“You really must grow out of trying to emulate me every way you can,” she scolds Blake. “This hero-worship will get you into trouble one of these days.”
“Hello to you too.”
Gretchen sits down on the foot of the bed, her legs curled under her daintily. “I suppose you’ve heard already about the wonderful coincidence?”
“You and Tim being sister and brother? Yes. I’m so happy for you both,” Blake says with genuine sincerity. Alexander’s one of the few people in the world who can tell when Blake is genuinely sincere. It doesn’t happen very often. “It’s like something from the end of a fairy tale.”
“We’re all of us fairy tales,” Gretchen reminds him. “And none of us have endings.” She smiles. “Thank you for adopting Bette.”
“She irritates Alexander immeasurably. It’s wonderful,” Blake answers with a grin of his own. “Truly, though, she’s a joy, and we all love her dearly. Even if her star-crossed romance with strange little Rose does drive us all mad with boredom.”
“I’m hardly in a position to judge her for that,” Gretchen observes, just as a shout comes from a few rooms over.
“HA!” Bette calls, running in and pointing a victorious finger at Blake. “You love me! I heard you! You can’t take it back.”
Michelle and Jay trail in after her, giving Gretchen wary glances and hanging back by the door.
“You’re hallucinating, clearly,” Blake tells Bette. Bette sits down beside Gretchen, resting her head on the other girl’s shoulder.
“Gretchen heard you, didn’t you Gretchen?”
“Yep.”
Blake’s maker and his protégé give him matching smirks.
“Stop taunting the ailing man!” Blake complains, throwing his hands up in defeat.
“Yes, about that,” Gretchen’s expression turns serious. “Why is Cora doing all this to you now? What set her off?”
“Jay’s sister, actually,” Blake replies. “And Will, one of—”
“I know who Will is,” Gretchen says, her smirk returning. “I saw him and Lily by the door as I arrived, and Tim told me the whole story. You’ve picked a grand game there.”
“Yes,” Blake agrees. “Anyway, it was Will and Jay’s sister, Sofie. Their paths crossed Cora’s in Denver, completely by chance. Sofie can be something of a vigilante when the mood strikes her, and it struck when she discovered that Cora was keeping several teenagers hostage for their blood.”
“Sofie and Jay were captives when they were children. Vampires had them prisoners for years,” Bette explains. “So it’s kind of Sofie’s thing, saving kids.”
“Oh,” Gretchen says, her voice carefully smooth, her gaze fixed on the pattern of Blake’s coverlet in front of her.
“They thwarted Cora’s plans and got away,” Blake continues, pretending to ignore the change in Gretchen. “And Cora’s been playing spiteful little tricks on us ever since. She made a few mad, mindless vampires out of students from Jay’s school—”
“My friend Ash was one of them,” Bette interrupts again. “I wouldn’t let Blake kill her when we found her, even though she can be pretty spaced out sometimes. I don’t mind if she’s crazy. I like crazy.”
“And arranged for a child to be given to Alexander as a business gift,” Blake goes on. “Sofie and Will’s sister are acting as the little girl’s guardians for the time being. Cora’s most recent strikes have been rather more pointed: shooting Tim, and now orchestrating my poisoning by a hunter.”
“She must have known you’d be able to get the antidote, though,” Gretchen points out. “Poison is hardly the most fool proof way to kill you, if that’s what she meant to do.”
“Yes, this is clearly just a step toward her ultimate intentions,” Blake agrees. Alexander can hear that Blake’s voice is getting weaker and wearier, despite his efforts to appear in good spirits. Gretchen can clearly hear it too, because she climbs off the bed and gives Blake a kiss on his forehead.
“Get some more sleep, dear heart. Quinn and I need to set off for our hotel anyway.”
With a final, extended embrace with Tim, and comparatively brief hugs for Alexander and Bette, Gretchen leaves with Quinn in tow.
Jay looks sullen. Michelle’s expression is harder to read, but she seems perplexed.
“As you can see, when she isn’t directly threatening you or those you love, she’s quite charming,” Alexander remarks to them.
