Chapter 11
After they finally sat down for breakfast, things swiftly escalated—as they always did with Sylvia—toward someone’s demise.
To avoid thinking further life-destroying thoughts, Aster ate diligently at her pancakes (surprisingly good, despite being burnt in the flames of hell) and listened intently.
“...So, that’s why I think we should kill Yasmine Sokolov.”
Aster nearly choked mid-bite.
“Wait, what?”
She apparently hadn’t been doing as good of a job at listening as she intended. Maybe the psychiatrist who tried to diagnose her with ADHD in the early nineties had a point—sooner or later she was going to zone out of a conversation that actually mattered.
She pretended like she had been following along. “The Physics professor?”
Sylvia frowned, crossing her arms over her chest adorably, like a toddler who’d had his idea to go back in time to save the dinosaurs dismissed.
“You weren’t listening.” Caught red-handed.
Aster batted her eyelashes. “Sure I was.”
“Yeah right. You’re really lucky you have that horribly endearing face. It’s a great disguise for your terrible interpersonal skills,” Sylvia muttered.
Horribly Endearing? Aster smiled despite herself. She was really losing her mind at anything now. She would argue Sylvia’s latter point, but Sylvia had already moved on.
“She’s not just a professor,” Sylvia continued conspiratorially. Not that Sylvia really ever said something without sounding conspiratorial. “That’s just what she wants you to think.”
“Why does she care what I think?”
Sylvia glared at her, and Aster grinned at her annoyance. “Not you specifically. The royal You—you know what. Never mind. What I’m getting at is that she’s also a vampire. A vampire masquerading as a professor.”
Aster’s eyebrows shot up.
Now that was interesting.
And she was grateful for anything remotely interesting at the moment. Because it was something to think about that wasn’t the other thing.
“How do you know?”
“I know everything.”
Aster rolled her eyes.
She had gotten a precious five minutes at the Being-Purposefully-Annoying wheel before Sylvia had kicked her back into the passenger’s seat where she belonged.
“Uh huh. Get to the point, Sylvia.”
“Great, as I was saying. I know everything—as in I know every vampire family that has ever lived. Courtesy of being raised by Catrina Maroven, most prolific vampire socialite of the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th centuries—thank god you put a stop to that—and I recognized Yasmine’s face the moment I saw her on the television screen. ”
A flash of last night appeared unbidden in Aster’s mind. She promptly swallowed it down, along with another of Sylvia’s potatoes.
“Old friend?” she asked between bites.
Selfishly, she hoped not. Sylvia’s friends tended to come with benefits.
Me excluded, she was about to think, but upon reflection of recent events—Aster had officially become a tally in Sylvia’s mountain of escapades.
She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Sylvia snorted. “I haven’t slept with her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Of course I wasn’t thinking that.” She was totally thinking that. “Not that I would care either way.” She would definitely have cared.
Luckily Sylvia didn’t drill into her for that second comment. “The Sokolov’s are new money. So I didn’t see much of them at Mother’s galas.”
“New money?”
“Newly turned. Yasmine’s a first generation vampire. Like you,” Sylvia added with a wink.
At that, Aster frowned. She didn’t like being likened to Yasmine for some reason. Probably because Sylvia wanted to kill her, but more likely because Aster felt pointlessly jealous.
She decided to focus on something else, balancing her chin on her hand and asking, “But wouldn’t that mean Wallace’s a vampire, too?”
Aster imagined that nerdy little thing tearing someone’s throat out. Didn’t feel right.
Sylvia shrugged.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Yasmine could have had a mortal baby daddy. Then it just comes down to luck and genetics.”
Aster’s eyes bulged. “Wait, that’s possible? A human and a vampire—procreating?”
Sylvia laughed, and reached over to fuss her hair affectionately.
“God,” Sylvia said breathlessly. “I love that I have to teach you everything.”
The admission sounded so earnest, Aster nearly fell out of her chair.
She looked pointedly down at her plate and tried not to blush, at which she immediately failed horribly. Her heartbeat thudded in her neck.
Why did that do something to me?
“Not everything,” she muttered, digging petulantly into a hardboiled egg with her fingernail.
