Nobody answers when he calls, and the voicemail message is just the generic greeting of the phone company.
“Nell, it’s Alex. Blake’s managed to get himself poisoned. I know a chemist who should be able to make the treatment, but since you’re in town I’d be grateful if you could lend your experience to the situation. Call me as soon as you can.”
Ending the call, Alex turns to Tim.
“Do you remember, when we bought Bette her nightclub, I told you about Anastasja, who became Gretchen?” he asks as they set off in the direction of the warehouse Will and Lily share. Tim nods. “I met her before then, too,” Alexander explains. “When she wore a different name again. She’s had so many. I wonder if they ever weigh on her, in the stillness when she tries to sleep. I think they’d weigh on me, if I tried to live in such… eras of myself. It’s hard enough to survive the guilts and regrets which one version affords us; I can’t imagine how she manages with so many past editions of herself behind her.”
Tim is quiet. Alexander finds the thought of going silent unbearable. Perhaps he is more worried for Blake than he wants to admit.
“She’d been poisoned, and almost died,” he goes on. “Before I knew her. And after you were hurt, that first and worst time, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. Even thinking of what had happened to her hurt me, because it made me think of her three… she called them her brothers, sometimes. They… she reminded me of you. She always reminded me of you. So thinking of how close they came to losing her made me think of losing you.”
“The poison, Alex,” Tim prompts gently. “Tell me about that.”
The streets are cold and dark. They stay away from the thoroughfares where they’d encounter too much foot traffic. Alexander speaks.
“The hunter’s name was Paulette. Nell… Gretchen had killed a French stable owner some years before, but left his young wife alive because she was pregnant. Paulette had never forgotten, and certainly never forgiven. After ten years, she got her revenge on the vampire that had killed her husband.
“Agheazma was named a long time ago. I don’t know who named it, or why. Vampires so rarely write down coherent, complete histories. I think, based on what I’ve learned of pharmacy this century, that it’s a pathogenic organism, causing something quite similar to blood poisoning. Lucky for us, it’s extremely difficult to create—the key ingredient comes from the blood of a rare bird. But Paulette created it, and slipped it into the food and drink of humans in the neighborhood where Gretchen was hunting. Gretchen fell ill, as Blake’s fallen ill now.
“It takes a few days for the poisoning to show—that’s why Blake’s been complaining of feeling ill; it wasn’t the blood-replacement blend he tried at all.
“It made Gretchen haggard and tired at first, just as it’s done with Blake. Owen, the oldest of Gretchen’s companions, recognized the symptoms, because he’d seen it strike, and kill, before. It stops vampires metabolizing blood in their system correctly—essentially, Blake is going into a kind of vampiric septic shock; his body is deoxygenated. He isn’t at death’s door—Gretchen was ill for several nights at the severity he’s only just reached—but the longer it is before he’s treated, the longer it will take for him to recover. Gretchen took some years.”
“Shit,” Timothy says.
“But Gretchen’s brothers weren’t nearly as familiar as vampire physiology as Will is. Everything will be all right,” Alexander says, determined to see that prediction proved correct.
~
“He killed us,” says Lily. “Why should we save him?”
Alexander’s glare is sharp and vicious. “Because that’s what you do. Your whole stupid game is that you think you’re heroes, isn’t it? You save people.”
“People. Blake isn’t a person. And this isn’t a fucking game, either, asshole.”
“Everyone calm down,” Timothy suggests coolly, his good-cop act on in full force. Which is a good thing, as Alexander tends to fall naturally into antagonist mode around Lily and Will.
“Lily,” Tim goes on in a level voice. “If you allow Blake to die now, you’re inviting chaos back into the city. His gang is the largest and most deadly, and it—” The limits of Tim’s ability to pretend he has no side in this begin to strain, a frown pulling at his mouth. “And we keep the rest in check. Saving him is the lesser of two evils.”
She doesn’t look convinced, though Will’s expression is nowhere near as sure. Alexander feels as if he’s choking on a knot of frustration and fear.