“I… don’t think it was a threat,” Michelle says, clearly choosing her words with delicacy. “It was something else.”
Jay makes a small noise of agreement, still frowning.
“She’s trying to learn it all over again,” continues Michelle. “People and vampires and what makes them different. I think it was a test.”
Alexander’s impressed at how astute Michelle is. He’s not all that surprised, though. In his experience, it’s often those who are visibly different to those around them who know best how vital it is to be observant and smart.
“Jay?”
“Hm?” Jay looks up, expression deliberately obtuse. It doesn’t fool Alex for a second, and clearly doesn’t fool Blake either.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Whatever.”
“Jay?” Alexander ventures, because he knows better than to trust two individuals as patently ridiculous as the boy and Blake to sort out their problems without assistance. “Would I be right in guessing it was her remarks about Will and Lily which bothered you?”
Jay’s laugh is brittle. “That’s the hilarious part. That didn’t even bug me. I’m… I’m okay with them now.” He looks at Blake, and there’s such trust there that it makes the predator part of Alex rise on its haunches inside his mind. Any vulnerability as naked as the love on Jay’s face, when it occurs between two members of Alex’s pack, must be protected with teeth and claws.
For there’s no question—and hasn’t been for some time now—that Jay is a part of them, of the household and of the older, more primal collective under the civilized surface which the household offers. From his expression, Alexander is quite sure that Jay knows this as well as any of them.
No wonder he’s not jealous of Lily and Will any more. It would be like the right hand being jealous of the left for a trinket it holds.
“Then what?” Blake asks, exasperated. “Or is this petulance merely for petulance’s sake? Because if you’re that bored, I’ll find you a hobby.”
“She couldn’t even look at me!” Jay snaps. “I was so beneath her attention that she might as well have wiped her shoes on me on her way out. I know you’re all old friends and everything, but I’m supposed to be the guy you love, and she couldn’t even pretend for the sake of politeness to give a shit.”
“Oh, Jason,” Alexander says, feeling terrible and sad for all involved. It clearly shows in his voice, because Blake gives him a sharp, warning look. Alexander ignores it; Jay deserves to know the truth of the situation, however shamed Gretchen might be by the revelation. She brought it on herself by not covering her feelings well enough. She should know better.
“It wasn’t that,” Alexander goes on, and Blake sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. Jay looks puzzled.
“It sure seemed like it.”
“Well, it wasn’t,” Blake speaks, surprising Alex. “She couldn’t look at you because of how guilty you make her feel. You… remind her of mistakes she’s made.”
“Now’s not the time for euphemisms,” Alexander cuts in, giving Blake a reprimanding look. “Tell him straight, Blake.”
“Hold your tongue,” Blake snaps back with a glare. “I’m getting to it.”
Jay’s eyes have gone very wide. Alexander realizes that the boy’s never heard them argue before.
“You’ve read Dracula, haven’t you?” Blake says, addressing Jay once more. “Just as Dorian Gray was Oscar’s little gift to me… Bram wrote Dracula from stories Gretchen told him. She was Nell, then. Short for Eleanor. It means ‘light’, you know. That’s why she
chose it. So when he wrote his novel, Bram gave her a name meaning light. A different name. He called her Lucy.”
“Lucy…” Jay echoes, brows furrowing as he tries to recall the character’s role in the story. Alexander can see the moment when revelation dawns; Jay’s puzzled expression turns to horror and then hate in the barest fractions of time. “Children.” His voice is hard. “Lucy bites children.”
“There were circumstances…” Blake begins, but Jay has already raised his hands to cut off any replies before they come.
“Don’t. Not now. I’ll hear it later. I… I gotta go. I think I’m gonna be sick,” he says in a flat, flinty tone, and walks out the door to the landing. His footsteps fade as he hurries down the stairs. Michelle, without a backward glance, follows him. Bette looks like she’s torn in two with wanting to go and also wanting to stay.
Blake rakes a hand back through his hair. “Well, that could have gone better,” he says finally. His words startle a laugh out of Alexander.
