Chapter 41
I tossed and turned all day, dreaming of Emma and Count Orlok and sinister organ music, waking in fits of self-loathing, too scared to go back to sleep.
I got up before dusk, unpacking my clothes into the wardrobe just for something to do while the sun was still glowing like an orange laceration along the horizon.
And now I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror inspecting the mark on my neck and dabbing concealer on it—it’s fading, but still there, still looking very much like a vampire bite—and going over my plan of action.
It is clear to me that Oscar doesn’t have any of the boundaries others have.
He’s kind one moment, cruel the next, ruthless and sadistic, and with no decipherable conscience—he’s not morally grey, he’s morally corrupt.
But he’s also stronger than me in every way; there is no point in fighting him.
I need to get him onside. To play along.
To learn what he wants to teach me as quickly as possible and then get the hell out of here.
Give him no reason to force me any further than he did last night.
No reason to escalate things.
The plan is simple: to go with the flow and not be a problem; nod and smile and wear his necklace like I am right now; make him think I want to be a vampire.
I will do what I’ve been doing for 150 years: I will fake it.
And then I’ll go back to my life. And provided I’ve played my role well enough, learnt what he wants to teach me, I’ll leave knowing he has no reason to harm Daphne or anyone else I love.
Because after last night, I know he’d do it. I know it in my gut.
I look at my reflection, look myself in the eye. It’s all going to be okay. You can do this.
That’s when I hear a woman’s voice, high enough to shatter glass.
Is that . . . opera? I move to the bedroom door, edging it open.
Yep, opera. It’s coming from downstairs.
As I descend the stairs in my pyjamas to see what’s going on, I think: Please don’t let Oscar be having another get together.
I’m not used to all this socialising, I just want to do whatever I have to do then go home. Never see him again.
I move towards the music; the woman is in the middle of some high-pitched trill, and it’s coming from the same room we were in last night, the drawing room.
Carmilla is in there, lying on the sofa, moving her cigarette around as if she is personally conducting the orchestra. Rupert is putting logs onto the fire.
‘Hey Baby-V,’ he says to me over the music. ‘Come to join the mental breakdown?’ He nods towards Carmilla.
I look at her; she just keeps on with her conducting.
Then I hear, ‘What the hell is going on?’ from behind me.
I turn to look as Oscar storms across the room.
His green silk dressing gown is hanging open, revealing his well-formed villain torso: the obligatory six-pack, pectorals you could crack an egg on, and the shoulders and arms of an underwear model.
He looks as though he’s made of the same hard and impervious material as his heart.
He stomps over to Carmilla, grabs a remote control from beside her and presses a couple of buttons. The music turns off.
‘It’s only four pm, you animal,’ he seethes.
‘I’m upset, I couldn’t sleep,’ Carmilla says, sitting up. She’s pouting.
‘Felix still isn’t answering her texts,’ Rupert says, standing up and crossing his arms.
Oscar does up his dressing gown, and again I notice that little silver cross on a chain around his neck, catching the light. He sees me looking and reaches for it, but I look away. I’m scared he’ll see how much I hate him in my eyes.
Then he says, ‘Well, I have to go into London to deal with something at the club tonight, so you two can take care of Aubrey. She needs a bit of training out in the wild anyway.’ He looks from Carmilla to Rupert, then back to Carmilla.
‘But we’re going into town,’ Carmilla whines. ‘Some of the shops are open late for Boxing Day sales . . . retail therapy. We can’t babysit.’
Oscar just looks at her, his jaw set.
She rolls her eyes. ‘Fine, she can come.’ Then she looks over at me and says, ‘But hurry up and get dressed.’
* * *
The town is quaint and adorable, Christmas lights still strung up across the cobbled street.
The buildings are made of uneven stone, shop windows adorned with tinsel and small plastic reindeer.
Something about it feels familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it.
The sky is clear tonight, the air freezing, and we’re walking arm in arm down the street, Carmilla, then Rupert, then me.
‘What shall we do first?’ Rupert asks, and I wonder if anyone walking past will notice that none of us is breathing fog.
‘I’d say get Aubrey a scarf so nobody wonders about . . . that,’ Carmilla says, nodding to my neck. ‘You’ll need to get better at concealing marks if you’re going to keep letting Oscar feed off you.’
I self-consciously reach for my neck. I’d thought my turned-up coat collar was hiding it.
‘What’s the deal with you and Oscar, anyway?’ Rupert asks.
