Deep In the Woods

by Chris Marie Green

  “Costin,” she said. “What about Costin?”

  “He’s not here.” Jonah touched his chest, his voice choked. “He’s gone.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ONCE A KEEPER

  LILLY slowly opened her eyes to find that she was in a bed, tucked under stiff white sheets, the walls round her just as sterile, too. She stared at the ceiling, not knowing where she was or how she’d got here until the particles of her mind sifted and settled into grains of memory.

  Fire. Screams.

  Many screams, many of them her own.

  When she tried to sit up, she found she couldn’t, due to bandages swathing flesh that felt raw under the gauze. Bandages that made her feel as trapped as a mummy. Even her face was encapsulated except for her eyes, nose, and mouth.

  Her mind took a minute to catch up to a heart that’d begun to hack out a painful rhythm. Now she saw blades, blazing green eyes, a tuner crushed under a boot, Nigel’s headless form falling to the ground . . .

  Then it was all washed out by a wipe of fire.

  Mortification welled in Lilly’s chest as it all clamored back to her—the Underground, destroyed, burning her just before she’d used a trapdoor to escape. And the dragon . . .

  A flow of dread crushed her to the mattress. The hunters—Dawn and the mean vampire—had slain the dragon, who was supposed to be so safe under Lilly’s watch.

  Biting back a furious, helpless sob, Lilly wrestled the image of Dawn taking down the master after he’d been awakened from his sleep by the mean vampire. The creature had to have been a blood brother, but he hadn’t fit the descriptions of the others on file, and he hadn’t been detected by any Meratoliage through their black-art crystal gazing.

  Then again, none of her family had known about what she had done with Claudia, either.

  A shadow seemed to cover one side of the bed, and Lilly focused on the stern face of her father. Her mother’s designer perfume signaled that she had come to stand on the other side of the mattress, and Lilly twisted her bandaged neck to look at her, too.

  A safe house, she thought. Her parents had brought her to a secure location.

  Then, one by one, family elders surrounded her. Meratoliages: rejected custodes with bad hearts, plus a small group of breeders, all of their faces like those of a gathered jury’s.

  But Lilly saw their stiffness for what it truly was—loathing.

  Her father, in his clipped voice, said, “You were found, crawling in the grasses near an explosion just outside of Highgate and the Underground ruins. One of us got there before the public arrived.”

  Ruins.

  Her intellect still wasn’t quite accepting that the dragon was no more. Surely he must be functional. He was their god, their hope.

  Mouth dry, she tried to ask if perhaps their liege had escaped, but her thick tongue produced words much different than she’d intended.

  “The mean vampire crushed my tuner by walking right over it,” was what she dumbly said. Her lungs felt shredded, leaving her voice smoke torn.

  The stoic woman with the gray bun—Lilly’s mum—revealed her disdain with only a sentence. “Whoever it was crushed much more than that.”

  Her father’s voice wobbled with sorrow. “Nigel was . . .”

  Mum speared a harsh glance at her breeding partner. It was only after activation that Lilly realized her parents were siblings and not really a true couple who had once wished to produce children out of love. Then again, they had never acted as if they even liked each other and it had merely been Lilly’s fanciful notions that had built the other dream.

  “Who is this ‘mean vampire’?” Mum asked Lilly. “Who desecrated the dragon?”

  With much difficulty, Lilly told them of the hunters—Dawn, in particular, always Dawn at the front of Lilly’s mind—and by the time she finished her abbreviated version, she needed water so badly that she was gagging for it. One of the Meratoliage breeders slipped an ice chip into Lilly’s mouth, but it was as if the sleekly styled, sandy-haired woman with slanted lime-hued eyes was only being kind due to wishing to hear more of Lilly’s story, not because she cared for Lilly herself.

  Amber, Lilly thought. She recognized her cousin as the doctor who had pronounced her sterile years ago.

  “This was certainly the attack of a blood brother,” Amber said. “But if we saw him in the crystals, he didn’t resemble any description we have of the brothers. He ran a careful operation, it seems.”

  Had the other Meratoliages known about the mean vampire, they would have only expected their custodes to stop the threat. Lilly had tried.

  Lilly had failed.

  Her father asked, “Why would he vanquish his own creator?”

  Her mum ignored him. “It leaves me to wonder what has become of the other brothers now that the dragon has perished. Is there anything left of them?”

  “What does it matter?” her father asked. “There’s nothing left of us.”

  At this comment, one of the breeders at the end of the bed turned away, as if affected by the dragon’s demolition. However, the rest stayed immobile, their reaction to losing their lord clearly caged in anger.

  “We did our best,” Lilly whispered, wishing they could feel just how beaten she was, too. If only the dragon had got merely a few more moments to awaken and come to his full powers. . . .

  Tears gathered in her eyes, and when one slipped out to catch in her facial bandage, she wanted to slash the moisture away with a hand.

  Her father made a derisive sound. “Clearly, your best was paltry. How did these hunters even find the Underground?”

  “Claudia.” And, really, because of Lilly herself. In her attempts to fortify the community, she had somehow opened it up, hadn’t she? Misstepped. Overstepped. Mihas, who’d been too flaccid from years of decadence, had let them all down on his end, and the attackers had been so much stronger than even he.

