Chapter 33
Leonard’s footsteps echoed away from the door, and Sylvia took Aster’s face in hers with an urgent, panicked certainty. Aster just narrowed her eyes back in concern. Everything felt a bit woozy, a bit floaty and slow. She chalked it up to the absolute ravaging Sylvia had just inflicted on her.
She’d come…. Three times? Four? It was like she was a woman possessed.
“I think,” Sylvia took a shaky breath in. “I just made you into my thrall.”
Oh.
Aster blinked at her. She was about to tell Sylvia that was ridiculous, that she didn’t feel any different from before, when she realized that she couldn’t.
Literally, physically, could not force her mouth open to tell Sylvia that she was wrong.
The moment she tried to, it felt like she’d been pricked by a shock collar, painful adrenaline pouring throughout her body.
And once she noticed that, she noticed a host of other new sensations.
She noticed that her body felt heavier now, like her limbs were weighed down by invisible barbells.
She noticed her thoughts had begun to phrase themselves differently.
Not I think Sylvia looks frightened but instead, Sylvia is frightened and I need to kill whatever’s frightening her.
And the most insane and perhaps embarrassing part of it all was that if Sylvia hadn’t pointed it out, Aster might not have noticed until she was taking someone’s throat out.
But in her defense, it wasn’t unusual for her to feel protective over Sylvia. It also wasn’t unusual for her to feel murderous over her, either.
Tommy Ashcroft, may his spirit rest in the sweet, sweet embrace of whatever Death had in mind for white collar criminals, was evidence enough of that.
But this felt different. This felt like it was out of her control.
Like Sylvia’s wellbeing had become her singular responsibility, and if she failed, she’d be punished.
She wasn’t sure by who—she knew Sylvia wouldn’t do that to her—but instead by something unseen.
As if betraying this impulse would cause her to implode inside, to throw up from nerves.
She fought against it again, tried to open her lips to say something inflammatory, but every time she tried, it was like being stung by a bee, and then a wasp, the severity increasing with every subsequent attempt until her ears were buzzing and she was physically wincing.
Something Sylvia must have noticed, because she was beginning to look wildly distressed.
“She was right,” Sylvia said in a hushed, frenetic whisper. After a few, slow blinks, she withdrew from Aster, and began to pound the palm of her hand against her forehead repetitively. “Fuck. She was right. This was inevitable. I can never do anything right. You stupid, stupid—”
Aster grabbed Sylvia’s wrist, freezing her hand before it hit her head again.
She wanted to stay Stop hurting yourself but her mind wouldn’t allow it. It sounded too much like a command.
“Who was right?” Aster settled on.
Sylvia had the audacity to look confused by Aster’s question.
“What are you talking about?” Sylvia replied shakily.
“You just said—” Aster’s voice trailed off. Sylvia looked… disoriented? “She’s right. She’s right. You repeated it several times.”
Sylvia blinked again. “I did?”
“Yes,” Aster said calmly, too calmly. It was like her brain was now wired like a detective from a 19th century crime novel. Her emotions were muted, ticked on and off based on Sylvia’s information. Information she needed to know, badly. “Who were you talking about?”
Sylvia’s hand went limp in her hold, and Aster carefully set it down by her side.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember,” Sylvia said, then looked deeply into Aster’s pink pupils.
The panic gripped Sylvia’s expression again, and a single tear streaked down her cheek, bringing a dark line of ruined mascara down with it.
Her hand trembling, she cupped Aster’s face tenderly.
“Look, I can fix this. I promise. I might be a fuck up, but I’m a competent fuck up. ”
The sheer panic in Sylvia’s voice broke her heart. Aster wanted to say It’s fine, I can stay like this forever. She wouldn’t mind. She didn’t need her free will anyway.
Hm.
That’s a bit too far, brain.
When she finally got the opportunity to tell Sylvia she loved her, she wanted to mean it.
Her thoughts and emotions were slowly cloying towards something that didn’t belong to her—a devotion that was impersonal, not to Sylvia, but to the Suggestion itself.
Sylvia withdrew her hand, and Aster immediately missed the warm pressure of it. “Screw Vey. Fuck it all. I’ll get us home, and we can unwind you again there. I don’t want anyone here messing with you. I — I can just use the blindfold until—”
“Sylvia,” Aster forced out. It felt like she was being attacked by a wild bear when she said it, gritting her teeth in pain, but she needed the other woman to hear this. “No.”