“You could get that phrase embroidered on a crest, at this point. It’s practically your motto.”
MICHELLE
“Come to my place,” Michelle says when she catches up with Jay at the bottom of the stairs. He slows his stride so that she can fall into step beside him, and they leave the house together.
“We can get a little sleep before school,” she encourages. “And there’s more than enough of your and Tommy’s clothes left in my room for you to put together a passable uniform.”
“Thanks Chelle,” Jay replies quietly, finding her hand and grasping it tight.
“Don’t thank me. I don’t want to be alone either.”
~
They sleep curled together, close and warm as they can get. Michelle wakes up first, a couple of minutes before the alarm’s due to go off. She watches Jay sleep, the way his eyebrows move as he dreams. She wonders if they’ll be like Rose and Bette if he becomes a vampire. Vampires don’t seem to know how to love anyone human, really love them, without a frisson of desire underneath. All they know how to do with people is want them.
When they’re at school in their respective Math classes, and there’s no way for Jay to see what Michelle’s doing, she texts Gretchen. The number’s still in her phone from Rose sending it last night.
It’s kinda funny, Michelle thinks. Dracula is all letters and journals and telegrams, but these days it would be texts and phone calls and maybe emails. Not quite the stuff of sprawling gothic fiction.
Careful with her typing, she writes Give me a reason why I shouldn’t get the hunter who hurt Blake to kill you right now.
Michelle knows she’d have no hope in hell if she went up against Gretchen herself, but Anna could do it. Right now Anna’s grief has made her into steel. Nothing would halt her until she killed who she was after.
After school, Michelle and Jay keep close, moving as a unit to the mall to hang out with their usual group, and then to a coffee shop, and finally back to Michelle’s place again. Michelle wonders if there’d be any way to talk her parents into letting Jay move in properly. It sucks that he lives alone in a little apartment when there’s so much empty space here.
Just before dusk, there’s a reply to her text. It’s an address: a hotel and a room number, and a short sentence. You will be safe.
She shows the message to Jay, and admits its context. “Should I go? Think I’ve got any hope of survival?”
“Nobody gets out of here alive,” Jay points out, characteristically chipper. “But we should go. I want to know what excuses she could have that would… that would make Blake defend her.”
Michelle doubts that explaining yet again to Jay that Blake is a vampire and making excuses for evil things is what vampires do will be any use. And it’s not like he isn’t saying exactly what she’s thinking too. Otherwise Michelle wouldn’t have sent the text to Gretchen in the first place.
They go to the hotel, cross the lobby, and catch the elevator up. Nobody stops them, or asks who they’re here to see. It’s too expensive for anything so gauche as noticing people, so long as the people act like they belong there. Michelle’s used to shit like that, because this is the kind of place her parents spend as much of their time as they can in.
Jay seems at ease too. Michelle thinks that might be because he was raised by an expert forger. Half the trick of faking something is the confidence.
The windows in the suite have thick curtains, tied back to show off the night-time view, and fresh tropical flowers in a vase on a table. Vampires obviously don’t care much about their carbon footprint.
Gretchen’s in another non-threatening outfit, a yellow dress and a grey sweater, her dead white feet bare on the thick carpet. Michelle wonders if Gretchen really expects them to fall for her crap.
“Do you want anything to eat or drink? I can call room service.”
“A more important question is, do you?” Jay asks her. She looks away from them.
Michelle wonders what the point of being a vampire is, if vampires still feel shame.
“Sit,” Gretchen offers, gesturing to the sofas in one corner of the vast room. “Quinn’s gone out. There’s only us here.”
“Our lucky day,” Michelle mutters, taking a seat beside Jay.
Gretchen sits in an armchair opposite them, curling her feet up in the same way she did on Blake’s bed.
“There was a hunter. Paulette. She had been a hunter for a long time. The length which constitutes ‘long’ is relative, of course. No hunter dies in their bed at ninety. Paulette was in her early forties when she brought me low, but looked a decade younger thanks to the uncanny rejuvenation which came with the vampire bites she’d gained in battles. It was an unwell kind of youth: she looked young but ill, lit with the fevered flush of a body halfway to death.
