Chapter IV
IV
If they could just stay, pressed in the amber of that moment, maybe everything would be okay. The club pulsing around them, Lottie’s hands against her hips.
But then the music dips, and Lottie tugs Alice close enough to kiss and whispers, “I’m going to get a drink. You should, too.”
And then she pulls away.
One moment she’s an anchor in the storm, and the next her hands are sliding free, and Alice says, “Wait—”
Alice says, “No—”
Alice says, “Don’t—” because they didn’t talk about this part, and Alice feels her fingers tighten on Lottie’s hand, willing her not to go, not to leave her there, unprotected and alone.
Because she’s afraid.
She’s terrified, and Lottie should be able to tell, to feel her mind spinning out, but there are so many people creating so much noise that maybe she can’t, because she just twirls Alice like it’s all part of the game, tucks a lock of blond hair back behind her ear, such a tender gesture, and then she pulls free and drifts back, until she’s swallowed by the crowd.
And Alice wants to go after her, to grab her arm and haul her back, but before she can the gap is gone, the bodies already filling in.
She feels suddenly adrift, at sea, surrounded by two hundred strangers, living breathing people, and the reality of that comes crashing in, and her throat goes dry and her jaw begins to ache and she backs away, or tries, but her shoulders instantly collide with another person, and she says, “Sorry” (the word made strange by the sudden sharpness of her teeth, the space they take up in her mouth).
Alice turns, searching for a break in the crowd, but she can’t find one, so she forces her way through, the bodies knocking against hers, the pulses hard as hammers through their skin, her head going light from hunger, until at last, at last, she’s on the other side, and there’s space to move (not much, but just enough), a gap between the people and the wall.
She follows a sign for the bathroom, tells herself she just needs a second to collect her thoughts, tamp down the panic, but she ends up in a narrow alcove, a makeshift hallway studded with doors, thinks she might have gotten lost along the way until she finds the right door, but just as she’s about to go in, a girl comes stumbling out and runs right into her.
Alice steadies the girl, who is all apology, cheeks flushed bright from dancing or from drinking, or a mix of both, and she’s still holding on to Alice, who can smell her sweat and hairspray and beer and under that, the bright, metallic tang that now makes her vision flicker and her head go light.
(“I’m going to get a drink,” said Lottie. “You should, too.”)
Alice feels the pulse through the girl’s palm, sees it flutter at her throat, and then the girl squints, leans close, her pupils wide as saucers, a thin blue ring around their edges.
“ You, ” she says, and for a second Alice is afraid she knows her, from school, but the girl just stares and says, “you look like you are made of stars.”
And it’s dumb, she’s clearly drunk, or high, but it’s the kind of line that makes Alice blush inside, even as she laughs.
“I’m sorry,” says the girl, shaking her head, “I’ve had a bad night.”
“Me too,” says Alice, because she’s shit at flirting, always has been, but maybe there’s something to the truth, or maybe there is starlight behind her eyes, a shimmer of the strange and magic to her now, because the girl bites her bottom lip, blood rushing to the surface of her skin, the air around her painted with want as she says, “Can we make it better?”
Old Alice would have blushed, and stammered.
New Alice only cocks her head and says, “Well, we can try.”
And the next thing she knows, the girl is leaning back into the wall, dragging Alice with her, and then her mouth is on her mouth, and Old Alice would have stopped right there, let the kiss be just a kiss.
But New Alice is so hungry.
Her mouth moves south, to the girl’s jaw, her neck, and she could still stop, if she really wanted to, but what she wants is to feel something besides that hollow panic, that ringing fear, so she sinks her teeth, as gently as she can, into the girl’s throat, decides, even as the blood spills across her tongue, and down her throat, that she will stop in time, that she will be like Lottie, not Sabine, that she will learn to take only what she needs, and never what she wants.
So even though the heartbeat has just started in her chest, even though the pulse beneath her hands has not even begun to falter, Alice lets her teeth slide free. She pulls back, and lifts the girl’s chin, glad to see that she looks glassy-eyed, a little dazed, but otherwise unhurt.
Alice smiles at this triumph, opens her mouth to tell her she’ll be fine, but someone else speaks first.
“Now, Alice,” says a voice, right there in her ear, “didn’t Charlotte teach you?”
Up until that moment, Alice didn’t know that she’d heard the voice before (the memory of that night so neatly expunged, a fallow plot in place of memory). But now the sound rattles something loose in her.
A hand, pressing her down into the sheets.
The same hand that reaches past her now and closes around the girl’s throat.
“You should always finish what you start.”
The swift clean snap of bone, and the girl crumples, like dead weight, onto the darkened floor, and Alice turns and finds herself face-to-face with a nightmare. With a dream.
The heartbeat dies inside her chest as she says the name.
“Sabine.”
A girl watches a widow step down from a horse, and wonders who she is.
“Call me Sabine,” she will say, the name glinting like a prize.
A wife slaughters the husband in her bed, and sheds her old life like a coat.
“Call me Sabine,” she will say as he falls.
A girl at her first ball is rescued by a stranger.
“Call me Sabine,” she will say, as if they are already friends.
Alice stands pinned to the spot, a dead girl at her feet, and in front of her, Sabine.
As she listened to Lottie’s story, she built a mental image of the monster at its heart. She imagined her by turns a goddess, a devil, a force of nature.
And the real Sabine is all those things.
But somehow, she is a woman, too. Flesh and bone, at once less lovely and more striking. Six feet tall in a violet dress made of layered lace, with ropes of molten hair, and eyes that might once have burned like matches but now are lightless. Black.
And when she speaks, the voice slides like fingers through her hair. Coaxing. Calming.
“Hello, Alice.”
Lottie warned her about the strength of Sabine’s will, the way it could bend minds, but she should have warned Alice about the power of her voice, the downward pull of it, the quiet danger resting just behind the sounds in a way that makes Alice think of freezing to death—how supposedly the cold sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you’ve given up, walked right into your own grave.
Alice shakes free of Sabine’s voice, but it turns out that’s even worse, the veil of calm replaced by panic, because even though the girl’s heartbeat has died inside her chest, she can feel terror kicking like a rabbit in its place.
She’s always had a taste for fear.
Alice doesn’t know how to hide it so she doesn’t even try, lets it spill out to every side, and Sabine must be able to taste it because she smiles a perfect, horrible smile, at once wolfish and feline, the sharpened white-tooth grin of predators, and what was Alice thinking—in what world could she ever— No, no, no, she fights the thoughts down, buries each traitorous one beneath the same word.
Lottie. Lottie. Lottie. And as she does, she tries to twist away, to look down the darkened hall, past Sabine and back toward the club and the crowd, hoping to catch sight—
But Sabine’s cold fingers come up beneath her chin. The same fingers that just broke a human girl’s neck, easy as snapping. She turns Alice’s face so there’s nowhere else to look but up into those haunted eyes, five hundred years of hunger staring back.
“We’ll find Charlotte later,” she says, and the words sound like a promise as much as a threat. “Right now, you and I have things to talk about.”
And before Alice can say No, before she can cobble together some version of resistance, Sabine says, “ Come with me, ” and this time the voice isn’t just a voice, it’s an order, rolling over Alice, and the sounds and the lights of the club cut out, as if someone pulled the plug—no, as if someone pulled every plug in every outlet, in every building—and after that, the club might as well have opened up beneath her feet, because she can’t see or hear or feel a single thing.
Alice’s whole world goes black.