by V M Black
The car stopped in front of my econometrics class, and I unfastened my seatbelt and started to get out. But as my hand touched the door handle, Dorian caught my other wrist and dragged me back.
His hand tangled in my hair, his mouth finding mine with such urgency that every desperate need was wakened in my body all at once and I felt like my skin would combust from how much I needed him and resented the clothes between us. His tongue inside my mouth was like every time he’d ever touched me, taken me, and in a sudden madness, every memory of him seemed to burst into my mind at once.
And then, as abruptly as he’d seized me, he pulled away.
“You’d better go,” he said.
That was another tipping point, another decision point where I could drop all of my life outside of him at that moment in return for everything he offered me.
Or I could keep going as I had been and keep myself more or less intact.
I nodded. “I’ll see you soon. Tonight.”
“Tonight,” he said, and the word was a promise.
I shouldered my bag as I stepped out onto the sidewalk and raised my hand in a farewell salute.
And Dorian drove off, taking my heart with him.
“We were waiting for you.”
The voice made me jump, and I whirled around to see Clarissa standing next to Lisette. I started to frown at seeing the two of them together—Clarissa was, after all, supposed to be keeping more of a distance from my best friend—but then I reminded myself that it was Monday, and Lisette and I shared two classes back-to-back.
“Had a sleepover?” I asked, just in case.
“No.” Lisette sounded slightly put out. “Clarissa said she couldn’t stay Saturday evening after the afternoon at the STAMP. Wouldn’t even go to dinner with the rest of us.”
Out of the range of Lisette’s vision, Clarissa made a face at me.
Don’t trust me? her expression read.
I carefully ignored her.
“Well, we’ll have lunch together,” I said, as if I was looking forward to it.
“Lunch! Of course, that’s true,” Lisette said, brightening as she turned to go into the building where our class was held.
I liked Clarissa probably better than any other agnate other than Dorian—which wasn’t saying much because she was the only agnate I’d had an extended conversation with other than Dorian who wouldn’t happily wish me dead. But I didn’t like her around Lisette. I missed our old lunches and study sessions, the ones with the real Lisette, but it was too awkward to make excuses as to why Clarissa suddenly needed to sit across the cafeteria from us. And that also would pretty effectively defeat the point of her being there to guard me.
I suppressed a sigh, and Clarissa merely gave me a smug little smile. I let Lisette get ahead of us far enough that I could drop my voice to the barest whisper and be certain that my words only reached Clarissa’s unnaturally sharp ears.
“Did you hear what happened this weekend?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she murmured back. “The wheel of fortune and all that.”
I knew that she wasn’t talking about the game show. “Then why don’t you seem upset?”
She snorted. “There are very few benefits to being too young for the senior agnates to take into their counsel. The fact that worrying becomes other people’s problem is one of them. In a few more centuries, I’ll worry, but for now.... ”
She looked at the hallway of students streaming past and made a small motion with her hand, spreading her fingers out, and suddenly, instead of jostling us, the students were flowing around an invisible bubble that began several feet away without even seeming to notice.
Clarissa’s smile widened predatorily. “For now, I take my enjoyment where I can. And so should you.”
I snorted. “You mean with Dorian. He’s your father. Isn’t that advice just a little creepy to you?”
“Of course not, stepmother dearest,” she said. “Only to you humans.” She looked at the students all around us with a kind of indulgent superiority. “And I am anything but that.”
For once, I had to agree wholeheartedly.
***
Dorian sent a car for me as usual on Monday afternoon, and I spent the evening at his house, first back in the lab and then with him. Tuesday I stayed on campus as I always did, but on Wednesday, I had to bow out of our usual plans because I had an appointment—one I’d been looking forward to for an entire year.
“Please start, please start, please start,” I muttered under my breath as I cranked the engine on my Focus. It did, coming to life almost smoothly for the first time since I’d inherited it from my Gramma. I gave a sigh of relief, and my breath clouded in the chilly air.
“Dorian wouldn’t allow it to not start, you know,” Clarissa said, her tone smug.
She was sitting in the passenger seat next to me because Lisette, who was usually the first to call shotgun, had happily declared her intent to sit in the back instead in order to let the agnate take the front. I’d decided it wasn’t worth arguing with both of them, especially since there wasn’t much I could say without seeming crazy.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t want to take one of your fiancé’s cars,” Lisette said, her teeth audibly chattering. “If there ever was something a rich fiancé is good for, a warm car on a cold day is at the top of the list.”
“I just don’t,” I said, tired of her nagging. “Not this time.”
In half an hour, I had an appointment to sign the closing documents on the sale of my grandmother’s house. It was a journey I’d begun on my own more than a year before I’d met Dorian, and it was one that, despite his aid in increasing the house’s curb appeal, I wanted to finish on my own terms, as well.
“Maybe you should let me drive, at least?” Clarissa suggested lightly. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but I knew what she was implying—that her agnatic reflexes might be a good idea to have, especially since we were driving in my old car with neither the horsepower nor, presumably, the bulletproofing of Dorian’s usual vehicles.
