My hand froze mid-stitch, my breath catching in my throat as Minnie opened the door and stepped outside. I didn’t start breathing again until the door shut and I could hear the bolt, the chain, and the lock turn into place.
Keeping me here, in this attic, but also keeping everyone else out there.
Minnie carried the sole key, and she only trusted that door unlocked when she was with me.
After I heard the last echoes of her footsteps down the twisting staircase leading to the rest of the mansion, I sighed. Getting up on my haunches, I reached over and flipped the dial, waiting for the radio to hum back to life and letting a small chuckle escape as I lost myself to the picture Molly painted of her ham-fisted home life with Fibber McGee.
♛
Though I’d been left with half a dozen afghans up here alone in the attic, which I’d taken from the other empty beds up against the back wall, a bitter chill bit through the gaps in the plywood along with the slits of sunlight struggling to make their way inside. The cold rushing up from my numb toes all the way to my nose shook me to the bone, but I lay there, shivering, not moving. The knock on the door signaled breakfast and a bathroom break. There was the chamber pot in the corner, but unlike Minnie, I was from an era where things like running water and flushing toilets were taken for granted—even in the cramped apartment where I’d spent my childhood. True, there were probably farmhouses that had yet to get with the times, but in my apartment complex, there’d been a private toilet closet for the family and a shower behind a curtain in the kitchen.
This mansion had three full bathrooms, and not a single resident other than me had need for them.
The second knock on the door was softer.
“Come in,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. For a second, my breath left a trail of steam in the air and I pulled my hand out from beneath the blankets to try to catch it.
The bolt, chain, and lock scraped and clicked as they came undone.
I sat up, smoothing my nightgown and leaving several of the blankets wrapped around my shoulders like a lumpy, overstuffed stole.
“It’s freezing in here. Why isn’t your heater on?”
Still groggy and expecting to find Minnie—with one of the others perhaps in tow—I blinked hard to let the figures entering the attic come into focus.
Dean, Minnie’s prized “nephew,” as she called him. And Leopold.
My Leopold.
Formerly my Leopold.
And Minnie was nowhere in sight.
A jingling key ring slipping into his pocket, Dean crossed the open room to my copper space heater and plugged it in as Leopold, balancing my breakfast tray, turned around and shut the door behind him.
“I’m surprised you noticed the temperature,” said Leopold. He balanced the tray on one hand and flexed the other in front of him as he stepped closer, his attention drawn to his appendage, as if he’d never seen it before. “I don’t feel a thing. Nothing uncomfortable. Other than thirst.” He put his hand back under the tray and stared at me.
It was nothing like how he used to stare at me, love and hope and adventure in his wide brown eyes. They were bright blue now, a sign of his transformation, along with the pallid tone to his skin. And if anything, they were full of… hunger.
I turned away, not wanting to see him stare at me like a wolf before its prey.
“I didn’t feel it,” snapped Dean. He moved closer and kneeled before me, laying a careful hand on my upper arm. “I could see her breath turn to mist when we walked in.”
His eyes were bright blue as well, and there was hunger there, longing, but it was more muted, more lost in the background. “Are you okay, Zelda? You look unwell.”
“I’m fine,” I lied. I grabbed hold of my long braid—still stuck under my blanket shawl—and nervously wound my fingers through it. Its length was getting out of control—some of it coiled around the other side of the bed, and it still hung off—but I didn’t want it cut. Not yet.
“When your hair is just a bit longer,” said Mom as she brushed a wooden comb through the thick strands, “we can sell it. Even in trying times, people are still paying good money.”
I twirled a strand around my finger and Mom tapped the back of my hand gently with the comb. “Leave it be. You’ll just get it tangled. We need to keep it soft and supple.” She parted the hair into three sections and began to braid it.
