by Tanith Frost
“Fuck you,” she mutters.
“You need to work on your banter,” I tell her. “You used that line already.”
“Fuck—” she begins, and pauses.
“Save your breath,” Daniel tells her, then turns to me. “Are you staying for this?”
My chest tightens. He doesn’t need to tell me he’s going to question her, or that there will be no limits on what he’ll do to get answers. Daniel’s not stupid. He won’t torture her into giving false information just to make the pain stop, as so many humans mistakenly do. But given what I saw him do to that cop, I’m willing to bet he’ll know if she’s lying, and he won’t stop until he gets the truth.
I should stay. I should learn.
My stomach turns, and I’m glad there’s nothing in there I could throw up.
I’ve never seen the side of him he’s showing to the enemy, this frozen darkness that goes far deeper than what I encountered during training. I’m not ready to. Daniel is a pure form of what I should have the potential to be, what I felt when I tasted pain and fear and became intoxicated on death. I can’t deny the monster that lurks beneath my surface, but this isn’t a mirror I’m ready to look into.
I won’t kill again. And much as I might still crave fear when I feed, I don’t think I can stomach witnessing her pain.
“You can handle it, I’m sure,” I tell him. “I’d better make sure everyone else is safe.”
For the briefest moment, he looks relieved. “Contact the elders, too,” he says, and frowns when he catches the look on my face. We pace back toward the door, out of earshot again. “You have nothing to fear from them. You’re doing a good job here.”
He always sounds like he’s betraying every moral fibre he has left when he offers faint praise to motivate me.
“I know,” I say. And I do. I got distracted and probably deserve punishment for that, but I saved Hannabelle. That counts. Hell, I did better than Daniel. He may not be on duty, but he would have been as responsible as me if Krystina had killed Naya and finished Hannabelle while he was fucking my brains out.
He knows it, too, and is probably pissed about losing control of himself so easily. I see it in his tense, threatening posture and the hardness around his eyes. I don’t envy Krystina if he takes that out on her along with his other frustrations. Daniel’s icy self-control is hard to shatter, but it’s possible. I would know.
“I’m not scared of the elders,” I lie. “I’ll do it. I just need your phone. I don’t have Miranda’s number in mine.”
He’s not buying it. He knows too well how I feel about them. About us, maybe. “You’re back with your own kind now,” he reminds me, and frowns. “You seem disconnected again. You were making such progress before the sanctuary.”
I bristle. “Yeah, well. Maybe isolating me from my own kind for a year wasn’t such a great idea if they want me to fit in. Maybe the elders don’t—”
He holds up a hand. “Don’t,” he whispers. “Just contact Miranda. Tell her everything. You’re not handling this one alone. Understood?”
I grit my teeth. I had no intention of investigating this without the elders, but I can see why he’d think I was making a habit of trusting myself over the clan. “Understood.”
At least he’s on my team this time.
I leave and close the door behind me, ignoring the first scream that rings out as I descend the stairs.
The elders are coming.
I flip Daniel’s phone open and shut a few times, then lie back on his bed.
I should go upstairs and see if he needs an assistant.
I can’t. Every time I try to force myself to my feet, a distant groan from the attic pins me back on the bed.
Fuck. What the hell happened to my momentum? I was doing so well before. I checked on the others, who are still gathered in the downstairs sitting room. All save for Naya, who’s in bed with an ice pack on her head, and Hannabelle, who’s watching over her. I sent Sean out to check outside the house, since no one else could go out into the sunlight. Everything was fine from roof to back door, save for a loose vent that showed us how she got in.
I didn’t let myself hesitate earlier when I walked into Daniel’s room and picked up his phone, found Miranda’s number, and politely bulldozed my way past the assistant I didn’t know she had.
Daniel said to talk to Miranda. I wasn’t going to leave a message.
Her voice chilled my bones, but without her midnight blue eyes on me I was able to keep my voice steady and professional as I filled her in. She promised she’d be out.
We’ll be there in the evening.
We. Multiple elders. This is serious.
I don’t want to see Miranda again, but I think I’m even less keen on bumping into Viktor or some other unknown elder.
In any case, I did fine with all of it. My discomfort with the elders and the vampire culture I’ve been away from for so long, my fears about sounding like an idiot on the phone, the knot in my stomach after I closed the door on Daniel and that asshole upstairs… none of it stopped me. I did my fucking job, and I’m glad I was here to do it. I feel competent for once. Not quite accomplished, but this is a step toward proving myself. I can handle this.
What’s happening upstairs is another story entirely, though.
A faint scream ends suddenly, accented by a thump on the floor above me. I close my eyes and consider moving down the hall to a room where I won’t be able to hear anything from upstairs.
Is he enjoying this, or just doing his job? If he’s relishing every moment, would that make him any worse than me when I killed?
I can’t let myself think like that. This Krystina person sought us out, broke into our home, and attacked without provocation. She’s not an innocent victim of our violent impulses. The fact that she’s human and weaker than us doesn’t make this unfair. It just makes her really fucking stupid.