  She closed her eyes as another truth weighed down on her. Had Mihas and his charisma led Lilly astray, just as with Claudia and the schoolgirls? And, here, she’d thought she’d been above them all.

  Her father sniffed. “How did Claudia contribute to this?

  Although Lilly craved more ice, she told them everything, except of her own part, where she had used Della to run out the co-master.

  “On your and Nigel’s shift,” her mother said. “For shame, Lilly.”

  It was as if her daughter had disappointed her most of all. And perhaps she had. She was proof that a female custode had been an unwise choice for service.

  “This would not have occurred with Charles or any other male still activated,” her father said, and the other men sounded off in acquiescence.

  Her cousin Amber silenced everyone. “Or perhaps a female was only there to witness everything’s collapse after a century of male fuckups.”

  Hearing a prim, proper voice saying such words was rattling. Everyone round the bed adjusted their positions, then went back to being stiff-necked.

  “In any case,” her father said, reaching into his large coat pocket to fetch a black, spindly tuner, so much like her own crushed one, “we must close this out.”

  Lilly waited for him to offer her the instrument, to show her that they were presenting her with another opportunity to right every wrong, though she didn’t know the reason they would arm her again with the dragon gone.

  But then he slid the tuner under her bandages and clamped it to her temples.

  “No,” Lilly said, realizing this tuner wasn’t a replacement at all.

  Realizing . . .

  When her father, the rejected custode, activated the instrument, it cast her into a dark place far down into her mind. A place of haunted, echoing sounds and blackness that tore at her from every side.

  The last thing Lilly heard were the words every custode feared.

  “You’re retired,” he said before she disappeared altogether into a mental coffinlike, wooded darkness.

  TWENTY-THREE

  FAREWELL TO
BABYLON

  IT was just before dawn on the streets of St. Albans, but the schoolgirls hardly paid mind to the rising sun.

  They had finally stopped running and had taken up here, in the city near Queenshill, under a set of stairs at the train station’s outside tracks after hours of screaming away from the Underground. Yet it wasn’t far enough.

  As Della shivered under those stairs, she thought of how her former master had well and truly deserted them this time. Wolfie had left them to these coarse human bodies . . . and appetites that hadn’t seemed to adjust to their change back to humanity.

  She was still so hungry. . . .

  Della picked up one of the males whom she and the others had found on the fringes of the train station and dragged under the stairs. The boys had been drinking from vodka bottles and laughing until Della, Stacy, Noreen, and the few remaining recruits had arrived wearing only bits of bloodstained clothing. Some, such as Della, weren’t even wearing a shirt. Their skin, which had never possessed the opportunity to fully heal from the UV attack, was burned, and with Stacy, Noreen, and Della’s still-clumped hair, they seemed like wild things let loose.

  The boys had backed away from the very sight, but the girls had caught them, even without vampire powers. Human teeth had nothing on the fangs that she and the others had lost, but they still had the cravings. They had known nothing else but nightcrawls and greedy feasting for too long to turn from them.

  Really, this way of coping was all Della knew.

  With the frenzied confusion of an animal, she bit into the boy’s neck, remembering the attack on the Underground: the flashes of fire and UV, the raining silver, the death of Wolfie. The death of what she had once been . . .

  The boy made a pitiful sound, and Della pressed her hand over his mouth. She gnawed at his skin, his flesh tasting of a dull, salty muskiness. It lacked the bang of satiation she had grown so used to, yet she sucked hard at him. Harder. Taking in his blood, gulp after gulp.

  But it wasn’t enough, and she spit the blood out, tears forming in her eyes as she realized feeding wasn’t the same. Nothing was, and no matter how much blood she took in, nothing would be as she’d hoped it would when Wolfie had promised her such a wonderful future.

  The other girls were also tearing off their prey’s clothing, seeking flesh, blood. For a suspended instant, Della watched the worst of them: Stacy, who had been mercilessly returned to her real age, with wrinkles and wiry strands of gray hair marring her appearance. She had been a vampire for so many years that she seemed the most vicious about clinging to her pattern of existence. She also seemed the most teched of them all upon the return of their diminished souls.

  Noreen and the recruits who had followed the last of the Queenshill girls were still fairly young, since this group had been turned into vampires only recently. Back in the Underground, just after the girls had started to unfreeze, Della had seen the older recruits grabbing the nearest sharp objects, unable to withstand the new terror stamped on their souls. She didn’t know where the rest had gone to—if they had outmaneuvered the little man who had been attempting to round them up with his partner, or if the former vampires had fled to the explosion that had rocked a deeper section of the Underground.

  But Della did know one matter for certain: none of them had anyone to turn to—no real families, no sane friends. She suspected that those who were here had only come along because, like Della, they were just now realizing how alone they truly were. It had merely taken them longer than most of the other former vampires who had already ended their humanized lives. Stacy was the notable exception, most likely because she had told Della of a distant cousin who might take her in.

  Yet Della had seen the doubt growing in Stacy’s gaze hour by hour.

