by Sonia Hartl
She opened the front door, and I gasped. Actual loss of breath. All my memories of searching for clues about Edie’s life or curling up on the couch to watch MTV went out the window. Nothing of the house I’d known existed. Stacey had transformed the place into some kind of over-the-top vampire den from every cheesy B movie ever made. Red velvet curtains covered half the walls, black iron candelabras dripping black wax sat on a dusty piano with missing keys. A coffin had been propped in the corner. Where did one even procure a coffin in this economy? Gauzy sheets of black satin covered a four-poster bed that had been shoved into the corner. Skulls that looked like they’d come from a natural-history museum gift shop were piled in the fireplace. It was as if Stacey had watched every vampire movie ever made and vomited out the contents.
It was so gaudy, I didn’t know where to look without making a face.
Two teens dressed in all black were making out on a second mattress with red satin sheets that had been dumped in the middle of the living-room floor. Three other teens dressed in—surprise!—all black passed around a crumpled can that smelled like skunky dirt, while another teen sat huddled in a corner crawling with black mold. He’d just pierced his lip with a rusty safety pin and it was already swelling and turning an unpleasant shade of green. Stacey took stock of them all with a hungry gleam in her eye, the way a farmer might assess their cattle.
She clapped her hands once, bringing her tiny cult to attention. “Leave us at once.” Her voice had taken on just a hint of Transylvanian accent, and Rose had to slap a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing.
The teens shuffled out, but not before they stopped to lavish Stacey with praise and kiss her outstretched hand like she was queen of the damned. It took every ounce of willpower not to roll my eyes. Rose eventually lost her battle to hold in her laugh and ended up snorting through her nose. The ridiculousness of these wannabe misfits was over the top. It was one thing for Rose to bring her kills home, but at least she didn’t treat them like pets she had to house train.
As the last teen left, Ida rubbed one of the curtains between her fingers. “You really leaned into that whole vampire thing, didn’t you?”
Stacey sniffed as she lifted her nose in the air. “It keeps me occupied.”
If she needed to stay busy, why not collect stamps? Or do a puzzle? Or get a Netflix subscription? This went way beyond being bored. She was collecting kids and keeping them on hand like a living buffet. “What the fuck, Stacey?”
“Oh, please. Do not even think about using that tone on me.” Stacey sashayed over to the red satin mattress and lay back on it, propping herself up by her elbows. “It’s called making the best of a shitty situation. At least I’m not walking around all, ‘Boo-hoo, my hot boyfriend didn’t love me forever after all, and now I have to sling fast food and live in a roachy motel.’”
That was so not what I sounded like.
And how dare she throw Taco Bell in my face, like there was an abundance of jobs for teenagers out there. “First off, I’m just trying to get by. Secondly, you hate all things vampire.”
“You haven’t seen me in over thirty years; you don’t know what I’m into anymore.” Stacey stood and paced the length of the living room. The carpet crunched beneath her feet from whatever had soaked in and dried there. “You did this to me, so you don’t get to judge how I spend the eternity I never asked for.”
“If it wasn’t for me, you would’ve died in that parking lot.” She had the nerve to guilt me, acting like death would’ve been preferable to being a vampire, only to turn around and embrace the worst clichés like she took lessons from the Count on Sesame Street.
“Keep telling yourself that.” Stacey whirled on Ida, who had moved in closer, staring intently at her neck. “What do you want?”
“Nothing.” Ida twirled a lock of hair around her finger. “Just minding my own business.”
“Okay.” Rose stepped between us, fully in her element as the peacekeeper. “I think we need to take a minute here. Clearly, you two have unresolved issues.”
That was putting it mildly. Clearly, Stacey had learned to adapt to immortality, even if it was in an incredibly crude way. The only reason she kept blaming me was so she could hold it over my head. Not because she was actually sorry she was alive. “I made the right call in turning her, and if she wants an apology for saving her life, it’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t think you owe me an apology for this?” Stacey ripped off her scarf, revealing the gray flaps of skin hanging limply around a gash covered by a thin layer of pinkish scar tissue.
