Chapter 10
There was a strange, rote choreography to being hunted by a vampire.
Not half an hour after learning that Sadie Grainger and Addison Greene were still somewhere on the Rollins campus, Lucy was frowning down at her class schedule on her phone.
Her after-dark fencing class would obviously need to be dropped, which was too bad—a fencing foil wouldn’t do much harm to Vanya, but it would be nice to be the one pointing a weapon at someone, for once.
The trickiest obstacle to avoid was any buildings with access to the steam tunnels.
Astronomy was out for that reason. The same was true for Horror Literature, though she’d move to a safe building if she switched to the nine a.m. section.
It was, in Lucy’s opinion, a disgusting time of day to attempt to learn anything.
But it felt worth it to keep at least part of her class schedule intact.
Thankfully, her next destination that day was also free of any doors to the tunnels. Which was a particular relief. There wasn’t much point to being a college student if you couldn’t get into the library.
She could feel it as soon as she walked in, even surrounded by all the light and bustle of the ground floor.
There was a chill coming up from the tile floor, and from the mouth of the concrete stairwell.
She could smell the must and age of the contents below.
And just as she had in the basement of the Goldwell building, she could hear the sounds of living things crawling in the earth.
They were faint sounds, all the way up here. But still present.
Lucy glanced over furtively. She was back in Mila’s custody; her newly revised schedule was clear for the afternoon, which left her little to do except go wherever Mila needed to go. “You’re sure there’s no tunnels through here?”
Mila raised an eyebrow. “Positive. Why?”
“Just checking,” Lucy demurred. She wouldn’t go into it. There was never a good time to explain that she could hear the worms underneath her.
They moved through the entryway and main foyer, turning off into a study room. “Sorry that you have to wait around for me,” Mila said. “You can only watch movies from the library in the library, for some reason. It’s an intranet thing.”
“It’s fine,” Lucy said neutrally, though the ever-watchful Mila probably caught the way Lucy was studying her. Mila had had a strange look on her face ever since Athena caught her up on what they’d discovered. Every so often, it looked like she was going to explain herself—but she hadn’t yet.
Finally, as they sat down, Lucy cracked. “Okay,” she said. “What’s that look?”
“What look?” Mila said.
“Your forehead’s been all crinkled since we left the studio,” Lucy said. “Is this about Sadie and Addison?”
The crease in Mila’s brow deepened then. It could only be about Sadie and Addison. But Lucy still didn’t expect what Mila said next.
“We never thought there was more than one,” Mila said.
“Hmm?” Lucy said.
“We’ve been keeping close track of all the deaths in the area.
” Mila was facing Lucy, but her focus was on some vague, invisible point in space.
“Roughly one missing student per year, of course. Deaths at nursing homes, missing hunters. So-called animal attacks all across the mountain. It’s not as if we know how much vampires eat.
But for three vampires, now four? It seems—”
“Too few,” Lucy murmured. Three vampires on a bustling, isolated college campus? It should have been like unleashing a cat colony on a bird sanctuary. “What about the dead rabbits?”
“Could be,” Mila said. “But then I guess my question is still the same. Why the restraint? They could turn this campus into an all-you-can-eat buffet any time they wanted to. For some reason, they haven’t yet. And it’s not because they’re scared of anything we could do to them.”
It was a question Lucy didn’t particularly want to consider. But she’d wondered the same thing back in the studio, hadn’t she? Athena was smart. She was cautious. She’d devoted her entire college life to staying alive, to keeping as many other people alive as she could.
And yet. What was all that to something that could hijack free will with a wave of his hand?
“Whitney told me she was supposed to save her appetite for a feast,” Lucy mused. It wasn’t an answer so much as another part of the question. For whatever reason, they were holding back. Maybe for the same reason that Lucy herself had survived so far.
Everything Lucy was feeling rippled across Mila’s face. “Well,” she said. “Let’s try to make sure she doesn’t get it.”
“No argument there,” Lucy said softly.