“All right,” I said, yielding reluctantly to practicalities. I got out of the car and circled around as Clarissa wriggled across the console and into the driver’s seat.
“Thanks for coming with me,” I said to Lisette as I buckled in, realizing that I’d been needlessly curt with her. “Sorry I’m in a mood.”
“Hey, I went with you the first time you needed me, didn’t I?” she asked. “I want to see the end, too!”
The first time—after my Gramma had died and I had to go to her house to begin to clean it out. I’d told Lisette that she didn’t need to come, but she’d steamrollered me as she so often did. Then I’d pulled into the garage, stood at the entrance to the kitchen, and it had truly come home what Gramma’s death really meant.
I thought I’d known. The concept of death was so obvious, especially to an orphan like me. And I’d already cried a bucket of tears. But until that moment, standing in the doorway to her house, I hadn’t fully realized at a gut-deep level that I’d never again be greeted by my Gramma in the kitchen or eat a bowl of cereal across from her as she drank her coffee and ate her toast.
Then Lisette had been the only thing that had kept me from running back to the car and driving as far away as my tank of gas would take me.
“Anyhow, I know that you’re just ticked that you’re not spending the night with Mr. Moneybags again,” Lisette added.
I opened my mouth to issue a scathing rebuttal—and then immediately closed it. She was, embarrassingly, right. I was irritated that I had to go a night without seeing Dorian, though not entirely for the reasons that she assumed.
Of course I missed him, but Dorian had correctly predicted that the aching desperation that was near physical pain had lessened considerably over the past several weeks, to the point that I often stayed in the dorms on Monday nights. But with the theft of Dorian’s research, I felt like everything was changing while I was being left frustratingly ou
t of the loop.
He’d messaged me around breakfast to tell me that Jean and Hattie’s joint funeral had been set for that Saturday, but that was the only contact I’d had from him since he’d dropped me off at my first class on Tuesday morning. A day and a half was hardly a long time, but when everything could change in a second, it seemed like forever.
“Sorry about that,” I apologized again.
She snorted. “You know you’re my best friend. And you know that I love you like a sister. But if Mr. Handsome Dashing Stranger shows up at my door and wants to sweep me off my feet, I’d send you plane tickets to visit me on my private island. Dorian does have a private island, doesn’t he?” she added.
I laughed. “Of course...well, I would have said ‘not,’ but I honestly don’t know.”
Lisette shook her head. “Some girls have all the luck and don’t even appreciate it. You’re marrying a guy who’s filthy rich, and you haven’t even bothered to find out whether he has a private island.”
All the luck. That was me, all right. Because that was what you said when an orphan finally sells her dead grandmother’s house—how very, very lucky she was.
I shook my head to clear those thoughts out of it. Lisette was being supportive, and I should be grateful to her. “Maybe he has an extra for you.”
“In that case, he can foot the bill for the bachelorette party,” Lisette grumbled.
“Bachelorette party?” I echoed.
“Of course!” she said. “Friday after next! You didn’t think I’d forget, did you?”
I was the one who had forgotten, but I said, “You don’t quite strike me as a penis cake kind of girl.” I made a face at her in the rearview mirror.
“Oh, it’ll be classy,” she said. “And not on campus, so that we can actually have some booze. Dupont, you know, nice places. Maybe not the most upscale, but the area’s way better than all the near-campus dives, right? So I checked all the clubs out on Not For Tourists, and I loaded them all into a Google map, which I saved to my account and synced to my phone, so we’ll know where the good ones are. We’ll have pub food, do a bar crawl, dance, try to keep Chelsea and Christina sober enough to walk. It’ll be fun.”
“Only you would do research to prepare for a bar crawl,” I said, grinning despite myself.
“Yeah, you want to rely on Christina’s partying advice?” she retorted.
“Um, no,” I said, shuddering. “Been there, done that, never going back. That was the frat party from hell.”
“So I heard,” she said smugly. She was two months younger than I was, so she hadn’t accompanied us on that fateful trip, which had been my first and last solo outing with Chelsea and Christina. Even now, the memory of the hall bathroom on the lower level of the frat house turned my stomach.
Despite Clarissa’s paranoia, we arrived at the title company’s office without incident. A settlement officer in too-high heels and a too-low-cut blouse made a few weak jokes about the crowd I’d brought with me and then led us into a conference room.
I would have felt intimidated by it a few months ago, all the dark, polished wood and shiny chrome that came together to give an impression of commercial sophistication. But it all looked cheap and thin compared to the richness of Dorian’s world.
A young family already sat inside the room, a little girl with big eyes and her hair in two poufs on the sides of her head sitting in her mother’s lap. The father sat beside them, and an older boy slouched at the end of the table with his nose buried in a tablet from which the soft noises of a game emerged.
I looked them over, these people who were going to buy my grandmother’s house. The wife smiled somewhat awkwardly at me, and I smiled back. The settlement officer poured ice water into crystal glasses and made introductions, but I didn’t pay much attention to the names or, in all honesty, to the forms she handed me to sign.
Instead, I was thinking about the kids sleeping in my room and my Gramma’s sewing room, playing in the basement and the backyard, sitting around the kitchen table—not my Gramma’s kitchen table but theirs.
