Chapter Twenty-Two
Athena and Natalie escorted Lucy to the basement of the Goldwell building. The astronomy lecture was in progress as they passed. Lucy had completely forgotten that there was class today. If she survived, she’d have a lot to catch up on.
She allowed herself the fantasy of catching up on missing homework. Cramming all the pages of reading she missed, probably sitting in for a makeup quiz or two, answering a few solicitous emails from professors and TAs. Waiting in a bus shelter that would never display a missing poster for her.
She thought of Sadie’s missing poster then. And it struck her that she hadn’t seen one for Addison. We have to be her family now, Athena had told her listeners on the radio.
Lucy adjusted the heavy burden in her arms as they made their way down the stairs. They’d stopped by Mila’s dorm to pick up one thing: her bow, which was now nestled in its black carry bag. Mila wasn’t usually without her bow for so long. She’d be missing it by now.
“Final chance to rethink me going with you,” Athena said. “We could leave the last word to Natalie.”
Lucy managed a smile. “Natalie doesn’t do manual labor, remember?”
“Yeah, well. I could make an exception this one time,” Natalie said. “But you seem pretty sure.”
“Sure as I’ve ever been,” Lucy said. She hoped that it was justified.
As they stopped in front of the entrance to the tunnels, Athena took Lucy’s free hand. “I trust you.”
Lucy squeezed before she let go. “What’s important now is that you trust Hiro. He’s going to be listening for my signal. And once he gets it, it’ll be down to him and you.”
She could feel Athena’s eyes on her as she shifted Mila’s bow to grab the doorknob. It was a little warm under her fingers, like someone had just been holding it. “How did you know to trust him?” Athena finally asked.
Lucy paused. The way ahead still sat in her palm, as warm as something alive.
Athena had said earlier that she didn’t know if Lucy had been right or not about vampires.
By the cold light of day, Lucy didn’t know, either.
She’d felt so sure, in the wake of Whitney’s death, but part of what Athena said rang true, too.
Vanya, Laurentius and Hiro, Sadie and Addison, even Whitney in her short second life—none of them thought exactly the way people thought.
It could have been their new instincts, like Athena theorized.
Or maybe it just changed a person, when life had no end.
But there were also things their nature couldn’t explain. Complications and contradictions and attachments. A self-ishness that could only be human. So Lucy knew how to answer Athena’s question. Probably not an answer that would satisfy her scientific mind. But an answer that satisfied Lucy now.
“The same way I knew to trust all of you,” she said. “I didn’t know. I just tried.”
She opened the door, and allowed the sounds of the earth to envelop her completely. She took one look at the two of them before she turned the corner, out of sight. Their faces were already indistinct shapes in the hazy basement light.
The steam tunnel was dark enough that Lucy’s eyes saw it in crisp detail.
The pewter and bronze pipes ran in thick bundles along the wall, decked with yellow caution stickers.
Everything else was bare, cold concrete: the walls around her, and the way ahead.
It was the kind of place that might have been eerie, had Lucy not found much better things to scare her as of late.
She moved briskly, as if she’d think better of all this if she gave herself time to. But there was no going anywhere else now. There was just her, this tunnel, and Mila. And, of course, the vampires.
So she let down her guard, and let the world in. Natalie’s blood had long drowned out the red voice. But if Lucy was quiet enough, she could hear the imprint of it on her mind. A subtler series of directions.
Holding Mila’s bow tight to her chest, Lucy allowed herself to be guided home.
She could tell immediately when she was getting close, even before she noticed the tunnel was widening.
Even before she felt Addison or Sadie, or the presence of the man who had brought them all there, she heard a single beating heart, slower and deeper than the hearts of the rats and the worms. Mila was there. Not far at all now.
Lucy wouldn’t dream of keeping a pretty girl waiting.
She slung the bag over her shoulder, turned the corner, and held up both her hands to send the signal that she wasn’t a threat.
They were gathered in an open space. A sort of atrium, where different pipes met and branched out: There were four different paths out of the room, probably leading all across the campus.
Lucy saw Mila first. She stood as if at attention, staring ahead with the same horrible flat eyes as Natalie had in Lower Alton.
Sadie was on one side, whispering in her ear.
Addison was on the other, smiling like a child on Christmas.
And then, of course, there was Vanya. He looked to Lucy first. Then to the bag slung over her shoulder.