“Oh, let her do what she wants,” said Pop. He peeked up over the newspaper in his hands, the top half of his face towering over a headline reporting of British troops evacuating France in one line and an opponent to challenge Roosevelt’s bid for reelection in the fall in the other. “Until some high society broad fashions it into a bird’s nest for her thinning chrome-dome, it’s her hair, isn’t it?” He nudged my youngest sister’s toes with his foot, causing her to look up from the ragged hand-me-down doll she was playing with before the fire and giggle. Cathy ran her fingers through the doll’s worn hair in imitation of our mother combing mine.
Mom grunted but said nothing, pulling on the comb harder and nearly ripping that precious hair out from its roots. I was just thinking about how I wished we had a radio like Leopold’s family did—something other to do than watch little kids play and get my hair combed and listen to my parents bicker—when smoke sifted out of the fireplace and my eyes began to water. I choked, nearly forgetting to breathe.
From the kitchen table where he’d been doing homework, Robbie hacked and coughed, pushing back his chair and waving one hand in the air as he ran for the damper. He nearly knocked over Suzanne, Jon, and Hannah where they’d been huddled together playing jacks in the corner, but they were too focused on covering their faces and coughing from the smoke to complain. He opened it, coughing harder as he struggled to speak. “Pops… You forgot to open it all the way again.”
Pop rolled his eyes and lifted his paper. “Yes, Mother,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry—or concerned. Pop always seemed to think his ten-year-old son was too much of an eager beaver.
I shivered, the chill of the cold, cramped apartment hitting my back as Mom dropped the comb on my lap and went over to open our two windows to let the rest of the smoke escape.
Cathy crawled over to me and grinned, reaching up to grab the comb from me to use on her doll. I smiled down at her, curling the very end of my long, long braid around my soot-stained fingers.
“Zelda!” said Mom as she noticed what I was doing. “Keep those dirty hands off that hair!” She sighed, daring Pop to challenge her, but he simply turned a page in the paper. “Go wash up. Let’s start dinner.”
I didn’t need to worry about selling my hair for wigs—not anymore. But I felt like once my hair was gone, I’d be severing the last tie I had to my parents, to my brothers and sisters—to my life. My real life. This… This was all a fantasy.
“Ack!” The tray slipped from Leopold’s grasp as he covered his eyes with his forearm.
Right before my eggs and bacon clattered to the ground beside my hot tea, Dean appeared at Leopold’s side, crouching to grab the tray in both hands. The glass tea cup teetered slightly on the saucer; the fork slid back toward the plate.
“You knew sunlight leaked in here,” said Dean, righting himself. “No need to shatter good china and act like you’re so surprised.”
The more time I spent among the immortals, the less surprised I was about such moments. One second, Dean had been at my side—the next, he’d been saving my breakfast from the wood floor. It was simply something vampires could do.
Leopold muttered a curse word and stepped into the shadows.
Some vampires, anyway. The more experienced ones—though Dean didn’t strike me as someone who’d been around as long as Minnie. He seemed too hip—too perfect for the times. Minnie, glamorous though she may have been, had some fuddy-duddy tendencies.
Dean handed me the tray with both hands and I tucked in, starting with some of the tea to warm me up and followed by the eggs and bacon.
<
br /> “What was that you said about no longer feeling discomfort?” Dean asked, a smirk on his face as he dug his hands into his pockets, jingling the keys again. He really looked at home in that pinstriped suit. Minnie looked gorgeous in the latest dresses I was told the movie stars wore—though it’d been so long since I’d been to see a picture, and so rare to go even then. But she wore them stiffly and carried herself with a detached sense of grace. Dean looked… comfortable. Like one of us.
“Shut your trap,” said Leopold, moaning. I chanced a glance at him as I munched on a slice of crispy bacon. His eyes were watering and he rubbed them vigorously.
“Don’t snap your cap.” Dean put a hand on his elbow to stop him. “You’ll make it worse.”
