But that afternoon, it was still a haven and a refuge, and Bette felt enough at ease to tell Darcy what she’d seen in the trauma room.
“They put electricity through her heart and it made her alive again,” Darcy explained breezily, in the know-it-all tones of somebody who was allowed to watch medical soap operas on TV, which Bette was never allowed to do. “You know, like Frankenstein.”
Bette didn’t know, so the next day at school she’d gone to the library and looked. She’d been bright but young, and so most of the novel had gone way over her head, the way most of the grown-up books she’d read then had (it had been, for instance, years before she’d understood that Josella and Bill in The Day of the Triffids have sex on the first night they meet, when the world’s just fallen apart and they’re both freaking out, years before she’d understood that need for touch and warmth and forgetting in skin). But even if she hadn’t comprehended all of it, she’d comprehended enough: science and alchemy and magic, blasphemy and rebirth and death. A life made from stitched-together discards. A man who thought he could be God, and a creation who knew it was a fallen angel.
Bette was in love.
Other interests came from that first one: from the lighting-bolts-and-mad-science creation scene of the 1931 movie, like a warped version of that hospital moment she’d once seen, Bette discovered her love for the creepy brilliance of Nikola Tesla. From the tragedy of the monster she’d learned that the anger of the outsider wasn’t something that only she felt. There were other people out there who’d felt it too, who’d made movies about it. And once she’d known that, it had been okay to be different and weird. She’d still felt like a freak, but at least she wasn’t the only freak. There was Rose, and Tommy, and the bands she liked to listen to and, always, there was Frankenstein. The library copy of the novel (which Bette had stolen a few months after the first time she’d borrowed it, and still has even now—it was one of the only things she brought with her after her death), that book had become like a friend she could visit whenever she needed comfort. The movies, too. It wasn’t about the content, exactly, not anymore. It was about the familiarity that she could vanish inside, at least for a little while.
Sometimes Bette used to wonder what happened to the girl. What her scar must have looked like, from having her chest cavity opened. Like autopsy scars, maybe; neat lines where the skin had been folded back to get inside, and then sewn back together at the end. Except that autopsies were dead, and so the stitches would never heal to scars. Later on, Bette had stopped thinking about the girl as much, but had always retained the vague thought that ‘Autopsy Scars’ would make a pretty cool name for a band.
When the movie’s over, Bette goes back upstairs and tries to sleep, but as usual she just lies in bed and waits for the sun to go down. Lucky for her, vampires don’t really get tired, not if they’re getting good blood regularly. But still, she misses sleep.
When the others wake up she goes out hunting with Blake. She likes being around Blake when she’s feeling unhappy or quiet, because the guy talks enough to obliterate even the heaviest of silences, and he never really requires her to respond to the things he says. She can just sit back and listen, not thinking about anything.
They’re in a town car, heading back for the house, when Bette’s phone rings, Ash’s number coming up on the display.
“Hey, you,” Bette says brightly. “You completely ditched us at your house, you know. That’s kind of flakey.”
Ash is making weird raggedy gulpy noises, just little quiet ones. Bette’s smile vanishes. “Ash? You okay?”
“Something’s wrong. Sh-she t-t-told me. She told me to c-call you,” Ash manages, stumbling clumsily over the words.
“Who told you, Ashley? Who’s there? What’s wrong?” Bette motions to Blake to make the driver turn around, then gives him Ash’s address as the girl on the line makes more awful, strange, breathy wet noises. But Ashley just sobs, just once, and doesn’t answer.
“Hurry,” Bette tells Blake.
~
Ash’s house is dark, this time. Not even the keypad of the front door’s intercom system is lit up. Bette breaks the lock with a sharp turn of her hand and steps inside, Blake behind her. His shallow, prattling persona has dropped away completely, and he’s a still, deadly predator beside her as they move inside the empty home.
There are smears of blood on the floor. Someone who was bleeding has been dragged—or dragged themselves—through the front foyer and into the living room area. Bette and Blake follow the trail into the second room, halting in the doorway as they take in the scene before them.
