by Sonia Hartl
“Wait.” Rose stepped forward, pushing her hand against the door to keep it closed. “You’re right.” Ida let out a strangled sound behind us, and Rose shot her a dirty look. “We haven’t been as upfront with you because we were afraid of hitting you with too much at once.”
“It’s a lot to process,” Ida said. “In case you missed the part about us looking out for you. We don’t have time for drama, and we can’t afford infighting. So suck it up, buttercup.”
I glared at her, and she blew me a kiss.
“What Ida is trying to say, in her special bitchy way, is that we’re ready to tell you more now, if you’ll just stay and listen.” Rose led me over to the floor, where they’d been hovering over some papers. “We know you know your own limits, and I apologize for trying to protect you. Tell me what you want to know, and I’ll answer all your questions.”
“Everything.” I gazed at the papers, my eyes widening as I fell upon the word heirloom written in a bold script and underlined twice. “Tell me everything.”
Chapter Seven
Rose scooped up the papers and put them in a neat stack. “These are just our notes. They’re kind of messy, but now that we have everything we need, we can start a new log.”
“What do heirlooms have to do with it?” I asked.
“Everything,” Rose said.
I hadn’t thought about my heirloom in years. One, because I no longer had the locket in my possession, and two, because I didn’t need it once I’d been transformed. Despite popular misconception, a vampire bite alone isn’t enough to complete the transformation. I’d needed to store a single drop of my living blood inside an object of my choosing. Objects held memory, and the stronger the significance, the more powerful the memories associated with the object, with silver and gold being the better conduits. The act of making it a vessel for my living self created a physical holding place for my emotions, sentiments, and self-awareness: everything that made me human and allowed me to retain those characteristics in death.
No one could survive the turning process without an heirloom. A vampire bite alone didn’t do anything, since the vampire needed to redirect a piece of themselves into the one they were creating. And without the heirloom tethering them to life, the person would die. Which was why vampires generally required permission to turn anyone. Generally, anyway …
I rubbed at the scar on my wrist. The bite marks where Elton had sunk his teeth into me and flooded my veins with the venom that ran in his. The moment our blood mixed, he became a part of me. I thought it had been metaphorical. I’d had no idea how wrong I was.
“Elton found out about the power of heirlooms too late,” Ida said. “He’d already turned me and given away his power before he discovered what a huge mistake that had been.”
I swallowed. Hard. “You give away your power when you make a vampire?”
That information would’ve been much more useful to me thirty-four years ago. Though I didn’t feel any different after I turned Stacey—other than the process itself being horrific enough to put me off the idea of ever turning someone again. If I’d given something away, wouldn’t I have felt it?
“It’s like a chain that links backward,” Rose said. “The heirloom Ida made preserves the memory of Elton at full power. The moment he turned us, we held the power. Destroy the heirloom, and you can destroy the vampire.”
“And we can’t just take a sledgehammer to them or toss them off a bridge,” Ida said. “We need to kill the blood stored within the heirloom at the same time. It’s a whole process.”
That was going to be a problem. “We need all our heirlooms?”
“Yes. Which I suspected. Even though it’s rare for a vampire to make more than one, he gave up his power three times over, which means it takes three times the sacrifice to balance. I’ve been researching this for thirty years,” Rose said.
I hadn’t realized just how much time both Rose and Ida had put into this. The time and the care it took to put all the pieces together, sorting through half-baked myths and near-forgotten legends in out-of-print books. While I’d been flitting across the country with Elton, they’d been making long-term plans. Not just for themselves, but for me as well.
And I was going to be the one to ruin it.
I should’ve taken more care with my locket. Stacey ripped it right off my neck, and I didn’t do a thing to stop her, because she was angry and I felt bad. I was still human enough at the time to let my feelings dictate all of my actions. Maybe this was the other reason I didn’t get close to anyone. They all walked away worse off for having known me.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you both earlier.” I bit my lower lip, piercing it with my fang. It quickly healed, and my mind instantly drifted to Parker’s full bottom lip kissed with a single drop of blood. “Today was a lot. I wasn’t ready to see Elton.”
“It’s okay.” Rose laid a gentle hand on my arm. Her clean-cotton scent was like a calming balm to my internal storm. “We knew it would be tough. I had a panic attack the first time I ran into him after he ended things, but it gets easier. What did you think of Parker?” Parker. Her name spun through my mind like a penny in a coin funnel, lightly skimming the edges. I saw so much of myself in her, protecting her had begun to feel as if it could be a do-over for me. A chance to make things right. If only we could convince her to make better choices, to live past this time when everything felt hopeless. I needed to believe there was still hope for girls who didn’t have any hope for themselves.
“She reminds me of me,” I said. Rose and Ida nodded. Maybe they felt the same way, like Parker had become the second chance none of us had gotten. An opportunity to forgive ourselves. “Why isn’t she skittish around us like the rest of the living?”
“She’s a lost girl.” A shadow of grief older than time passed in Ida’s eyes. I’d seen it in Rose’s too. The weight that lost girls were expected to carry for an eternity. “She’s not afraid of death because she doesn’t think her life matters. Her world is black and gray. We’re something other, so she looks at us and sees color.”
