Chapter Eight
She woke like someone who had slumbered at the bottom of the ocean for a thousand years. Slowly, heavily, and with little
memory or understanding of what the surface was like. Her world was the still, strange darkness down there now. There was
no easy way back to even the wild sort of normality that existed at Harrowhall.
How could there be?
Her mortal enemy was a vampire.
He had bitten her, hard and brutally enough that she wasn’t even sure how she was still alive. It was supposed to have killed
her, something like that. And even if he had somehow stopped short, resisted, spared her—there were other things that definitely
should have finished her off.
Because when she finally managed to focus on her surroundings, she could see she was still in the library. That was a line
of burgundy book spines directly in her line of sight. She looked down, and there was the polished parquet floor. And she
recognized the brown leather beneath her body.
It was one of the couches that lined the borders of the main space.
She was sprawled on it—as if she’d maybe gotten away, and staggered to it, and collapsed into its plump, pillowy embrace.
And then for some inexplicable reason, the wraiths had left her alone.
They had not touched her. They had let her sleep off being drained by Dracula, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Could be he marked you as his kill, her mind threw up.
And that made enough ramshackle sense for her to try to get it together. She had to, really. She could hear the staff starting
their day, from the direction of the main desk. A student was asking a question in a high fluting voice that grated against
the insides of her head. As if she was just hungover.
It felt like she was, truthfully.
She sat up and the world spun, then settled into a slow sway. Her stomach lurched, and most likely the only thing that spared
her was the lack of anything in it. Her last meal had been the inch of an egg she had managed with Anaya. The meal before
that some packets of crackers.
And now she was missing god only knew how much of her blood.
She even wondered if she was still losing it. She put her hand to her throat gingerly, expecting something horrible. A gory
mess, blood fountaining over fingers like it had over his lips. Then jerked her hand away when she encountered nothing of
the sort. The skin there felt slightly uneven, true. It felt sore.
But it was dry and smooth.
Which was good, in one way. It meant she wasn’t going to drop dead, or need a visit to the infirmary that she wouldn’t be
able to fully explain. However, in another, it seemed bad. It suggested things she very much did not like. She stood on legs
that didn’t want to hold her up and staggered to the table she had used the night before. Flicked frantically through pages
until she found chapters on vampires.
The one that said how they were made.
A person, even one imbued with magic and with a strong connection to the Underneath, cannot be infected by a vampiric bite; a vampire can only be born to the Underneath or made by their magics, she read and sagged against the bookcase after she had.
She breathed freely for the first time in what felt like an age.
She wasn’t going to become a bloodsucking creature of the night.
She was safe.
Or at least as safe as anyone could be when their mortal enemy was a vampire. Once he’s licked his many wounds, he’s going to be coming for you even harder, she thought, as she let herself sink into one of the chairs around the table.
And that only meant one thing:
She had to come for him before he could.
She didn’t know where or how he would make his move. And when she first saw him again across the quad, laughing with friends
as if he was just the same as them—a glowing golden boy, fat with family money and as smug as you like—it honestly seemed
like no move was even being planned. He seemed oblivious to her. Like he was just going to bluster through the whole business.
It never happened, his boisterous laugh seemed to say.
And then his friends turned to watch two people firing warning shots at each other from their wands, and Harker St. James
did not turn with them at all. He saw them looking at something other than him, and he seized the opportunity. He let his
gaze slide to the left, to where she sat, on the bench beneath the willow tree.
As if he didn’t even need to search for her.
He simply knew exactly where she was, at all times.
Once they have a taste for certain blood, it will call out to them, she had read in one of the books she had checked out. But what it hadn’t said was exactly how that would feel. What it would
be like to experience someone’s eyes always on you, drawn to you, to sense their presence like a second shadow, so close to
smothering you at all times . . .
