Chapter Nineteen
“No.” Lucy didn’t feel like standing, but suddenly, she had to. Her legs shook dangerously under her. “This is insane.”
But Mila’s jaw was set. Lucy had learned that when Mila made that face, she was not interested in listening to counterarguments. “Insane would be letting you die in my dorm room.”
“Just a few nights ago you told me to try to understand if you had to kill me,” Lucy said. “Is this not the line you were waiting for me to cross? Hurting someone?”
“It was. It was when I said it then,” Mila said. “But a few hours ago, you told us that you believed Whitney wasn’t totally gone. You begged us to consider that Sadie and Addison might not be lost causes, either.”
“I was angry.” Lucy started to pace. “And apparently, I was starving! Maybe I had no idea what I was talking about.”
“I hope you did,” Mila said. “You convinced me.”
Lucy gripped the bed frame for support. Mila looked up with that usual evenness. That controlled calm that made Lucy want to cling to her and throttle her in equal measure.
“Then I’ll get a bird,” Lucy said. “Or a squirrel, or something.”
“It’s getting dark,” Mila said. “Neither of us should be outside.”
“Mila,” Lucy said. “You can’t be suggesting that I drink from you.”
“I didn’t get to that yet,” Mila said. Lucy wanted to reach out and shake her until she sounded as frenzied as Lucy felt. “But I guess you’ve come to the same conclusion I have.”
“You could end up with the infection, too,” Lucy said. “Then what?”
“I don’t think so. You’re not a vampire yet. And if it happened anyway…” She shrugged. “It wouldn’t be so bad, being your thrall.”
“I swear to God, if you don’t take this seriously—”
“Who’s not taking it seriously?” Mila said. “I’m being completely sincere. I’m conveniently available. I’m not going to run from you. And not to brag, but I take iron pills every morning with breakfast. I’m your best option. Your only option, if I’m being frank.”
“And you’re the only one of us who doesn’t care if she lives or dies!”
The realization was barely formed in Lucy’s mind even as it left her mouth, but as soon as she said it out loud, she knew it was true.
You promised me no more of this, Athena had said.
Mila had probably meant that promise, or tried to mean it.
But Mila had never really learned caution the way she tried to.
The second Vanya was finally in her reach, she was right back to the old strategy: Stick her neck out and see if he’d bite.
Lucy knew what fear of dying was. She’d seen it in Athena and in Natalie. She’d lived with it all her life. That composure that Mila carried like a cloak was only shaken when someone else was in danger. Mila never lost her composure for herself.
“I…” Mila said. She looked a little stunned. “I don’t not care.”
Lucy sank onto the bed next to her. Just a few short minutes of pacing had her exhausted. Maybe Natalie had a point about being able to take her right now.
“I worry that your best-case scenario isn’t that all of us survive,” she said. “I specifically worry that your best-case scenario is that you’re the only one who dies.”
“I mean, maybe a little,” Mila said faintly. “But only because I’m a realist.”
“God, you really don’t know when to quit sometimes,” Lucy said. She could barely summon any heat to it. “If you hadn’t met Athena, you probably would have died long before you meant to.”
“Lucy,” Mila said. And now, finally, she looked a little angry. “I’m not suicidal.”
“I never said you were,” Lucy said. “I said that you don’t care, and right now that’s not any different to me.
You’re asking me to do something that I may not be able to stop when I start.
If I—if you want me to do this, then you have to promise me that you’re going to fight me off if I lose control.
I have to trust that you’ll fucking care if I kill you. ”
Mila let out a sigh and folded her long legs onto the bed.
“It’s not my best-case scenario,” she said.
“I’d love to live, actually. Be really pleasantly surprised if I did.
I’d have liked a year and a half left to actually fuck around in college.
Get some failing grades for fun reasons.
Maybe go off campus, for once. Did you know there’s an entire mountain out there?
I’ve never gone hiking. Every moment I’m at Rollins, I’m waiting for something to happen.
When I decided that I was going to come here, I didn’t know I’d spend most of my time waiting.
“So if it helps,” she said, “I care most of the time. At least ninety percent of the time. And for the other ten…I care about being here for the end of it. You can trust that.”