“Cool,” Ida breathed. “Can I touch it?”
“No, you can’t touch it.” Stacey backed away, her face twisting in disgust.
“Knock it off, Ida.” Rose grabbed her by the elbow. “Now is not the time to be you.”
Just looking at Stacey’s torn neck activated my gag reflex. “I suppose I should’ve gotten your permission before I turned you.” I toed at a patch of dry blood on the floor. “But what would you have done in my shoes? You were dying, and I had the means to stop it.”
I had a lot of resentment mixed with my guilt when it came to Stacey. Maybe I screwed up, but there was no way I could’ve let her die. I was a handful of weeks from saying goodbye to every positive memory I had of us, leaving me only with today and the night I turned her, and no understanding of why she’d been so important to save. I didn’t need to be her best friend again, but we had to deal with this old wound before it was too late.
“You want to know what I would’ve done?” Stacey crossed her arms. “I would’ve listened to you if you had told me a guy I was dating was bad news.”
And that’s what it would always come back to. She wasn’t really mad at me for turning her, horrific neck flap notwithstanding, but she would never forgive me for letting her get killed in the first place. If I’d just walked away from Elton because he made everyone else uncomfortable, we both would’ve been fine. She’d never understand that’s what had drawn me to him in the first place. He had played into that mysterious loner persona, making me believe we were two souls who didn’t fit anywhere, except with each other. What a joke.
“We all made that mistake,” Rose said quietly. “And we regret it deeply. But how long are you going to keep her feet to the fire over it?”
Stacey turned on Rose, her eyebrows rising with her incredulous expression. “She stayed with him. He murdered me without a second thought, and she stayed.”
“I was in love.” It was a terrible excuse, but I still couldn’t admit the deeper truth out loud. It still shamed me to my core. Yes, I’d been in love, but I’d also been terrified of being alone. As I was dying at his hands, I had regrets. I wanted to stop the process and rewind. But it was too late, and I was too afraid to attempt surviving on my own. “But you were right. He didn’t really love me, he just wanted to have me, and now I’m on my own. Feel better?”
“Believe it or not, no.” Stacey swatted at Ida, who had lifted a hand like she was going to poke at her neck. “You came here for a reason, so what is it?”
The time had come to show my hand. If she didn’t have it, we were screwed. “I need my locket. The one you ripped off my neck the night you died.”
Stacey narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“We need to kill Elton.” I could only hope her hate for him endured and that would appeal to her more than withholding something I wanted out of spite. “My locket is a necessary component to get that done.”
Stacey paused for a moment, running her finger over a rusty nail poking out of the fireplace mantel, letting it slice open and heal over and over again. “Good one. You can’t kill a vampire, though. Something that would’ve been nice to know before I attempted to stake Elton.”
“You can kill one. It’s complicated, but not impossible.” I ran my hands through my hair, pulling at the roots. “Look, I know you hate me, but don’t let that override your common sense. We can end Elton and break the bond that forces us
to be in his proximity.”
Her nostrils flared. I’d said something to set off her temper again, though I couldn’t guess what. After thirty years of zero communication, we were bound to think the worst of each other. “I don’t have it,” she said.
“You’re lying,” I said. She wouldn’t get rid of Edie’s locket. She had to have some level of sentimentality left. She never would’ve been able to live in this house otherwise.
For the first time since we arrived, Ida tore her gaze away from Stacey’s neck. “What did you do with it? It’s imperative that we find it.”
Stacey turned her back to us, resting her arms on the fireplace mantel. “I tossed it in a rubbish bin in New Orleans. It’s probably buried thirty years deep in a landfill.”
If I’d had any blood in my face, it would’ve drained clean away. I recovered quickly enough, schooling my features into casual indifference. I refused to believe she’d tossed my locket away like that. She would’ve put it somewhere safe; if not for me, then for Edie.
