Mila looked supremely unconvinced, but she gestured for Lucy to come over to the bed. “Okay. But if you ask to be untied for any reason, I’m going to untie you. I’m not running a Chamber of Torment in here.”
Lucy laughed, and lay down. “As long as you keep an eye on me.”
“Oh, I will. Fool me once, et cetera.” Mila bent over her, pulling the cuffs of Lucy’s pajama shirt over her wrists. As Lucy strained to get a look at what she was doing, Mila said, “I don’t want to tie these over your bare skin. Let me know if I’ve got your arms too far back, here.”
Lucy held still and let her work. Maybe Mila would be a fast learner at the whole Chamber of Torment thing. Her grip was smooth and no-nonsense as she gently moved Lucy’s right arm into position.
“You know…” Mila’s face bent mostly out of Lucy’s field of vision as she slipped the red tie around her wrist. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be so gung-ho about this. Especially just after telling me to be nicer to you.”
Lucy grinned as she closed her eyes. She was making herself dizzy trying to watch. “I try to hype myself up every time I have to do something unpleasant. Apparently it comes off as a little intense. When my grandmother went into hospice care, I had to learn all the emergency stuff to do if no one was there—how to get her into her wheelchair, change her catheter, all that. I had this friend who gotsoupset when I was telling her about it. She thought I wasn’t taking it seriously.”
Mila let out a short, unimpressed noise. “It wasyourdying grandmother. What did it matter to her how seriously you were taking it?”
“Things could get a little dark at home,” Lucy said. “So sometimes the things I talked about could get a little dark, too. Not everyone wanted to go there.Ididn’t always want to go there. But then they’d see me getting out, having fun, and they couldn’t quite understand that, either. It was how I balanced the pressure. Fake it till you make it and all that. I guess it looked a little flippant, though, if you didn’t know where it was coming from.”
A soft, satiny knot closed around Lucy’s right wrist. Despite Mila’s worries, it didn’t pinch. It was secure, but not tight.
“They were your friends,” Mila finally said. “It should have been obvious that you were just trying to stay afloat.”
“Well,” Lucy said as Mila moved to the other side of the bed. “I was an idiot teenager. Maybe I didn’t make it that obvious that I was struggling.”
“Maybe not,” Mila said as she pulled another tie around Lucy’s left wrist. “But if you explained it then anything like you’re explaining it to me now, she should have been able to tell. I’ve never heard anyone sound so solemn about having fun.”
Lucy sat up just enough that it jolted the right bedpost. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that I’ve known you for less than a week, and you’re talking about going to The Club like you were drafted for war,” Mila said. “If I were your friend, I think I’d be able to hear that in your voice.”
“I—‘drafted’?” Lucy said. “It wasn’t like that.”
“I am so sorry to break this to you,” Mila said. “You sound like my great-grandpa reminiscing about the shores of Normandy.”
Lucy might have swatted at Mila’s arm, if she had the free hands to do so. Mila laughed, as if she’d seen the urge flitting across Lucy’s face. “It wasn’t like I was miserable,” she said. “I just never knew how long my family was going to need me. So I wanted to experience however much I was allowed to experience.”
Mila tied off the left knot. “And then you got to leave home after all?”
“And then I got to leave home after all,” Lucy echoed. And there she was, sporting two puncture marks on her neck and tied to an almost-stranger’s bed.
Mila moved Lucy’s arm in the binding, as if testing that she had enough slack, and Lucy blinked heavily. “What time is it?”
“A little after eight,” Mila said.
“Hah,” Lucy said. She was starting to feel it again, that bleeding-out kind of tired. “Going to sleep at eight p.m. was not really what I pictured from my college life.”
“You got maybe two or three hours last night,” Mila said. “And who knows how much the night before. Go to sleep.”
Lucy blinked. Her eyes were slow to open again. “You’ll wake me up if something seems wrong?”
“Trust me. If anything happens, you will be getting woken up.” Mila was quiet long enough that Lucy had started to drift off by the time she spoke again. “Is he out there?”
“Hmm?” Lucy’s eyes didn’t quite open that time.
“You said that when you met the library vampires, it was like you could feel them. Is it like that for him?”
Lucy tipped her head back. The box spring was so stiff under her, even with a memory foam pallet nestled under the fitted sheet. But she was so powerfully exhausted, it felt as if every breath sank her deeper and deeper down.
She couldn’t know for sure if there was a feeling. She had been in Vanya’s company three times now, and she remembered almost none of it. It probably didn’t feel the same. Laurentius and Hiro’s presence felt like history, like the mountains themselves, but Vanya was so much younger.
However, there was a different kind of weight she’d come to know over the past few days. That unmistakable feeling of attention. Like someone’s eyes when you cross a room. Since the bite, that feeling hadn’t stopped.
