As she crossed the hall to the basement stairwell, she caught the sound of two voices. There were two students a little way down the hall, their heads bent together as they talked.
“—third one since I got here. I almost stepped on it.” The first voice was brimming with revulsion. “I’m calling it into that radio show.”
“Jesus, not you too,” the second voice groaned. “Rabbits die all the time, Maria.”
“It’s weird!” Maria hissed back as her companion opened the side door back to the quad. “You can’t tell me it’s not weird! Whatever’s killing them, how come it always leaves so much behind? Unless the meat isn’t what it’s really after.”
Whatever Maria’s friend had to say to that, Lucy didn’t hear it. The door shut behind them, and they had officially passed out of Lucy’s earshot.
Lucy opened the stairwell door and started down to the basement. She’d seen a dead rabbit too, now that she thought about it: on the way to the bus shelter, the night she was bitten. She hadn’t made much of it then. Like Maria’s friend said, rabbits die all the time.
But it seemed Pallas wasn’t the only one to notice that there was something not quite right about the campus. For all its detractors, maybe her show gave some students exactly what it had given Lucy: the relief of clarity. Though maybe it gave the detractors that clarity, too. There were few things more annoying than a truth you didn’t want to see.
The chill of the concrete steps bruised the soles of Lucy’s flats. The stairs were built for someone taller. She had to point her toes a little as she lowered herself from one to the next, the banister a cool slide along her palm.
It was disorienting, this sudden awareness of her own body. Lucy was young, and until now, she’d been healthy. For all her focus on living, she’d never thought very hard about the mechanics of being alive. Her body was something to look at, to twist, to study, to hide or not hide depending on the circumstances. It was a thing in motion, an object in space. It had never been a place where she lived. It had never been a house that could crumble.
She felt all of it now. The air rushing into her nose and seeping out of her mouth, the unsteady squirm of her pulse. It didn’t feel like being alive, though. It didn’t even feel like something that was wholly hers. It felt like unseen things wriggling under a rock.
Pallas had said it was complicated, what was happening to her. Lucy needed to know how complicated it was, exactly.
Not for the first time that day, Lucy wished that Mila were here with her. She could have used some of that cool, calm decisiveness right now. And if Mila wanted to let Lucy squeeze her hand until it hurt a little, that would have been fine, too.
She made her vague, meandering way toward the signs for the bathroom. There was a strange sound rumbling at the edges of her magnified hearing. Part of it was the rustling of the classroom above, though she wasn’t quite sure if that was real or just an echo in her ears. But she was gradually becoming aware of something beyond it.
She slowed as she listened. And as she did, she felt a confident sort of understanding in the back of her mind. She was starting to recognize, as she had last night, which thoughts weren’t quite her own. The thoughts that had a different color, a different pitch. The red voice.
The red voice heard the sound, and knew it.Through that closed door, it told her.To your left.
Lucy drew in a breath. Pallas had warned her that the vampire targeted students who were isolated. He was probably counting on her being alone and stupid.
But Pallas wasn’t here yet. Mila wasn’t here to walk her through her options. And in the absence of any new information, Lucy wanted to know what she was up against.
There was a gentlepopwhen she opened the door, like a wine cork giving way. And the first thing Lucy sensed, sticking her hand into the half-lit hallway beyond, was that it was a few degrees cooler than the hallway behind her. Not dramatically, but enough to raise the hair on her arms. The higher notes of the thrum were louder now, closer.The water heater, the red voice told her.
But beyond the water heater, there was something else. A sifting, grinding sound. And beneath that, a sound not unlike the sounds under Lucy’s own skin. The squirm of something living.
The night is alive.That was what she texted her mother the night she was bitten. She still had no memory of sending it. But she must have heard something like this that night. The whole world shifting and breathing and decaying. Exactly what she heard from the hallway ahead.
She remembered, then, all those nights she’d spent googling Rollins. The campus ran on steam heat through the winter, which meant that there was a widespread system of steam tunnels across the mountain. She’d read that there were accessible entrances through a few different buildings, but that they were locked and alarmed. Students had been barred from entering them altogether after one too many hazing incidents.
But the hallway ahead hadn’t been locked at all. Maybe the real entrance was a bit farther down.
Or maybe someone had left this door open.
Lucy stilled, and tried to remember that article. There wasn’t a tunnel entrance in Quincey. She would have noticed by now if there was. But it seemed that the Goldwell building could be accessed from underground. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone to get in. To go upstairs to the ground floor, to delicately sidestep the sunlight streaming in through the front windows. To duck into the auditorium. To slide into a faceless crowd of students, like they belonged there.
The boy who had handed her the attendance sheet. She hadn’t looked at him that closely, beyond his smile. Did he have light hair?
Lucy’s purse buzzed against her leg, and she had to stifle a yelp into her hands.
She fished her phone out of her purse with shaking hands. Blocked number. Thank fucking Christ. It had only been a littlemore than half a day since Pallas of Pallas Radio said she’d be in touch, but it had been anextraordinarily long half a day.
Lucy slammed the door to the tunnels shut and beelined for the staircase to the ground floor as she cradled the phone against her ear. “Hello?”
There was a beat—not all that long in reality, but long enough that Lucy tightened her grip on the phone. And then finally, Pallas of Pallas Radio said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, Lucy.”
The breath Lucy let out was much louder than she intended it to be. It didn’t escape her notice that she was “Lucy” now instead of “caller number thirty-two.” Wherever Pallas was, she didn’t seem to think anyone was listening.
