Chapter Five
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Lucy said. “And what are you holding?”
Mila inclined her head, but otherwise didn’t dignify that with a response. And it was then that Lucy understood the cool tension of her posture. It wasn’t the stance of an athlete. It was the stance of a hunter.
Lucy’s brain tripped uselessly over at least three or four half-formed questions.
Her mind was a tangle—the same kind of tangle it had been just the other day in the Quincey lobby, when Mila had sat with her and helped her consider her options.
The same Mila who was now giving her a long, evaluating stare.
“Pallas will be here soon,” she said evenly. “Let’s keep things civil.”
“I’m not the one holding a weapon,” Lucy said.
Mila delicately arched her eyebrows. “I have a weapon. And you could be a weapon. Feels pretty fair from how I see it.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Lucy said.
“Glad you feel that way. But you’re just going to have to let me see that for myself.”
In some ways, Mila wasn’t talking to her any differently now: She still had that easy cadence, that same assessing gaze that had sized her up back at Quincey. But there had been a weight to that gaze that had soothed the deep, clawing feeling in Lucy. It made her feel like she was in safe hands.
That same weight was still there. But it wasn’t so soothing now. Lucy felt pinned. Studied.
She held up both hands. “Fine,” she said.
Mila adjusted her grip on her bow. Lucy’s sight was growing sharper as the sky darkened: She could see the lines of tension in Mila’s knuckles. “I get that this is hard,” she said. “I’m not looking to make it harder. Let’s just cooperate with each other for a few more minutes, okay?”
It wasn’t much of a question. More than anything, Mila’s tone suggested that it would have to be okay. But if nothing else, it was a stalemate.
That stalemate didn’t last long, though. In her shock, Lucy had already forgotten: She hadn’t come here alone.
“Hey!” Both Mila and Lucy whipped around just in time to see Natalie barreling across the grass. “Get away from her!”
Lucy caught her breath just in time to see Mila raise her bow. “That’s a friend,” she said quickly, “a human friend!”
Mila’s eyes didn’t soften much at the clarification. “You were supposed to come alone.”
“I was asked not to be followed! Not to come alone!” Natalie’s logic didn’t sound nearly as confident coming out of Lucy’s mouth. It didn’t help that she was half convinced she was about to see Natalie get an arrow to the chest.
She moved between Natalie and Mila as Natalie closed the distance. She didn’t think Mila would hurt a person—at least, a person who wasn’t under the influence of a vampire. But she wasn’t about to assume anything in that moment.
Natalie didn’t seem interested in being protected. She sidestepped Lucy and got directly in Mila’s face. “You’ve got some nerve telling her what she is supposed to do, by the way. Seeing as no one told her that you or your deadly weapon were going to be here.”
“I don’t know what you two think this is,” Mila said. “But if you want our help—”
“Mila,” called a now-very-familiar voice. “It’s okay.”
There was a clear shift in Mila’s demeanor at the sound of Pallas’s voice. Her back straightened. And when she stepped aside, clearing the path between Lucy and the direction of the voice, she stood taut, as if at attention.
From behind the middle chapel, Lucy heard someone gently but deliberately brush a branch out of the way. And then a figure stepped onto the pavement.
Pallas dressed like someone trying to blend in.
She wore light-wash jeans, a plain black hoodie, and a pair of clean white sneakers.
But she was so strikingly beautiful that she would stand out anywhere.
She was tall and willowy, with delicate braids that cascaded down to her waist. Her skin was a deep brown, and her dark eyes were as watchful as Mila’s, but softer.
She moved across the pavement with long, soundless strides.
“I know you’re upset,” she said. “And that’s my fault for running late. But if you don’t keep your voice down, it won’t just be our friend with the cold hands who hears us.”
Lucy had to marvel, in the quiet that followed, at what her sharpened senses could pick up in the absence of other sound. She could hear the itch of everyone’s heartbeats. Natalie’s hard and loud. Mila’s metronome beats. Pallas’s much faster than she would have thought, looking at her placid face.
But despite the breathless patter of her pulse, she was smiling. “First things first,” she said. “Why don’t we all sit down. Relax, to the extent possible.”
Sitting appeared to be the last thing Natalie and Mila wanted to do.
But Mila was the first to obey, perching on the edge of the bench directly opposite Lucy with her bow resting neatly across her lap.
