Chapter Thirteen
Lucy was awake, but she didn’t want to be.
It was still dark behind her eyelids, she miraculously didn’t need to pee that badly, and she was tired enough that the creaky extra-long twin felt deliriously comfortable underneath her.
She could be asleep again in moments, if she let herself.
If she opened her eyes, she risked breaking the spell.
She allowed herself the small luxury of shifting on the pillow.
Both of her arms went along with her, with no resistance.
She lurched upright. She wasn’t only untied—the restraints were gone altogether. “Mila,” she said, her tongue thick. “Why did you—”
But when she turned to the corner where Mila had been the night before, she found it empty.
The same was true for the little table near the kitchenette, and the shitty overstuffed armchair by the window.
It was dark in the dorm: The only lights came from outside, through the blinds, from the lampposts and the blue glow of the emergency phone a few feet away.
And Mila wasn’t there.
Lucy’s feet shook a little as she swung them around to the floor.
Maybe she was dreaming again. Her body didn’t hurt the way it had when she’d crawled into bed that night.
She didn’t hear the sounds of footsteps in the room next door, or voices and muffled music in the hallways.
But if it was a dream, it was a vivid one.
The room wasn’t fuzzy the way the forest had been in Athena’s guided meditation.
The details weren’t flattened. It didn’t feel as if she’d gone anywhere.
It was just that everything was quiet, and she was alone.
A shadow passed across the blinds. For a moment, the blue emergency phone light had been occluded. Blocked by something with shoulders, a torso, a head.
She peeled two of the blinds apart, but barely. Just enough to look.
The light from the phone was visible. The shape of it wasn’t. There was a viscous fog rolling into the quad courtyard, in thick, tangible coils. It moved like dry ice, blanketing as it spread. If she opened the window and reached down to the ground, she could scoop it up in handfuls.
But as quiet as it was, the night outside didn’t feel watchful. Not watchful like she’d tried to describe to Mila in those moments before she fell asleep.
“Nope.” Lucy shook her head as she released the blinds.
The back-and-forth swish of her hair felt uncomfortably real against her chin.
“Not tonight.” It had to be a dream. The alternative was that Mila was gone, and something was moving outside.
She slid back under the covers and yanked them up to her chin.
She wasn’t here. Or rather, she was in another version of “here,” a real one, still tied to the bed under Mila’s watchful eye.
Maybe she just needed to be still long enough to let this dream end.
She waited for exhaustion to overcome her. But she was still wide awake when she heard the sound.
Click-click.
She sprang out of bed. The dorm had grown darker. Like a hole punched in the world.
But darkness was nothing to Lucy anymore. So, when she heard the click-click a second time, she saw exactly where it came from. She saw the slow, gentle turn of the doorknob leading to the hall.
It turned without resistance. It was unlocked.
Lucy’s ankles nearly buckled as she scrambled to the other side of the room. She didn’t have far to go. Just a few feet. But by the time she reached the door, it was already slightly wedged open.
She hit it with all her weight. She’d surprised whoever was coming—she felt the opposing force falter, then redouble.
But her shaking hands had found their target, and she pressed the lock shut with her thumb, hard.
She grabbed for the deadbolt next. Her fingers, slick with sweat, nearly fumbled it.
The door rattled again, hard, as she snapped it closed.
But it held. It bowed a little with the force of another push, maybe a shoulder driven into the wood. And then it wasn’t pushed again.
“Who’s there?” Lucy’s voice was so guttural that it startled her.
She staggered back, and for a moment, no one answered her. Until someone called out, “A bit of a pathetic showing. Sorry to say.”
Lucy’s chest heaved as she struggled to catch her breath. That…was a very strange thing for someone to say after trying to break in. And it didn’t quite sound like the vague impression of Vanya in her mind. It didn’t sound like Hold still. But she knew the voice, nonetheless.
She raised herself onto her tiptoes to look through the peep hole.
Laurentius of Rome, the reference librarian, stared balefully back at her.
“Are you going to open the door?” he said. “Or are we going to talk like this?”
Another night, Lucy might have thought better of opening Mila’s door to nature’s perfect predator, even one she had conditionally decided to trust. But in her adrenaline-fueled anger, she would have opened the door to anyone.