The truth of her statement cut deep. Even before Elton enrolled at my school, I’d already become so good at folding myself down, making myself smaller so I wouldn’t burden anyone by taking up too much space. Elton made it so easy for us to willingly embrace death. Because none of us thought we’d been worth much at all.
“Elton never loved us, did he?” It had all been for nothing in the end. “If he loved us, he never would’ve let us believe our lives meant so little.”
“You’re way late to that party.” Ida paused, her expression softening. “But yes, he courted us specifically because it had been easier for him to convince us we wouldn’t be missed. Funny how we had to become undead to figure out how much our lives really meant.”
I couldn’t think of anything less funny.
The only thing we could do now was free ourselves of Elton so we could find a way to make a life out of our immortality. That meant making nice with Stacey, somehow. I had to believe there was a reason why I was seeing her all over town now. She had to have kept the lockets. They had been our heirlooms for a reason.
“What happened with Frankie?” I asked.
“That boy will never learn.” Rose let out a chuckle. “He’s had a thing for Ida for years, but he won’t do anything about it because he’s bound to Gwen.”
Gwen. Just repeating her name in my mind sent a shiver of fear down my spine. As a kid, she was undoubtedly the kind of person who pulled the wings off flies and fed them to her enemies. Beautiful in a cold and sadistic way, she took pleasure in torturing her victims before feeding on them. She often removed their eyelids first so they’d be forced to watch as she tore them apart before letting them die.
“That is all very much his problem, not mine.” Ida grinned. Her smile was made of nightmares, but still carried a warmth that was absent from Gwen’s. “I told him we needed to talk, and he agreed because he doesn’t have a drop of common sense in his
thick head.”
“And he just told you what you wanted to know?” It couldn’t be that easy.
“Yes.” The mischievous gleam in her eye was terrifying. I had a feeling that was the last thing many people saw before she made a meal out of them. “After I tied him to a toilet-paper rack in a storage closet and ripped off his arms.”
I choked and beat on my chest to clear my lungs. “You ripped off his arms?”
“They’ll grow back.” Ida shrugged, like she went around ripping off arms every day and this was just business as usual. “It got him to talk, so I don’t want to hear any judgment.”
“No judgment.” I held out my hands, then glanced at Ida and tucked them under my legs. Our limbs did grow back, and rather quickly, but it was still traumatizing to lose them. Dying hadn’t changed our pain thresholds. “What did he tell you?”
“We already knew we’d need our heirlooms and certain death plants to complete the burning ritual that will make Elton killable, but we didn’t know if the time and place mattered,” Rose said.
“It matters,” Ida said. “We can burn them anywhere. The universe will throw a minor temper tantrum when we do, nothing serious, but it needs to be done under a full moon.”
“That is specific.” Though I supposed if making and killing vampires were easy, there would be a lot more of us. As it stood now, there were fewer than five hundred vampires in the world. And Elton had made three already.
“The moon cycles have long been a part of many rituals since the dawn of time,” Rose said. “It makes sense from a historical standpoint. And it should be done at the school. To make Elton’s need for his own rituals his undoing, which also seems appropriate.”
“And when is the next full moon?” I needed time to find Stacey, but if we waited until the next moon cycle, Elton would have a larger window in which to turn Parker. We were walking a fine line with time.
“Three weeks until full moon,” Ida said.
Three. Weeks. Panic clawed at my throat. So much hinged on getting this exactly right, and I was about to set us back, possibly indefinitely. I needed to come clean to Rose and Ida, so we could come up with a plan if I couldn’t retrieve mine. “I don’t have my heirloom.”
“What do you mean you don’t have it?” Rose raised her fist to her mouth. “Please don’t tell me you lost it. Because this doesn’t work without all three.”
“I don’t know if it’s lost. It’s been gone for a long time. Stacey stole it from me the night I turned her.” I swallowed the bitter memories of Stacey ripping off my locket, the twin to hers, and telling me I didn’t deserve to wear it after what I’d done.
Ida held out one of her palms. “Back the fuck up. First of all, who’s Stacey? And more importantly, you made a vampire and didn’t think that was pertinent information worth sharing?”
I sniffed. Those two had kept many more secrets from me, so they had no room to lecture. “It’s not something I like to talk about.”
“I don’t care about your feelings.” Ida paced the living room, chewing off her thumbnail, then chewing it off again when it grew back. “This changes things.”
“I realize that.” I knotted my fingers together. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“Do we have to destroy Stacey’s heirloom too?” Ida asked Rose.
Rose shook her head. “Elton’s power is only tied to us and our heirlooms, because he made us. Stacey can kill Holly but not Elton, because he never gave her anything.”
“That’s something, I guess,” Ida grumbled. I tried not to cringe over her relief of Stacey having the power to kill me. “We’re still screwed.”
“It’s not over yet. She might still have Holly’s heirloom, especially if she knows its value.” Rose lifted my chin and tilted her head as she studied me. “You feel guilt. Don’t. Guilt can consume you. Do you know where this Stacey person is?”
