Chapter Twelve #2
She’d been hungry when she ordered it—at least she thought she’d been hungry.
But now that she was eating it, it felt gristly and overcooked against her teeth.
The muscle fibers felt like rubber. She would have eaten around the meat, but the sour cream, the lettuce, the cheese—it mostly just tasted cold.
Only the steak, unpleasant as it was, had any real flavor.
She grimaced. Laurentius had said something back at the library, something about Hiro’s groupies craving rare meat for a few weeks. Was real food going to be this unpleasant until she rode the infection out?
Well. Not all real food was unpleasant. She could think of one thing that could make her mouth water. That thick, marbled, raw filet at Falls Quad Café the other day. And the faint sheen of red against the white butcher paper.
Lucy put her half-eaten meal back in the bag and withdrew her phone. That was enough eating for the night. It was time to turn her attention to something marginally more pleasant: the article Hiro had shared that was currently waiting in her inbox.
The Mountain Villa Massacre:
The Strange Case of the Volkov Family.
Do you like true crime?
If so, you’re not alone. Open your podcast app, and you’ll find dozens of murders and mysteries awaiting you, from polished prestige media outlets and wide-eyed amateurs alike.
You might be forgiven for assuming this boom is a recent development.
But long before there were podcasts, humanity was captivated by the macabre.
In the Christmas season of 1916, less than one year before the Bolsheviks would change the future of Russia forever, one such case captivated Russia’s upper class.
The story is this: A few days after Christmas, 1916, the corpses of the Volkov family were discovered in their winter home.
The father, Andrei. The mother, Anna. The daughter, Sofiya.
The eldest son, Alexei. Their injuries, of course, were strangely minimal, given the condition of their bodies.
They lay neatly and calmly at the nearly bloodless scene.
If not for the two small punctures at their necks, they would not have looked injured at all.
It was a fascination for the aristocracy, for a while.
The Volkovs had a profile just high enough to cause panic.
But what fascinated everyone most was the missing son, Ivan.
He had been twenty-five years old, fit and strong, a loyal advocate for his father and brother.
No one wanted to believe he had done it. Though if he hadn’t, where had he gone?
But the case never entered the annals of history’s great unsolved mysteries. In November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution blanketed the aristocracy in fresh blood. No one remembered the Volkovs by the time everything was scrubbed clean. And Ivan never returned to remind them.
Lucy closed the tab. So perhaps a vampire had come to the Volkovs’ mountain villa that night, had turned Vanya and killed the rest. Or maybe Vanya had already been turned elsewhere. Perhaps he was the stranger in the villa, making sure none of his family would outlive him.
And yet the people who had known Ivan Volkov didn’t want to believe he’d done it.
Maybe the vampire wasn’t anything like the man.
Maybe in life, Vanya really had been the loyal brother and son everyone thought he was.
Or maybe he’d never been that man at all.
He died young and handsome. People never look at young and handsome men and correctly imagine what they can do.
“All right. Fifteen minutes until sunset, if you want to get set up over here,” Mila said. “You really don’t have to do this. I’ll be up all night watching you. I won’t let you go anywhere.”
Lucy set her phone down and decided not to say anything about the article for now. She wasn’t sure if she had gained any new information, really—just more questions.
“I trust you,” she said. “But I want you to be able to, like…blink. Or get a glass of water. And I’ll sleep better if I know I’m not about to climb out a window.”
Mila looked supremely unconvinced, but she gestured for Lucy to come over to the bed. “Okay. But if you ask to be untied for any reason, I’m going to untie you. I’m not running a Chamber of Torment in here.”
Lucy laughed, and lay down. “As long as you keep an eye on me.”
“Oh, I will. Fool me once, et cetera.” Mila bent over her, pulling the cuffs of Lucy’s pajama shirt over her wrists. As Lucy strained to get a look at what she was doing, Mila said, “I don’t want to tie these over your bare skin. Let me know if I’ve got your arms too far back, here.”
Lucy held still and let her work. Maybe Mila would be a fast learner at the whole Chamber of Torment thing. Her grip was smooth and no-nonsense as she gently moved Lucy’s right arm into position.