She would have let Dracula himself through if it gave her a better vantage point to yell at him.
“What the fuck,” she rasped, as she wrenched the door open, “are you doing here?”
“Watching you lie in bed and wait to die, apparently.” Laurentius moved into the room, delicately sidestepping her. “What was that pace? If I hadn’t turned that knob one fraction at a time, you never would have kept me out.”
“Not an answer,” Lucy snapped. “Why were you trying to get in to begin with? And—how did you just walk in without an invitation?”
“Because none of this is real, of course,” he said, with the enunciation of someone stating the obvious. “Everyone else has been in your head. Why shouldn’t I be?”
She took several breaths, and reminded herself that throttling Laurentius of Rome would do absolutely nothing for her. He’d probably catch her in one hand, with ease. “Okay. Then maybe we can start with what you’re doing in my head.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” he said. And now that the rage-haze was clearing, that made sense.
She’d known Hiro Minamoto for a cumulative five minutes, and she could still guess that this had him and his court whispers written all over it.
“I didn’t create the scenario, either. We used one of your memories as a base. ”
“My memory?” Lucy echoed. This was the second night she’d spent in Mila’s dorm. She hadn’t had a lot of time to make memories there.
“The situation, if not the setting, then,” he said. When Lucy’s stare stayed blank, he added, “You were a teenager. Your mother was away for the evening, with your grandmother at the hospital. And you woke up in the night and remembered—”
“That I hadn’t locked the door,” Lucy realized out loud. Of course. She’d been in bed, mostly asleep, and she’d dreamed she heard someone walk into the apartment. It had started the same way, too. With the click-click of the turning knob.
“You think of that moment often, when you’re feeling vulnerable,” Laurentius said. “You thought of it just the other night, when you realized that your thoughts weren’t entirely your own.”
Lucy sank into one of Mila’s kitchenette chairs. It felt very solid for something in her head. “You told me that you didn’t know how to help me,” she said slowly. “A few hours ago, you said that. And now your husband is giving you detailed reports of the goings-on in my head?”
“Don’t mistake me. I still don’t know how to help you,” he said. “But Hiro thought it might help if you visualized the issue in a way you’d understand.”
As Lucy looked up at him, she noticed, for the first time, how wide his pupils were in the dark. Hers must have looked the same to him. Nearly black. “The ‘issue’ being that Vanya is breaking into my mind?”
“To be a vampire is to constantly take inventory of what you control,” Laurentius said.
“You control your territory—or ideally you do, barring some ravenous young upstart moving in.
You control your hunger, whether you sate it with convenience or with violence.
You control your mind, fortify its defenses against the rest of your kind, keep bad actors and curious busybodies from reading your thoughts.
To be human is to control nothing. You make choices, here and there.
You change your clothes and rearrange your furniture.
But you spend most of your lives allowing things to happen.
“But,” he said, biting down on the t. “Even if you’re not a true vampire, perhaps you can still guard your own mind, to a degree. And whatever other skills you lack, what’s easier than locking a door?”
Lucy leaned back against the hard chair, suddenly dizzy. “So if I visualize locking a door, I could lock him out of my head?”
“Could being the key word,” he said. “And if you’d like this to have any chance of working, I’d suggest you be much quicker next time.”
Lucy felt the chair back vanish behind her. She yelped as she fell, braced for impact, but she didn’t hit the ground. She hit something nearly as unforgiving, though. Mila’s extra-long twin mattress.
There was a click-click around the corner. And then the slow sound of scraping metal.
“Fuck!” Lucy jumped out of the bed, the rush of vertigo threatening to toss her off her feet.
But she gained her bearings, and by the time she reached the door, she’d built enough speed that she felt real impact when she hit the wood.
She could feel the pressure of Laurentius’s push against the door, but this time, she was faster.
She clicked the lock, flipped the deadbolt, and slumped forward to hold it shut.
She had a few seconds to catch her breath again. Then Laurentius’s muffled voice called, “That was an improvement.”
She took her sweet time opening the door. “You’re an asshole, by the way.”
“Yes, well.” He stepped through the door once more. “I’d like to see you live thousands of years and remain chipper.”