Lucy let her head drop back onto the mattress, then thought better of it. The urge to go back to sleep was nearly as strong as the urge to curl up on the floor and scream herself hoarse. “So,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,” Mila said.
“If we sit in silence, I may lose my mind,” Lucy said. “So I’d prefer talking, if that’s okay.”
Mila settled along the wall where she’d been sitting before. Maybe it was Lucy’s imagination, but for the first time since Lucy had met her, she looked a little uncomfortable. “Okay, then,” Mila said. “Let’s talk.”
Lucy was suddenly no longer sure if she wanted to ask the first thing that had come to mind. But like Athena said, trust went both ways.
“I know why Athena is doing this,” Lucy said. “But what about you?”
Predictably, Mila’s expression darkened. “That’s not really a soothing bedtime story,” she said.
“I don’t think I’m going to be soothed tonight.” Lucy paused. “You don’t have to go into details—”
“No. No, it’s fine.” Mila leaned more heavily against the wall and exhaled in a controlled burst, like she was letting out a puff of cigarette smoke. “You probably deserve the details.”
The central air-conditioning kicked in overhead, and the blinds above Mila’s bed swayed a little with the disturbance. Every time they clicked against the window, Lucy’s eyes were drawn back to them again. But if anyone was still watching from outside the dorm, they were no longer visible.
“I wasn’t going to apply to Rollins,” Mila finally said. “I’m from Oregon. And I hate humidity. So Tennessee wasn’t on my radar—never even thought of leaving the Pacific Northwest, honestly. I don’t know if I would have heard of it if it wasn’t my boyfriend’s dream school. Jon wanted to go into neuroscience, just like Athena. Dreamed of working with the same professor who headhunted her. He probably would have hero-worshipped Athena, too. He loved listening to smart people talk.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. The blinds kept tapping the glass like fingernails. “I tried not to apply here. I didn’t want to go to the same school as Jon. I didn’t want to get married right out of college. I didn’t…want to be with him in the first place. But even if I didn’t love him, Ilovedhim, you know? He was my best friend, all my life. The only misunderstanding we ever had is that he thought we felt the same about each other.
“You might find this hard to believe, but I wasn’t very good at being straightforward back then,” Mila said. “The most I could make myself ask for was a little space. I told my parents and Jon that I was going to take a gap year, just to save a little money and get some work experience. And I thought, a year is a lot of time. Enough time to figure out how to tell Jon we weren’t going to get married.
“So I drove him to the airport,” Mila said. “I spent the drive home trying to figure out how the hell I was going to break his heart. And I let him come here alone.”
Lucy pulled Mila’s cardigan off the bed to wrap around herself. She felt the sudden, panicky impulse to cut Mila off. To tell her that whatever terrible thing happened next, Mila couldn’t have seen it coming. It was like Mila had said earlier. Normal people responded in normal ways, expected normal things to happen. Whatever hunted on the Rollins campus was never something they were meant to cross paths with.
But there was something fragile in Mila’s voice now. Something that said that if Lucy opened her mouth, the story would end. And though Lucy wasn’t sure now that she wanted to know, she needed to.
“I wish I could remember this next part more clearly. I was distracted that night, when he called me,” she said. “But he told me he had a roommate change at the last minute, and that the guy wassocool. His parents were Russian, he grew up in Moscow. My parents are from Vladivostok, so Jon wanted us to talk sometime, when things were less hectic. He said the boy was named Vanya.”
A faint, brittle smile flickered on Mila’s face. “That’s one of the only things Athena and I disagree on, by the way. She thinks Vanya is another alias. But as far as we can tell, Jon crossed paths with him right after he arrived at Rollins. I don’t think he’d started giving out aliases yet. I think Jon asked his name, and he gave it honestly. One of the few times he’s been honest on this campus.”
Mila went quiet for a moment. Lucy didn’t want to ask the question she’d been chewing on for the past several minutes. But it didn’t escape her notice that when Mila talked about Jon, she used the past tense.
“How did it happen?”
“I can’t tell you how much I wish I knew,” Mila said. “By the time Jon’s parents called me, it had been about a week since any of us had heard from him. What they told me at the time was that he had a psychotic break of some kind. Attacked a classmate, then a security guard who tried to break things up. Jon was moved to a hospital in town, and his parents booked a red-eye that night. They asked me to come. They—Well, I think we all thought that my not being there was part of it. We’d never been apart for so long before.”
Mila exhaled again. Lucy’s sharpened senses heard it rattling through her chest. “By the time we landed in Nashville,” she said, “Jon was dead.”
Consciously, Lucy eased her grip on Mila’s cardigan. Her fingers had gone so tight that it hurt. “How?”
“Jon’s parents never gave me the details,” Mila said. “Wanted to spare me, I think. The hospital they brought him to is so close to here. Sometimes I think it wouldn’t be that hard to go down there, find a way to get the coroner’s report. But however much I want to know—I really, really don’t.” She breathed out in a long, harsh rush. “He wasn’t a vampire yet, Lucy. They took his vitals when he got to the hospital. He was alive, and then he wasn’t. He had the same infection you have—and it killed him.
“Oh, and the kicker?” Mila added. “According to everyone I spoke to, Jon didn’t have a roommate. His real roommate dropped out two weeks before move-in.”
They sat in silence for a long moment. Outside, something moved, but even from the safety within Mila’s dorm, Lucy could feel that whatever it was, it was something alive. Its blood hummed to her, tuneless and inviting. Or maybe not to her. It was the infection that could hear it. The infection currently simmering in her like water in a pot about to boil.
If Mila’s timeline was correct, Jon had been alive for about a week after he was bitten.
So how long did Lucy have?
Lucy shook her head once, to herself. She didn’t want to follow those thoughts any further. She wanted Mila to keep talking. “So you came here.”
“Yeah, I can’t exactly judge Athena, can I?” Mila said. “She may have stayed, but I had the chance to stay away to begin with. I took my gap year—it was too late not to, at that point—but as soon as they let me enroll, I made my plans to come. Athena was attacked the same semester I enrolled. She started Pallas Radio. Most of the students thought it was fiction, or bad taste, or both, but it started to resonate, too. It’s impossible not to feel the wrongness of this place, when you live here. It’s just that some people talk themselves out of feeling it.”
