“That’s not very Rollins of you” was all she said. “Where are the five majors plus an internship?”
“I did tell you that not all of us are turbo–child prodigies here, didn’t I?” Mila flashed her wry, closed-lipped smile. “It’s the same as Athena. Hard to have time to find anything else to get interested in, you know? Unfortunately, we ended up majoring in trying to find needles in haystacks.”
Lucy was quiet for a moment. Mila was still going through the motions of setting up her computer, pulling up the movie—she didn’t seem to realize that she’d just said something crushingly sad. Then again, Lucy had said the same thing about herself, hadn’t she? It was hard to be interested in much of anything when you were keeping your head above water.
“I’m gonna start this,” Mila said. “Did you bring your own work, or—”
“It’s the second day of my freshman year,” Lucy said dryly. “I haven’t learned shit yet.”
That drew a quiet laugh from Mila. One that parted her mouth wide open. “Okay, well. Entertain yourself somehow, then.”
Mila slipped on her headphones, and Lucy was officially alone with her thoughts.
She sighed and tipped her head back. This was almost certainly better than sitting back in Mila’s dorm room with the windows drawn, listening to every little creak in the walls. But Mila’s movie was 105 minutes long, and that was a lot of minutes to kill. She hadn’t brought her laptop, but there was a free library desktop down the table.
She slid over into the next chair and logged in with her Rollins email. She briefly considered tying her ankle to the chair leg for security—but she only went wandering when she fell asleep, and it wasn’t as if she had any rope. She did, however, tuck that idea into her back pocket for later.
The Rollins Library Catalog and Information Services home page blinked cheerily at her, its margins decked with clip art of books, magnifying glasses, and a strangely suggestive image of a finger pressed to a pair of lips in a shushing gesture. The page header framed a search bar, captioned with the wordsWhat do you want to know?
Lucy laughed. Everything she wanted to know at that moment would have filled 105 minutes and then some.
With no real expectations, she typedvampireand pressed the search button with a flourish. It didn’t take her long to see why Athena had given up on the internet: The first few search pages offered her a wealth of books and articles, all predicated on the completely understandable idea that vampires didn’t exist.How vampire traditions developed around the world, the summaries read.The origins of a legend. A tongue-in-cheek look at vampire myths, from medieval to modern. It wasn’t as if she expected academia to have any particular ideas for her. But it was sobering to see real, living proof of how few people would believe her.
She scrolled aimlessly for three pages before she was too depressed to keep going. She wasn’t going to find anything useful this way. Nothing that Athena hadn’t already dug up.
That said. Now that she thought about it—there was one thing she knew now that Athena wouldn’t look into very closely.
Ivan Volkov, she typed into the search bar. Her expectations hadn’t gotten much higher. But the name on the screen sent a cold prickle up her arms.
There were a lot of Ivan Volkovs. It felt silly, in retrospect, to assume there wouldn’t be. There was a poet, a biochemist, a literary critic. Lucy was nearly six pages into the results before she’d moved past the texts authored by Ivan Volkovs and into the textsaboutIvan Volkovs. She ran each results page through a Google Translate filter, hoping the long list of Russian and Bulgarian article names would yield some clue. Instead, she got things likeVictory of the Kolkhoz Construction Workers in the Belarusian SSR.Hammurabi, King of Babylonia. Mass Development of Old and Abandoned Lands.
She had just begun to feel very, very naive for having any hope when her eyes skimmed the translated title at the bottom of the page:
The Mountain Villa Massacre: The Strange Case of the Volkov Family.
Lucy’s cursor paused. The result was probably just pulled in by the matching last name—at least, that was what she thought at first. But the small gray text at the bottom of the search entry readcontains: ‘ivan volkov.’
She clicked. And despite the library’s ancient Wi-Fi, the next page loaded as quickly as a slap in the face.You’ve taken a wrong turn!read the cheery Comic Sans text.Redirecting…
With a short, frustrated sound, Lucy tried the link again. She could have sworn she was redirected back even quicker the next time.
Dead end confirmed.
She leaned back in her chair, and all the largely useless text on-screen blurred. Maybe this Mountain Villa Massacre was just as useless. If there was anything she’d learned from the last several pages, it was that there were a lot of Ivan Volkovs in the world. But she had an hour and a half left to kill.
“Mila,” she whispered, leaning around the computer. “Do you mind if I—”
She clipped her question off halfway. Sometime in the past ten minutes, Mila had pushed her laptop back in order to pillow her head in her arms. Her back was rising and falling in a steady pace, and the fringe of her bangs partially, but didn’t quite, conceal a closed eye. When Lucy carefully pushed her chair back and stood, Mila didn’t even flinch.
Lucy laughed softly. She figured that Mila’s two to three hours of sleep that morning hadn’t been sufficient, no matter how many times Mila tried to convince the both of them that it was. But still. It was a little surprising to see exhaustion get the better of her. Not many things seemed to get the better of Mila Rostova.
Her hand hovered above Mila’s shoulder. It would be sensible to wake her up and tell her where she was going. But she doubted that either of them would have a quiet night ahead. It couldn’t be a bad thing to let her rest a little while longer.
Carefully withdrawing a notebook and pen from her bag, she started to write on a fresh page.DON’T PANIC!she wrote first, in all caps.Going downstairs to reference librarian. If I’m not here when you wake up, the desk is on floor B2. Sleep well.
She backed away carefully, as if slipping around a sleeping lion. Hopefully Mila would see that before she armed herself in the middle of a crowded library. The black bow was safely in its bag at her feet. Ideally it would stay that way.
Lucy made her way out of the study room and back across the main floor. She had a faint memory of where the reference librarian’s desk was from the library tour, but Natalie hadn’t taken them all the way there.He’s cranky, she’d said, which was fine with Lucy. With any luck, he could help her find the article quickly, and she’d be in and out.