Lucy sat back as she looked at Mila. The bed was starting to feel so familiar under her. It smelled more like her now than it smelled like Mila. “That’s not really what I was hoping to hear.”
Mila’s mouth twisted into a smile. “Sorry, babe,” she said. “Tonight, that’s what you get.”
“You’re such a pain in the ass,” Lucy said softly. “Have I told you that yet?”
“In words, no.” Some of the tension eased out of Mila. Probably because she knew she’d won. “In little side glances that you think are subtle…”
Lucy treated her to one of those side glances, which were never intended to be subtle in the first place. But the crook of Mila’s arm caught her eye, and then her attention. She had a prominent vein there. Cool blue, like her sheets.
Lucy’s mouth parted. When she ran her tongue along her teeth, she felt the same two sharp points she’d felt that morning. She tried not to be afraid of them this time.
Mila had followed her gaze. And slowly she rotated her arm and extended it to Lucy. She had a little tattoo near the crook of her elbow. Orion the hunter. Of course.
“Right there?” Lucy whispered. The blood had a sound, when she was this close. A low and inviting hum.
“If it’s good enough for phlebotomists,” Mila said.
Lucy let out a short laugh. “I hope this isn’t what phlebotomists do.”
“Well. Maybe it’s less awkward if you think of yourself like one,” Mila said. “You’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just doing something necessary.”
But as Lucy drew closer, there was nothing rote about it. Mila’s pulse was loud enough to fill the room—it was in the cords of her neck, the tips of her fingers. It sounded as strong and assured as she was. It didn’t even sound all that fast until Lucy opened her mouth.
Hunger had been an uneasy thing, since the bite.
The strangeness of it had been so quiet that she’d barely noticed it until now.
Vanya had been breathing down her neck—there hadn’t been anything unusual about losing her appetite, or about choking down the rare meat she thought her body wanted.
But holding Mila’s arm in her hand, she thought of the dry, sinewy mouthfuls of the dining hall steak.
The queasy, gnawing allure of the raw steak in the Falls Quad Café: not the steak itself, she realized now, but the bloody butcher paper it lay on.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have an appetite.
It was that there was only one thing for her.
And now, finally, she was close enough to taste it.
She lifted Mila’s arm to her mouth and pressed her lips against the waiting crook of her elbow. It should have felt unnatural. But the infection knew what to do. She just had to follow it.
She bit down. And gradually, the skin gave under her teeth, and Mila’s blood filled her mouth.
It didn’t taste like she thought it would.
Though it wasn’t as if she had a frame of reference.
She’d tried one of her mother’s iron gummies once, and it had tasted like fruit with a spike of metal, like biting into an apple and losing a tooth.
Mila’s blood tasted like something deep and savory, garnished with a ribbon of honey.
It was so hot, pouring down her throat. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d been until she felt how body temperature should taste.
She gasped, and it spread her mouth wider, her bite deeper. Instinctively, she jerked back, but Mila’s hand settled between her shoulder blades. “It’s okay,” she said.
Lucy would have questioned that, if she’d had the ability.
But that ability was so far beyond her now.
Every starving cell was blanketed with warmth, and suddenly she was alive.
Her thoughts were connecting, her body was moving without the pain or fatigue that had clung to her these past few days, and she drank, deeply.
She didn’t know the half of it before, when she’d wondered whether or not she could stop.
She knew now, with a certainty as cold as she was, that she would live her whole life at the crook of Mila’s elbow if given the chance.
But Mila’s heartbeat was labored, her body quietly protesting under Lucy’s teeth. Her free arm spasmed, grasping at Lucy’s side for purchase, and the euphoria shifted. She could feel Mila’s nails through her shirt, little pinpricks against her ribs that jolted her with little snaps of electricity.
Lucy gasped again, and this time it dislodged her mouth from Mila’s skin.
She wouldn’t have called herself starved for touch.
She was busy, was all: She was graduating, then she was breaking up with her high school girlfriend, then she was on deathbed duty, and then she was a vampire’s thrall.
It had been a while since she’d been so close to anyone.
She’d been able to ignore it pretty well.
But hunger was hunger, she realized. You could starve without knowing it, if you didn’t know what starving felt like.
“I’m okay,” said Mila, misunderstanding her hesitance. “Keep going.”