She closes her eyes, squeezing them so tight the light through her eyelids splinters and blurs, like one of those kaleidoscope toys she had as a kid, the ones that you put your eye to and watch the psychedelic patterns spin at the end of the cylinder. Okay, this is too real. This is too much.
She can feel her breath coming faster and shallower, that panicked sound. It’s all an illusion, she reminds herself, and this time she does know it, but it makes it worse, somehow. Because even as an illusion, this is all far too close to the truth.
This is the life Veronica sees herself having. Unhappy, trapped with a man just like her father, a man who belittles her and berates her and wants nothing more than for her to smile and look pretty. Who believes deep down that she is capable of nothing more than smiling and looking pretty.
She backs into a corner, grasping for something real to hold on to. Something to anchor her in reality, but this husband of hers suddenly appears at her side and slides his arm around her waist, the gesture outwardly sweet but with his hand behind her back he pinches at her skin, hard enough to bruise. A warning, Veronica knows: Get it together and act like the sweet, demure little wifey you’re supposed to be.
“Honey,” he says, and his voice oozes with it, a thick coating over the razor venom beneath. “What are you doing hiding over here?”
“I’m not hiding.” Her voice shakes when she speaks, but Veronica feels emboldened by the anger that strobes over his face. “I’m leaving.”
Veronica shakes him off and breaks for the door. This is not my life and this is never going to be my life, she thinks. You don’t own my future, and I am not afraid of it. This is not me.
She feels hands ripping at her as she tries to escape, claws of strength that seek to keep her there, in her place. That try to hold her down and pin her to this empty-shell version of herself. But Veronica is strong now, is determined, and she lets them bruise and scrape her as she pushes through, fights her way free.
And then she is on the other side of the door and she slams it shut and it’s over.
She’s free.
She bends at the waist, catching her breath, and when she straightens, the walls around her are solid again. Stairs straight ahead leading down, down, and if she takes them she’ll find her way to the basement, she knows.
“Not free,” Veronica says, dragging a hand through her hair, adjusting her gem-studded hoop earrings. “Not yet.”
She makes her way over to the stairs and looks down into the darkness ahead. Whatever nightmare awaits her below, she’s ready for it. Time to put an end to all of this.
Time to put an end to the sire.
She descends.
THE WATER’S AT waist level now. Cheryl has her crossbow up and ready to fly, not that she’ll be able to hold off any more than a handful of vamps with it. It feels better than just sitting here, waiting to die, though.
“Hey,” Betty calls. “Is it just me, or does it look like there are less of them now?”
Cheryl scans the watching moroi. Actually—yeah, the crowd does look thinned out. “Where are the others?”
“Look.” Archie sloshes through the water and points to the ballroom behind them. Inside, at least half the vampires are working as one, taking the chairs and tables that are scattered across the room and piling them up in the center. “What are they doing?”
“Building something,” Dilton says, and a shadow passes over his face.
Cheryl looks up and flinches. Veronica’s father is standing directly in front of her, his cold red eyes focused on her. “Not something,” he says. “A gift. For you, Cheryl.”
Her blood runs cold, if it’s possible for her to even get any colder than she already is. “What?”
“You’ll see.” He crouches, looking down at the sinking water level. “Shouldn’t be too long now.” He stands and flicks a hand in Cheryl’s direction. “Then we’ll get you nice and warmed up.”
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Cheryl cocks her crossbow, aiming right at Mr. Lodge’s heart. One move from her and he’ll be dead.
She shuts one eye, narrowing her aim. Bam, she thinks.
And then Betty’s on her. “Don’t!” She pushes the crossbow right as Cheryl lets fly, the bolt careening wild, high in the air, and Mr. Lodge barely reacts, only laughing as he walks away, the vampires parting to let him through and then swallowing him up.
Cheryl glares at Betty. “What did you do that for?”
“You can’t kill Veronica’s dad!” Betty looks aghast. “What would Veronica do? God, Cheryl.”