Mila rubbed at the bridge of her nose, hard enough to look like it hurt. “Sorry,” she said again, needlessly. Lucy really needed to tell her later that being nice to her didn’t need to involve quite so many apologies. “I should start this stupid movie so we can both get out of here.”
Lucy made a short, noncommittal sound. She wouldn’t mind getting out of the library and away from its wet, underground smell. But it didn’t make too much of a difference where they were on campus. No place felt completely safe to her now.
“What’s the class?” Lucy asked.
“It’s a class on adaptations,” Mila said. “We read a book, we watch the movie it was based on, and then we analyze how the story changes to suit the format. It’s an English class, so. Lots of talk of narrative devices.”
“Are you an English major?” Lucy said.
Mila shrugged. “Nominally, yeah,” she said, as if there was some distinction between being an English major and an English major in name only.
“I finished most of my requirements already, so now I’m mostly just filling time with elective credits.
I like books. I like movies. And the professor is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve taken classes for less.”
Lucy carefully did not react to that last bullet point.
Her budding crush on Mila had already passed through an assembly line of life-shattering, boner-killing revelations in the past twenty-four hours: There was no more reason for her to get excited that Mila was into women.
She quietly noted it anyway. It was data.
There was nothing wrong with collecting a little data about the person who was meant to keep her alive.
“That’s not very Rollins of you” was all she said. “Where are the five majors plus an internship?”
“I did tell you that not all of us are turbo–child prodigies here, didn’t I?” Mila flashed her wry, closed-lipped smile. “It’s the same as Athena. Hard to have time to find anything else to get interested in, you know? Unfortunately, we ended up majoring in trying to find needles in haystacks.”
Lucy was quiet for a moment. Mila was still going through the motions of setting up her computer, pulling up the movie—she didn’t seem to realize that she’d just said something crushingly sad.
Then again, Lucy had said the same thing about herself, hadn’t she?
It was hard to be interested in much of anything when you were keeping your head above water.
“I’m gonna start this,” Mila said. “Did you bring your own work, or—”
“It’s the second day of my freshman year,” Lucy said dryly. “I haven’t learned shit yet.”
That drew a quiet laugh from Mila. One that parted her mouth wide open. “Okay, well. Entertain yourself somehow, then.”
Mila slipped on her headphones, and Lucy was officially alone with her thoughts.
She sighed and tipped her head back. This was almost certainly better than sitting back in Mila’s dorm room with the windows drawn, listening to every little creak in the walls.
But Mila’s movie was 105 minutes long, and that was a lot of minutes to kill.
She hadn’t brought her laptop, but there was a free library desktop down the table.
She slid over into the next chair and logged in with her Rollins email. She briefly considered tying her ankle to the chair leg for security—but she only went wandering when she fell asleep, and it wasn’t as if she had any rope. She did, however, tuck that idea into her back pocket for later.
The Rollins Library Catalog and Information Services home page blinked cheerily at her, its margins decked with clip art of books, magnifying glasses, and a strangely suggestive image of a finger pressed to a pair of lips in a shushing gesture.
The page header framed a search bar, captioned with the words What do you want to know?
Lucy laughed. Everything she wanted to know at that moment would have filled 105 minutes and then some.
With no real expectations, she typed vampire and pressed the search button with a flourish.
It didn’t take her long to see why Athena had given up on the internet: The first few search pages offered her a wealth of books and articles, all predicated on the completely understandable idea that vampires didn’t exist. How vampire traditions developed around the world, the summaries read.
The origins of a legend. A tongue-in-cheek look at vampire myths, from medieval to modern.
It wasn’t as if she expected academia to have any particular ideas for her.
But it was sobering to see real, living proof of how few people would believe her.
She scrolled aimlessly for three pages before she was too depressed to keep going. She wasn’t going to find anything useful this way. Nothing that Athena hadn’t already dug up.
That said. Now that she thought about it—there was one thing she knew now that Athena wouldn’t look into very closely.
Ivan Volkov, she typed into the search bar. Her expectations hadn’t gotten much higher. But the name on the screen sent a cold prickle up her arms.