by V M Black
Idiot.
The snarling force of the thought was like a slap. I turned off the water and scraped the hair out of my face, grabbing the towel and drying off before I stepped out of the tub. In my bedroom, I threw my clothes into my laundry basket and grabbed an oversized T-shirt and a pair of panties. After dragging them on, I flung myself full length onto the narrow twin bed.
And then I started to cry. Not the small, hidden tears that I’d so quickly dashed away when I knew I was dying, pushing them down deep inside until I could lock them up. These were heaving sobs that wracked my shaking body until I thought I would break, from the depths of a despair I didn’t know I had.
All the fears of death that I had locked away came tumbling out all at once. I was alive. I should be happy. But I had never felt so hopeless.
Even if I was cured, I had traded one life sentence for another—bondage to an inhuman creature who had not just changed my body but could do what the cancer never could by reshaping my mind. He could make me crave the insane, the repulsive, the most hideous perversions that his mind could imagine with only a touch of his fingertips. He wouldn’t even have to order me. I would beg for them, if he wished it.
I knew it, because even lying there in the small, crowded cube of my room, I also cried because I wanted him. I had scrubbed away every trace of his scent, but I still felt his presence inside my blood and bones.
I’d dared to hope that I could just pick up my life where I’d left off. But I would always be at his mercy.
Why couldn’t I just accept death? Why did I have to throw the dice one last time?
The sobs turned dry when all my tears were spent, my throat rasping with grief. As my hiccupping grew softer, the shrouded silence of the empty apartments pressed down around me until I thought I would smother under its weight.
And I slept.
Chapter Ten
I reached for my phone reflexively as I woke, holding it in front of my nose as I dragged my eyes open and willed them to focus. It was nearly noon—Thursday, Dec 25, it read.
I’d slept in until Christmas.
I let out a puff of air, setting the phone back in its spot and grabbing the graduation photo that sat beside it, with my Gramma hugging my shoulders as I held up my high school diploma in victory. I’d never expected to see it again when I left last Friday. I’d never expected to see anything again.
“Hi, Gramma,” I said, stroking the image of my Gramma’s eternally proud, smiling face with one finger. “Merry Christmas. I miss you.”
She had been a wise, kind, practical woman—a happy one despite the car accident that had robbed her of her husband, her only child, and her son-in-law all in one blow. I had been saved from my dying mother’s body, so Gramma had been the only family I had ever known, though my childhood was haunted by the wedding pictures of the smiling young couple and the snapshots of the grizzled man that hung throughout the house.
She had just turned sixty-three the day I was born and her life was turned upside down. I remembered my birthdays with a peculiar kind of clarity, each one haunted by the memory of her fearless smile and, in unguarded moments, eyes that grew bright with unshed tears.
I returned the photo and rolled out of bed with a groan, bracing myself for the difficulty of standing and facing another day.
Except it wasn’t hard anymore. My muscles didn’t protest every movement, and now that I was awake, I realized that the bone-deep exhaustion that had shadowed me for so long was gone. I pulled a bra on under my shirt and dragged on my favorite pair of yoga pants, throwing my hair into a ponytail.
I felt so...normal. I’d never expected to feel normal again. Normal, except for the fact that there was a teardrop, as small as my pinkie fingernail and as red as blood, on the inside of my right wrist. Except for the fact that I had to keep the blinds cracked so the light wouldn’t blind me.
I pushed those things out of my mind. They belonged to another world. One I wasn’t going to go back to. I refused to even think about the possibility.
Not on Christmas.
I grabbed the earbuds for my phone, pulled up the queue of my favorite music, and set it to blast as I rummaged above the refrigerator for a box of cereal. If ever I was ready for some comfort food, it was now. Shamelessly, I grabbed the Lucky Charms that I’d stashed, half-hidden, in the back. Lisette teased me mercilessly about my little kid cereal, but Lisette wasn’t there.
I hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours. I didn’t even bother with a cereal bowl. Instead, I got the mixing bowl that Lisette had bought to make cookies, and I filled it with a third of the box, drowning it in milk.
Bowl in hand, I sprawled on the couch—not the utilitarian couch that had come with the apartment but the puffy one with the big, pastel 1990s lilies on it that I’d taken from my Gramma’s house when I cleaned it out after she’d died. It still had a slightly discolored spot at one end where her miniature poodle Popcorn had loved to sit while she watched TV when I was little.
I was home. I could hardly believe that I was home.
My phone rang, interrupting Christina Perri’s warbles.
It was Lisette. Her name on the display was yet another reminder of everything I’d come back to.
Everything that I might still lose.
No. I punched the screen to answer the phone.
“Hi, Lisette.”
“Hey, Cora, I didn’t hear from you again yesterday,” Lisette said.
“Sorry,” I said, relaxing at the sound of her voice. “It seems that my nap ended up turning into more of a marathon sleep.”
“As long as you’re getting better,” she said.
“Oh, I am,” I assured her. “Dr. Robeson’s going to be in the office tomorrow, and I’ll see her and get an order for a blood draw.”
“Good,” she said. “Well, I just wanted to call to tell you Merry Christmas.”
“Yeah, I’ve probably gotten text messages from like 50 people,” I said. “Those didn’t wake me up, though, apparently.”
“So, did you unwrap my present yet?” Lisette demanded.
Most of our friends had exchanged small gifts before the break, but Lisette had insisted that I save hers so that I had something to unwrap on Christmas Day itself. The tiny gift bag was still sitting on the counter where she had left it.
“Not yet,” I said, levering myself up and retrieving the bag.
“You haven’t peeked, have you?”
“Of course not,” I retorted. “I’m not you.”
“Ha ha, very funny. Open it up!”
I reached in, past the tissue paper, and pulled out a tiny stuffed rabbit with a heart-shaped label on its ear.
It was so mundane, so delightful and unexpected, that I burst out laughing.
“Nibbler!” I said. “You found me a Nibbler.”
“Cheaper than new, too,” she said.
“I can’t believe you remembered that stupid story.”
Nibbler had been my first and favorite Beanie Baby when I was a kid, and it had been stolen by another little girl in the neighborhood. I had mourned that stupid rabbit for years, and I had told Lisette about it several months ago when we were talking about our favorite childhood toys.
“I knew it’d make you smile,” she said.
“I’ll put it on my dresser,” I told her.
“What, you aren’t going to sleep with it?” she asked.
“Ew,” I said.
Our roommate Chelsea still slept with a stuffed teddy bear, which had become a running joke between Lisette and me since that teddy bear had at this point been a witness to more action than most adult movie stars.
“Are you sure you don’t want to drive up here and join us?” Lisette asked. “Just for Christmas dinner?”
I blanched at the thought of the chaos of the Bonner family gatherings. It was wonderful to hear Lisette’s voice, but I couldn’t possibly hold it together at her house.
“I don’t think I’m up for that quite yet,” I said, “but
I’ll probably do something with you before the break is over.”
“Cool,” she said. “Well, call me if you get lonely.”
“No problem.” It wasn’t her I would be lonely for, I was afraid.
“Gotta go. It’s presents time.”
“Talk to you later.”
“You’d better.” She hung up.
I set the absurd little stuffed animal on the coffee table so that it was looking back at me as I finished my cereal. Then I cleaned up my bowl and took Nibbler to my room, where I propped it on my dresser in front of the big cardboard box that took up most of the space.
And then my mind returned, full force, to the one thing I didn’t want to think about: Dorian.
I wanted him. I barely knew him, but I missed him like a part of myself that I’d accidentally left behind. It was stronger than the sense that I’d had yesterday. Maybe it got more powerful the longer I was apart from him. Whatever the cause, I felt his absence as an ache that wouldn’t go away.
