Chapter 6
If Sylvia wasn’t a thousand year old vampire, and instead just your normal, run-of-the-mill capitalist sadist, she’d probably run a department store.
“I just don’t think you should legally be able to sell hand soap for more than five dollars,” Sylvia muttered into the crook of her neck, which was awkwardly propping up her iPhone. “If you get above that price point, I better be washing myself with secretions from an extinct species of whale.”
She finished scratching the tester label off the soap and slipped it in her handbag.
“Ma’am.”
Shit.
Someone cleared their throat directly behind her, close enough that they definitely saw that.
Sylvia spun to face this offended onlooker, who turned out to be a twenty-something girl with eyeliner-heavy waterlines and a deep-set frown. Sylvia smiled: maybe she wouldn’t even need to Suggest this one. She looked one bad day away from quitting her job anyway.
“You didn’t see anything,” Sylvia said with a wink. “Can you show me where the changing rooms are? I want to try on a few things.”
The girl studied her for a moment. Sylvia hoped she wouldn’t do something stupid, like call the police, or worse, the store manager. Sylvia could Suggest her, but using her powers tired her out, and she was already exhausted. Infants will do that to you. Soul-sucking little cretins.
After a beat, the girl finally spoke up. “If you’re going to shoplift something, I’d pick a better soap.”
Sylvia snorted, instantly relieved.
“I knew you were my people. Yasmine, hold on a second.” She took the soap out from her handbag and showed it to her new accomplice.
“I only chose this one because it says baby safe and fragrance free but is baby safe even a federally-regulated term? Or do they just slap it on every product that isn’t made of toxic waste?
I just want something that won’t give my son hives.
If I can do one thing right as a mother, let it be that. ”
“Pretty low bar for motherhood,” the twenty-something said, taking the soap and giving it a bored once-over. “Yeah, your son should probably be fine. I think. I don’t know. I don’t have kids. Or want them.”
Sylvia took it back with a huff. “I didn’t want kids either. Now here I am. Watch out, it might happen to you. Then you’ll have to care about stuff like this.”
The woman’s expressionless eyes opened slightly. “You get knocked up?”
Sylvia weighed the idea of venting her life’s story to this adolescent then erasing its memory, but Yasmine was already complaining to her on the other side of the phone.
“I did the knocking up,” is what she settled on. “I’m kind of like a deadbeat dad. Except that instead of leaving, I see my child every day, and traumatize them.” Sylvia cleared her throat. “So, changing room?”
***
Sylvia pressed the skin-tight dress to her body and sighed miserably at her reflection.
Perfect fit. As always.
Aster had done the hard part. Carrying the baby.
Being nauseous for nine months and throwing up in Yasmine’s marble sink.
The delivery itself had been easy—Aster’s pain tolerance capped out at being annihilated by a space laser, pushing out a child barely felt like a pinprick to her—but at least it had left a mark.
A few stretch marks right below her stomach.
They were beautiful. Sylvia kissed them every morning.
She knew it was the stupidest thing to care about, the fact she didn’t have her own battle wounds.
Her skin was still as poreless and taut as a twenty-year-old.
If she had only had some sort of mark, she dreamed, then she could at least feel like she did something to help with Rafael.
But no. She couldn’t even fall back on the physical toll, like a bad mother might.
As the non-birthing parent, she had to do the thing of actually being good at parenting. Her. Of all people.
Catrina Maroven’s daughter.
She clenched her teeth, and looked away from her own reflection. Her nose had started looking too much like her mother’s.
“Sylvia? Are you there?”
Yasmine’s voice barreled through Sylvia’s spiral.
“Of course I’m here. I’m listening.” She wasn’t. “What were we talking about?”
Yasmine sighed impatiently. “My new colleague.”
“Right.” Sylvia dragged out the word, trying to piece together all the half-sentences she’d absorbed from their conversation. “The one who’s working as the barista?”
“Correct.”
“Why the hell is she doing that, by the way? Don’t they pay her enough?”
“Evidently not.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll fix that soon. Now that you’re dating her.”
Sylvia snickered to herself in the mirror when she heard Yasmine make some sort of scandalized choking sound on the other end.
In truth, she knew the likelihood that Yasmine would ever date anyone was pretty much in the negatives.
She’d known Yasmine for over eight hundred years, and not once had she seen her so much as hold pinkies with another person. There had been Richard, of course, the thrall-husband, but he had always been a cover for her.
No one questions the wife’s finances when she has a rich husband. It was always assumed her money came from him.
But as far as real romance, there had been nothing.
She knew Yasmine slept around occasionally, discreetly, but that was about it.
Back during one of Sylvia’s homeless stints, she’d stayed over at Yasmine’s place for a year, and she’d brought back a girl for dinner and drinks.
The mansion had been large enough that Sylvia could listen through the vents, and she’d overheard the most boring conversation of her life—some perfunctory bullshit about the weather before Yasmine eventually asked, “So, should we have sex now?”