Ash is curled in the corner, between the wall and the edge of the sofa, trembling and whimpering, clutching at her shins with her palms. She’s naked and her skin is riddled with scars, some as short as a knuckle and some as long as her arm. There are new bites on one of her wrists, hasty messy bites, and her chin is wet with her own blood.
“Oh, fuck,” Bette says, forcing herself not to remember her own terrifying first moments after death and instead stepping into the room, over towards the shivering girl. Blake’s hand on her arm stops her.
“Wait. She’s dangerous. Very dangerous. She’s not like us. She can’t be reasoned -“
“She called me,” Bette reminds him, shaking his grip off her arm. “Now do something useful and go find a blanket and some of her clothes.”
Kneeling next to Ash, Bette reaches out as slowly and gently as she can. “Ash? Honey, do you know who I am?”
Ash looks at her with wide, terrified eyes. They’re glassy, unfocused and distracted, but Bette can’t remember ever seeing Ash any other way. “B-Bette?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Wanna come out from the corner there? We’ll get you cleaned up?”
Ash holds her bitten arm up. “I-I was so th-thirsty but it wasn’t, it didn’t, I…” she buries her face against her knees and begins making her awful sob-choke noises again.
“Okay, okay.” Bette holds out her own wrist, ignoring the fragile sleeve cuff that’s about to be seriously mangled. “Here. This will be better.”
Ash growls as she bites Bette’s arm hard, like an animal tearing into meat. It hurts like hell, and Bette swears quietly, stroking Ash’s blood-stiff hair with her other hand.
From this angle, Bette can see the damage done to the other girl’s body more clearly. The longest and deepest wounds, now healed thanks to the vampire change, are across her chest, one line from each shoulder point coming down to meet between her breasts and then heading down in in a Y.
“Autopsy scars,” Bette says softly.
Blake brings some of Ash’s clothing, a fluffy white dressing gown, and a first aid kit back to the living room. Bette’s managed to coax Ash out of the corner and onto one of the couches, with Ash gulping at the ragged gash on Bette’s arm all the while. Bette’s too busy trying to be all Cool and Sensible and Good In A Crisis—things she’d always hoped that she would turn out to be when confronted with true disaster—to let herself feel freaked out or increasingly light-headed, but she’s woozily grateful when Blake forcibly separates the two of them and hands Bette a square of thick gauze from the first aid kit to clamp down on her arm.
Blake drapes the dressing gown around Ash’s hunched and trembling shoulders with surprising gentleness, and once again Bette can’t help but be reminded of the night of her own violent death, how disoriented and panicked she’d felt and how kind Jay and Timothy and Blake and Alexander had been to her. And her death had been nothing, compared to the horror Ash is going through.
It makes Bette’s vision film red with fury. Ash was a vulnerable fucked up teenage girl, and somebody has violated her. It’s like like what happens all the fucking time to girls, at school and at home and in a million other places, in TV shows and movies and video games and comics and books and Bette fucking hates it, it’s not fucking fair. Because she’s got claws and teeth now, she can protect herself now and rip the world apart now, but to get that way she had to die
first.
Usually she doesn’t think about becoming a vampire in terms like this, because that had felt like a natural extension of other things she’s loved. Frankenstein can only exist if people die first to provide the pieces. Lots of stories Bette and Rose had been into were variations on that theme, because Bette loved stories of monstrous rebirths and Rose loved stories of revenge. So they’d watched and adored Carrie and Ringu and I spit on your grave and Kill Bill and tons of other things, girls and women who dragged themselves back from the dark to act as their own avengers.
Bette had adored them all but now she wishes that she hadn’t, she wishes that there had never been a need for a single one of them to be made. Because it had all been okay when she’d thought of herself as one of them, but everything is different if it’s someone else with that born-from-loss life left as their only option. It isn’t fair, and not even getting revenge on those who’ve done it will make it fair. The only triumphs Ash can ever have now are dark victories, at best, and that isn’t fair.
It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair. Bette’s eyes sting with tears as she sways on her feet.
“Go get some blood for yourself,” Blake orders Bette gently. “You’ve given her a lot. You need to heal your arm. And it will make you feel better.”