But it had to go away, one way or another. A vampire didn’t belong in this life of mine, the one I’d just gotten back. I couldn’t let him into it. I had to do everything I could to preserve whatever integrity it had left.
I turned restlessly in the room and spotted my tennis shoes peeking out of the closet. I had to think, and to think, I had to move. I grabbed some socks and shoved my feet into the shoes, dragging my UMD hoodie over my head and shoving my keys in one pocket and the phone in the other even though I wasn’t in the mood for music anymore.
I grabbed the Chanel sunglasses as I headed out the door, then took the stairs down and shoved through the front door and out into the brilliant morning. The sunlight hit me like a wall. I shoved the glasses on, pulled the hoodie low, and started to run, the only thing moving in the chill air that hung dead around me.
I hadn’t run in months. My thighs were still a little tired from—oh, God, don’t think about it—and my legs were slow and weak from months of sickness, but I could feel a strength, an energy that I hadn’t felt for nearly half a year.
I really was healed.
I jogged along the empty sidewalks, my breath frosting the air, moving between the buildings that were so familiar to me but made strange, almost post-apocalyptic in this almost-peopleless world. Everyone was celebrating Christmas with family or friends.
I ran past the McKeldin Library, but even the good-luck offerings in front of the turtle mascot statue had been swept away after finals. I saw someone else, far across one of the greens, and waved just to try to make a connection with another human being. He didn’t see me.
What I felt for Dorian scared me. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t okay. And it definitely wasn’t right that I had ended up in bed with him so quickly...and that the very thought of it still made my blood race and my body heat up all over again.
He really had done something to me, gotten inside my head. And I still didn’t know what I was going to do about it.
I stopped running, gasping for air, my hands on my knees. I’d only gone a mile at most, and I was wrung out. I caught my breath, turned around, and walked slowly back toward the apartment building.
This bond must be some kind of infatuation, I decided. It felt a bit like the crush I’d had on the captain of the debate team when I was a sophomore in high school. Multiplied by about a thousand. I’d ignored that crush, and it had gone away eventually. This would, too, or at least it would get better. I just needed a little time and a little space, and this would become something I could deal with. It had to.
Because my life was still the same. It had been here on campus all along, waiting for me to come back. That was the important thing, wasn’t it? Nothing had changed. Not really. Whatever Dorian had done to me, it wasn’t really like the cancer, which would have taken everything. I could deal with anything as long as it was just in my head.
Couldn’t I?
As I walked back toward my apartment, I caught a glimpse of motion out of the corner of my eye, drawing my attention in the flat winter stillness. I jerked my head around, but it was already gone. I was certain I hadn’t imagined it, and whatever it was, it jangled my senses with the sense that it didn’t belong. I slowed my walk, keeping my head fixed straight ahead as I strained my peripheral vision around the edges of the sunglasses to spot it again.
There it was—in a gap between two buildings a hundred yards away: a flash of dark fabric, gone as quickly as it had appeared.
I walked faster, trying to appear casual, my eyes watering with the effort of peering along the buildings.
There, again—several buildings away. It was gone in an instant, but I was certain it was the same person, and whoever it was definitely was following me. But it wasn’t possible. No one could travel so fast.
No human, at any rate.
Chapter Eleven
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was being stalked by a vampire—or something else that was more than human. And even from a glimpse, I could tell that it wasn’t Dorian. Already, I would know him anywhere.
My phone was in the pocket of my hoodie. Walking quickly, I pulled it out and paged through my contacts until Dorian’s appeared. My fingers were shaking so badly that I had to thumb the listing twice before it registered and started to ring. I held my breath.
“Yes, Cora?”
A wave of relief hit me as I recognized Dorian’s voice.
“Hi.” The word came out as a squeak. “Did you send someone to follow me?”
There was a pause. “I assigned a team. It’s just a precaution. I didn’t see the need to frighten you.”