Only almost everything.
“I still don’t see why we have to kill her just because she’s a vampire,” Aster muttered just for the sake of being contrarian. She actually had no problem killing Yasmine now that she had this one-sided and completely irrational hatred towards her. “How does that help our plan?”
And oh—for the love of—Sylvia had been smiling at her with the softest expression while she hadn’t been looking. Which was definitely not helpful to Aster’s plan of avoiding over-thinking.
And it was especially not helpful when Sylvia ignored her question and reached out her hand, wiping her thumb gently across Aster’s cheek, grazing her lips.
“Hold still.”
She hovered briefly at Aster’s upper lip, looking at it, then up at Aster’s eyes. Sylvia’s eyebrows furrowed, and a shadow of something crossed her face, but the expression was so quick and miniscule that Aster wasn’t even sure it was real. Wouldn’t be her first time hallucinating.
“I’ve never met a messier eater,” Sylvia laughed, then popped the egg-covered finger into her own mouth—which, what the fuck—and licked it clean. “Are you sure you were a human before this? And not like, someone’s very loyal dog?”
Aster scoffed and thought, I was a human before this, and unwittingly became your very loyal dog sometime after.
She did not say this. “Answer my question, Sylvia.”
Sylvia made a noise of protest, but Aster’s glare eventually drew it out of her. “You should already know the answer to your own question. We have to kill Yasmine because vampires are territorial.”
Aster blinked.
She had no clue what Sylvia was talking about. So, a typical conversation for them.
“Really?” Sylvia laughed, gesturing toward Aster’s general cluelessness. “I’m having to explain this to the girl who tore Tommy Ashcroft’s throat out for the crime of looking at me?”
Aster stilled, heart clenching.
What the hell was she insinuating?
Aster felt the sudden compulsion to come up with an excuse.
“He did more than look.”
Sylvia chuckled.
“Sorry. You’re right. Murder is a totally justified reaction to a little slap on the cheek.”
Aster scoffed in disbelief. “As if you’ve ever needed justification for murder.”
“Well, you sure didn’t. Hence my Yasmine point.
” Sylvia gestured in frustration as if this was all incredibly obvious.
“She was married to this prick Ashcroft for years. So either he’s already a thrall—unlikely, given the whole divorce—or he’s a human-shaped piggybank Yasmine tossed aside after she got sick of him.
But he’s still hers, discarded or not. Vampires don’t share toys. ”
This was slowly making some sense to Aster, enough sense that she could have just nodded and let Sylvia continue talking—if it wasn’t for the fact that the other vampire had very plainly insinuated that Aster saw Sylvia as—well—
Aster tried to sound discreet, filling her mouth with half a pancake before whispering, “I would never do that to you. Throw you away like that.”
She wasn’t sure whose benefit she was saying it for—hers or Sylvia’s. She just felt the need to let it sit in the air. Because regardless of how either of them felt, it was true, she realized.
Sylvia could reject her in every way—she could drain all the blood from Aster’s body in one long drink—and Aster would forgive her. Aster could die and she’d haunt Sylvia as a ghost, holding her hand wherever she went without her even knowing.
She didn’t care if it was a pitiful truth. Sylvia had been abandoned by everyone in her life. Even if it killed her, Aster would never give Sylvia an excuse to believe that her destiny was to be set aside.
Sylvia set her fork down. It rattled against the kitchen table.
Aster looked up at the sound, and found Sylvia’s eyes studying her with a quiet intensity.
“You have to stop saying things like that.”
Aster frowned and held her gaze with the same intensity.
“Why?” she whispered.
Because it scares you?
Because you wouldn’t do the same for me?
“Because…” Sylvia frowned, and then she shut her eyes, and sighed, like she was reigning something in—preventing something forbidden from leaking out. “Nothing. Let’s just get back to Yasmine.”
“I don’t want to get back to Yasmine.”
I want you to make me feel less insane.
I want you to give me a sign.
She took in a sharp breath.
I want you to call me your baby again.
Aster flushed at her own desperation.
But Sylvia didn’t give her an inch.