Leopold just growled and flung his elbow to get Dean to step away. Dean shook his head and sat down beside me on the edge of the bed, pulling out a half-dollar he often kept in his pocket and liked to play with when his attention wasn’t captivated. He leaned closer to me as he rolled the coin between two fingers. “I warned him to wear sun cheaters,” he said, referring to the immortals’ habit of covering their eyes with dark lenses whenever they ventured outdoors. “He’s got a nice pair of aviator glasses and everything, but he wouldn’t listen. I knew he wouldn’t be on the ball enough to look away.” He nudged his chin toward that window with the slits of light. I often wondered why they didn’t do a better job of sealing it if they found light so offensive, but I supposed they took pity on my kind and wanted to offer us a little ray. Knowing it could be the last time we saw it without flinching.
Thanks to my little brother Robbie, who’d wanted so badly to see that scary old flick that had been playing at the theater on a discount night, I knew that Nosferatu turned to smoke and ashes in the light. In comparison, these vampires just seemed to be mildly inconvenienced.
“Ow,” said Leopold as he walked into the foot of my bed, his hands still rubbing vigorously against his eyes. Maybe not mildly.
Dean studied me with concern and I quickly wolfed down the rest of my bacon, polishing off the plate. He grinned. “Well, you certainly haven’t lost your appetite. But do keep the space heater on when it’s cold. We won’t have problems paying the bills.” I didn’t tell him I was afraid of turning on the heater because of what had happened that night, almost a year ago.
“Zel, get up!” Robbie was shaking me awake. He hacked loudly. “I can’t get the damper open anymore. The fire is… spreading—wake up!”
I shook my head, forcing the echoing sound of Robbie’s continual coughing out of my head.
I shouldn’t be alive. I didn’t deserve immortality, not when they all lay dead in an unclaimed family mass grave.
Leopold should have known why leaving the space heater on overnight would bother me, but he was too focused on the damage the miniscule amount of sunlight seemed to have done to his eyes.
“Ugh!” He slammed a fist against my headboard and I jumped in place.
Dean shook his head—he was so much better at avoiding the sun, even when its beams were sprinkled throughout half the attic. “Let’s get you down to the bathroom,” he said. “Maybe a hot shower will warm you up.”
My toes curled at the thought. That sounded divine. Except… My eyes flitted to the door. “Where’s Minnie?”
Dean stood and took my tray from me. “She’s gone for a few days. She had… business.”
Leopold snorted. “Business recruiting more quenchers, you mean.”
I shivered. Leopold and I had been on the streets a couple of days, done drifting from couch to couch, done hiding in basements to avoid the questions the parents of our friends asked. Too many fathers had thought Leopold a draft-dodger, but he’d still been seventeen. He would have lied and joined the military to escape his own father before the fire even, but it was I who’d stopped him, I who’d begged him not to leave me and then… He became all I had. In any case, running off together—promises of getting hitched when we landed on our feet—was what had led to Minnie crossing our paths.
“You poor dears,” she’d said, extending a hand toward the park bench where we’d cuddled up one night. “Come with me. I can offer you a roof over your heads, food in your belly… And more than you might believe possible.”
“She has business other than blood at the moment,” said Dean matter-of-factly. “Investments. And licenses. She’s interested in opening a company—”
“Why?” I asked. The question was out of my mouth before I realized. She was rich. But she was more involved in helping the community, more active than Pop had been, and Pop had had so many mouths to feed—to feed with food that needed to be bought, with money that needed to be spent. Employment had been scarce on our side of town before the war.
Dean shrugged. “And then there’s the matter of that land,” he said, as if that were the natural course of the conversation. “She’s keeping a close eye on the construction of that house.” I knew there was a piece of land near the woods that ran along the river that particularly interested her, but I didn’t know more. A house was being built there, but she didn’t seem interested in buying it—just curious about the couple who planned to move in there. A pregnant woman, her husband off at war. Minnie hoped she’d have a girl, had lamented once she couldn’t have just bought the land and built a house and moved me or one of the other girls in there herself. Why, I didn’t know for sure. Something about the “pixie watching.” That was all I’d gathered, my mind too often wandering when Minnie made conversation. That was outside. Outside had little to do with me. Not anymore.