Bette doubts she’ll ever feel better again. She gestures at Ash, who’s shivering and muttering to herself indecipherably. “I can’t go. I have to clean her up.”
Blake gives her a very droll look. “I did raise three daughters, you know. I think I can manage without you for twenty minutes.”
Bette hadn’t known that about Blake. She wonders if she’ll ever know anything else about it, beyond that single comment. Blake’s tendency toward glib conversationality makes it hard to get a straight answer out of him about anything.
“Okay,” Bette says. She feels lightheaded, and her arm aches like hell. “I won’t be long.”
She goes down the street, back to the boy’s house. There’s no handy tree she can shimmy up to his bedroom window, and she feels too clumsy from lost blood to risk trying to climb up using nothing but the gutter pipe as a handhold. There are still a lot of lights on inside the house, though, so Bette goes for the easiest option: she rings the doorbell.
A middle-aged man with the same nose and mouth as his son answers the door. Bette does her best to conceal the gauze patch with the palm of her hand and gives him a smile, trying to work out what to say. She realises abruptly that she doesn’t know what the boy’s name is.
She’s saved from the dilemma—a dilemma which, she’s sure, Alexander and Blake would cluck their tongues over—by the man giving her a pleased, surprised smile and asking, almost hopefully, “Are you a friend of Carlos’s?”
Bette gives him a closed-mouth smile of her own, the kind that hides her fangs, and nods. “Yeah. Is he home?”
“Up in his room. Go ahead.” The man steps aside, letting her past, and Bette goes up to the boy’s—Carlos’s—room.
He’s lying on his bed, reading a dog-eared fantasy novel with a girl in a chainmail bikini on the front.
“Hi,” Bette says. He looks up, startled, and gives her a nervous, wary look.
“You’re back.”
“You’re observant,” Bette retorts, stepping inside and closing the door behind her. It doesn’t lock, which is unfortunate, but she’s fairly sure they won’t be interrupted before she’s done, if she’s quiet and quick. “I’m sorry to be a total asshole and use you like this, but I need some of your blood.”
“You can use me, I don’t mind,” Carlos says brightly, sitting up. Bette rolls her eyes.
“God, please do not use dumbass teen sitcom lines. This isn’t some cutesy horror metaphor where the hot predatory teenage girl comes into your room and takes your neck-virginity and you get to high-five your friends about it later.”
Carlos blushes. “How do you know that I haven’t already lost my, my neck-virginity to someone else already, huh?”
Despite the utter and total fucked-up-ness of the night she’s having—or maybe because of it—Bette starts laughing and can’t stop. “You didn’t even know vampires existed until you met me!” she giggles. Then, dizzy, she stumbles, and has to steady herself on the edge of his desk.
“Shit, you’re bleeding.” Carlos stands up, grabbing a handful of tissues out of the box of them on his nightstand and coming over to her, pressing the tissues against where the bites on her arm have bled through the gauze. After a second, Bette works out the probable reason why he has a box of tissues on his nightstand, and oh, god, sex is so hilarious and gross and ridiculous, and she can’t stop giggling, and she feels so sick and strange, and so hungry…
“I’m sorry about this,” she manages to say to Carlos, before she bites down on his throat.
Blood always tastes good, but it’s never been this good since the first time. The gnawing, itching emptiness in her veins starts to fade, replacing itself with warmth and contentment and relief, blessed relief. Her arm tingles as the skin knits and heals.
She’s not full, nowhere near, when she pulls back, and the pure-vampire part of her, the hungry lizard-brain id that lives in the back of her head, is extremely vexed that she’s stopped drinking. But the front part of her head, the Bette-part of her, is back to being stronger than the other part of her, now that she’s not so hungry. The Bette-part of her knows that if she takes much more, Carlos will be in danger and she’ll have to get his parents to call an ambulance, which would be a whole mess of stuff she seriously doesn’t have time for tonight. The vampire-part’s anger fades to a quiet grumble in the back of her mind, after she promises herself that she’ll go out hunting later and kill someone nice and big.