She poked a hornet’s nest. She’s getting stung.
I force myself off the bed and out of the room, then drag my feet up the stairs.
He won’t make me stay if he doesn’t need me. Daniel came close to breaking me many times during my training, but he was never cruel.
The door swings open as I reach the landing, and Daniel steps out. He closes the door behind him and raises his eyebrows, questioning. He seems eerily calm, unaffected by whatever’s happened in there.
I thought for some reason he’d be covered in blood. There’s not a drop on him, though there’s a faint smell of vomit rising from somewhere on his clothes.
There must be a hundred ways you can break a person without making her bleed.
“Miranda said they’d be in tonight,” I tell him.
He nods and rubs the back of his neck.
“Is she—” I begin, and pause at the sharp look he gives me. “Secure?”
He relaxes. I wonder what he’d have done if I’d said okay or dead.
“Secure enough,” he says, and starts down the stairs. “I’m going to have a shower.”
He doesn’t tell me not to open the door to check on her, but I know not to. He’s dealt with the enemy, maybe more kindly than the elders will when they arrive. I assume they’ll take her back to town, away from the scene of the crime.
I give him a head start. There’s no question of me offering to help Daniel get nice and dirty in the shower. The mood is deader than either of us, and the wedge between us—his knowledge of my weakness, my discomfort with his perfect vampire nature—feels deeper than it ever has before.
Two attempts. Two interruptions. That’s it. I’m never getting laid again.
I glare back at the door before I head back down the stairs.
I poke my head into Naya’s room. She’s resting comfortably, watched over by Hannabelle. I’m certain the old vampire hasn’t moved since I looked in on them earlier.
“Is she asleep?” I whisper.
Hannabelle nods, not taking her eyes from her injured caretaker.
I step into the room and
close the door. We’re both silent for a moment, watching Naya’s slow breathing. I’m sure Hannabelle knows what I’m going to ask. I wonder whether she understands how badly I wish I didn’t have to.
“Why didn’t you fight back?”
She turns her black-brown eyes to me, then looks back at Naya. “I would have if I thought that woman was going to kill her,” she says slowly, like she’s drawing every word from the bottom of a dark well. “But she didn’t come here to kill the living, I think, though maybe it would be different if she knew our caretakers were planning to become…” She trails off and strokes Naya’s dark hair.
I sit on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb the sleeping human. “Have you ever tried to talk them out of it?”
Hannabelle sighs. “No. They know the risks and the costs. I envy them the choice, but it is theirs to make.”
“You would have chosen differently.” It’s not a question, but she nods. “Is that why you didn’t fight back? Because not existing would be better than what you have now?”
She smiles sadly. “We have good times here. Lucille is wonderful for keeping my focus on today, tonight, this moment. And as long as that’s all it is, especially between feedings, I’m okay. I’ve closed myself off from my nature for a long time, focused on becoming less of what I am. But when I consider the future, when I think about hundreds of more years of… of what?” She reaches for a tissue from the bedside table and dabs at her eyes, but her soft voice remains steady. “We’re neutral at best. Simply trying not to hurt anyone is a victory over our true nature. When that woman attacked me, there was a moment when I wondered what it would be like to simply not be. Even if it was the wrong choice, it’s not as though I’d regret it afterward.”
She turns her attention back to her caretaker. Our conversation is clearly over.
This is why I don’t feel her. Hannabelle may sleep in a coffin and live with vampires, but she’s never embraced what she is. Maybe with good reason.
I rise and leave them, fighting back the despair that churns within me. I want to curl up in bed, to think over her words and how they echo thoughts I keep locked deep inside me, to let myself cry just this once over my fear that Genevieve’s theory of our origin is entirely right.
I won’t. I can’t end up like these vampires, locked away because they couldn’t handle the reality of what we are or the changes in the world around us.
We are what we are, and there’s no changing that. I can’t return to life or light or the certainty in my purpose that I once had.
But I can find something else.
I have to.
Chapter Eight
Sean and the old vampires are in the downstairs sitting room. Edwin has massive headphones on and is fiddling with an old radio. Lucille, with Sean’s assistance, is sorting through cardboard boxes as Genevieve and Trent watch. She pulls tangled garlands of green tinsel free and sets them on the floor, then stares deep into a clear glass ornament like it’s a crystal ball.
Genevieve seems disinterested. Trent’s expression gives no hint of what’s going through his mind. I can only imagine what that stoic old bear thinks of his shattered housemate with her laughter and backyard fairies.
They all look up expectantly when I enter.
“Naya’s resting,” I tell them. “Hannabelle is fine.”
A lie, of course. But she’s as well as I suspect she can be.
“Are the elders coming?” Trent asks. He doesn’t sound excited by the prospect.
“They are.”
Lucille looks up from her box and sets aside a golden angel ornament that sheds chunks of glitter on the carpet. “I’m sure it won’t be so bad.”
Genevieve snorts and rearranges herself on the old sofa, looking like she needs a drink in one hand and a long cigarette holder in the other. “Not so bad, indeed. Things will only get worse now.”