“Uh-oh.” He laughed and raised his hands, like she’d just pointed a Nerf gun at him. “Don’t shoot.”
“I didn’t bring it to shoot…Mr. Volkov, sir,” she said. It was what Addison had called him back in the dorm. She could see the way it brightened his eyes a little to hear it. “It’s not loaded. I left the quiver back in her dorm, see? I just…wanted to give Mila a parting gift.”
Vanya walked in a wide arc around her, as if to observe for himself. When he spoke, his voice was unconcerned. “Go ahead and take that, Addie.”
“Of course, Mr. Volkov, sir.” For someone who’d just crossed the room in the blink of an eye, Addison was so gentle when she took the bag from Lucy’s shoulder. Lucy smiled at her as they made eye contact. And in response, Addison glowed.
“I knew you’d come,” she said. “Sadie wasn’t sure.”
Next to Addison, the look on Vanya’s face was all business. He sized up Lucy like he was taking inventory. “My voice is no longer in your ears,” he said. “But you decided to come anyway?”
“Yes, sir,” Lucy said.
“And yet you come here empty-handed.” The casual, modern cadence of his voice shifted into something colder.
This, Lucy imagined, was the aristocrat.
He was probably never far below the surface.
“You call that bow a parting gift. So without holding up your end of the bargain, you expect me to let the girl go? I imagine you didn’t get into such a good school without learning how to do your homework, did you? ”
She looked at him calmly, even as she choked on her own rage. All that he had done to her. All that he had done to all of them, and he was making a little joke. He had torn her life apart out of boredom. He still had a spot of Lucy’s blood on his collar. And he thought he was funny.
She was going to kill him.
But not yet.
“I tried to find her for you.” This part, Lucy had practiced with the others in the studio.
She wanted to make sure she sounded as pathetic as Vanya already thought she was.
“I went to the studio, but she was already gone. My friend Natalie was there. I—I told her to just forget she’d seen me.
I told her to go back to her normal life.
But she was screaming. I couldn’t get her to stop. And I…”
Sadie had stopped whispering into Mila’s ear.
Lucy didn’t notice until she pretended to look away, pretended the next part was too much for her to say out loud.
Mila’s eyes looked a little clearer now, without Sadie’s perpetual instructions.
But she didn’t move, or speak. And if she understood what Lucy was implying, she didn’t react.
“Ohhh,” Vanya said. “So you fed from her.”
There it was: the bit that Lucy needed to sell above all else. She knew that every vampire in the room could hear her hammering heart even better than she could. But she had lived a week with a vampire’s senses. She understood the information the body could give—and the information it couldn’t.
She pretended to hesitate. It gave her a moment to close her eyes, take a breath, and think of the door that Laurentius had taught her to imagine.
She clicked the lock. Flipped the deadbolt.
Her heart could tell them that she was scared.
But as long as this door stayed closed, it couldn’t tell them why.
“I killed her,” Lucy said. “And…I think I enjoyed it.”
There was a small intake of breath, drawing Lucy’s attention back to Mila.
She seemed aware of her surroundings now—and she definitely understood exactly what Lucy just said.
Mila had that evaluating look as they locked eyes.
The one that had always reminded Lucy of a cat.
Lucy had never figured out how to read that look.
“Sadie,” he said. He was looking at Mila, too. “I asked you to keep her calm.”
“I’ve been keeping her calm since dawn.” It was the first time Lucy had heard Sadie’s voice exceed a whisper. Vanya’s face barely darkened. But Sadie shrank like she’d been chastened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If I had something to eat—”
“I know that I’m asking a lot.” Vanya’s face rearranged itself into something that was probably meant to be sympathy. “But if you can hold on just a little longer, there’ll be plenty to eat.”
Lucy took a quiet breath. “Sir, Mila is stronger than she looks. If Sadie is tired, then maybe Addie could help hold on to her.”
Addison looked absolutely delighted to be assigned a job. “I can help Sadie, sir,” she said. “I’d be happy to.”
There was something horribly indulgent about Vanya’s smile. “All right, then,” he said. “Go ahead, Addie. If it’ll make everyone feel better.”
“Of course, sir.” Addison returned to her original position on Mila’s other side, the bow’s bag swinging from her free arm. Mila’s unreadable stare narrowed.
Suddenly, Addison’s voice was in her head. I hope you know what you’re doing, she said, directly to Lucy.