I wasn’t reassured. Precaution indicated that the danger might be real. “This team. Are they vampires, too? Or something else that moves that fast?”
“Where are you?” His voice crackled through the phone loud enough to make me wince.
Damn. Shit just got real.
“On campus—”
“I know. Where?”
“Walking back to my apartment.” I stepped into the student parking lot. I could see the cluster of orange brick buildings now.
“Get inside,” he ordered. “Now.”
I threw a glance over my shoulder. The stalker was behind me now, not bothering to hide anymore. It had the features of a woman, but in the shadow under the hood of her long black coat, her eyes glowed a piercing yellow, visible even from this distance.
She was walking only slightly faster than me—for now. I remembered the speed that Dorian could summon when he chose to, and I judged the distance between me and the apartment steps.
My heart started hammering in my chest.
I wasn’t going to make it. My legs shook with the need to run, but I knew that would just bring her down on me faster.
“That could be a problem,” I said.
“I’m coming to you.”
“You’d better hurry.”
“Stay on the line.” Dorian’s voice got distant as he pulled the phone away from his ear and started snapping orders to his staff. I didn’t pay attention to them. I had far more pressing concerns.
Keep it together, Cora. I clenched my jaw until it hurt. The creature was in no hurry to catch up with me. As long as I kept my cool, she seemed content to play it out.
But there was nowhere to go, no escape—
I saw my Ford Focus, just a few dozen yards away.
She believes I’m going to the apartments, I thought. She wouldn’t think about my car. She probably didn’t even know it was mine. The keys were in my pocket on my lanyard with my apartment key, keycard, and student ID.
I’d need both hands.
“I’m putting up the phone now, but I’m not hanging up,” I told Dorian.
Under the pretense of putting the phone back into my hoodie pocket, I wrapped my fingers around the key fob. I subtly changed my angle of approach so that I’d walk past the driver’s door on my path to the apartment.
I risked a glance. The creature was still hanging back. Toying with
me. I could see the cruel smile curving her elegant lips. She would let me get all the way to the apartment building door before rushing in to snatch me away.
But I wasn’t going to the apartment.
I fixed my eyes on the car door.
Don’t run, I told myself, even as my heart raced out of control. Whatever you do, don’t run.
I was forty feet away. Thirty. My fingers were sweaty on the key fob. Twenty. Fifteen. I bit my lip to keep from sprinting the last few feet.
Ten. I was almost to the rear bumper.
Five.
Now.
I hit the unlock button on the fob an instant before I jerked the door open, flinging myself inside and shutting it behind me in the same motion. I hit the lock button and fumbled with the key at the ignition, my hands shaking so hard they wouldn’t work right.
I saw the creature in the rearview mirror for just an instant, so fast she was almost a blur. She hit the Focus just as I jammed the key home and turned it.
The rear window exploded in a shower of tempered glass. I screamed as the creature lunged through, her body grown suddenly larger, the skin of her face turning to glittering, golden scales as her mouth stretched wide to reveal a row of jagged fangs.
I ducked her swinging arms and slammed the car into reverse, throwing my weight onto the gas pedal. One clawed hand caught me across the back, slicing through my clothes and into my skin. Pain blasted into my brain as skin and muscle parted.
The car leaped back, hurtling across the parking lot aisle to smash into the SUV behind. The creature let out a shriek that split my skull as her legs were crushed between them. I stomped the brake, slapped the stick into drive, and floored it. The sedan’s tires screeched on the pavement, and it tore out of the parking lot, leaving the creature crumpled on the pavement behind.
I didn’t stop. I’d seen evidence of how I could heal now—already, the pain in my back had subsided from blazing agony to a manageable throb. I had no doubt that a creature like that had powers far greater than mine. I wasn’t going to gamble my life on the chance that I’d crippled her for long.
Besides, she might not be alone. I shuddered, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. There was no way I was stopping now.