“If you let him die,” Alexander says. “Bette will have lost the person she looks to for guidance and advice. Do you think Rose will be safe, if that happens?”
That makes Will and Lily’s expressions wear a matching flicker of concern. Rose is their protégé, almost like their foster child. She’s stopped hunting since the night she found the bodies of two of Ash’s kills, but that doesn’t mean Will and Lily’s sense of responsibility towards her is in any way diminished. Rose is the best, perhaps only, reason they have to help Blake now, as far as Alexander can see.
Will and Lily communicate silently for a moment, in the way that lovers have of doing so, but Alexander can guess at their thoughts easily enough even without attempting to hear them.
Will is the one to answer. He holds his palms up, as if to show how hopeless and helpless the situation they’re in is, how few options they have for what to answer.
“All right,” he says. “We’ll help.”
MICHELLE
Despite Anna’s firm refusal to teach her anything else for now, Michelle stays at Anna’s as the evening deepens into nightfall. Probably that’s because Michelle’s always been kind of obsessive, and right now the focus of that is her desire to be as hard on the outside as she sometimes feels on the inside. There’s a tight little knot of something tough and angry inside Michelle, and she can feel it coiling ever tighter. Sparring with Anna, learning stances and throws and techniques, is an outlet for some of that rage. Not much of it, but some. It stops her feeling so useless. And if she goes home, she’ll feel useless again.
The trade-off for Anna seems to be the chance to have someone to talk to. Michelle’s not usually the most talkative person on earth – far from it – but she’s never had to be alone when she doesn’t want to be. There’s always someone to hang out with, something to do. Being as solitary as Anna has made herself would be incredibly lonely, Michelle thinks. The least she can do is listen while Anna talks, while Michelle sits there with new bruises and ice packs against her aching muscles.
“My name wasn’t Anna when I was a kid,” Anna says, unwrapping and re-wrapping the binding across her hands. “I picked it when I was arrested for the last time, when I ended up in juvie and met Lily, and because of that— because of her— it ended up being the one that stuck.”
She gives Michelle a rueful smirk. “The funny part was that it was… it was just a name, it wasn’t meant to be the name. Kind of like how Remember the Stars was just a band, it wasn’t meant to be the band. That’s how we always thought of it. We’d talk about it sometimes, how funny and random it was that this was the thing that clicked. I’ve always sort of felt that about my name, too. Anna, I mean.
“Russ knew my real name, eventually. I told him when we were in California, when everything had narrowed down to just the two of us against the darkness of the world. But he never called me by it. Always kept calling me Anna. I was glad of that. I don’t feel like her anymore. The other person I was. I made myself into someone new.”
She goes quiet and sad for a while after that, and Michelle sits and sips at a glass of water, and thinks about the question Anna asked her in the bar that night after the show. About whether she’d use up the last bits of herself on revenge, or if she’d go out and start from zero again. Michelle wonders if the prospect of starting from zero seems less horrible when you’ve had to do it before, or if that just makes it worse.
“I’m older than Lily and Will,” Anna tells her, breaking
the sad quiet with sad words. “They don’t know that. They never knew that. And I’m just going to get older and older than them now, I suppose, since they’re going to stay exactly as they are forever. Well… they’re going to keep looking the same, anyway. Even as the people they were inside keep fading away. They can’t tell it’s happening. But I can tell. That’s what happens.
“I’m older but I don’t look it, because for a while when I was a kid I didn’t grow much. Like your friend Sofie, but I got hit a little bit older.”
Anna’s over at the window now, looking out at the view that she can only afford because she doesn’t think there’s any future to save her money for. If she wasn’t still talking, Michelle would think that Anna had forgotten that Michelle was there.
“I’d already reached puberty when I got bitten by a vampire when I was ten years old,” says Anna. “It was a near thing, but I shook the infection off eventually. Then I got bitten again. He was my stepdad; who would believe me? Not my mom, who didn’t even know what he was. I don’t know why he lived like that. Pretending to be human. Having all the trappings of a normal life when he was this disgusting thing. Working a fucking night shift as a hospital security guard, a wife and stepdaughter and we probably would have even had a fucking dog if dogs couldn’t sense how wrong he was, how sick and dangerous.