“Somewhere in the city.” So helpful. “I think I saw her at the bus stop outside the school, but it was only for a second, and maybe I saw her outside the piano bar the night you two found me. That might’ve been a trick of the light, though.”
“I don’t think so.” Ida let out a derisive huff. “She’s playing with you. Why?”
Over the past thirty years, I’d gone from city to city with Elton, never knowing Stacey had been in those same cities, not really understanding until three months ago that she would’ve had no choice but to follow. If she wanted me dead just for changing her, I had to imagine being tethered to me for eternity only increased that desire, and unlike Elton, she didn’t need a whole trail of exes to make that happen. She only needed herself and her heirloom. Which, lucky her, she probably still had.
“She never wanted to be a vampire,” I said. “I did it while she was unconscious and bleeding out. I thought I was saving her life; she thinks I damned her soul, so here we are.”
I told them the entire story. Stacey hadn’t trusted Elton from the start. She warned me repeatedly to stay away from him. At first, I thought it was because she was jealous, because he took away time and attention that had always belonged to her, but she’d felt uncomfortable around him the way most of the living did around vampires. The night he turned me in the school parking lot, Stacey had followed us. The moment he bit me it was too late, but Stacey charged him with a wooden stake, having no idea how useless it was against him.
He tore her neck open and left her body on the concrete.
He said he was only protecting me as I screamed and cried over her dying body. With my new heightened senses, I could feel her life slipping away. I panicked, not thinking about what she would’ve wanted, only of saving her. So I put a drop of her blood inside her locket and bit her wrist in the same place Elton had bitten mine.
The pain that sliced through my veins as I forced the redirection of my blood was worse than dying. Everything inside me felt as if it were being tied into knots. The process was so intense, I couldn’t even scream. It felt as if I’d been ripped clean in half as a living part of me flowed into Stacey’s body, while her death flowed into mine. Just reminiscing about that night caused me to break out in a cold sweat. It wasn’t just the pain, although that had been unbearable, but the feeling that part of me was gone forever, and I’d never get it back again.
When she rose, covered in her own blood, her neck wound was still very much present. It had cauterized, leaving flaps of dead skin hanging wide open. Because she had died with the injury, it would stay with her for all eternity. I’d thought it would knit itself shut. Elton told me wounds healed quickly. He even demonstrated by slicing his own throat, and I watched in fascination as it barely bled before stitching back up as if it never happened. But I didn’t know that only applied to after death. Anything done before death became permanent, sealed within the time gap where we all existed.
“Holy shit, that’s gruesome.” Ida cringed when I finished. “No wonder she hates you.”
“Thanks, Ida.” I patted her shoulder. “You really ought to make a living writing cheerful sympathy cards for Hallmark.”
“If you want cheerleading, look to Rose. I’m the realist here.” She paused, running her hand over her finger waves, a hairstyle that managed to have a modern elegance, unlike my own. “If she still wants Elton dead, though, this could be to our advantage.”
“I agree,” Rose said. “We should find Stacey first, then get our heirlooms next.”
“What if she doesn’t have it?” I asked.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” Ida said. “For now, we’re going to function on the assumption that she has it, because it’s the only option we’ve got.”
“Don’t worry yet.” Rose had lined up her figurines on the counter and began polishing them with an embroidered dishtowel. She gave me a tentative smile as she held a sea-glass butterfly and rubbed it furiously enough to scrape off a layer of iridescent paint. “If I’m not worried yet, you shouldn’t be worried.”
Right. Not worried at all.
Stacey had to have it, though. I couldn’t imagine an alternative scenario, and not just because of what that would mean for our intentions with Elton. Even if Stacey despised me, Edie Barrett’s lockets meant too much to us both.
The summer after eighth grade, my mom had hooked up with Jason McCreedy’s dad, so she arranged for me to stay at Stacey’s while Mr. McCreedy took her on a fishing trip he had previously promised to his son. After Stacey and I spent the day at the public pool trying to get the high school boys to notice us (they never did), we dug through her attic after her mom had found some old love letters up there. The scent of sun-soaked chlorine and attic musk filled my senses whenever I thought about the afternoon we became obsessed with the previous owner, Edie Barrett. We created a whole fictional life for her based on a handful of letters, an old trunk full of moldy lace, and two matching lockets with a B carved into the tarnished silver. We believed Edie’s ghost wandered the attic at night, waiting to collect the souls of lonely girls.
In a way, she had.
Stacey and I spent the rest of the summer going through every box in the attic, making up stories about Edie with each small treasure uncovered. We even made several trips to the library in the hopes that we’d stumble on an old diary or an account of her life. All we turned up was an obituary stating that she hadn’t been survived by any family and passed away at the age of eighty-four. A Scrooge McDuck who had died alone with no one to mourn her or claim her lost possessions. To say it had been a letdown was a huge understatement.
When Stacey and I started high school together, we decided we’d make our own history. It might’ve been too late for Edie, but it wasn’t too late for us. We’d been young enough to believe we could still conquer the world, not knowing the world had already decided our fates, and it wasn’t kind to awkward girls who wanted, more than anything, to be loved. We vowed never to take those necklaces off, and we made good on that promise, until the night Stacey ripped mine from my throat before she ran. I never saw her again.