“You’re talking about the same girl who killed two of her own friends,” Cheryl says. “She knows what might happen. She knows that there’s only one way to stop them when they start coming.” Then she ducks beneath the water to retrieve her weapon, where it fell after Betty’s shove. “What do you want me to do, Betty, just sit here? I’m supposed to let him threaten me?”
“We’re supposed to wait for Veronica to—”
“I know,” Cheryl snaps. “But what if she doesn’t do it, Betty? What if the strigoi kills her first?”
It makes her feel sick to even say it, but look at them. Look at the situation they’re in—they’d be stupid not to consider it. If Veronica doesn’t pull it off, then there’s no magic solution coming to rescue them. They’re in this by themselves, and at the rate the water’s disappearing, they don’t have long to come up with a plan. “Betty,” Cheryl says, and her voice has lost its edge. She’s scared. That’s the honest truth of it. “I don’t want to die tonight.”
Betty puts a hand on Cheryl’s shoulder and shakes her. “You’re not going to die tonight,” she says, and she turns to the boys, raising her voice. “None of us are dying tonight. Do you hear me?”
I hear you, Cheryl thinks. But she raises her crossbow again anyway.
VERONICA SLIPS THROUGH the darkened basement. She’s turned on the light, but the bulb flickers and the glow it gives off is weak at best.
In the back corner was where she saw it last time: the coffin.
And Veronica sees it there again, as if it’s waiting for her. She’s so close she can taste victory, sweeter than the thick chocolate shake she always gets at Pop’s.
When she reaches the coffin, Veronica runs her hands over the top, just like she did that first time. The etched symbol is still as unfamiliar as before, but Veronica ignores it, hooking her fingertips under the lip of the lid instead. Inside here lies the other strigoi, the real sire; she’s sure of it. Open it up, stab a stake through the heart, and everything’s over.
She stops, a breath away from cracking the lid.
That’s true, isn’t it? It’ll all be over the minute she puts her stake into this creature’s chest. Riverdale will return to the way it was before all this mess: Her parents will become human again; her friends will be saved. And Veronica will no longer be a vampire.
It’s that which makes her hesitate. She knew this before, of course she knew this before, but in the rush and heat of the attack at the hotel there had been no time for her to truly consider the ramifications of what she was doing. She had to kill Theodore so fast she didn’t have the luxury of considering the impact his death would have on her.
Veronica stares down at the closed coffin. It’s just her and this strigoi, in this dark lonely basement. Now she has time (You don’t, you don’t have time, think of Betty and Cheryl waiting at the hotel, surrounded) and now she can think about how soon, so soon, she’ll no longer be this new vampire version of herself. She’ll go back to being Human Veronica, and with her comes all the trappings of her former self: the perfect, role-playing daughter-friend-cheerleader she’s always been.
The teenage version of the girl who goes on to be the wife she briefly was upstairs, the woman with the husband she hates and the empty sad heart.
Veronica swallows. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Vampires are monsters. Look at her parents, look at Theodore. If she’s truly good, the light-side vamp she and her frien
ds have cast her as during this whole ordeal, then surely she wants to go back to being human. It’s what a good girl would want.
But I like being a vampire.
That’s the deep-down truth.
There’s no feeling like it, none that Veronica has ever experienced. In her human life she was Veronica Lodge, always trying so hard to be all things at once: hot and funny and kind and smart. Ambitious but not too much, flirty but not too needy. Determined but not greedy. And it was exhausting, draining, to always be trying to do all those things and somehow pulling them off—but at what cost? Trying to convince her father she’s worthy of taking over the company one day when he’ll never believe in her. Spending all that time calculating what will make Archie like her more than Betty; but really, does she even like Archie like that anymore? Or has it always been that she’s stuck in this love triangle because that’s what people expect?
