Chapter Thirteen #2
She settled back into the kitchen chair.
Lucy wasn’t exactly sure why this conversation had gotten so under her skin.
Except, perhaps, that she’d never really liked people who were certain of everything.
Even if those people were as old as the rise and fall of several civilizations.
“Hiro doesn’t want to leave, does he? That’s why he’s making you help me. ”
Lucy had meant it to antagonize him. But Laurentius looked thoughtful, if irritably so. “Getting involved may benefit me as well,” he said.
“How so?” Lucy said.
“Because maybe he’ll finally understand that it’s hopeless,” he said, “when he sees how this goes for you.”
Lucy suppressed her shudder. It was a reminder not to forget what he was, no matter how relatively harmless she had determined him to be. She had lived a fraction of his life. Whether she died tomorrow or decades from now, it was not going to make a difference to him.
“I’m surprised it’s not him here, then,” she said. “Since he’s the one who reads minds.”
“He’s better at explaining his own foolish plans, too,” Laurentius said. “But he thought I could speak to something that he couldn’t.”
“Which is what?” Lucy said.
His mouth folded into a grim line. Somehow, it was the most human he’d looked thus far. “I spent my mortal life trying to grasp control where there was none,” he said. “A long time ago, of course. But he thought I could—relate.”
He paused, and didn’t quite meet her eye.
That rueful human grimace had faded, leaving his face smooth and empty.
By the light of the moon, and by the blue glow of the emergency phone outside, his stillness made him look like something carved out of stone, or marble.
He didn’t look like something that had ever been living.
Let alone something Lucy could relate to.
Then again. He probably looked at her and felt the same.
Laurentius raised his head. And all that smooth blankness in his face suddenly sharpened to a point. His gaze snapped, catlike, to the window. As if following movement.
“You should wake up now,” he said, calmly. “You’re not alone.”
And then Lucy was flat on her back, tied to Mila’s bed.
She blinked. This time, the room was as she had left it.
The light was switched on in Mila’s kitchenette, casting a low yellow glow in the room.
When she turned her head, Mila herself was back in the corner, her eyes closed and head tilted against the wall.
But Lucy could tell by her breathing that she wasn’t fully asleep.
And that watchful feeling, fully absent from the dream, came rushing back. It felt closer than it had been when she’d fallen asleep. So close that it felt as if he was just outside.
She took a breath. Slowly, so as not to alert Mila that anything was wrong.
Laurentius must have sensed him from inside the dream.
But she’d felt Vanya’s attention long enough that she noticed gradations to it now.
It wasn’t like the night before, when she’d felt him outside the window.
She didn’t hear the click-click of the doorknob, the sound of her mind being opened.
He wasn’t trying to call out, or get in.
It was as if he just wanted to stand close enough to be known.
Once again, she remembered what Laurentius had said about the taste of a person’s fear.
Strong and sharp, tinged with vinegar and acid.
Vanya’s favorite. It was difficult, knowing that now, to see any of her small victories against Vanya as victories.
If he didn’t try to reach her tonight, it wasn’t because they’d done anything right.
It was because she was still being seasoned.
Motherfucker, she thought. She hoped he heard her. I’ll make you choke.
Technically, Lucy had finally gotten some sleep. But it seemed hosting Laurentius of Rome in her mind hadn’t been particularly restful. She was still exhausted. She knew she looked it, too: Mila had offered to watch over her a little longer, sans restraints, if she wanted to sleep in.
As kind as the offer was, Lucy declined it.
For one, she wasn’t sure how to explain why she was so tired in the first place, when she had just promised not to go back to the library vampires without Mila.
Sure, she hadn’t meant to break that promise when she went to sleep.
But she hadn’t tried very hard to wake up, either.
She would tell them what she found out, of course. She just needed to think hard about how to present that information. Laurentius had been right. It would be all too easy for Lucy to lose Athena and Mila’s trust.
She adjusted her backpack as she swiped into the multi-media center, with Natalie on her heels.
Lucy had finally gotten to spend the morning in one of her classes, though her Horror Literature course hadn’t done much to get her mind off things.
The only thing she’d written down from the lecture was Unfinished business is a Western construct.
And, more relevantly, Death is inevitable.
She rounded the corner and slipped through the open door of Athena’s studio. But even as Natalie closed the door behind them, Athena and Mila barely looked up. They were standing by the desk, heads bent over a piece of paper.
“What’s that?” Natalie said.
“Oh no.” Lucy’s stomach dropped. “Is someone else missing?”
“Not yet,” Athena said. Which was not the kind of denial that Lucy had been hoping to hear. “Come look at this. It was taped to the front door when Mila got here.”
Lucy sidled alongside them and followed their gazes down to the kind of cheery, inexpertly designed flyer that littered every spare wall of the campus. There was nothing alarming, upon the first read, about the text on its own:
Looking for answers?
Well, we don’t have them, either. (But let’s find them together!)