“In what sense?” I ask her, but it’s Trent who answers.
“Security,” he growls, and the others nod as though this is all the answer I should need.
Silence follows, though there’s obviously more he wants to say.
Sean stands and brushes the dust off his pants. “I should go prepare a meeting room,” he says, and Genevieve winks at him as he leaves.
“He’s a good boy,” she muses. “Too good, maybe, but we won’t tell the elders that. They might change their minds about letting him join our gruesome order.”
Interesting. These humans may be part of our circle and privy to some of our secrets, but Sean’s not one of us yet.
“There was a time when vampires had freedom,” Trent says. “We were alone for the most part, existing as we saw fit. If we exposed ourselves, we paid the price.”
“It was dangerous,” Genevieve adds. She sounds almost gleeful about it.
“Terribly,” Trent agrees, and a hint of a smile touches his ancient lips. “Vampires came and went. We had to be crafty to survive, and only those most fit for this existence did so. But now.” He scowls. “Now we protect our prey. We have our laws, our secrecy, our limited and carefully chosen numbers, our damnable safety. Humans don’t hunt what they can’t see, and we obey the rules to keep it that way. All it cost us is our freedom.”
My mouth goes dry. Surely I wouldn’t have survived long under the old ways. But I do wonder what that freedom might have been like. I’d have killed, no doubt. We all would. I know the undeniable strength of our hunger. Still, I can’t help thinking that a measure of freedom would be lovely. Choices outside the roles imposed on us in the name of order and secrecy.
“And now we’re hunted again,” Genevieve adds. “So for our own safety, our cage will become smaller.”
Lucille hauls a string of red and green lights out of the box, plugs it in, and starts hanging it on stick-on hooks that she plants in an uneven row halfway up the wall. The lights that aren’t burned out blink slowly. “Survival is important, youngster,” she says, “but only if you’ve got something worth surviving for. Better to exist as we wish and let it end as it may than to go on forever as…” She falls silent and stares at the wall, then slowly turns back to us. Her dark eyes have gone flat, and the cheer has drained from her expression. She lets the rest of the lights fall into a messy pile on the floor. “I feel I should lie down.”
She leaves without another word.
I won’t ask about the lights. If baking cookies and decorating for Christmas in October are how Lucille finds her meaning, I’m not going to knock it. Until a moment ago, she seemed the most contented of any of us.
Trent rises from the couch and unplugs the lights.
“Would you want us to go back to the way things were?” I ask him.
“There is no going back.” He sounds angry, though not at me and my questions this time. He drops the lights back into the box and shoves it into the corner with his foot. “The world progresses, for us as for humans. The old ways wouldn’t work now. I may hate the cage we’ve built for ourselves, but I understand it.”
“So what do you suggest?”
He scowls. “Go back in time.” He looks at me again. Really looking this time. It’s disconcerting to have his dark, piercing gaze locked on me, but for the first time he doesn’t seem entirely disgusted with what he sees. “You can’t help being young,” he mutters. “Do the best you can with the situation as it stands, and we’ll be waiting when you end up here with the rest of us miserable beasts who don’t fit the system.”
I open my mouth to answer, and can’t. Is it that obvious, even to them?
Genevieve rises from the sofa. “Don’t be ridiculous, Trent,” she says, and pats his shoulder. “Aviva’s not like us.”
“She’s not like them,” he grunts.
“Of course not,” Genevieve says, as though this is perfectly obvious. “The question is whether she will become like them, like us, or… well, look at her. She’ll probably find herself well and truly dead long before either is remotely an option.” Her tone is light, almost flirtat
ious, though I can’t say who she might be flirting with. Maybe everyone. Or no one. But she’s serious when she turns back to me. “We’re all trapped, darling. The forgotten ones in this house. The elders. You. Your… whatever he is. The handsome one.” She follows Trent out of the room.
“So what do we do?” I ask Edwin, who’s been listening to the whole conversation but has had nothing to add.
He chuckles and puts his headphones back on. “Wait for the fucking elders to arrive. At least things might get interesting.”
“Did you sleep well?”
I turn and offer a casual smile to Daniel, rolling the chair I’m occupying aside to make room for him in the cramped office. Naya’s chair. They haven’t brought anything in for me yet. “Like the dead. You?”
In truth, I had a horrible nightmare about being trapped in a burning building with every human I’ve ever fed on. I don’t think I screamed out loud, though. As long as I keep sleeping alone, no one ever needs to know this is happening.
There was a time when Daniel would have seen it in me, when I’d immediately have assumed he knew just because he asked. But we’ve been apart. He doesn’t know me like he once did, and I suspect I’ve become better at keeping my secrets.
“Same as ever,” he says, and reaches past me for the coffee pot.
We took shifts through the day, needing our rest but not wanting to leave Sean alone. Nothing else has happened, though. Daniel took care of checking on our guest in the attic, and apparently saw no need to fill me in on her condition when we changed shifts.
It was a long day. Even with the curtains drawn, there’s something about the presence of the sun outside that drains us. Sleep really is the best way to get through the misery it brings.