“That’s why I’ve never liked how Will and Lily… It doesn’t work like that. Playing house and going through the motions doesn’t make you human. It makes you a monster wearing a mask, if you’re like… like he was.
“So I ran away. Ditched my name, my past, everything. When I started growing normally again, I was about three years behind where I would have been, so I just shaved those years off the age I told people. Those years… it was like I could make them vanish completely. They didn’t have to have happened at all. I was fourteen but I looked eleven, so who’s to say I wasn’t eleven? Couldn’t I live those years over again, without the bad things this time? Even foster homes and squats and sleeping in the sheds behind churches where the wall was warm from the heaters inside was a better way to grow up. So much better.
“I never even thought about vampires. I didn’t think about them at all. I’d gone through it once. I’d had my share of the pain they bring, as far as I could see. It didn’t have to be anything to do with me ever again. They’d taken enough from me. I was keeping the rest of my life for myself.
“And then eventually I met Lil, and she was so… she made me laugh. I never laughed much, before I knew her. And she had so much anger inside her, this miserable half-hopeless anger that she channelled outward as much as she could. I loved that. I loved that she’d rather spray paint a wall for hours through the night than sit and hate herself, that she’d rather fill a supermarket cart with newspaper and set it on fire in a parking lot than think too much about the darkness inside her. She was like me: maybe if she never stopped moving, the things inside her head would never manage to catch up.
“And then… and then. And then, when I thought I’d finally done it, left that old me and her lost years and all the rest in the past, found myself somebody new to be and a new life to have. That’s when the vampires came back into the story. Lily and Will saw one of them kill a girl at a school dance, and when they told me all about it, it was so weird. It was like I was made of stone, almost. Like I was a stone carving of me, with a little shelf cut into my chest, and they’d reached into that little shelf and dropped this ugly, awful, rotten, foul thing in there, just by saying what they’d seen at their school dance. I was still me, I was just the same, I was made of stone and I didn’t even move or flick an eyelash, but now there was this rotten thing inside my chest. I swear I could feel it settle there, I really could.
“So I gave up… no, I didn’t give up any of my new life, not really. We just made choices we wouldn’t have made. Learning to fight. Moving into the warehouse. Giving up our dreams of being rock stars, which had been safe dreams when it looked like it would never happen, but stopped being safe the more popular we got. It wasn’t safe to aspire that high, not when the gutters were still overrun with vampires.
“It was funny. Hearing Rose say Jamie and Russ are dead. I remember thinking how it was funny, because I couldn’t remember telling Rose my real name. I wondered how she knew it. I was always waiting for someone at shows to call me that, especially when we played in Detroit. A lot of people knew me by my old name in Detroit. But I didn’t think Rose knew it, so when she told me that was the first thing I thought. How funny.”
Anna scrubs the back of her hand over her eyes and draws in a long, ragged breath. “You’d better go now. The vampires will be out soon. Sometimes they go out early in the night.”
She doesn’t look at Michelle. Michelle puts her empty water glass down by the sink, and the slowly melting ice pack inside the sink itself.
“Bye, Anna,” she says quietly, closing the door behind her as she goes.
~
Michelle makes it home with no problem, only to find Bette waiting for her on the front porch of her house, smoking a cigarette as she perches on the railing and swings her booted legs.
“I didn’t know vampires could smoke,” Michelle says. It’s too exhausting to be frightened of Bette. Michelle doesn’t have enough fear to go around, and Bette’s not as scary as most of the other vampires.
Not because she’s any less deadly, or strange. It’s just because… Because she’s Bette. It’s hard to be afraid of anybody who’s such a goofy dork.
“We can’t,” Bette answers, exhaling a thin stream of smoke from between her garnet-red lips. “It’s habit, mostly.” She spins her lighter between her fingertips. It’s just a cheap black one, decorated with a sketchy little picture done in silvery paint, a tiny winged skeleton.