  Blood dried on Della’s chin and round her mouth as her prey went still. She set him down on the pavement, the shadow of the stairs chopping his body into sections. An object crinkled out of one of his down jacket pockets. She squinted at it, because, compared to how she used to see and hear, she felt nearly blind and deaf now—a muted palate surrounding her, almost as if she were being suffocated by dullness.

  When she scooped up the dropped item, she found upon close inspection that it was a plastic bag bulging with multihued pills.

  Della stared at it for a moment, then tucked it into her fisted, bloodied hand.

  Next to her, Noreen glanced up from where she was chewing on her victim’s ear, and Della unintentionally backed away.

  Humans who had their souls again? That was what they were now?

  Just behind Noreen, Stacy paused in the act of stripping off the skin of her own victim while her old woman’s body hunched in the near darkness. The recruits, as ill-bred and aimless as always, continued feasting on their shared prey.

  Creatures of the in-between, Della thought, feeling herself sinking inside, just as if all of her was being pulled into a hole. And in that hole were so many things that were now coming to the surface: this hunger. The method in which she had murdered Violet.

  Now, with a soul, she saw the vampire Della through a tint of horrifying twilight. Had she really committed such a crime?

  As she glanced at her bloodied mates, she knew that she had, and she couldn’t bear it.

  “Murder,” she said, though she hadn’t meant to say anything.

  Even the recruits hesitated at Della’s comment.

  Stacy and Noreen were retreating from their prey, moving away like wounded jackals. Della could see they understood better than the recruits, since Queenshill training had been so much more intense, introducing them to higher appetites that would create the officers Wolfie had required for his army.

  Was this what was in store for all the little girls?

  Was this how they would live from this point forward, with no true home to slink to after a hunt? Would the blood always taste like metal and would their bodies always be this slow and heavy?

  She rested her free hand on her chest, where she felt her heart beating, but not with the same vivacity as before. No, there was only the echo of the sleeping city: the pause that occurs just before vehicles begin to roam the streets, the waiting limbo before the darkness is consumed by light.

  All of it so pale now.

  “I know you feel it, too,” she said to Stacy and Noreen.

  The multiplied hurt in their souls, the darkness.

  Stacy wiped at her mouth with her gnarled fingers, but blood still remained there. “It’s been a long time since I was last human,” she said in a frail old woman voice, “yet . . .” Her hand dropped to her side. “I don’t remember ever feeling like this.”

  Noreen only nodded as a drop of blood from her chin fell to her victim, hitting his flannel shirt where a nest of shattered bottle glass lay. She’d used the shards to let blood from his skin, as she’d had no claws.

  Della backed away from her own dead victim. Her stomach protested all the thick blood she’d consumed, and it pushed up her throat.

  Something had altered in her, but it wasn’t physical this time. Something that was dragging her down inside and not allowing her to go back to what a human should be. She didn’t even have anyone to help her discover how to get back there, and the alienation only allowed the stain inside of her to spread. She wished someone could help her stop it, but there were only the others, just as wounded and lost as she.

  With the hand that wasn’t holding the bag, she gripped the first stair, using it to bolster her.

  Stacy asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Where is there to go?”

  Noreen said, “Anywhere. We can still go anywhere.”

  But it didn’t seem as if Noreen believed this. She sounded just as stranded as Della. None of them knew how to be anything but a soldier vampire.

  One of the recruits spoke. “I miss Wolfie.”

  The three Queenshill girls rounded on her.

  “Don’t ever say that name,” Stacy whispered. “Never again.”

  Yet it was too
late—Della was already thinking of how he had abandoned them even before he had been put down by the hunters. She thought of how her parents had left her, long before her master had done so, and how the days that stretched ahead of her would contain so many more desertions.

  She couldn’t imagine enduring any more of them.

  Turning away from the carnage, she wandered away from the station, into the lamp-lit streets that seemed to coat the buildings and pavements with an ill hue. Cut off from her higher sense of smell and hearing, she felt so very removed.

  There were footsteps behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder to see the others following, directionless.

  But where was she off to? Home to her parents?

  They wouldn’t want her.

  Queenshill?

  A misty dream of snuggling into her house bed then rising in time for classes smoothed over Della. But then she remembered how she had fed on Melinda, the classmate she’d always admired, and the blood seemed to run down into a pool that festered in the center of her.

  There was no going back to anyone.

  Della meandered up a hill, through an alley, which was darker, with its enclosed brick that scratched her as she brushed against it with her bare arm.

  Nowhere to go . . .

  She and the others walked out of the city, toward a stand of trees. Just beyond, train tracks slashed through grass while the sky slouched further to daylight. Belatedly, it occurred to Della that they hadn’t cleaned up their feeding scene.

  Careless. But it didn’t seem to matter now.

  When she came to the train tracks, she stopped, the cold air picking into her skin. She wasn’t used to being chilled, and she shivered, belly deep. Then she bent so she might rest her free hand on the tracks. She waited there until she felt the quiver of an approaching train. Glancing into the distance, she identified the shape of it coming, but it was only a blur.

  Moving away from the tracks, she walked, then halted just before the trees, where she found Stacy inspecting her own aged skin as if seeing it for the first time, now that the light was coming.