Leopold removed his fists from his eyes. His eyelids were raw, red. “I’m sorry, but I can’t hold it back.”
“Fellow, take it down a peg and—” Dean started, but it was too late.
Leopold was already sinking his fangs into my neck, his large, clumsy hands fumbling through my hair, pulling out the braid, getting lost in it. My neck burned and my blood seemed to boil. I gasped, the scream I wanted to let escape stuck halfway to my lips as the searing pain shot through my body from my neck down. My body convulsed as I weakly sent a hand in his direction, my instinct to get him off, even though I’d been through this before—but never like this. Never without warning.
There was a crash as the tray and dishes clattered to the ground. “Lay off! You’ll hurt her!”
In the blink of an eye, Dean was there, his hands at Leopold’s mouth, forcing his head away, then shoving him across the room.
Leopold landed on his haunches, blood dripping down his lips—my blood. He wiped it off with the back of his hand.
Dean stood in front of me, his arms out wide. There was a twitch in his jaw as his bright, blue eyes glanced toward me, and I had to wonder if he was fighting his instinct to drink from my neck, too.
“I just took a sip,” said Leopold, clenching his hands into fists. “She’s fine.”
“Beg to… differ,” I said through suddenly-parched lips. Though the burning stilled, I still felt weak, dizzy. My hands dug into my mattress, wove through thick strands of my hair that were slicked with blood.
“Scram!” said Dean, digging his heels in.
Scoffing, Leopold headed for the door. When he opened it, there was a ghastly pale figure behind it, stock still, staring inside.
Mary Ellen. The freshest vampire of the bunch. If Leopold had a hard time holding it in, then she—
Her mouth opened wide, her fangs lengthening.
“Out!” shouted Dean again, disappearing from beside the bed and appearing at the door in a blink of an eye, slamming it closed. He turned to me. “I’m sorry. I promised my aunt I’d look after you.”
“It’s fine,” I said, clutching at my throat. I didn’t feel fine.
They were supposed to drink from me in small doses. Too much at once could kill me. A little at a time, a little taste of their venom—and one day soon, I’d turn. But Minnie was supposed to decide when that would be.
And I was supposed to be restrained when it happened. Becaus
e otherwise, I’d twitch and flail and scream—and they could accidentally slit my throat entirely.
My would-be fiancé could have done that just now, had Dean not been here to stop him.
Dean took a step toward me. “Let me—”
“Stop!” I said, holding out a hand, even as the other cradled my throat. “Stay away.”
“Zelda, I won’t hurt you. I have better control than they do.”
I shook my head. “I don’t care. Just please… Leave me be.”
The fire, the heat, the flames… Robbie coughing as we made our way out, collapsing into my arms when we hit the streets, when we should have been safe.
“Where… are they?” I spoke through fingers I’d slammed against my lips.
“I don’t… I don’t…” Robbie looked around, dizzy, unsteady on his feet. I tugged on him to stop him from pulling away from me, from heading back inside. Mom and Pop and Suzanne and Jon and Hannah and Cathy… None of them were here. They were all still inside.
He’d screamed at them to leave. He’d told me they’d left. While I’d been tripping on my hair and fighting through the smoke and making my way to the sound of his voice, we must have passed them. They must have gotten stuck in the stairwell, the stairwell that had snapped and cracked and collapsed behind us just as we’d broken free to the cold, sharp air of the sidewalk in front of the flaming apartment building.
“Leave me be.” A tear escaped down my cheek.
Dean frowned and nodded, bending to pick up the plates and the tray. He only flinched slightly at my nearness, at the blood splattered all over my blankets, my hair, my hands, my neck.
“I’m sorry,” he said again before exiting out the door. I waited for the sounds of the bolt, the chain, the lock.
I stared at the space heater, its bright orange coils, for I didn’t know how long. Eventually, I turned on the radio and fell asleep to a melancholic jazz melody, a soulful woman crooning about her lost love.
♛
Magic at Midnight Page 5