“Rose draw that?” Michelle asks. She can recognise the art style. Bette looks down at the lighter, then nods.
“Mm-hmm. We had matching ones. I don’t know if she still uses hers,” Bette answers. “You been training with Anna?”
Michelle doesn’t see the point in trying to deny it. If the bruises and scrapes have already given her away, then lying isn’t going to save the situation. “Yeah.”
“Okay. You gonna be trying to kill me or anything?”
Michelle thinks about it before answering, because it seems like the kind of thing she should think about. “No.”
“Okay.”
Michelle shifts her weight from foot to foot, feeling at a loss as to what she’s supposed to do. Bette finishes her cigarette and pinches out the cherry with her thumb and forefinger. A tiny scowl appears between her eyebrows as the heat burns her.
“You’re so fucked up,” Michelle says, almost meaning it like a compliment. “Do you wanna come in?”
“I don’t need an invitation. It’s not like in movies,” Bette replies, but comes in anyway. There’s fresh sushi in the fridge, left by the housekeeper. Michelle suddenly realises how ravenously hungry she is.
“You don’t mind if I eat, do you?” she asks Bette, who shrugs. Michelle takes the plate of sushi over to the dining room table and sits down, gesturing for Bette to join her.
“I trained with them for a while. Before I died,” Bette says. “Back when they were all still alive. They made me stop. Said I should have a normal life. Then I got killed anyway, so I guess they don’t bother saying that anymore. And I guess ‘they’ is just Anna now.”
Michelle eats another piece of sushi and doesn’t answer. Bette spins the lighter on the table top, making the silver paint design vanish in a whirl.
“Russ told me some seriously fucked-up stuff about how he’d become a vampire hunter in the first place,” Bette goes on. “About how his little brother got bit by some creep, and how his sister saved his little brother by giving him blood when he was dying. Making the infection take hold enough to bring him back, I guess. How fucked up is that, a little kid getting made into a vampire?”
“Anna’s had bad stuff happen to her, too,” Mi
chelle agrees. She doesn’t think it’s her place to retell the story Anna shared with her, but the bare bones of it are probably okay to tell Bette. It’s not like it’s a great revelation or anything. Nobody ends up in the kind of place they’re all in without something bad happening on the way.
“We’re not immoral, you know,” Bette says. “We’re amoral. It’s not the same thing.”
Michelle snorts. “You have no idea what you just said, do you?”
Bette grins and shakes her head. “Nah. But it sounded good, right?”
“It sounded like the kind of shit Jay says Blake’s always saying,” Michelle answers, with a smile of her own. Then she goes serious again. “It’s not you guys. That’s not why I went to Anna. I don’t want you to… did Tommy tell you what happened?”
Bette looks puzzled. “I haven’t spoken to Tommy. I slept at the club today, because Ash and I were working stuff out and stayed too late, and then I came around to your place when it was dark enough to go out. What happened? Is Rose okay?”
Michelle wants to rolls her eyes. “Oh my god, you are so predictable. Rose is fine. I guess. As fine as me and Tommy and Jay are, anyway. That Gretchen girl came to Tommy and Rose’s house and did this whole stupid evil-vampire thing about how she was going to turn Rose into a vampire and we could all come along too if we wanted. It was –“ Michelle’s dismissive tone wavers and stutters in her throat. She looks down at her plate, swallowing back a sudden wave of sickness. “It was fucking scary, to tell the truth.”
Bette doesn’t say anything. After a few seconds, Michelle looks up. Bette’s expression is terrifyingly still and calm.
“So it was her,” Michelle goes on. “It was her who made me go to Anna.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
Michelle shakes her head. “No. But Rose might.”
“Call her.” Bette’s voice is icy and furious. Michelle wonders if maybe it was a bad idea to put Bette in the ‘goofy dork’ category. Right now, she’s as scary as any vampire Michelle has met.
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