“Uh.” Carlos looks shaky and pale, like Bette had before she stole a bunch of his blood. She smiles at him and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Thank you,” she says, sincerely. “I have to run, and I’m super-sorry about that, but I’ve got epic family drama going on and it’ll probably turn into a full operatic disaster if I don’t go back and keep an eye on it.”
Carlos blinks. “You have a family? I thought you prowled the night and killed people and stuff.”
Bette shrugs. “Yeah. But who wants to do all that alone? Go to bed after I leave, and try to get some sleep. You’ll feel shitty in the morning, but you’ll be okay.” As she’s opening the door to go, she turns and gives him a little smirk. “Don’t use up all the tissues if you can help it.”
~Ash is washed and dressed and asleep on the couch when Bette reunites with her and Blake. With the tear-tracked mascara and eyeliner carefully cleaned from her eyes, and a pale aqua sweatsuit covering her skinny frame, Ash looks devastatingly young.
“I’ll call a car,” Blake says when he sees she’s back. He’s discarded his vest and jacket, and the sleeves of his crisp white shirt—no longer crisp, and splotched pink-red from bloodied water—are rolled to his elbows. Nobody has ever looked so refined and elegant in such a rumpled state before. Bette thinks that there’ve probably been people who’ve tried it, like Lord Byron and stuff, but none of them can hold a candle to Blake. Bette could be freshly laundered and pressed beside him and she’d still feel grubby.
“What are we going to do?” Bette says.
“You’re a teenager. I date teenagers. Even I’m humble enough to admit that our demographics do not suggest that forward planning is our forte. We’ll return to the townhouse and get Alexander’s more considered opinion on the matter.”
Bette snorts. “That’s not humility, that’s passing the buck.”
Blake gives her one of his blade-gleam grins. “Which is but one of the numerous arts I’m proficient in. Go pack a bag of her clothes for her, will you?”
Bette quirks one of her eyebrows, unimpressed. “Is that another skill you’re too humble to aspire to?”
“On the contrary, I would do an excellent job of it. But I’d simply choose the most expensive clothes she has—and there are some e
xquisite gowns in her copious closet, believe me—and if I did so, you and Jay would doubtlessly tell me off for ‘missing the point’ or offer some equally inane protest. I’m saving you the trouble. Go choose her clothes.”
“You are such a jerk.”
“Among my more endearing qualities, yes. Now hurry up.”
He shoos her toward the stairs, then turns to phone for a town car. Bette glances back as she climbs the staircase—two steps at a time, like she usually does—and catches the look on Blake’s face as he looks at Ash. It’s furious, angry and dark, and completely unlike any other expression Bette’s ever seen him wear. It makes her blood cold, and she hopes that she never feels that look directed at her.
TIMOTHY
Several nights after Ledishka’s thwarted monster-spotting vigil, Timothy had once again been woken up in the middle of the night. He’d opened his eyes, expecting his little sister to be peering at him in the dark with another scheme in mind. But it wasn’t Ledishka who’d woken Timothy, not this time.
The romanticism of the city is a beauty Timothy has never tired of, and he can’t imagine that he ever will. Skyscrapers, reaching up like a row of dark and jagged teeth into the night sky, their windows a mosaic of golden squares of light, the crowds stopping and starting at crosswalks like a heartbeat regulating the pulse and flow of blood. Timothy loves the city, and perhaps part of why he loves it is because it’s so different to the village. But the village had a romanticism of its own, in a curious way.
There was, for instance, something almost primal in the eroticism of the moment Timothy surfaced from dreaming, opened his eyes, and looked up into the ghostly white face of his young lover, whom he’d thought vanished forever, and who stared at him now with a look of wicked joy.
“Come with me, into the night,” said Ilia, and his teeth were long and sharp in his mouth. Timothy sat up and wondered why he didn’t feel more afraid. He didn’t feel afraid at all.
“I don’t want to leave my family behind,” he said. “I don’t want to die.” But even more than he didn’t want those things, he didn’t want his quiet protestations to sound convincing. He didn’t want Ilia to leave. He couldn’t imagine living out the rest of his life, always remembering the night a creature from nightmares and folk stories woke him up and offered him something strange and dangerous.
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