I pulled a nail out of the mantel and scratched our address into the wall. “Now you’ll know where to find us if you were mistaken and the locket shows up.”
I grabbed Rose and Ida by the elbow and dragged them out the door into the hazy fall sunshine. They sputtered and tried to fight me as I pulled them across the front yard to the sidewalk. As soon as we made it a safe distance away, Ida yanked on my arm hard enough to nearly pull it out of the socket. “What the hell was that?”
“We had to get out of there,” I said. “I think she knows where my heirloom is; it might even be somewhere in that broken-down funhouse where she lives.”
“Neat.” Ida glared at me. “So why did we leave again?”
“Because I pissed her off. I’ll explain on the way home.”
Withholding my heirloom after I let her know how much I needed it was the easiest way to hurt me. If I had any chance of getting it back, I had to let her make the next move. And I could only hope she still hated Elton more than she’d grown to hate me.
Chapter Twelve
It took some convincing to get Rose and Ida on the bus. Ida wanted to storm back into the house, overpower Stacey, and steal my locket. But if Stacey didn’t keep it in the house, we’d never see her, let alone my heirloom, again. She needed a few days to cool off. Ida and Rose didn’t trust her, but I knew Stacey. Buried under the thick eyeliner and black clothes was the same girl who collected bells, loved cold-case mysteries, and thought you could never be too old to catch fireflies. No amount of dressing up and playing mistress of the dark to a feeding ground of clueless worshippers would change that.
“That girl has serious issues.” Ida pulled a brain out of the refrigerator and plopped it down on some newspaper she’d spread out on the dining-room table. “There’s something not right in her head to make her act that way.” She took out a steak knife and began carving into the brain, setting aside the sections she’d cut away. “Are you sure something didn’t break in her when you did the transformation?”
“It’s not like she’s the only one with issues.” I eyed the pale and squirmy brain on the table. Even when I was furious with Stacey, I still felt the need to defend her.
“To whom are you referring?” Ida plunged her knife into a section of brain, held it up, and grinned as fluid ran down the blade and curled around her wrist.
“Never mind.” We all had our own ways of coping with death. “The more important thing here is that Stacey either has my locket or knows where it is.”
“How do you know?” Rose had her dishrag out again, and she attacked the beveled glass cabinets with fervor. “Forgive me for being skeptical, if she does that’s wonderful news, but I don’t want to get my hopes up again.”
“I just know, okay?” When Stacey and I were fifteen, we stole some of her mom’s vodka because we wanted to see what the big deal was about being drunk. Her mom wouldn’t have noticed. Still, as soon as she got home, Stacey acted weird and twitchy until she finally blurted out, unprompted, that someone had broken into the house to steal drinks from the liquor cabinet. Stacey absolutely sucked at lying.
“I still say it was a bad idea to leave so soon.” Ida peeled apart the brain, tilting her head as she studied the places she’d carved away, then carefully cut a circle around the top. “There are three of us. We could’ve taken the heirloom and been done with this.”
“And if it’s not in the house? Or she somehow got away? We’d never see that locket again.” I opened a window over the kitchen sink to let out the foul scent of rotting brain. “This way I still have a chance of talking her into giving it to me.”
“I’m going trust that you know her best.” Rose grimaced. “I’ll feel better when we have the locket in hand, but if you think this is the way we need to go, I’m willing to wait.”
What she didn’t say, but heavily implied, was that Stacey was on a deadline. If she didn’t give us the locket soon, there wasn’t anything I could do to stop Rose and Ida from going after it. I didn’t even want to think about those consequences.
“Fine.” Ida went back to her brain carving, dismissing us both entirely as she focused in on whatever she was trying to do with that thing. “I can wait too, but not forever. If we don’t have it in three days, we’ll retrieve it ourselves by any means necessary.”
“Should we move forward with next steps?” I really didn’t want to say, Let’s go dig up your dead sister. Tiptoeing around it was horrific enough. “Or should we wait until Stacey shows up with the locket?”
