She gasped. He hadn’t given her much room to breathe. He’d barely given her an opening to repeat what she’d tried to say. “Why are you doing this?”
He looked confused. And in that confusion, his smile slipped. Lucy saw the monster then. It was just beyond that polite, smiling mask. It waited in the absolute blankness that existed underneath.
“I was bored,” he said. “And you were there.”
And for a long moment, he held her there. The handcuffs hung uselessly off her wrist. It was well secured to the radiator. The only way to pull free would have been to pull the radiator from the floor. But she couldn’t even try. Couldn’t even move. She was pinned. Useless. Useless as she’d been this entire time.
There was a soft knock at the door. “Lucy?”
Vanya’s eyes lifted, and Lucy stopped breathing. The faint flicker of interest sent adrenaline howling through her. “Stay away from her,” she whispered. As if that would do anything. As if he’d stay away from any of them now.
He arched one perfect eyebrow. Then, with the same flourish as before, he raised his hand. He made a show of loosening his fingers one by one. And he released her.
Lucy couldn’t tell which pain hit her first: her knees against the floor, or the tug of the handcuffs against her wrist. She didn’t recognize her own voice when she cried out. It was a cracked and ragged sound. Far more animal than human.
She’d faintly heard the door flung open, but she flinched nonetheless when Mila hit the ground next to her. “Lucy.” Frantic hands smoothed the hair out of her face. She’d probably never get to wash it now. “Lucy, talk to me. Where is he?”
She knew the answer to that question, of course. She knew it even before she brought herself to look up at the empty window, where he’d been standing until just seconds ago. She’d probably known it that first morning, when she woke up in her blinding white dorm room after Natalie’s party.
He was everywhere.
He had always been everywhere.
They left for the radio station at dawn. They waited until the sunrise was midway into the sky, until most of the mountain was bathed in early fall gold. Mila’s question last night had been answered in the worst possible way. There had still been a little light left in the sky when Vanya killed Whitney.
Lucy wondered if that light had hurt him the way it had hurt Whitney. But she doubted it. Whitney had looked so small and miserable and afraid. Vanya had looked perfectly pleasant the entire time. Even with the last of Whitney on his shoes.
These were some of the details Lucy left out as she recounted the story to Athena. It was horrible enough to say. She didn’t want anyone else to see it, even in their mind’s eye.
Athena didn’t need much description, though. She looked as if she was imagining it well enough.
“Lucy, I can’t imagine how hard this is,” she said. It was her radio-host voice, that calm and gentle curtain. “But think one more time. Was there anything Whitney said that could help us?”
Lucy rubbed her eyes. The conversation should have been burned into her mind. But seeing Vanya, seeing Whitney dissolve into his hands, had scattered the order of it in her mind. She’d already told Athena the most important part—that Vanya planned to kill her as soon as she graduated.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “All she said was that Vanya was hiding them in the tunnels, which we already knew. And it’s not like we can go find them there, unless we’d like to die even faster.”
Athena’s flinch was soft, but Lucy felt it. Loud, useless infection. Telling her everything except what she needed to know. “And him? What did he say?”
That was the most useless information of all.I was bored. And you were there. She wasn’t Athena, the Holmes to his Moriarty, the object of his fascination. She wasn’t even a rabbit in the grip of a fox. She was an inanimate object. She was a half-eaten box of crackers.
“He didn’t say anything,” Lucy said. “He just killed her.”
Athena studied the floor for a long time. “I know it doesn’t feel this way,” she said. “But there was nothing you could have done for Whitney. She’s not suffering anymore. It…might have been for the best.”
There had been plenty of words, in Lucy’s life, that had knocked her feet right out from under her. Her grandmother’s diagnosis, then her grandfather’s. The bloodlessly polite email she’d received when she was eighteen, after she canceled her first college matriculation. Jillian telling her that she must have been glad that her grandfather was dead.
Athena’s words landed somewhere central. Somewhere load-bearing in the depths of her chest. She felt it crack. And then altogether give.
“You don’t believe that,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you don’t fucking believe that.”
Athena rocked back as if she’d been shoved. Lucy could feel Mila shift behind her, maybe to take her by the arm—but Lucy stepped out of her reach.
“You gave your whole life up to stay here,” Lucy said. “Sacrificed every single thing you came here for, just because you didn’t want to leave your classmates to be hunted. You were nineteen. You must have been so scared, and you did it anyway. You can’t tell me that you, of all people, think it’s for the best that a girl is dead. I don’t believe you. I don’t.”
“Lucy,” Athena said. Lucy had never heard her voice shake like this. “She was already dead.”
“Maybe she was!” Lucy was pacing now. Her own voice was shaking, too. When she spoke, she could feel the dents of Vanya’s fingers in the dip of her throat. “But she wanted to live. She wanted to study at the Bodleian, or the Sorbonne, or somewhere with a bigger library than here. She wanted to know what to tell her family. If you’re right, if becoming a vampire changes who you are completely, why would she still want those things?”