Veronica begins to ease the coffin open, more out of curiosity than anything now. The strigoi inside is powerful enough to play with her perception of reality while being knocked out in this box. Powerful enough to control the minds of all these newly made moroi.
That’s the other part of this that Veronica has grown to love: the sheer power, most of which she hasn’t even gotten to explore yet. Not just the strength, or the speed, but the shape-shifting, the mind trickery that has been used against her so much. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t curious, if she pretended she didn’t want to explore those parts of herself, too. But in the space of just a week she’s gotten into more physical fights than she had in the rest of her life. Actually—she’d never gotten in a physical fight before she turned. And now she can more than handle herself. She casts fear with just a look; she sees it in people’s eyes.
Being a vampire has blown up her existing world, and Veronica—
She’s not sure if she wants to set it back.
The lid slips off the coffin and lands on the basement’s cement floor with a harsh crack. Veronica looks at what’s within and inhales sharply.
“No,” she says quietly. “No no no.”
Inside the coffin the strigoi lies perfectly still, waxy. Hands together at heart height, clasping a single white hydrangea between its palms. And its face—
Veronica holds the confused keening inside.
The strigoi is wearing her face.
It is her, and she is it.
“Not real not real not real,” Veronica finds herself whispering again, but this time she’s not so sure. Maybe it is her. Maybe this is another vision of her future, the life she could have if she remains a vampire forevermore.
A cold blade runs up the length of her spine, and there’s a voice in her head—her own—telling her to do it. To remember her friends, her family, the rest of this town she calls her home, and save them all.
Veronica reaches into the coffin. She just wants to see. She just wants to feel.
Her fingers slip around a cold, waxy wrist, and—
The strigoi snaps her eyes open, grabs Veronica’s wrist, and holds tight, her fingers so cold they sear like a burn. “Hello,” she says. “I’ve been waiting.”
THE STRIGOI RELEASES Veronica and climbs out of the coffin. No; climb is not the right word, Veronica thinks. She doesn’t move like a lowly human so much as slink and shift and creep like a rolling ocean wave slip-sliding onto the shore. She is liquid, melted ice.
“Who are you?” Veronica swallows and licks her dry lips. Her voice is ragged, not strong at all, and she tries again. “I’m going to kill you.”
The strigoi—the mirror version of Veronica—laughs, her head thrown back. “No, you’re not,” she says, and then her face seems to change. Does change: features morphing and rearranging themselves until Veronica’s face has entirely faded and the one that replaces it is different but familiar; Veronica doesn’t know why until the strigoi smiles again, her own smile this time, and the memory snaps into place.
Veronica has seen this girl before. Because she is still a girl, a little taller than Veronica but with a young face, an innocent sheen to her, and it’s the same version of her that lives inside the photograph they saw in that old book. The Finch family portrait.
“Odette,” Veronica breathes. “You’re Odette Finch.”
Odette’s smile widens. “Yes,” she says. “I am.”
Veronica blinks. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“But I am,” Odette says. “Don’t you see?”
“YOU’RE THE STRIGOI. You’re the sire.”
Veronica says it, and Odette makes a pained face. “God, it sounds so boring when you say it that way,” she says. “But you are right. And you’re smart.” Odette gives her a nod. “I didn’t expect you to make it through all those nightmares I conjured up for you. I’m impressed, little girl Lodge.”
Odette Finch died in the fire that wiped out her family, Veronica knows. Except Theodore was supposed to have died in that fire, too, and yet Veronica just put a stake through his heart.
He escaped, she thinks. And so did Odette. “You were trying to stop me,” Veronica says. “But you couldn’t.”
“Stop you?” Odette turns and runs a pale finger along the edge of the coffin’s velvet lining. “No. I was trying to challenge you. See if you would rise to the occasion or fail me. But you’re made of sturdy stuff, I see now. And it pleases me, Veronica. Look at how far you’ve come! If I’m honest, it’s not that I didn’t expect you to make it through all of that up there.” She waves a hand toward the ceiling. “I hoped you would. But I couldn’t make it too easy for you. I had to see that you truly were the girl I thought you might be.”
