“You really think Rollins will let you finish this after you rip my fucking throat out?” Lucy said. “Just back off, and we can talk.”
Whitney wasn’t backing off, though. For a second, she looked almost—annoyed.Annoyed in that normal, Whitney way. But that familiar annoyance was rapidly contorting.
“I tried to be nice to you,” she spat. “I tried to give you advice!”
Lucy’s fingers trembled against the laptop. This seemed far from the ideal time to have this argument. But in an all-out fight against Whitney, she was going to lose. Here, at least, she had footing.
“And what did you tell your friend Alicia about me?” she said. “I met her the other day. Didn’t seem like she had a very nice impression of me.”
“I just told her you weren’tfocused!” There was something that could have been funny about the venom she poured over that word. It probably would have been, if Lucy wasn’t more scared than she’d ever been in her life.
“You have no idea how focused I am,” Lucy said. “You have no idea what my grades were, you have no idea how hard I did or didn’t work. Just because I’m older than you, just because I didn’t go to college prep courses, you decided I was some burnout fuckup who needed your advice.And I don’t even care about that anymore, by the way! But if you don’t listen to me right now, you are going to die!”
“I’m alreadydead, Lucy!” Her mouth opened wide as she said it, showing all the ridges of her teeth. “If you really wanted to help me, you’d hold still!”
The light flicked on. Whitney jerked back, whipping around to face the now-fully-open door. Lucy followed suit. And she locked eyes with Mila Rostova, her hand hovering by the light switch.
Several things happened then, close enough to be nearly simultaneous. Mila reached for the quiver of arrows hidden just beneath the long edge of her coat. Whitney lunged for the window. And Lucy, with far more reflex than thought, hurled Whitney’s laptop in Mila’s direction. It didn’t hit her. It landed exactly where it was meant to: in the path of the arrow that Mila had just nocked.
Mila cursed, scrambled to reposition the arrow. But by then, it was too late. Whitney had kicked out the screen and hurtled into the night.
Mila threw her bow on the ground, and the two of them tore across the room to the window. By the time they looked down to the ground, the only signs of disturbance were two firm footprints in the mud. Even from that height, Whitney had landed on her feet.
And as Lucy’s heart slowed and the sweat across her face cooled, it began to dawn on her what she’d just done.
She turned to face Mila, who was already facing her in return. The look in her eyes was—hard. Not angry. But it was close.
“You realize,” Mila said, “she could be on her way to hurt someone else.”
Lucy realized it then. So keenly that it rose like nausea in her stomach. But she hadn’t thrown that laptop to spare a vampire. The only thing on her mind in that moment was the fact that she was about to see her asshole roommate skewered by a junior archery champion.
“We can’t just kill her,” Lucy said uselessly, and Mila’s gaze didn’t so much soften as shift. She didn’t need to say it. Lucy knew it perfectly well. Whitney was already dead.
“Get your things,” Mila finally said. “Before someone comes to see what’s going on.”
Numbly, Lucy picked up her bag and followed in Mila’s long strides, stepping over Whitney’s forgotten laptop on the way out. Lucy wondered if after all that, she’d broken it. Strangely, she hoped she hadn’t.
Halfway into the hall, Mila stopped. “Wait,” she said, easing Lucy’s duffel bag off Lucy’s shoulder and onto her own.Full service, Lucy thought dully. “My bow. I think it’s behind the door. Grab it for me.”
Lucy picked it up, draping Mila’s green cardigan over the top to more or less conceal it. “You trust me to hold it?” she asked.
Mila’s laugh was colorless. “I have the arrows.”
They were almost to the stairs before Lucy could bring herself to ask. “You’re her RA,” she said. “What will you—do you have to report anything?”
Mila didn’t answer, at first. She made sure the door was tightly closed. That the stairwell below them was empty. “I’ll tell my supervisor that her roommate hasn’t seen her since the weekend. It’s the truth, more or less,” she said. “If I can’t tell her parents what happened, at least I can tell them thatsomethingdid.”
They shuffled down the first-floor hall, Lucy trying to hold Mila’s bow in a manner that looked halfway inconspicuous. She didn’t quite have that part down. Mila walked with it like it belonged in her hand. Lucy clutched it to her chest like the world’s hardest and most angular security blanket. She needed something to clutch right then.
They slipped into Mila’s room, and Lucy took a single bare second to acknowledge the utter strangeness of being there. Mila slid in behind Lucy, tapping the blue-and-gold mezuzah mounted to the doorframe, then locked them in.
She held out Lucy’s bag. Lucy, in turn, handed the bow and the cardigan back to Mila with a mumbled “Tradesies.” She didn’t know where that came from. She wasn’t sure she’d ever used the wordtradesiesin her life.
“Keep the sweater,” Mila said, gently easing the bow out from under it. “You’re shivering.”
Lucy let out a soft noise of affirmation and tucked the sweater against her chest.Well. Maybe chivalry wasn’t dead.
She slipped into the bathroom and mechanically went through the process of getting ready for bed. Last time she’d spent the night with—well, anyone—was with her senior-year girlfriend, Jo, right after prom. Lucy faintly wished that looking cute was anywhere near her radar tonight. The ghost of the feeling hung just far enough away that Lucy could vaguely sense the inappropriate weight of it.
