Lucy’s mind stuttered. “What do you mean, ‘advocate’?” she said. “Someone here? At Rollins?”
“In the upper administration, to be exact,” Laurentius said. “Someone has enabled him to make his home here. Someone who has smoothed things over with those two missing kids. I don’t know the details, but he is being protected. Which means thatyouaren’t.”
For such simple sentences, they didn’t gel. Not when she thought about Sadie’s face on those missing posters, or Addison, standing in the trees, with her long straight hair and vacant smile.
It was the thought of Whitney’s empty desk, never to be occupied again, that finally drove Laurentius’s words home. Someone was protecting Vanya here. Which meant that someone had served up those girls on a silver platter.
“It would hardly be the first time,” Hiro said, responding to her thoughts once more. “That’s America, isn’t it? A few bodies are the cost of doing business.”
“Which is why,” Laurentius said, with the cadence of an oft-repeated line, “we arenotstaying.”
“You never said I couldn’t try one last thing,” Hiro said. “This is our home.”
“And here I thought you were helping out of the goodness of your heart,” Laurentius said acidly.
“We’re not leaving yet. We can wait to see how this plays out,” Hiro said. “The radio children have a plan. Or they must, if they reached out to Lucy, here.”
“Which is proof enough that any plan they have isn’t very good,” Laurentius said. “They’ve invited a thrall into their inner circle. One snap of the brat’s fingers and she’ll turn them all over as an appetizer. And now she can tell him thatyou’rescheming against him, too.”
“So tell me what to do, then.” The words were out of Lucy’s mouth before she could think better of them. But she no longer had the energy to think better of anything. Her eyes hurt. Her shoulders hurt. The bruise on her neck was throbbing. And she was abruptly sick of people and vampires alike talking over her head. “Go on. Maybe you can’t beat Ivan Volkov into a pulp, but you must know something we foolish little radio children don’t, right? I’m not a vampire, but it’s been made very clear to me that I’m not totally human anymore, either. Tell me something I can do. Tell me how to keep him out of my head.”
Hiro turned, obscuring his face, and seemed to share a long look with Laurentius. Laurentius’s face remained fully visible to Lucy, but his blank look betrayed nothing. “Love,” Hiro finally said. “Why don’t you go make us some tea?”
Laurentius’s shoulders sank like a pricked balloon. “No, you go,” he said. “I’ll talk to her. No need for you to dig us deeper into this mess.”
“Ah. I see.” Hiro sighed and stretched, as if under the weight of the same tired limbs and creaky joints as a mortal. Lucy knew that he wasn’t, of course. His lifeless body crossed the room like a fish through water: smoothly, with barely a sound. “Don’t be afraid, Lucy. He’s all talk.”
And, with a smile, he swept from the room. Laurentius stared after him with enough exasperation to burn a hole in the wall.
It seemed that if there was to be any talking, Lucy needed to go first. “Are you two married?”
“That’s right,” Laurentius said. “My own personal saboteur for over one thousand years.”
Lucy swallowed. She’d already approximated the math, but it was another thing to hear out loud. “Mazel tov.”
“He was a courtier,” Laurentius said. “In Kyoto’s Heian court. It’s why he can’t help but meddle. It was his full-time job when he was alive.”
“He wants Vanya gone,” Lucy said. “Don’t you?”
“I think you know the answer to that question perfectly well,” Laurentius said. “I suppose I sounded flip, earlier. But I don’t like wandering. I don’t have a taste for it anymore. You cannot fathom how much I would prefer for him to go and for us to stay.” He paused, laughed once. “Well. I suppose you can. You’ve met him.”
“I don’t remember him,” she said. “But I can imagine.”
“Ah,” he said. Lucy wondered if she imagined the slight note of solemnity there. “Of course. His specialty.”
“If you don’t want to get involved, I don’t care,” Lucy said. “It’s not like it changes anything for us. We weren’t planning to have help to begin with. But we don’t know anything about vampires. Nothing definitive. If you could just give us something to work with—”
“I wouldn’t have lived this long if I made a habit of handing over our weaknesses to strangers,” Laurentius said. But there was no real conviction behind it. “Listen. You wanted honesty, so I’ll give it to you. You’re still human, for the most part. You will be until the moment you drink his blood in return. But until the infection fades, you’ll be at the mercy of your instincts. You’ll have all of a vampire’s weaknesses and none of its strengths. You can barely fight yourself, let alone him.”
Lucy wasn’t fazed. She didn’t have time to be. “But the infectiondoesfade.”
“As far as I know,” Laurentius said. “I haven’t fed from humans for years, but Hiro does. His clients might crave rare meat for a few weeks, or miss out on a few opportunities to tan, but they’re back to normal by the end of the month. You’ve been bitten twice. His hold on you could last far longer. Much longer, I’m sure, than he plans to leave you alive. Frightened creatures have a taste—too acidic for my palate, but I know the brat loves it. He’s building that fear in you now. Seasoning to taste, if you will. When he’s satisfied it’s enough, it’s going to be over for you. I really do take no pleasure in telling you this, but at this moment, your best chance of escaping him is to accept what he’s offering. Allow him to turn you. You’ll have a better chance of outrunning him as a vampire than as a thrall.”
“No one has outrun him yet. He’s got Sadie Grainger and Addison Greene doing his bidding,” Lucy said. “Do you think they’re here because they want to be? Or because for some reason, they can’t leave?”
His mouth shifted then. She wanted to believe he was thinking, as she was, of those two girls. But she was looking at something that hadn’t been human in thousands of years. Maybe he didn’t feel that kind of empathy anymore. Maybe Lucy wouldn’t have, either.
She sank into the chair vacated by Hiro, suddenly shaky. It creaked under her weight as she and Laurentius of Rome stared each other down.