She had thought she was prepared after a few days of research and gathering supplies and making plans. But even so, bearing
it proved difficult. She had to walk to class perfectly calmly, like she wasn’t constantly aware of the predicament she was
in. Like there was no predicament at all.
Even when she could have sworn she felt his hand reaching for her. Sometimes the air would stir behind her, and her hair would
seem to lift in a way that couldn’t quite be explained by a breeze or by the rush of the crowd in the foyer, and then there
would be a kind of coolness on the nape of her neck.
Almost a caress but not quite, not quite.
It chilled her more than any truly tender touch would have done. Sometimes she almost froze to feel it. Others, she felt like
she needed to frantically bat it away. And the more times it happened, the worse it got. On the sixth day of him not making
his move, that cold touch almost made her scream, as she walked into the lecture on the Underneath that Professor Hargreaves
was giving.
But she bit it back.
She kept walking, eyes forward. She had to, for a number of very good reasons: like the fact that Anaya was already obviously and frighteningly suspicious.
And the there was how important it seemed to appear helpless and oblivious, if she truly wanted to get the better of Harker.
And finally, and most simply—it was just the most normal feeling tack to take.
It meant she got to be an ordinary student, learning things she desperately wanted to know, instead of someone who’d been elbow deep in someone’s guts, and gotten bitten, and was now being hunted by a psychotic vampire.
This way, she figured, she could hear what Hargreaves was going to say.
And god, she really wanted that. The woman was fierce about the rules and realities of that shadowy place and how they impacted
the world above. We cannot afford to play fast and loose with the divide between the two, she had written, in a paper Mina had found in one of her full-daylight but still frantic forays back to the library. And
now she had questions.
So she took her seat in the lecture hall with her back to the wall, and waited for the Professor to arrive.
Though god, it seemed like an age until she did, with Harker sitting three seats in front of her.
By the time the woman swept in, Mina felt as if she was on the verge of bursting. Like before, when she’d sat next to Harker—but
worse, so much worse. Now it wasn’t just mutual loathing or some beef he had with people who didn’t fit in. It was blood and
secrets and shadowy things.
She had to dig her fingernails into her palms just to stay in her seat.
The pain was excruciating by the time the professor started her lecture.
But it felt worth it. The history, purpose, and characteristics of the Underneath, she had put on the chalkboard. Only she hadn’t written the word Underneath. She’d called it by the name the beings that lived there did. The one Mina had seen herself in the books she’d taken from
the library.
Calabaraia, it had said.
“Now,” Professor Hargreaves began. “Can anyone tell me when Calabaraia was first discovered by humans?”
And because of Harker, she knew the answer.
She put up her hand. “There are rumors that it was found and formed a relationship with as early as the seventh century, in
some parts of the globe. Though, of course, many such places ensured this knowledge remained protected.”
“And do you know why that it is?”
“Because we were not trusted.”
“Indeed. And do you know when—”
“In England, it was discovered in 1812, by the wealthy landowner Lord Henry Amberson. He accidentally opened or found a doorway
in his garden and began his first explorations due to losing his eldest son through it,” she said and knew when she did that
Harker turned to look at her.
She kept her eyes on the professor, but felt his just a few inches below her sightline.
She paid no attention, however. The professor was looking at her too curiously for that. “Very good—Miss Morrow, is it? Well.
Nice to see a student with such a keen interest in history. Perhaps you might even enlighten the rest of the class a little
further on the subject of his son,” she said—and when she did, there seemed to be a sharp light in her eyes.
Like this was a test of a different kind.
Less deadly than before.
And one she had an idea of how to pass.
“He was found and brought back to the manor.”
“I see. Well, we cannot all be aware of every—”
“Only he wasn’t the boy anymore at all. He just looked like it.”
Hargreaves had already turned her attention to her stack of neat lecture notes.
Now her attention turned back. She had very pale eyes, and they zeroed back in on Mina with an intensity she wasn’t quite
prepared for. Mina knew why, however. The official accounts didn’t mention that part. They behaved as if Amberson’s meddling
in the things he hadn’t understood were heroic, with no consequences.
