CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wren
Here is what nobody warns you about being bitten by a vampire: the aftermath is deeply unglamorous.
I wake at noon with a headache like a hangover, a bruise the colour of a plum on the inside of my wrist, and a craving for salt so violent I eat four slices of toast standing over the sink in a house where the toaster is still in its box.
"You're anaemic," Cassius says from the doorway.
"I'm fine."
"You've had six ounces taken out of you by something that doesn't have a needle. Sit down. There's liver in the—"
"Absolutely not."
"—and spinach, and there is a bag of those small hard sweets you—"
"Where did the sweets come from?"
He goes quiet in a way that answers the question.
"You shopped," I say, delighted. "You went to a shop. At night. Like a normal—"
"There's a twenty-four-hour place on the coast road."
"What did you buy?"
"Things."
"Cassius."
"Bread, eggs, salt, four kinds of juice because I couldn't remember which one has the iron, a hot water bottle, and paracetamol." He says it in the flattest voice I have ever heard, like a man reading a charge sheet. "The boy at the till asked if I was having a party."
I have to sit down on his ridiculous engineered-oak floor.
"What," he says.
"Nothing." I press my hands against my eyes. "Nothing. Oh my God. Four kinds of juice."
◆ ◆ ◆
The rest of the day goes like this: I eat everything in the house, I sleep for three hours, I wake up feeling roughly like a person, and I discover that Cassius Rook has decided to teach me how to survive.
"We have five days," he says, "so we're doing this badly and quickly."
Lesson one: thresholds. Any dwelling with a door and someone living in it.
Not offices. Not shops — "a shop is a hole with a sign on it, they walk in and out of shops constantly, please stop looking hopeful about the pharmacy.
" Hotel rooms count if you've paid. Cars don't count at all, ever, which explains a great deal about last week.
Lesson two: they're fast, but they're fast in straight lines. "We're built for the last two metres. We're catastrophic at corners. If you're ever running from one of us, run through furniture."
Lesson three, delivered while I'm holding a kitchen knife the wrong way: "You cannot fight us."
"That's not a lesson, that's a mood—"
"You cannot fight us and I need you to stop trying to make the knife work.
" He takes it off me with an ease that's frankly insulting.
"You have three weapons. Sunlight, which you can't carry.
A threshold, which you can't move. And the fact that you're the only thing in the world every single one of us wants alive.
" He hands the knife back handle-first. "You are not going to win a fight, Wren.
You're going to make yourself expensive. "
"And if it's you?"
I don't know I'm going to ask it until it's out.
Cassius goes still.
"If it's ever me," he says, "run through furniture."
◆ ◆ ◆
Lesson four is a drill, and it's the one that actually frightens me, because it's the one where I find out I'm slow.
He does it in the hall. He stands at one end and I stand at the other and he says, "Get to the door," and I get about four feet.
Four feet. I don't see him move. There is a distance of eleven metres between us and I take one and a half steps into it and there's a hand flat against the wall beside my head.
"Again."
"That's not fair—"
"Correct." He's already back at the other end. "Again."
We do it eleven times. On the fourth I go sideways instead of forward and get seven feet.
On the seventh I put the console table between us and get to the bottom of the stairs, and he says "better" in a voice that makes something ridiculous happen in my chest. On the ninth I throw a shoe at him, which does nothing but makes me feel enormously better.
On the eleventh I go through the kitchen doorway, round the island, out the other side and I have my hand on the terrace door before he gets me.
"That one," he says. "What did you do?"
"Corners. I made you do corners."
"You made me do three corners and a change of surface, and it cost me about a second and a half, and a second and a half is a car door." He lets go of my wrist. "Now do it again while frightened, because the version you just did is the version you can do calm, and you are not going to be calm."
"Cassius—"
"Wren, I need you to hear the actual point of this.
" He's not out of breath, because he doesn't, and there's something almost apologetic in it.
"You cannot outrun us. There is no drill where you win.
What there is, is eleven seconds, and eleven seconds is enough time for somebody to arrive, and my entire plan for the rest of your life is that I am the one who arrives. "
"And if you're not?"
"Then it's Marisol with a coconut knife," he says, "and I would not entirely bet against her."
◆ ◆ ◆
We have the row at about nine that night and it starts over a bin bag.
I'm doing the washing-up, because there is washing-up now, because a man who does not eat bought me eggs. And I say — perfectly reasonably, in the middle of nothing — "I'll need to go past the office tomorrow, there's a licence renewal and Mari can't sign it on her own."
"No."
I turn round with a plate in my hand.
"Sorry?"
"No. Not tomorrow, not this week." He doesn't look up from the map he's got spread on the table, which is a map of Ashmoor with eleven pencil crosses on it.
"It's forty minutes of daylight driving and an hour in a room with one door on a street where anybody could sit and watch, and I can't be there for any of it. "
"Cassius, it's a form."
"Then Marisol can courier it."
"It needs two signatures and a stamp and it has to be lodged by Thursday or we're not licensed, and if we're not licensed we can't take a job, and if we can't take a job then in about six weeks I have no business and no income and I'm a woman living in a strange man's house with four hundred dollars.
" I put the plate down harder than I mean to. "So no. I'm going tomorrow."
"Wren—"
"And here's the thing I actually want to say.
" My hands are wet and I don't dry them.
"You've made every decision in the last four days.
Where I sleep, what I eat, when I go outside, what I'm allowed to be told and in what order.
And every single one of them has been the right decision, which is what makes it unbearable, because I can't argue with any of it and I'm still being handled. "
He sits back.
"That's fair," he says.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Agree in that voice." I grab the tea towel. "That's not agreeing, that's absorbing. That's what you do — you take the hit and you go quiet and you're so bloody reasonable about it that I end up apologising, and I've clocked it, and I'm not doing it."
There's a silence with a lot in it.
"All right," Cassius says. "Then I'll say the other thing, and you won't like it either.
" He stands up. "You're right that I've made every decision.
I've made them because on Friday you found a mark under a table and on Sunday you were being carried out of a basement, and in between those two things you did not have enough information to make one single choice for yourself.
That's not contempt. That's arithmetic."
"And now?"
"Now you have most of it." His jaw works.
"So you go to the office tomorrow. Take the coast road, not the interstate; be there before two and out before four; park in the open where the sun's on the car; and text Marisol before you leave and when you arrive, because if she doesn't hear from you she'll assume the worst and she'll come looking, and she'll be doing it in the dark. "
I stand there with a tea towel in my hands.
"That's it?"
"You asked me to stop deciding," he says. "That was me stopping. It's appalling, I want to be clear. I would very much rather chain you to a radiator."
"Cassius."
"I'm being honest. You said honest even when it's disgusting."
And I laugh — properly, ridiculously, in a kitchen, at nine at night, five days out from a basement in a bonded warehouse — and then I say the thing I've been holding since two in the morning.
"I'm going to say yes on Friday."
He doesn't move.
"Not now," I say. "Don't — don't do a face.
I'm telling you so you can plan. But I'm not saying it to you in this house at night after you've had my wrist, because if I do that then for the rest of my life I won't know which part of me said it.
" I fold the tea towel over the rail. "I'll say it in that room, with the lights on, in front of eleven people who all want to eat me. That way it's mine."
Cassius Rook looks at me across a kitchen for a very long moment.
"That," he says, "is the most sensible thing anyone has said to me since the Second World War."