It took me a minute to remember. My life before Le Bec’s attack seemed to belong to another person.
I’m so sorry, I scribbled.I accidentally broke the chain. I was going to get it fixed, but then all this happened.
She went white.The pendant is fine, I wrote, worried that she’d think I’d been careless with her family heirloom.It’s just the chain that broke, and I’ll get it fixed or replace it. I’m sorry, I added, because she looked devastated.
“When?” she breathed. “When did you break it?”
Last week.
“Before you were attacked?” Her voice was tight and urgent.
Yes; before.
She looked like she would cry. “It was supposed to keep you safe from them. Did you—Did he—” She closed her eyes and focused inward, like she was sifting her brain for the right words. She took in a breath, let it out slowly, and looked hard at me. “Did you ever invite him in?”
Like into the apartment?
“Anywhere. Did you ever say to him, ‘Enter,’ or ‘I invite you,’ or was there a threshold you told him he could step across?”
No.
She nodded, then turned abruptly and went into my bathroom, returning with my makeup mirror, which she thrust at me. “What do you see?”
I saw a white face surrounded by a rats’ nest of unwashed hair. A partially untaped lump of gauze covered my neck from below my jaw to just above my clavicle.
I waved my hand in a circular motion in front of my face, then pointed to the dressing on my neck to tell her I was seeing my face and neck. I looked so wrecked andweak that I wanted to cry. Le Bec had done that to me. She craned around the mirror, and when our eyes met in its reflection, her distraught expression relaxed into a small, cautious smile. I pushed the mirror away. Why had she wanted me to look at myself like this—wounded and vulnerable?
She nodded as though she’d read my thoughts. “Je sais; I know,” she soothed. “I did not do it to hurt you; I needed to see if the mirror reflected your face.”
Why wouldn’t it?I wrote.
“It would not if you were a vampire.” She said it matter-of-factly.
What?
“I gave you that necklace to keep you safe because silver repels vampires. It burns them if they touch it.”
I was about to scoff, but then I remembered in the catas, when Le Bec had “pretended” to bite me, he’d recoiled as soon as he put his mouth onto my neck. Like he’d been hurt. The night he’d attacked me, he’d taunted me about not being protected by my necklace. I remembered because it had been such an odd thing to say.
You can’t be telling me that he’s a real vampire? That vampires actually exist?I felt distant from myself, like part of me was floating nearby, connected but only barely. It did kind of explain why everyone was using that word instead of something normal, like “attacker” or “predator,” though. And Le Bec had torn my neck open with his teeth, like every vampire I’d ever heard about.
She sighed as she sat down on the side of my bed. “My grandparents were vampire hunters,” she murmured.“Whenever there was a vampire nearby, they were called. They would stalk, stake, and kill it. They taught my mother, and she taught me. I knew that silver, salt, and garlic repel vampires before I knew how to read. When I was nine, I learned how to kill one.”
You were nine?She nodded. I imagined her as a little kid, going off to school, learning about fractions, playing with her friends, and then coming home and getting vampire-killing lessons. How is that not child abuse?
She did a sideways nod, like,I’m not disagreeing. “I left my family as soon as I was able to.”
How do vampires happen?Are they born that way? Is it some sort of genetic thing?
“They are made. Vampirism is a disease that lives in the blood. One is infected by the bite of the vampire.”
I went cold.Le Bec bit me. And you think Le Bec is a vampire.She nodded.So that makes me one.My hand shook as I wrote the words.
She was saying “no” before I’d finished writing. “I cannot see how you could remain infected after a blood transfusion.”
I had a transfusion?
She put her hand over mine. “You had lost so much blood.”