I was happy at the thought of the house being full of voices and life again, but for some reason, there was still a lump in my throat, and the words on the papers in front of me blurred several times so that I had to blink to clear my vision.
Finally, all the papers were signed and the checks handed over. We stood up, and the mother and father gave genuine smiles for the first time—smiles of relief. As I grasped the bank check in my hand, I realized that just as I’d been afraid of not selling the house at all or, even worse, selling to the wrong people, they’d been afraid that they’d found the right house but that something would happen to it and it’d be snatched away from them.
The family bundled up and left quickly through the front office, and I followed more slowly with my friends, looking down at the check as I walked. It was more money than I’d ever held in my life—more money than I’d ever imagined holding. It meant that I could pay my rent now, even pay off my student loans and the rest of my medical debt. And to Dorian, such a sum must seem like a trifle.
Lisette looked nosily at it over my shoulder and whistled as we headed out the door into the cold.
“Look at you!” she said. “You’re rich. Now you can pay me back for like three months of groceries. Aren’t you lucky?”
Trust Lisette to lighten the mood. I grinned and folded the check, and shoved it into my wallet. “And then you can blow every cent of it on the bachelorette party, right?”
She put a hand to her chest, in a motion of exaggerated innocence.
“Who, me?” she asked. “Throw a huge party? You know, me, the prom committee president of the Student Council?”
“Yeah, you,” I said, bumping my shoulder into hers in a friendly manner as we reached my car. I turned to Clarissa, who, other than ordering the other family to sign the damned papers when they wanted to read through everything first, had been uncharacteristically silent. “Can you take me by the bank on the way home?”
“Of course,” she said, buffing her nails against her designer jacket. “I am as skilled a chauffeur as I am a babysitter.”
Lisette giggled. “Oh, Clarissa, you’re so hilarious!”
Right. Hilarious.
I’d started to circle to the passenger side of the car when I saw a flyer under the wiper of my windshield. With a snort of annoyance, I jerked it free. It was only when I touched it that I realized that the paper wasn’t cheap photocopy paper or slick printed flyer stock. Instead, it was the heavy-weighted, slightly coarse texture of fine stationery with a high rag content. Cream-colored, I realized, not white.
“Gah, don’t you hate those?” Lisette was asking. “Junk shoved under your wiper, I mean. It seems like half the time I park on the street down in the District, someone puts something under my wiper. And then I have a heart attack because I think I’ve gotten a ticket, but it ends up just being some jerk trying to sell me something I don’t want.”
Ignoring her, I turned the paper over with a knot of dread. And there, just I had had feared, were words in the familiar scrawling hand:
You’re Next.
Next for what? I thought bitterly. For being shot by a sniper? For suicide? For being mind-controlled by a vampire and forced to kill myself? A white-hot fury went through me, an unaccustomed emotion that burned away any traces of fear.
How did they dare come after me, follow me, threaten me? Whoever it was, I decided, would pay for it in spades. One way or another.
Silently, I handed the paper to Clarissa. She scanned over it, then crumpled it up with a sound of contempt.
“They couldn’t get to me in my dorm room anymore,” I said to her. “So they came after me here. What does it even mean?”
“Most likely?” Clarissa asked, making a dismissive motion as she tossed the tight wad of paper neatly into the trashcan near the door. “Most likely, it means nothing at all. They’re just trying to scare you.”
“They used to succe
ed,” I said. “But now...now I think I’m just mad. “
“What is it?” Lisette asked. “What’s all that about?”
“Nothing,” I said, speaking the word simultaneously with Clarissa—except the agnate’s statement had a whiplash of power behind it, and Lisette instantly settled back, looking idly around as if she’d forgotten that she’d asked anything.
“How can I find out who did this?” I demanded of Clarissa.
“The person who did this touched your car. There should be surveillance videos from the escort vehicle.” Clarissa nodded to another car, positioned a short distance away in the mostly empty lot. “You can have them sent in to Dorian, and he’ll send them on to one of his tech companies to see if they can get an ID.”
“Let’s do that,” I said. I pulled out my phone as I got into the passenger’s seat and used the house app to relay the instructions to the people in the escort car as Clarissa and Lisette took their seats.
As Clarissa was pulled out of the lot with the follow car behind, the guards indicated their agreement. A few seconds later, I got CC’d on a message to Dorian, and I opened the video of the event eagerly, hoping that I’d see...well, to be honest, I hoped that I’d see Cosimo busily writing me hate mail and sticking it onto my car. Instead, a young man with curling hair and different features appeared.
“Is that even a...you know?” I asked Clarissa softly, knowing that I could freely use words like agnate or cognate in front of Lisette but not wanting to say anything that would prompt Clarissa to rearrange my best friend’s memory.
She looked away from the road for a split second to take in the still I’d been studying so closely.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “It’s too grainy. There’s something familiar about him, but then again, most people look familiar after long enough.”
I looked at him again. He did seem familiar, with his light brown curling hair...but I was afraid that it was merely because I wanted him to. I sighed. “I don’t know. It’s not Cosimo, that’s for sure.”
