It’s
    hard to leave your best mate when you move.”
    “I know. We e-mail. We wouldn’t have gone to the same school anyway,
    he would have been sent to