I can feel them both looking at me. I shrug. ‘It’s nothing,’ I say. ‘He’s just, you know . . .’
‘Nothing?’ Carmilla asks, her eyes searing me. I swallow hard.
‘Well, not nothing,’ I say, backtracking. Because if it’s nothing, that means Oscar didn’t bite me and someone else did, and why do I get the feeling she’d love to piece it all together? And that she’d blame me, not Felix, or even Oscar, if she knew what had happened. ‘But nothing serious.’
‘So . . . it’s not serious but you let him bite you? Sharing blood is the most intimate thing two vampires can do. And to let him do that after he abandoned you . . .’ She says something else under her breath that sounds like ‘desperate much’, but I let it go. I want to change the subject.
Rupert, on the other hand, does not want to let it go.
‘Oh my god, stop being such a judgemental bitch,’ he says.
‘I’m just warning her. We both know what Oscar’s like. I don’t want her getting her hopes up.’ Then she looks me dead in the eye. ‘Oscar doesn’t care about you, he just wanted to get high on your blood.’ She tosses her dark hair.
I’m confused. Do vampires get high off each other? When I drank Oscar’s blood, I didn’t get high. There was no euphoria, no bliss. I just got kind of aggressive and agile and strong.
‘How would it make him high?’ I ask, frowning.
Rupert squeezes me gently and, in a kind, teacherly voice, says, ‘Oh, Baby-V, so much to learn. Young blood gets you high, old blood gives you power.’
‘I’m not that young . . .’ I say.
‘Compared to us, you are,’ he says, and we keep walking for a bit as his words tumble around in my brain. I think of the glitter in my veins as I fed on Emma, how hard it was to stop. How hard it always is to stop.
‘But I do get kind of high on human blood,’ I say softly to him.
‘No, you don’t,’ he whispers back. ‘Not like new-vampire blood. Whole other circus.’ He winks at me.
‘All I’m saying,’ Carmilla cuts in, ‘is that I hope you’re not expecting some big commitment.
All Oscar ever gives is heartbreak and despair.
’ Carmilla scoffs. ‘He’ll chew you up and spit you out, even if you wear some necklace he gave you every day for the rest of your life,’ she gives a mean little laugh. ‘I’ve seen him do it again and again.’
My cheeks get hot. What kind of idiot does she think I am? I see straight through him. But also, I need to be careful here. I can’t let her think for a moment it wasn’t Oscar who bit me. Can’t have her suspect the truth.
‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘I’m . . .’ I almost say I’m in love with someone else, but I stop myself. I don’t want any of them to know about Jonathan—they might mention him to Oscar. I want him safe. ‘I’m just in it for sex.’
‘Classy,’ Carmilla says.
‘Wait,’ says Rupert with a laugh, ‘are you of all people seriously slut-shaming her now?’ And then he stops dead in front of a clothing store. ‘Ooh,’ he says, staring at a mannequin wearing a frilly, open-chested pirate shirt. ‘I need that.’
‘I’m going to take a lap,’ Carmilla says, looking down at her phone. ‘I’ll be back in a few.’
‘Don’t worry about her,’ Rupert says as we watch her stride away.
‘She’s just being a bitch because Felix is gone.
He does this. Disappears, screws around on her, then comes back all apologetic.
It’s totally toxic, but it’s their thing.
’ Guilt pulses through me because I know Felix will not be coming back, not this time.
‘But she’s had sex with someone else too, at the house . . .’
‘Yeah, revenge for not texting her back. Carmilla has two sets of rules: one for everyone else and one for her. Typical fucking Leo,’ he says as he goes to pull open the shop door but it’s locked.
There’s a woman in there, at the counter, pretending not to see us.
But Rupert isn’t having any of it. He bangs loudly on the glass and grins at her as he says to me.
‘But Carmilla is right about one thing, Baby-V. You be careful with Oscar. He’s alluring, but he’s got a .
. . dark side. And you seem like the kind of girl who wants love. He can’t give you that.’
The shop woman glares at us, comes over and opens the door. ‘We’re closed, sorry,’ she says, flashing a fake grin.
‘No problem,’ Rupert says, his eyes latching on to hers. Then in a honeyed tone says, ‘I’d like to try on the shirt in the window, please.’
‘Of course,’ she says, a familiar daze in her eyes. ‘What size are you?’
‘A large.’
‘Of course,’ she says, going over to a rail of white clothing. We go inside and the door closes after us, and as she finds Rupert’s size, he inspects the other racks.
