Chapter II #2
But Lottie just stands there, watching, waiting, and suddenly the words are just words, a stupid postscript in the back of a battered book, and Alice flings the paperback aside and climbs back onto the couch, drawing up her knees as Lottie steps over the book, and sets the bag aside, and says, “I’m glad you’re awake. ”
Alice glares, and she adds, “Sorry for drugging you. It was Ezra’s idea. He has more experience with things like this.”
“Things like this,” echoes Alice darkly.
“In the beginning, we’re . . .” she searches for the word, “volatile. Every feeling, every need, is dialed up, the good and the bad. He thought you might hurt yourself. Or at the very least, destroy the room.”
This last said with a shred of lightness, too like a joke.
Alice clenches her teeth as Lottie lowers herself into a nearby chair, sinks her fingers into her curls, and sighs, the air around her tinged with tension. Alice asks the question that’s bothering her most.
“Why didn’t you kill me?”
Of course, until the early hours of last night, Alice was convinced she had —that this strange girl had walked into her life and stolen it from under her.
Now she knows that Lottie’s not to blame for that part—at least, she’s not the one who stopped her heart, even if she’s still the reason why it happened.
“I liked you,” answers Lottie limply. “We had fun and then—”
“Not that night,” says Alice. “After. When you found out what I was. What she made me.” Alice swallows. “Sabine.” The name, like a bitter cordial on her tongue. “When I showed up here. Changed. Like Penny.”
Lottie’s expression darkens. “I didn’t want to.”
“So you wanted to kill Penny?”
She winces at the name. “No. It broke my heart.”
“But you did it.”
A whispered, “Yes.”
And it occurs to Alice then, that just because Lottie hasn’t killed her yet doesn’t mean she won’t still try, that maybe the only reason she waited was because Ezra might disapprove. Alice looks toward the door, wondering if and when he’ll—
“I sent him home,” says Lottie. “This isn’t Ezra’s problem. It’s mine.”
And Alice doesn’t appreciate being called a problem, but her thoughts skip past that to the fact Lottie knew exactly where her mind was going.
“How did you—”
“Your head’s too loud. You might as well be shouting.”
Alice frowns. “How do I think quieter?”
Lottie comes and sits across from her, perching on the edge of the cracked table, close enough that their knees touch, close enough that Alice can see the faintest threads of gold, like filaments of light, in her brown eyes.
And even now, despite everything, Alice finds it hard to look away.
She feels an echo of the longing that circled her that night, the force that drew her forward, and wonders what could have been, if things were different, if she had woken the next morning and hadn’t been alone in bed.
Lottie’s heart-shaped face burrowing into her shoulder, her violet curls tickling her chin, her cool arms wrapped around her waist, her lips against her ear as she whispered about breakfast.
But then Alice thinks of the list in the back of the book, and knows that’s all she was to Charlotte Hastings, all she would ever be. Alice. Scottish. Gentle. Tastes like grief.
Lottie’s hand settles on her knee, forcing her attention back, and the look on her face says she knows. There’s pity in her eyes, and Alice doesn’t want it.
“Show me how it works,” she says.
“It takes practice, to put up walls. To keep your thoughts safely to yourself. But in the meantime, you can try and cover it by thinking pointedly. Focus on one thing you want me to hear, instead of all the things you don’t.
It’s not words, really, so don’t try thinking of a number or anything like that.
It’s feelings. Emotions, desires, that kind of thing. ”
Alice looks Lottie in the eye, and focuses, as loudly as she can, on her distrust.
Lottie nods. “That’s fair,” she says. “I haven’t earned it yet.”
Alice can’t believe it worked, almost smiles before she remembers that it’s Lottie’s fault, and that thought must have come through loud and clear, or at least the blaming part, because she looks exhausted, drawn.
And yet, the walls around her mind have gone back up, and no matter how hard Alice strains, she can’t glean the faintest hint of Lottie’s thoughts.
“You want to know why I didn’t kill you?
” she says, looking down at her hands. “I wish I could tell you it was kindness, or that I knew you’d been through enough.
But it’s not. It’s because I’m tired, Alice.
” Her gaze flicks up. “I’m tired of running.
Tired of living in fear. Tired of playing cat and mouse, of knowing it’s only a matter of time before Sabine catches up again.
I didn’t kill you because someone has to stop her, and I can’t. But maybe you can.”
Alice almost scoffs.
She wants Sabine to pay for what she did, wants to hold her down and drive a stake right through her heart, watch the life go out of her eyes and her body turn to dust.
She wants Sabine to look at her before she dies, to understand that it’s her fault.
That she created her own killer.
She wants it, of course she does, but Alice is no fool.
She may be new to all this, but she suspects that there’s a power differential, that someone—some thing —as old as Sabine is much, much stronger than she is, and she’s about to point this out, that what Lottie is proposing might as well be suicide, when she says, “You’d get your life back. ”
Alice’s mind shudders to a stop so fast she can almost hear the gears. “What?”
Lottie chews her lip, and nods. “Sabine made you. She took your life. But you can take it back.”
“What are you talking about?” asks Alice.
“I didn’t know that, back when I found Penny. I wish I had. And it wouldn’t work if it had been a year, a month, even a week, but you’re newly made, ” says Lottie, eyes alight. “Which means you’re still connected to her. Your blood. Your life. It’s like a rope that runs between you.”
Alice’s hand drifts to her collar, the pendant cold against her skin.
“If you kill Sabine, you’ll sever it. And you’ll go back to being what you were before.”
Alice cocks her head, uncertain. “What I was?”
“Alive,” says Lottie.
The word flares like a torch in Alice’s chest. Alive. Alive. Alive?
Doubt rushes up to meet it, because that isn’t how it works in all the stories, the good books and bad TV, there’s never any going back, but then again, this isn’t any story, this is hers.
Alice versus common lore, and if Lottie’s right, if there’s a way to fix this, if there’s even a sliver of a chance that it could work—
What does she have left to lose?
She looks down at the paperback and thinks of that single line, those six, sad words— Alice. Scottish. Gentle. Tastes like grief. —and decides, right then and there, that they won’t be the last record of her life. The sum total of her story.
Alice looks up at Lottie, searches her face, but all she sees is hope, and it’s like a mirror, catching the sun, reflecting the light. Alice feels herself begin to warm.
“All right,” she says, “what do I have to do?”