“Well, then.” Sylvia rose suddenly, avoiding her gaze. “In that case, I’m going to get dressed. I do still have to go work. Turns out the human resources department is quite in-demand when the CEO is murdered. Let me know when you’re ready to get serious about escaping bankruptcy.”
And before Aster could reach out to her—like the moon reaching out to the single-minded tide—Sylvia was gone, the bedroom door slamming shut.
***
Aster called in sick that day.
In the twenty-first century, some might call what she was doing an attempt at a mental health day—except Aster was quite sure she was actively making her mental health worse, not better.
She was spread on the couch, watching Love Island, eating instant ramen with a “this might contain cancerous substances” warning label on the front, and seeing too much of herself reflected in a man named Chad.
Chad waltzed over to a blonde lying on a sun chair—and offered her a drink.
“Why are you avoiding me, gorgeous?”
The blonde glared at him from over her sunglasses. She took the drink he offered her, and poured it on the ground.
“Because I’m not interested in you, dimwit.”
Chad looked confused. “But I want you, babe. I swear, only you. No other hoes.”
“Well, wanting something and having it isn’t the same thing, is it?”
Aster frowned.
She shut off the television, and decided to do something she hadn’t done in two hundred years.
***
Aster was extremely—out of her mind, squirming in her socks, six candy bars in—stoned.
And their bank account was officially out of money.
Weed was fucking expensive these days.
“Don’t tell Sylvia,” she mumbled.
She only realized a few minutes later, as she walked herself over to the fridge, looking for food that didn’t exist, that she had no idea who she was talking to.
The lock on the door clicked, and Aster jumped up like a cartoon character. Shit, shit. There were still seven joints sitting on the living room table—the vampire metabolism made getting high even more expensive—and the room smelled like a hotbox.
The door pushed open, and Sylvia’s voice lifted from the hallway. “God, did a skunk escape into the apartment while I was at work?”
Aster froze.
And Sylvia’s mouth fell open.
What Sylvia saw:
Aster, in nothing but a sports bra, black boy shorts, red-rimmed pupils blown to infinity.
What Aster saw: Oh-god-she-looks-so-good-in-that-pantsuit-fuck-fuck-fuck.
“Are you…” Sylvia laughed incredulously, looking down at the still-smoking joint on the table, then to Aster. “High?”
“No,” Aster coughed. Then coughed some more, until it was just getting embarrassing. “Okay. Yes. Please don’t be mad at me.”
Sylvia snorted. That incredulous look on her face only grew more severe. Aster started panicking.
But then, Sylvia leaned down, picked up the smoldering joint, and brought it to her lips.
She slunk towards Aster as she sucked the smoke in, hovering right in front of her, only a few inches away, before blowing the smog to the side, creating a cloud between them.
“Mad at you?” Sylvia laughed. Aster could see her perfectly white teeth glinting through the gray. She was grinning wide. “Sweetheart, I fucking love you for this. Best idea you’ve had since killing my mom.”
Sweetheart. Aster’s mind short-circuited on pretty much every word in that sentence, and her circuitry only broke more when Sylvia spread her hands on Aster’s hips, then licked her lips breathily, her pupils going nearly as large as Aster’s.
“You look hot,” she said, like it was nothing. Then she began to snake her hands behind Aster’s back, tracing the serpent tattoo that hugged her hips. “Whoever ends up with you tonight will be a very lucky woman.”
Aster laughed. “You don’t look too bad yours—” Wait, what the fuck? She blinked quickly, disoriented. “Whoever I—end up with tonight?”
Sylvia’s brows screwed together in genuine confusion. “I mean, you clearly got the weed for us to pre-game, right? To go clubbing and find you some human to bite? To deal with our little..”
Sylvia gestured between them.
“Issue.”
Their little issue. Right—because this was all still a biological mishap for Sylvia.
Aster was eternally glad for the THC clouding her perception right then, because she was pretty sure she would have had a breakdown otherwise.
“Totally,” Aster coughed. “That’s what I did.”
“Genius.” Sylvia smacked her on the ass, then turned toward the couch and picked up another of the rolls with a sigh. She turned to Aster with a terrifying glint in her eye: “Come on, let’s finish these, then I’m going to dress you for the best night—I mean bite—of your life.”