“Her poison didn’t kill me. But it hurt me badly, and in some of my bleaker moments I’ve wondered if maybe it could have ended me. If I hadn’t been as old and strong, perhaps. Or if I’d been less loved. It took all three of my brothers at my side to save me.
“Vampire blood is hardly different to human blood. It begins as human blood, and the change it undergoes isn’t even enough to sense by taste.” Gretchen smiles a little. “The tongue can tell one colour of apple from another, one colour of grape from another, with no difficulty at all, but not vampire from human.
“That’s beside my point, though. I only mention it because I remember thinking it, as I drank and drank and drank.
“It was a long time before my strength was back to its natural level. I make a poor invalid and always have—I’m too impatient, too easily bored by my own company. I’m sure there were times when my brothers wished the poison had done away with me properly.”
Jay clears his throat, a clear prompting to get to the point. Gretchen drops her smile into a more serious expression, and goes on with the story. “I wanted to do more than simply kill Paulette. I wanted to make her suffer, as revenge for the years of discomfort which lay in my future. Vampires didn’t invent the art of revenge, but we are its virtuosos.
“The only family Paulette had was her daughter, who was nine years old. Her name was Nicole.” Gretchen rubs at her forehead above the eye patch, as if to stave off pain. “I bit Nicole. Made sure she’d come back. Killed her, and trapped her mother in the room with the corpse and the knife. Paulette had three choices that I could see: destroy her child, watch the girl go insane from thirst, or let her drink her own mother’s blood. However it went, I’d’ve gotten my revenge.
“Paulette used the knife to kill her daughter and then herself. But, like most hunters do at one time or another, she’d underestimated our ability to survive. Nicole endured. And when my glee at a well-played game had faded, I realized that I had created a vampire who never should have been, and that Nicole would live forever, a reminder of my terrible mistake.”
“Nice to hear that it was all about your feelings,” Michelle says acidly. “So sorry to hear that being a fucking monster made you f
eel bad.”
Gretchen opens her mouth, probably to say more trite, contrite things, but Jay cuts her off.
“Are you going to do it again?”
Gretchen shakes her head. “No. Never.”
“All right then.” Jay stands up. “I wouldn’t be able to love a vampire if I wasn’t too pragmatic for my own good. You stay away from kids, we’re fine. You don’t, we’re not. Deal?”
Gretchen gives him a shrewd, impressed look. “You remind me of Alexander.”
Jay snorts. “Yeah. Assholes like you and Blake need us around to keep your imaginations in check.”
~
Tommy comes back to school, exhausted but recovering. In English class they have to work in groups and do a presentation on two novels by different authors addressing a common theme. Michelle, Tommy and Jay pick Carrie by Stephen King and Rage by Richard Bachman, which is cheating because Richard Bachman is just a different name used by Stephen King. But their teacher doesn’t know it, and the three of them are all good at lying.
It’s comforting to have violence and gore safely trapped in ink and fiction, for a change.
On the weekend they sneak into a show, and catch sight of Anna over by the mixing desk. Michelle waves hello.
It’s not that they’re pretending that things are ordinary and good. They’re just… taking happiness where they can, like they’ve always done.
~
After a fucking interminable Monday—seriously, Mondays are like eight times as long as any other school day—they spend the afternoon in Tommy’s room planning their presentation for English and arguing about whether the supernatural stuff in Carrie makes what the girl in that book does any different to the things done by the boy in Rage.
Tommy and Jay think it’s just the same. Michelle thinks it’s not.
“Daydreams that could really come true are more dangerous, because then it’s up to the reader to decide if it’s fiction or not,” she explains to the boys. “When there’s stuff that you know isn’t real in there, it’s not the same. The story’s still about exactly the same stuff as it would be if Carrie dropped a match or picked up a gun, instead of using telekinesis. But this way you can watch her, maybe even cheer for her, without worrying that you’re going to become her.”
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