‘Here you go,’ she says with a smile, handing him his size. He’s already got five more pieces from the racks hanging over his arm.
‘Change rooms are over there,’ she says pleasantly.
‘Lovely,’ he says, looking her dead in the eye again. ‘Now leave us. You can come back in twenty minutes.’
She nods and walks out the door and Rupert flits over to the changing cubicle and disappears behind the curtain.
I hear drums, a bass—a song start to play; I’m guessing it’s coming from his phone.
I recognise it immediately: ‘Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)’ by Concrete Blood.
I take a seat on a large pink velvet chair and wait, watching his feet move under the curtain.
The curtain swishes and Rupert steps out in the white shirt from the window, striking a pose in front of the long mirror.
‘What do we think?’ he asks, looking at me and then back to his reflection and turning side-on. ‘Do I look fabulous, like Lord Byron?’
I give a little laugh. ‘I love it.’
‘Me too,’ he says with a grin.
He disappears behind the curtain again as the song ends and ‘vampire’ by Olivia Rodrigo starts to play.
And I don’t know whether it’s because I’m here, among them, or if it’s because I only found out I could die two nights ago, and honestly, I should have known that before, but now I want to know the rest of it.
All the things Oscar never explained to me.
And Rupert seems like the most sensitive of the bunch, so, as the song changes, I say, ‘Hey, Rupert . . .’
‘Mm?’ he replies, from the other side of the curtain.
‘Have you ever met a human . . . again?’ I ask, thinking of Jonathan. ‘Like, someone you met and then they died and came back and then you met them again, in a new body?’
The curtain swishes open. ‘Did Carmilla tell you something?’
‘What? No. Why?’
‘Well, yes I have,’ he says, coming out in a teal shirt with frills around the collar and sleeves.
He poses in front of the mirror, one knee bent, then the other.
‘I didn’t realise at first, of course, but once I did, I kept my distance.
Thankfully he didn’t know,’ he says, lifting his hands to his hips.
‘Who was he? How did you meet him the first time?’
‘Just some guy I knew,’ he says, shrugging. ‘I guess we had unfinished business or something.’
That makes sense, I think. I was torn from Jonathan, and we have unfinished business, a love that was interrupted.
Rupert looks at me. ‘Sometimes that happens, our souls are tied to those we knew before. Destined to find each other again and again. Why? You meet someone you knew before?’
I shake my head. ‘No, but sometimes I see past-life visions and it occurred to me that it could happen, so I was just wondering . . .’
‘Argh, those mess with your head, don’t they? But they are a nice little reminder that no matter how shit the world gets, at least it’s not the fifteen hundreds anymore,’ he says, turning back to the mirror and tilting his head. ‘What do you think of this one?’
It suits him; it’s the same colour as his necklace, as his ring. ‘It’s perfect,’ I say. ‘Do you ever wonder who you were, you know, before? When you were human?’ I know I’m being a bit intense, but this is the closest I’ve ever got to getting answers of any kind.
He crosses his arms and frowns. ‘Hell no. Whoever that fool was, he wasn’t as hot and fabulous as I am.’ His eyes bore into me. ‘What’s going on, Baby-V? Why are you asking all of this?’
I look down. ‘I just want to know. Nobody ever told me.’
‘Ah. Yeah, Oscar was a right shit for doing that to you,’ he says. ‘But you’re looking at this all wrong. You are a motherfucking vampire, Baby-V. We have everything everyone wants. Stop taking everything so seriously—have some fun with it, okay? The night is ours . . .’
I nod, and he smiles and heads back behind the curtain.
As ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ by Bauhaus plays, then ‘Vampire Blues’ by Neil Young, then ‘Closer’ by Kings of Leon, he tries on three more outfits, and I think about what he just said.
I can see the appeal, the fun, of living like this.
Doing what you want, when you want—having total agency.
Wading into the darkness and letting it swallow you whole. Just letting go.
But now comes a flash of my face in that mirror, hair tangled and covered in blood. That little boy in my arms. Emma, last night.
And I think: At what cost?
Fifteen minutes later, the shop woman is back and then Carmilla comes in too.
She flops down on the chair beside me and immediately starts looking at her phone. Rupert comes out of the change room with the clothes he wants on one arm and those he doesn’t on the other, and goes to pay.
As we step out into the night air, Carmilla puts her phone in her pocket and says, ‘You know what? I’m done with this.’ She looks at Rupert and me in turn, and there’s something dangerous in her eyes. ‘Could you eat? I saw a pub on the corner. I could eat . . .’