Read Online The Radleys by Matt Haig - Free Book Online

stil intrigued by the bottle. “What’s that you’re drinking?”
    “It’s vampire blood.”
    Julie finds this hilarious. Her head fal s back to release the laughter, and Wil has a ful view of her neck. Pale skin meeting paler makeup. His common preference. A smal flat mole sits near her throat. The turquoise trace of a vein under her chin. He breathes in through his nose and just about catches the scent of her, the rivers of nicotine-infused, il -fed rhesus-negative running through her.
    “Vampire blood!” Her head fal s forward again. “That’s funny!”
    “I could cal it syrup or nectar or life-juice, if you prefer. But you know what? I real y don’t like euphemisms as a rule.”
    “So,” she says, stil laughing, “why are you drinking vampire blood?”
    “It makes my powers stronger.”
    She enjoys this. Role-play. “Oh wel , come on. Use your powers on me, Mr. Dracula.”
    He stops drinking, recorks the bottle, places it down. “I prefer Count Orlak but Dracula wil do.”
    She looks coy. “So, are you going to bite me?”
    He hesitates. “I’d be careful what you wish for there, Julie.”
    She moves closer, kneels over him, her lips charting a trail of kisses down from his forehead to his lips.
    He pul s away, nuzzles his head into her neck, and inhales again what he is about to taste, al the time trying to obliterate the cheap perfume she’s wearing.
    “Go on,” she says, whol y unaware it’s her final request. “ Bite me .”
    When Wil finishes with Julie he looks at her lying there in her blood-soaked uniform and feels hol ow. An artist gazing at one of his lesser works.
    He checks his phone and hears the first and only message on his voice mail.
    It is his brother’s voice.
    It is Peter, asking for help.
    Peter!
    Little Petey!
    They need his help because, from the sound of it, Clara has been a naughty girl.
    Clara is the daughter , he reminds himself, Rowan’s sister .
    But then the message stops. The line turns into a hum. And it becomes what it always is, just him sitting there in the van with some dead girl and bottles of blood and a smal shoebox ful of memories.
    He gets the number from his cal records and dials it with no luck. Peter has switched off the cel phone.
    Curiouser and curiouser.
    He crawls over Julie and doesn’t even think about dipping his finger into her neck for another taste. The shoebox is parked between the driver’s seat and his most special bottle of blood, which he keeps wrapped up inside an old sleeping bag.
    “Petey, Petey, Petey,” he says, taking the elastic band off the box to get not the familiar letters and photographs but the number written inside the lid—the number he’d copied down from a number written on a receipt, which had itself been copied down from Peter’s email, which Wil had read at an internet café in Lviv, where he’d spent last Christmas with some members of the Ukrainian branch of the Sheridan Society, en route home after partying in Siberia.
    He dials. And waits.

    The Infinite Solitude of Trees

    Rowan goes downstairs to find that not only has everyone left the living room but his parents haven’t cleared away the bowls. Even the summer pudding is stil out.
    Looking at the rich, dark red fruit juice oozing from its center, Rowan decides he is hungry and takes a bowl for himself. Then he goes into the sitting room and eats in front of the TV. He watches Newsnight Review , his favorite show. There is something about intel ectuals sitting in chairs arguing about plays and books and art exhibitions that soothes him, and tonight is no exception.
    As they discuss a new S&M version of The Taming of the Shrew , Rowan sits there and eats his pudding. When he has finished he realizes that, as always, he is stil hungry. He stays there though, vaguely worried about his parents. Clara probably phoned them to get a lift. But why wouldn’t they have told him they were leaving?
    The celebrity intel ectuals move on to a book cal ed The Infinite