Lucy quietly filed away the fact that despite all Mila’s easy confidence, it seemed she deferred to Pallas.
Even when she looked a bit reluctant to do so.
Lucy settled onto the bench closest to her. Natalie remained standing. “Natalie,” Lucy murmured, lightly patting the spot next to her. “It’s okay.”
“We’ll see about that,” Natalie muttered. But eventually, she complied.
Resting her hands on her thighs, Pallas turned to Natalie. “Why don’t we start with your name? I think the rest of us have been introduced.”
It wasn’t admonishment, exactly, but Natalie squirmed at it anyway. “Natalie Baker.”
“You hosted the party,” Pallas said. This was, as Lucy noticed, a statement rather than a question.
Natalie seemed to notice that, too. Her uncharacteristic discomfort deepened. “I did,” she said. “I don’t like it when people hurt my friends. Particularly on my watch.”
“It wasn’t a person that hurt your friend,” Mila said. At Natalie’s curt nod, she added, “But you came anyway?”
“You know what hurt her,” Natalie shot back. “And you still came, too.”
Mila ran one absent finger down the curve of her bow. “I’ve considered what could happen to me,” she said. “I don’t know that you have.”
Natalie looked unruffled. “My ex once said that I had a ‘yes, and’ mentality.”
Mila laughed. It was a short, harsh sound. “I don’t know that you can improv your way out of this one.”
“Mila, she’s already here,” Pallas said. “We need all the help we can get.”
Mila didn’t seem entirely sure about that. But as before, she deferred to Pallas.
Another silence followed, this one much less deliberate than the last. As if they’d each realized, in roughly the same moment, that it was time to stop stalling.
“Lucy.” Pallas turned. It was the first time, Lucy thought, that Pallas had looked at her dead-on since she arrived. “You don’t have to be nervous.”
Lucy laughed warily. “Just feeling a little—exposed.”
Pallas nodded slowly. “Does it help if I tell you that this is one of the safest places on campus?”
Natalie perked up. “Because of the religious buildings?”
“Not exactly. Not for our friend, at least,” Pallas said.
“Turns out that horror stories are just as susceptible to church propaganda as anything else. Figures, right? The idea that religious objects are supposed to protect you—crosses, holy water—I’m not sure if that messaging came from the church itself, or if that was just the God-fearing public trying to self-soothe.
But either way, it isn’t true. As far as I’ve been able to tell from my research, Christian iconography only works if the vampire itself was a Christian in life.
It’s a placebo effect. If you think God can hurt you, then maybe He can.
“But when it comes to our friend—it doesn’t seem like he was a believer.
” Something in Pallas’s face clouded, then cleared.
“Anyway. It’s actually that ‘no entry’ tape doing the heavy lifting.
Some of the lore is true: They do need to be invited in.
And the university hung the tape. I still don’t know if that means that President Ballard would have to extend the invitation, or the construction workers—but either way, it means we’re safe here. ”
Lucy glanced over at the aforementioned, terrifyingly fragile tape. “That feels like a very narrow loophole.”
“Oh, it works,” Pallas said lightly. “Unfortunately, I’ve tested it in person. Completely by accident.”
Lucy waited for her to continue. But Pallas didn’t elaborate. And her silence had an expectant quality.
It was Lucy’s turn to speak then.
“Have you seen him?” Lucy finally said. It felt like a hilariously inadequate way to ask what she was really asking.
“I did,” Pallas said. “Two years ago.”
Lucy sucked in a breath through her teeth. “Did he—”
“He didn’t bite me,” Pallas said. “I got very, very lucky that night. If I hadn’t run through here completely by chance, I don’t think I’d be talking to you right now.”
Lucy could hear Pallas’s quick rabbit heartbeats again in the silence that followed. “What does he look like?”
“You don’t remember?” Pallas said.
“I don’t remember anything,” Lucy said.
Pallas nodded. “If he passed us now,” she finally said, “you’d think he was anyone else. That’s how he hunts. He just looks normal.”
Lucy’s own pulse fluttered loudly—loudly enough that it felt impossible that no one but she could hear it.
He looked like a person. That was what she remembered, too.
But in the days since, the thought of it no longer made sense to her.
What kind of thing could upend her life—so many lives—so completely, and still look human?
“Why did you stay here, after?” Natalie said. “I think I would have transferred.”