Veronica shifts her weight, watching Odette warily. “I am going to kill you,” she says. “For what you’ve done to this town, my friends, to me—”
“To you?” Odette rushes to her and has her hand around Veronica’s neck before she can so much as think of moving. “Look at you. Before, you were so weak, and now you can do whatever you want. You can live the kind of life you’ve only dreamed about!”
“What, like you are?” Veronica says, her words choked. “Trapped in a tragic coffin in the basement of somebody else’s house? Yeah, no thank you.”
Odette releases her, pushes her away hard. “You don’t know the half of it,” Odette says.
“I know you’re supposed to be dead.” Veronica rubs at her neck. Odette’s grip is stronger than her father’s, her mother’s, stronger even than Theodore’s. “I know you were supposed to have burned in that fire that killed the rest of your family. Or that everybody believed killed the rest of your family. But here you are.”
“Here I am,” Odette agrees. “A survivor.”
“You and your brother,” Veronica says. “Except—bad news.” She smiles darkly, because she’s almost excited to tell Odette what she did. It’s not like the pain she felt when she killed Reggie and Moose. This time, she’s proud. “I killed him.”
Odette’s eyes flutter closed, and she sighs. “I know,” she says, only slightly mournful. “And I suppose I should thank you, really. Because you did what I couldn’t do.”
“What?” Veronica shakes her head.
No. This isn’t how Odette is supposed to react. She’s supposed to be hurt, in pain, or at the very least act like she is. Veronica destroyed her brother, like Odette is trying to destroy her parents. She should be sickened. “Do you even care? Do you have any feelings at all, or is this what happens when you live for far longer than you ever should have? You become an empty monster, is that it?”
Odette opens her eyes. “You think I don’t have any feelings?”
Odette circles Veronica, brushing at her hair, her dress, the exposed skin on her back. “Would you like to hear a story?” she says, in a singsong voice. “It’s really rather good. Here, sit—”
She shoves on Veronica’s shoulders and Veronica finds herself sinking to the ground, and try as she might, she can’t fight it. “You and I, we’re alike,” Odette says, and her words snake
into Veronica’s ears. “Let me tell you about the night I died.”
IT’S PITCH-BLACK when Odette wakes.
She smells it first: smoke. It takes her a minute to understand what’s happening, why the air around her smells like burning, and then the sleep falls from her and she sees the glow beneath her bedroom door.
“Fire,” she breathes, soft and awestruck. “Fire. Mother!” She almost falls out of bed and runs to her door, the lace edging of her nightgown twisting around her knees. “Father! Theo!”
She touches the door handle and snatches her hand back. “Ah!” It’s monstrously hot, the skin on her fingers and palm instantly swelling where she touched the metal.
Odette coughs. The smoke is thicker than it was only a moment ago, and it’s getting harder to breathe. If she can’t escape through the door—
She turns to her bedroom window. There’s a trellis below her window; she had used it in the past to welcome romantic partners to her bedroom without her parents knowing. Griselda Thomas lost a shoe climbing back down once, and Odette had to get up early and pick through the rosebushes at the side of the house to find it before any of the house staff could.
I can break the window and climb out, she thinks, searching frantically for something to use to smash the glass. Her eyes alight on the chair that accompanies her dressing table.
She can hear the flames now, and it’s a wonder that she slept for so long through the noise of the crackling and burning, through the smoke that’s seeped in and polluted the air surrounding her. Odette picks up the chair and braces herself before ramming it at the glass. The window shatters, the wooden frame groaning as it splinters and then falls apart. It leaves a jagged rim of wood and glass spikes around the hole Odette needs to climb through, and she pulls the heirloom quilt from her bed, uses it to pad the frame. It’ll have to be enough; she doesn’t have anything else on hand to help, nor the time to think too much about it.
Interview with the Vixen Page 20