Join our philosophy department info session and mixer this Wednesday, 3 p.m., Lower Alton Hall #105. Meet our majors and graduate students, have some pizza, and maybe get some answers to your burning questions (but then again, maybe not). See you there!
“I don’t get it,” Lucy said. “What am I looking at?”
“Oh, wait. Remember that fake identity Vanya used at the party, with Alicia?” Natalie said. “He was going by the name of that philosophy PhD student he killed on the cruise line.”
So much had happened since they spoke to Alicia that Lucy had almost forgotten about Demeter Cruise Lines and Luke Thompson’s smiling face on the In Memoriam page.
But now that she thought about it, Alicia wasn’t the only person who had mentioned a philosophy PhD student in the past few days. Whitney had, too.
“He could be using this Luke Thompson alias regularly,” Athena said. “The library vampires told you that he’s got protection from someone higher up, right? If that’s true, he could have some kind of excuse to be on campus.”
It sounded disturbingly possible. How much did Vanya need, after all, except for a little plausible deniability?
With a student ID card and a good excuse, that would open more than enough doors for him.
Maybe Luke Thompson had given Vanya more than a meal back on Demeter Cruise Lines.
Maybe he’d given him an identity to assume.
And a new hunting ground to call his own.
“I assume Lower Alton has a steam tunnel entrance?” Lucy said.
“Give the lady a prize,” Mila said faintly.
“But the party is at three p.m.,” Natalie said. “And Lower Alton’s a pretty new building. Lots of windows.”
“What better way to tell us we’re not in control than to threaten us in the middle of the day?” Athena said. “He left Lucy alone last night, and now he invites us somewhere in the middle of the afternoon? He wants us to know that we can’t predict him. And he’s right, isn’t he?”
Lucy could feel what Mila had spoken of yesterday: Athena’s fear, in the room with them like a presence.
She hates that she’ll never really know if every precaution she’s taken is enough, Mila had said.
But looking at Athena now, Lucy couldn’t help but feel like that wasn’t it.
Lucy would have recognized the fear of uncertainty.
It was her mother’s constant companion, after all.
This felt like the opposite. A fear that came from understanding. Because Athena knew Vanya better than anyone else alive. She knew that no precaution could truly be enough. The moment Vanya wanted this to be over, he would end it.
“I’ll go,” Mila said. “Maybe I can lure him out.”
“The hell you will,” Athena snapped. “This is a trap, Mila.”
“Then we should see what happens when I set that trap off.” It was the strongest disagreement Lucy had ever heard out of Mila, at least where Athena was concerned. “I’m sorry, boss. But he clearly knows we’re trying to lure him in. If he’s not going to let that happen, then I have to go to him.”
The flinch was only visible in Athena’s eyes. “Mila,” she said. “You promised me no more of this.”
“I know. And I really am sorry about that.” Mila took a breath before she spoke again.
“But I don’t know how much longer we can stay in this holding pattern.
I don’t know how much longer—” The sentence ended in a vague gesture.
But it was hard not to notice how carefully Mila avoided looking at Lucy.
Mila didn’t know how much more Lucy could take. And Lucy couldn’t help but think, with a rush of cold down her chest, that she was right to wonder.
“I’ll come with you,” Natalie said.
“Natalie—” Mila said.
“No, I’m going,” Natalie said. “I’m the one who invited that thing into my dorm in the first place. I’m sick of sitting around waiting to see which of us he’s going to hurt next.”
“Natalie.” Lucy was the one to say it this time. “It’s not your—”
“Babe,” Natalie said, “I love you to pieces, but if you say it’s not my fault one more time, I’ll bite you myself. I know it’s not my fault. And I know I’m not a junior archery champion. But I’ll bet you could use me for something. If Mila’s going, I’ll go, too.”
Lucy let out a breath. What she was about to say was not going to go over well with any of them. But if Mila and Natalie were going, she wasn’t going to sit in the studio and wait by the phone. “I’ll go with you.”
The uproar started almost instantly. Lucy raised her voice over them before the protests could gain steam. “You said it yourselves,” she said. “My role here is to be bait. So…I should go be bait, shouldn’t I?”
“Lucy.” Athena’s voice, always calm no matter how fast her heart was beating, had started to tremble. “I know the waiting is hard. Believe me, I know. But this isn’t the way.”
Her eyes fell back to the flyer, as if by scanning the cheery font one last time, they’d find something useful.
But there was no more information they were going to find that would change anything, just like there wasn’t going to be an article about what happened after the Mountain Villa Massacre.
No web search or book was going to be able to tell them what Vanya had done once his family was dead.
What he planned to do now. What he hungered for.
This was no longer a hunt. It was a siege. He had surrounded them, and now he was trying to smoke them out. And if anyone could survive that siege, it was Athena. He was never going to bait her into leaving this fortress that she’d built. She could outlast him. She probably would, in the end.
That would never be true for Lucy. No matter how many doors she put between them. No matter how many times she practiced locking them. Sooner or later, she would walk out into the night.
“I’m sorry” was what she finally said. “But I’m tired of waiting, too.”