Only Hargreaves’s paper had acknowledged otherwise.
“And do you know what that is called Miss Morrow?”
“Arbrigor. It means . . . replacing or doubling.”
“Indeed it does. Though, of course, the practice is very rare and only liable to occur when humans perform corrupt and unpleasant
acts. Remember, all of you, that the accords of 1843 were put in place for a reason. We may only trespass on their lands with
great care, and they may not trespass on ours save for a few very regulated and rule-based set of circumstances. The library,
for instance. Demonstrations and the like. Mingling among our kinds is unseemly in ways that are never to be encouraged.”
She eyed her class on the last word. As if she expected each one of them to start drawing doors and jumping through them or
using summoning spells for purposes they shouldn’t. Like fraternization with otherworldly things, Mina thought. Or maybe so they could sit three seats down from you, plotting your demise.
“But I was wondering, Professor. Do they always obey the accords?” she asked. Not pointedly, not aimed at him, just out of
curiosity really. But once the words were out, she knew he shifted in his seat.
And the weight of his eyes on her grew greater.
“Well, of course. It is binding upon them.”
“Because we learned how to use the magic they gave us against them.”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that. We learned to recognize what we could wield, and opened doors to better let it through.
Then simply put safeguards in place to make sure that certain perilous practices could no longer occur.”
“You mean like monsters emerging from the depths, to stalk us.”
She could have heard a butterfly bat its wings in the silence that followed that. And she knew why, too. Every single person
in there was most likely thinking of the quiz, and the werewolf, and what it meant if something could simply break through
without any sort of way to avoid them at all. No questions you could answer correctly, and stay safe. No Professor to create
any kind of boundaries.
Just chaos.
Every creature Hargreaves had forced them to acknowledge were real, suddenly roaming around.
And then of course there were the others that she hadn’t mentioned at all.
The ones that still teetered in their minds, between the myths they’d been taught, and the potentially terrible reality. Vampires,
for example, didn’t sleep in coffins, or wear cloaks, or fear sunlight. They weren’t even actually called vampires, in the
Underneath, in the magic world. That was their fumbled, cobbled-together title, made by a man who had most likely half glimpsed
them once. Their real name, she knew, was Areifen—arei, meaning “wrong,” fen meaning “fey” or “fairy.” Or at least the fairy- or fey-like beings that existed down there. Some looked winged and pretty, like people thought.
But she knew now that some didn’t.
That some had teeth instead of eyes.
“Yes, precisely so. That sort of thing no longer happens. And it shall not as long as there is constant care and vigilance,”
Professor Hargreaves said. But when she did, Mina thought of the people of Stanley Bridge. The ones who had been told it was
just a collapsed stanchion. Instead of what she suspected it had actually been:
Tentacles as big as buildings from a being that closely resembled Cthulhu.
She’d seen pictures, in an unverified account in a book the librarian hadn’t wanted to give her. And Cthulhu was not alone.
“If it did, though, if you thought it had, if you believed a being from the Underneath had breached or maybe slipped through
one of the doorways without permission, what would you tell that person to do, Professor?” she asked. And now everybody was
looking at her. It felt like she was drowning in a sea of eyes—not least of which were the professor’s.
There was a flinty look to them now.
Like Mina was disrupting something, instead of what she was actually doing:
Trying to goad that fucker. Trying to warn him. It was time for her plan now.
And the professor fit her answer into that perfectly.
“I would tell them to speak to me directly. Most fears are unfounded—we call it the first-year frights, as exposure to these many wonders and horrors can be quite unsettling. But in the event that they are not, I should like to know. My forte is dealing accordingly with anything untoward, Miss Morrow. So do feel free to come to me, any time you feel the need,” she said.
And then she turned away, as did the rest of the class.
Except, of course, for the one she had been really speaking to.