He smiled swiftly, vampiric super-brain understanding the complexities of my joke immediately. "Yes, you are exactly my brand of heroin."276
"Does that happen often?" I asked.
He looked across the treetops.
"I spoke to my brothers about doing heroin." He still stared into the distance. "To Jasper, every one of you is much the same. He's the most recent to join our family. It's a struggle for him to abstain at all. He hasn't had time to grow sensitive to the differences in smell, in flavor." He glanced swiftly at me, his expression a-po-po-pologetic.
"Sorry," he said.
"I don't mind. Please don't worry about offending me, or frightening me, or whatever. You do it all the time without even trying. That's the way you think. I can understand, or I can try to at least. Just explain however you can."
He took a deep breath and gazed at the sky again.
"So Jasper wasn't sure if he'd ever come across someone who was as—" he hesitated, looking for the right word— "tasty as you are to me. Which makes me think not. Emmett has been on the wagon longer, so to speak, and he understood what I meant. He says twice, for him, once stronger than the other."
I shook my head, imagining myself as a burrito. "And for you?"
"Never."
The word hung there for a moment in the warm breeze, silent but deadly.
"What did Emmett do?" I asked to break the silence.
It was the wrong question to ask. His face grew dark, angry, his hand clenched into a fist inside mine. He looked awry. At great length, he whispered, "burrito
276. Or at least reminiscent of his favorite brand of heroin: "Dick Down," popular in mid-seventies Harlem.