Sylvia’s eyes widened. Aster breathed in, then out, slowly.
“No,” she repeated, at great expense. She said it so quietly that she hoped the phantoms couldn’t hear. “Talk to Vey. I’ll survive a few hours like this.” She then couldn’t help the dark chuckle that came out of her mouth — “This really isn’t so unusual for me, anyway.”
She meant that, as in, I am desperately in love with you, and I’d do anything for you without you having to cast a single spell, but Sylvia clearly took it as You’ve been making me your thrall for five hundred years already, what’s a little more.
Aster could infer it by the way Sylvia’s eyes darkened, the way her arms fell limp to her sides. Aster desperately wanted to correct herself, to make Sylvia feel better, but the thrall hex was too great, too immobilizing, like trying to push against a mountain to make it move an inch.
Thankfully, Sylvia capitulated. “Okay,” she said. “Come with me.”
Sylvia took her hand, and gently kicked open the door to the main room.
The music had quieted significantly, mellowing from ear-bleeding Electronica down to something jazzy and lofi.
The disco ball had been cut down and stuffed in a closet, its glimmering head still sticking out from the cupboard a little bit, like a child who’d been put to bed too early.
The crowds had thinned, too, so now it was only a handful of cross-faded vampires talking in hushed, gossipy whispers.
Gossip that focused immediately on the two of them as they began to trail to the staircase.
Aster noticed, like a tourist to her own mind, how she’d started to evaluate every single person as Threat or Not Threat.
She felt like the computer she’d learned to use for work.
It would all be very disturbing if she was able to process any of it.
Thankfully, she couldn’t. The thing about becoming a thrall, Aster was slowly realizing, was that it felt a lot like being heavily medicated during a big surgery — like, it’s still traumatizing to watch a man in a white coat saw your foot off, but if you’re floating around on horse tranquilizer, it’s sort of like, whatever, man.
So instead of thinking, she kept her eyes pinned to her north star.
A star which, to Aster’s great irritation, was trying to escape her purview.
“I want you to stay here until I’m done,” Sylvia said, her hand gripping tightly to the railing as she looked up at the upper floor. “I… I think I need to go there alone.”
Aster gripped the railing so tight that it broke underneath.
Sylvia put her hand on Aster’s arm, “Chill. Chill. I’ll be fine. Just stay here. If I’m not back in thirty minutes, or you hear me, like, screaming or something, then come look for me.” She glanced around suspiciously, then added with a muttering joke, “And if anyone tries to touch you, kill them.”
Aster would normally have laughed at that. But the now hyperliteral side of her thrall brain took it with a quick nod, and she knew, almost immediately, that this wasn’t going to end well.
***
Sylvia didn’t lose her shit often. In fact, she could count on one hand the number of times it had happened.
Almost all of them included Aster nearly dying, which was a true feat, given that she was practically indestructible.
The other two or three incidents were all related to packages being delivered to the wrong address. And the final one was right now.
Losing her shit was maybe putting it politely.
Because she had just enthralled the single person she cared about, after she was finally, finally coming close to being able to admit something to Aster that was real, and vulnerable, and all the things she was so viscerally, hereditarily allergic to, and she just had to fuck it up.
It was cosmically necessary, in fact, that she fucked it up.
Because that’s just what Sylvia Maroven did.
She tortured precious things to death.
So, no longer caring about any pretense, she barreled through the hallways of Vampire Orgy Manor, pushing kissing couples apart so fast a few of them went catapulting down the stairs, slamming her hand through various doors to jiggle the lock on the other side, until she finally found Leonard snorting cocaine off a thrall’s belly button.
“Whatever you want, I’ll do it,” she gritted out, kicking out the chair the thrall was sitting on from beneath him so he flopped unceremoniously to the ground. “Tell me where Vey is.”
Leonard rubbed the powder off his nose, and huffed.
“No need to be in a rush, Sylvia.”
“What do you want? One Mass Suggestion Contract? Two? I’ll write as many as my body lets me.” She surged forward, feeling manic and probably too brash as she took him by the chin. “Just tell me where Doctor Vey is.”
Leonard held her gaze for a moment, and Sylvia saw in the reflection of his stormy pupils four phantoms, yellow-eyed and murderous, lingering at the doorstep.
“Careful,” he whispered.
Feeling a chill run down her spine, she reluctantly let him go.