7. Chapter 7
Serenity
The supervisor comes through on morning rounds with her clipboard, stops at my cell, and scans my tag through the bars. I look at her numbly. Jane Brown. She’s the only one who ever wears a name tag.
“You’re off the draw list.” She pushes thick-rimmed reading glasses up her nose as she makes a note on the clipboard.
I sit up on the cot, and a blanket I didn’t fall asleep with slides down into my lap. Second one. Heavier than the ward issue. “Since when?”
“Since today.” She’s already moving to the next cell.
“For how long?”
No answer. Her shoes squeak away down the aisle, and I sit there with my wrist half raised, a blanket I can’t explain in my lap, and nobody to ask about any of it.
“Mrs. Brown.” I get a hand around the bar. “My sister. You said you would take her my message. Did she get it?”
Her pen stops on the clipboard. It’s only a second. Then it starts again.
“I don’t make promises to stock,” she says. “Just be glad you’re off the list.”
Off the list. In a year, nobody has come off the list. The list is the whole reason any of us are fed at all. You go off the list one way, and it’s the way cell six went empty. That should frighten me more than it does.
The last draw was the last normal thing that happened before any of this. Three tubes, same as always. Then there was him.
Is that what this is about?
I lie back down slowly and keep still. I don’t trust any of it.
Don’t get used to it.
Maybe they’re just worried about tapping me out.
I snort at that. The bastards who run this place couldn’t give a damn about my welfare.
The others file out of their cells, and I listen to the ward for a while.
One guard at the far end, working his rounds slower than usual with nobody to hurry for.
Fewer boots than usual on the concrete. Even the lights hum differently, thinner, like half of them have been switched off down the far aisle.
There’s movement on the other side of the wall.
“Red? You’re there,” I say, low, under the hum of the lights.
“Where else would I be?” The dragon’s voice comes through the concrete, dry as ever. “No draw for you today, little wolf?”
“First time that’s happened since I got here.”
“Since they took you from your sister, you mean.” Not a question. I’ve told her a little about my past. I don’t know anything about hers. This place doesn’t give much time for casual conversation.
“Since then,” I acknowledge. “They didn’t come for you either.” It’s something I’ve noticed but never commented on.
“They hardly do. Twice a week is all they’ve ever wanted from me. Rare, is what they call it.”
“I bet you taste like gunpowder.”
There’s a chuckle at that. “You could be right. I imagine there’s some sick fucker out there frying his brain with my blood twice a week.”
I find myself grinning, which is something I thought I’d forgotten how to do. “There’s something for all tastes, I guess.”
“Mm-hmm.” Her voice fades out as boots pass by again. They don’t pause.
“I know you’re a dragon,” I say. I’ve never confirmed it.
“Of course you do.”
“Tell me about flying,” I say, because I’ve forgotten what the sky looks like.
“Which part?”
“The free part.”
There’s a pause. I imagine her smiling. “Above the clouds, the air tastes thin and cold, older than anything down here. My clan winters up there, in the mountains, when the passes close below.”
“Your clan?” I ask.
“Yes. It’s small. We don’t come out much.”
“Secret?”
“I guess you could say that.” She inhales. “I miss it. We used to shift at dawn. Every dawn. My grandmother used to say a dragon who skips a day of her own shape is borrowing someone else’s.”
I think about that for a minute. About how long it’s been since my wolf ran free. “I think I know what she means.”
“It aches,” she says eventually, “along my shoulder blades, where the wings start. The dragon gets ready every dawn. Nothing comes. She gets ready anyway.”
“How did they take you? You’ve never said,” I say.
“You’ve never asked.”
“I’m asking.”
The pause stretches long enough that I think I’ve pushed too hard. Then: “Politics.”
“Politics?”
“An old story,” she says, “for a worse night. Ask me the thing you actually want to ask.”
“The vampire,” I whisper. “What do you make of him?”
“Less than you’d think.” Something shifts against the wall. “I watched him walk that whole line from the far end. He barely noticed anyone. He stopped for you. Even though you were doing that flickering thing you do.”
“Flickering thing?”
“Yes. When you’re trying to be invisible.”
“It used to work,” I mutter.
“Still does, a bit,” she says. “Though this time it worked against you.”
“You think that’s why he picked me?” I think of violet eyes and cool fingertips on my skin. I shiver.
“Who knows,” she says. “Can never tell with addicts. Maybe he just liked the look of you.”
“But if he’s just an addict, why come to a place like this?”
“Slumming it, maybe? Seemed rich. Maybe he likes to see where it comes from. Or maybe he wanted to get his mouth on the source. Some vampires enjoy the whole experience.”
I think about the drug our blood becomes, somewhere past these walls, in bottles I’ll never see. I’ve had a year to wonder about it and never gotten further than wondering.