“You know…” Mila’s face bent mostly out of Lucy’s field of vision as she slipped the red tie around her wrist. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be so gung-ho about this. Especially just after telling me to be nicer to you.”
Lucy grinned as she closed her eyes. She was making herself dizzy trying to watch.
“I try to hype myself up every time I have to do something unpleasant. Apparently it comes off as a little intense. When my grandmother went into hospice care, I had to learn all the emergency stuff to do if no one was there—how to get her into her wheelchair, change her catheter, all that. I had this friend who got so upset when I was telling her about it. She thought I wasn’t taking it seriously. ”
Mila let out a short, unimpressed noise. “It was your dying grandmother. What did it matter to her how seriously you were taking it?”
“Things could get a little dark at home,” Lucy said.
“So sometimes the things I talked about could get a little dark, too. Not everyone wanted to go there. I didn’t always want to go there.
But then they’d see me getting out, having fun, and they couldn’t quite understand that, either.
It was how I balanced the pressure. Fake it till you make it and all that.
I guess it looked a little flippant, though, if you didn’t know where it was coming from. ”
A soft, satiny knot closed around Lucy’s right wrist. Despite Mila’s worries, it didn’t pinch. It was secure, but not tight.
“They were your friends,” Mila finally said. “It should have been obvious that you were just trying to stay afloat.”
“Well,” Lucy said as Mila moved to the other side of the bed. “I was an idiot teenager. Maybe I didn’t make it that obvious that I was struggling.”
“Maybe not,” Mila said as she pulled another tie around Lucy’s left wrist. “But if you explained it then anything like you’re explaining it to me now, she should have been able to tell. I’ve never heard anyone sound so solemn about having fun.”
Lucy sat up just enough that it jolted the right bedpost. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that I’ve known you for less than a week, and you’re talking about going to The Club like you were drafted for war,” Mila said. “If I were your friend, I think I’d be able to hear that in your voice.”
“I—‘drafted’?” Lucy said. “It wasn’t like that.”
“I am so sorry to break this to you,” Mila said. “You sound like my great-grandpa reminiscing about the shores of Normandy.”
Lucy might have swatted at Mila’s arm, if she had the free hands to do so.
Mila laughed, as if she’d seen the urge flitting across Lucy’s face.
“It wasn’t like I was miserable,” she said.
“I just never knew how long my family was going to need me. So I wanted to experience however much I was allowed to experience.”
Mila tied off the left knot. “And then you got to leave home after all?”
“And then I got to leave home after all,” Lucy echoed. And there she was, sporting two puncture marks on her neck and tied to an almost-stranger’s bed.
Mila moved Lucy’s arm in the binding, as if testing that she had enough slack, and Lucy blinked heavily. “What time is it?”
“A little after eight,” Mila said.
“Hah,” Lucy said. She was starting to feel it again, that bleeding-out kind of tired. “Going to sleep at eight p.m. was not really what I pictured from my college life.”
“You got maybe two or three hours last night,” Mila said. “And who knows how much the night before. Go to sleep.”
Lucy blinked. Her eyes were slow to open again. “You’ll wake me up if something seems wrong?”
“Trust me. If anything happens, you will be getting woken up.” Mila was quiet long enough that Lucy had started to drift off by the time she spoke again. “Is he out there?”
“Hmm?” Lucy’s eyes didn’t quite open that time.
“You said that when you met the library vampires, it was like you could feel them. Is it like that for him?”
Lucy tipped her head back. The box spring was so stiff under her, even with a memory foam pallet nestled under the fitted sheet. But she was so powerfully exhausted, it felt as if every breath sank her deeper and deeper down.
She couldn’t know for sure if there was a feeling. She had been in Vanya’s company three times now, and she remembered almost none of it. It probably didn’t feel the same. Laurentius and Hiro’s presence felt like history, like the mountains themselves, but Vanya was so much younger.
However, there was a different kind of weight she’d come to know over the past few days. That unmistakable feeling of attention. Like someone’s eyes when you cross a room. Since the bite, that feeling hadn’t stopped.
“I don’t know,” Lucy finally said. “I think I feel him all the time.”
She wasn’t sure if Mila had anything else to say to that. Lucy thought she heard her mumble something, after a long period of silence. But by then, Lucy was already nearly asleep.