Ida set her knife aside, and by the look she gave me, I had a moment where I was pretty certain she debated whether or not to use it on me next. “I’d rather we have a guarantee.”
“We’ll go in three days,” Rose said.
Ida pounded her fist on the table. “We will not go without the locket.”
Rose stared Ida down, part warrior, part Disney princess. The portrait of a young 1950s housewife, one broken Jell-O mold away from snapping. “A vote then, if you don’t want to be reasonable. Those in favor of getting Ida’s heirloom before Frankie sells us out to Elton and he snatches it from under our noses, raise your hand.”
Since she put it like that …
I tentatively raised my hand, while keeping a careful eye on Ida’s knife.
“That settles it.” Rose gave a curt nod. “I’ve been watching the security rotation of the graveyard for two weeks now. They are lightest on staff on Sunday nights. It’s our best chance of getting in and out without alerting anyone to our presence.”
“Cool.” Ida got up, leaving the misshapen brain to ooze on the table. “I need toothpicks and a candle. Don’t expect me back any time soon.”
She slammed the door on her way out.
Rose pressed a hand to her midsection. “That went better than I expected.”
While I agreed with Rose’s reasoning, I still sympathized with Ida. Stacey had been the only person I really loved in life, not counting Elton, and if she’d died in the parking lot that night, I would’ve been hard-pressed to dig her up again. “For the record, I hate all of this.”
“It’s no picnic for me, either.” Rose stared down at Ida’s half-finished project before shaking her head and pulling out all the cleaning supplies from under the sink.
I curled up on the couch with a Tessa Dare book, thankful they’d picked an apartment right around the corner from the library. Books had always been my bright spot away from the dark. I couldn’t concentrate, though. The constant swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of Rose cleaning and polishing every surface began to drill into my head. My heart started to skip in rhythm, and the urge to feed beat in my veins. I’d always been a stress eater.
After half an hour of staring at the same page, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I set my book aside and rose to my feet. “I’m going out for a while.”
I needed space to be alone and think, and there were few places I felt more alone than in a crowd of strangers. The apartment was only a few streets over
from the bigger college bar scene, though the earlier hours were generally populated by the middle-age crowd who were still trying to find a work/Tinder balance in their lives. Early dinner dates before they had to get home and put the kids to bed, or work on an office project, or try to get their basement craft breweries off the ground. All those adult-type things I’d never fully understand.
As I turned down the street where I’d chosen to do my hunting for the evening, the sun had just started to set. The crisp scent of fall twilight always made my pulse hum. A wooden stand on the corner sold hot apple cider, and a fire pit at the center of a multi-bar courtyard popped and crackled. I was weaving my way through the older couples who window-shopped and waited outside for a table at the new sushi bar, when I spotted a familiar bald patch. Mr. Stockard, out on the town. I tapped him on the shoulder to say hi.
“Oh. Hey, Holly.” He gave me a lukewarm smile, like the very effort of it made him tired. “Do I want to know what brings you out tonight?”
“Probably not.” I scanned the crowd for someone I could pick off easily. “How is class going? Seems like you have some pretty decent students this year.” Which was not my roundabout way of asking about Parker. Because I had no reason to ask about her. None at all.
“They’re students.” When I just blinked at him, he shrugged and took a sip of what I’d bet my heirloom was a pumpkin spice latte. “I’m not sure what else you want me to say.”
“When did you become like this?” I waved a hand to encompass his general aesthetic. Crooked tie peppered with dryer lint, coffee-stained teeth, sad droop to his red-rimmed eyes. This wasn’t the same guy who jumped on desks and threw Jolly Ranchers, or gave kids who were struggling on the outskirts books they’d actually want to read.
“I’m not uncaring … not completely.” He scrubbed a hand over his five o’clock shadow that was well on its way to becoming a six o’clock. “Look, you’re still young, so you might not understand, but when you get older, you begin to see the world through realistic-colored glasses. You approach life a little less idealistically.”