“You think that’s all he is? A rich addict?”
“I think that’s the simple answer, and simple answers are usually right.” Something in how she says it doesn’t sound like she believes her own rule this time.
Footsteps move down the hall as a guard does his rounds. We both go silent.
“What did he do to you in there?” she asks once he’s passed. “When they sent you to him. You came back quiet.”
My throat closes. “He fed,” I say.
I don’t go on, and I think she reads something in my silence. “All right,” she says, and lets it go.
I lie there with both blankets pulled to my chin. My thumb finds the crook of my elbow and rubs at tape that isn’t there anymore, back and forth over the scars. In my head it’s all firelight, leather, the sound I made.
My face goes hot. Some part of me can’t leave it alone.
“It didn’t hurt,” I say.
The wall is silent.
“That’s what I can’t—” I stop. Start again, quieter. “It was supposed to hurt. Everything in this place hurts. It was the opposite of that, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Ah,” she says.
“What do you mean ‘ah’?”
“He’s softening you.” Something shifts against the wall, adjusting position.
“My kind hunt too, long before any of this. A dragon doesn’t drop out of the sky onto the first deer she finds starving and desperate.
Starving meat tastes wrong, floods itself with fear until the blood is bitter.
A good hunt lets the herd settle first. Feeds it, even, if she has the patience. Calm animals are sweeter.”
“He wants me sweet?” I think about how sweet my blood must have been while I was unraveling last night. I shut the thought down.
“I didn’t say I know what he wants. I said I know what patience looks like on something old enough to have plenty of it.”
“You think that’s why they took me off the list?”
“Could be. If he’s got a taste for taking his time, maybe he wants his next meal rested first.”
I shudder. “Great. Thanks for that.”
“I’ve never seen the use in softening things, little wolf. It doesn’t change reality. After a year in this place, you’d know that.”
“And when he’s done playing?”
“You already know what he is. When he’s done playing, he’ll have no more use for you. It might not end well.”
“Vampires have rules,” I say quickly. “Even I know that. They’re not allowed to kill the people they—”
“Out there, maybe. Rules need someone to enforce them. Look around you. Do you see anyone keeping count of what happens to us, besides us?”
Nobody. That’s the whole design of this place. If a client with that much money took too much one evening, it would barely register as a loss.
I swallow hard. He could drain me to the floor of that pretty room, and nobody in this building would even slow him down.
Drain me…
I remember the feeling of his mouth on my throat, and my body—my stupid, warming body—picks exactly this moment to think about it again. Sitting in that chair. The heat rolling from the bite, spreading until there was no room left in me for anything else.
That’s what dying in that chair would feel like. Warmth, building past the point where I could call it fear. Then further. Whatever came after the last of it, I wouldn’t be there to feel it stop.
I press my knees together. Something low in me answers to the memory anyway, and I hate that it does.
Is that how I die? Wrapped in it, and half-willing?
“Whatever you’re thinking,” she says through the wall, “stop. You’ll make yourself crazy.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re breathing like prey.”
I make my breath slow down. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
Stop thinking about it. Stop.
“Don’t let it get to you,” she says, which is impossible. “He might just send you back to the line.”
“You’re not making it better.”
“Sorry.” She doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds like someone who’s never had to apologize for anything.
“Serenity,” I say abruptly.
“What?”
“My name. It’s Serenity. Serenity Sangrey.
” It comes out rough. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud since they took my clothes.
“You’ve called me little wolf for a year, and they call me by number.
If I go through that door some night and don’t come back, I want one creature in this building to know who I was. ”
The wall is silent. When she speaks, the dryness is gone.
“Kalli,” she says.
“Just Kalli?” I ask. Naming things makes it harder to lose them. And everything is eventually lost here.
“The rest is a mouthful, and isn’t important right now.”
“I’m glad to know you, Kalli,” I say. And I mean it.
“Likewise,” she says. “And you’ll come back, Serenity Sangrey. Expensive things get taken care of. It’s the cheap ones they lose.”
“You’d better be right.”
“I’m old. I’m rarely wrong.” Her weight shifts down the wall as she settles.
“Sleep, while you can. Whatever he wants with you won’t happen before dark.
His kind don’t move well in daylight. That gives you until dusk to be rested and fed and worth the trouble of catching.
Make him work for every scrap of you. It’s the one thing left that you can control. ”
She goes silent after that. So do I.
He’ll come back after dark. He’ll take what he paid for, for as long as it stays interesting to him.
And then?
I don’t let myself finish that thought. Best case, I go back on the line when he’s done: the needles, the yellow paint. Worst case—
Don’t think about that.
I tuck both blankets around me and wait for whatever comes with the dark.
I’m awake when the boots outside change over for the evening shift.