Thinking back to it, Sylvia had to stifle a laugh. Yasmine was a very straightforward person. She didn’t do messy. She didn’t even drink from the humans she slept with. Hell, she didn’t drink from humans at all.
God, she could be so boring.
Even with all her money, she only drank from the blood bank. It’s more ethical that way, Yasmine would insist. Sylvia held the opposite view.
Life was too long to be ethical. She wasn’t put here on Earth with her good looks and fantastic personality to live like a monk.
“I’m not dating her,” Yasmine insisted, sounding more irritated than usual by the accusation. “I’m not sleeping with her either. The thought did cross my mind in the beginning, but…”
Sylvia absolutely lit up. She tossed the dress aside in celebration and it skidded across the floor and into the stall next to her. “Wait, it did? Fuck! I knew it!”
She heard Yasmine mutter damn it under her breath.
“Briefly! I thought about it briefly! Sue me. She’s like an America’s Next Top Model dropout or something.” Sylvia could hear her friend loudly pacing around her living room. “But I just attended her lecture and… God, Sylvia. She’s good. She’s really good. I can’t sleep with someone that smart.”
“Well, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve maybe ever heard you say.”
A loud knock cratered into the left wall of Sylvia’s dressing room. “Excuse me?” an intruding voice shouted. “Can you not throw your shit into my stall?”
Sylvia’s eyes went comically large as she stared through the gap at the bottom of the stall, finding a pair of porcelain-doll feet pointed in her direction.
“One second, Yasmine, I might have to kill someone,” she whispered, then raised her voice. “Were you speaking to me?”
“Um, yes? I could have slipped on that and broken something.”
Sylvia covered the receiver on the phone and shouted back, “My deepest apologies. I didn’t realize you were one of those inflatable tube men they put outside car dealerships.” She rolled her eyes aggressively. “The dress is made of satin, it should not have been able to knock you over.”
The woman let out a shrill sound of disbelief. The porcelain feet disappeared, footsteps pounded against the blindingly white changing room tile, and a moment later Sylvia’s own stall door was being yanked ajar.
Backlit by the horrible fluorescent overheads was a skyscraper of a woman. She was a cherry blonde, aggressively well-dressed, fisting three overly stuffed shopping bags in her right hand.
Her left was pointing at Sylvia with complete derision.
The woman’s slightly yellowed eyes looked her up, down, then settled on, “Bitch.”
Sylvia snorted. It was so simple, so singular, it left her momentarily speechless. By the time she was ready to respond, the woman was already turning away from her.
“Let’s go, Teodora,” the woman said, eyes fixed on someone Sylvia couldn’t see, likely someone in the dressing room waiting area. “Mother’s going to wonder why we’ve been gone so long. And we haven’t hit our quota for today.”
“Noo. Sabina, please. We can’t leave the mall yet,” whined another voice. “I’ve never been to a Sephora before. I’ll die if I don’t go.”
“It’s literally just a store that sells makeup. Bucharest has those, too.”
Bucharest?
The apparently Romanian skyscraper—Sabina?—didn’t give Sylvia another glance before stalking off toward the cash register. Another woman, around her same height, watched her flash by and followed behind her like a lost dog.
Sylvia stared after them for a long moment, feeling a foreign sense of familiarity. Like deja vu, almost. But, she couldn’t place it.
“Sylvia?” Yasmine muttered into her ear. “Have you stopped harassing the public yet?”
Sylvia laughed, coming out of her reverie.
“Yes, I’m done, I’m done,” she said, grabbing her things before hopping over to Sabina’s abandoned stall to pick up her dress.
She reached down for it, but frowned at the texture.
She rubbed the fabric in between her fingers, and it felt brittle now, like it’d been sucked dry.
The threading came apart just with a single drag of her thumb.
“So much for quality materials,” she muttered, letting it droop back onto the floor. She sighed: the dress wasn’t going to help her anyway.
It was just a bandaid.
Sylvia lifted her bag back onto her shoulder and walked out. “So, you were just telling me how this girl is too smart for you to have sex with her?”
“That is not what I said.”
“It is exactly what you said, actually.”
Yasmine sighed dramatically. “Well, it’s more than that. I’ve decided to hire her into my lab. And I’m not going to have sex with one of my employees. It’s an… ethical dilemma. Not to mention, it’ll distract from the work."
Sylvia stopped in her tracks.
Had she heard that correctly?
“Yasmine,” she paused. “You’ve never invited anyone to join your lab. Any of your labs. You've never let anyone even look at your research.”
The other line went silent. Sylvia stood there and waited, shopping carts squeaking by. Women dragged their wailing children into the home goods aisle. Sylvia wondered at what point she’d start relating to other mothers.
“Yes…” Yasmine finally said. “I suppose that’s true.”
Her voice sounded uncharacteristically confessional.
“Until now, no one had ever been impressive enough for me to try.”