“Can you read my mind?” she finally asked.
He snorted. It was almost a laugh. “A little. It’s more Hiro’s gift than mine.”
“A little is probably enough,” Lucy said. Vanya had felt it all the way across a crowded room, after all. Her stupid, loud thoughts. “Maybe you can tell that I already spent my whole life with someone who thought she could control everything that happened to me. She did that because she loves me. She loves me so much, she thought she could spend her entire existence standing at my door and deciding what was allowed in. And I left her. It broke her heart. It brokemine. And I left her anyway. Can you feel me remembering all of that right now?”
It was quiet for a moment, under Laurentius’s watchful eye. He didn’t study her with Mila’s careful appraisal, or Athena’s threat assessment, or Vanya’s cold, predatory weight. His gaze suggested he hadn’t made up his mind about her yet.
But he finally said, “Yes. I do see that.”
“So,” she said. “If I won’t be controlled by the person who loves me most in this world, then why do you think I would let Ivan Volkov do it for even one day?”
When Laurentius wasn’t moving, or speaking, the stillness of his body was especially apparent. Now that she’d grown a bit used to his outsized presence, she could understand how unassuming he might look if you didn’t know what he was. How he might have slipped by, unnoticed, over all these years.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I truly don’t know how to help you. Hiro is the only vampire I have ever made. I know how I would keep Ivan out of my mind. I know how I would tell Hiro to do it. I have no idea what to tell a thrall.”
Lucy rubbed at her face. Letting her feelings out in front of an audience had given her an odd sense of calm. What did it matter if he could help or not? She wouldn’t be any better or worse off than she’d been before. “Okay,” she said.
He didn’t have anything to say to that. Not at first. But then, quietly, he added, “I could keep thinking.”
Lucy’s resigned sense of serenity fled her in an instant.
“So you think there’s something I could do,” she said.
“I think that there is an infinitesimal chance that there is some way you can prolong your mortal life, at least for a week or two,” Laurentius said. “And I think even that is very unlikely, by the way. But I didn’t just take this position for the sunless ambiance. I’m very good at what I do. So on the slim chance that I find something…I will pass it along.”
Hope and suspicion were a heady mix. Lucy breathed both of them in. “I thought you didn’t want to help me.”
“I’m a realist. And I did not live this long by underestimating anyone’s capabilities, let alone those of a young, careless hunter.” Laurentius pressed a thumb to the bridge of his nose. “But we’re leaving anyway. Perhaps this will give Hiro some closure on the way out.”
“Well…thank you,” Lucy said softly.
Laurentius’s eyebrows furrowed. “I’ve just told you that this is a fool’s errand that has very little to do with you. There’s no need to thank me.”
“Oh, I know,” Lucy said. Though it was sort of shocking to her, too, how little she cared about how noble the vampire’s intentions might be. Athena and Mila genuinely wanted to help her—and were also planning to kill her, if they had to. Help was help. “But thank you anyway.”
A light knock at the door startled her. Hiro eased it open, carrying a hot beverage in a paper cup and wearing a Cheshire cat smile. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, in his lilting voice. “I come bearing tea. And someone looking for you, Lucy.”
The door opened a little farther, wide enough that Lucy could see Mila beyond Hiro’s shoulder. “Sorry to interrupt,” Mila said. She had her RA voice on—the one she’d used on the phone with Jillian. But Lucy’s magnified hearing picked up the slight strain behind it. “She was gone for long enough that I thought she’d gotten eaten down here.”
Lucy didn’t wince, but she was close. She’d been gone long enough to make Mila worry. And Mila didn’t know the half of it yet. But they couldn’t exactly discuss it here. Just because she was ready to conditionally trust Laurentius and Hiro didn’t mean she was ready for them to know who was behind Pallas Radio.
“I prepared your tea to go,” Hiro said brightly, handing it over. “Sounds like you’ve got a tight schedule upstairs.”
“Thanks,” Lucy said. “Ah, sorry, Mila. I just need to ask Mr. Roman one more thing.”
Mila seemed to take that in stride. Very cautious stride, but stride nonetheless. “I’ll wait for you at the reference desk.”
Hiro waited until Mila’s footsteps had fully receded before he said, “Nice kid.” His tone all but confirmed that he, with his courtier instincts and his tendency to pluck loud thoughts out of people’s heads, already understood far more about Mila than Lucy wanted him to. “Are you going to tell her whom she was just speaking to?”
“We’re not a threat to you,” Lucy said quickly.
“Oh, I know. It’s not the threat to us that I’m worried about.” As Hiro resettled in his chair, he reached out and moved one of Laurentius’s slim hands to his shoulder. Laurentius sighed but allowed it. “You should remember this, Lucy,” Hiro went on. “Your new friends genuinely wish to help you. But they have also spent the better part of three years believing, more or less correctly, that creatures like us are the enemy. Their trust in you is a resource. You should take care not to waste that resource.”
Lucy smiled, though she was well aware of how queasy it must look. She knew all of that already. She understood it far more keenly than she wanted to. Athena, unable to pursue the degree she’d been recruited for. Mila, forever unable to break the heart of the boy she treasured but didn’t love. It wasn’t exactly trust they had in Lucy, who now had so much in common with the monsters that altered the courses of their lives. They were gambling on her.
No matter how genteel the two vampires in front of her looked, no matter how quietly they lived their lives, they were still vampires. Something that Athena and Mila would never gamble on.
“If they don’t trust me,” Lucy finally said, “then I think maybe that’s wise.”
