Page 12 of Thrall
“Okay,” Lucy gasped. She breathed shallowly through her mouth, but that just meant tasting it instead. It was a dull, metallic slide down her throat. Like the taste of a penny, but sharper.
Lucy thought she knew what fear felt like. More than most people her age, at least. Growing up with Jillian, she’d become acquainted with its sounds, its colors, its smells. But she had never been this afraid before. She had never once tasted this.
And when the nurse withdrew the needle, pressed the cotton ball to the tiny drop of blood, the smell was snuffed like a candle.
The dorm was empty when Lucy returned.
As the door swung open, the shadows bent, long and jagged, around the light from the hallway. Lucy checked twice for signs of life, for a lump under the quilt or a missing shower caddy. But for the first time since Lucy moved in, Whitney wasn’t there.
Maybe she’d decided to go for a walk. Or maybe she was at the library. Lucy seemed to recall Whitney saying, at some point, that the library was too noisy to get anyrealwork done. Maybe she’d decided to try anyway?
Either way. It should have been a relief to Lucy, to catch her breath in private. But standing there in the quiet, it didn’t feel like much of a relief.
She scrubbed at her face and let her bag slip off her shoulder. Getting herself to the health center had been the one thing keeping her more or less upright. Now that it was over, the last of her reserves were bleeding out. Maybe she could at least take advantage of the relative peace and lie down.
Lucy tugged off her dress, crawled into an oversized shirt. She folded herself onto her creaky, extra-long twin mattress. And she balled Mila’s cardigan up underneath her chin. She’d have to return it later. For now, the acrylic felt cool and soft between her fingers.
She didn’t have to close her eyes. They pulled shut slowly, like weighted shades. The sun was a deep, insistent gold behind the blinds. She wasn’t sure she’d ever slept this early. For a second, she wasn’t sure she could.
But another wave of exhaustion landed hard, tugging at her ankles. This time, she let it take her under.
Four hours later, something that was not Lucy Easting sat up in her bed.
Lucy woke like she was surfacing from water.
The air was thick and damp when she gasped it in. But there was a breeze moving on her skin, lukewarm as breath. There was a chorus of frog song overhead. And a few feet away, the tree line sat patiently.
She was standing outside, in the field across from her dorm. In her pajamas, without shoes. And the low afternoon light she had fallen asleep to was long, long gone. The night was deep around her. So deep that the pond in the center of the field looked like a hole in the earth.
The sidewalk lights whirled as she spun around. There was no one with her in the quad that she could see—and she could see surprisingly well, despite the dark. Most of the lights in the windows were off.
And yet something about the dark felt very…full. As she stood, scrambling for her bearings, she found her eyes drawn once, then twice, to the same corner of the woods.
I don’t want to be here. It was a hilariously inadequate thought. But her whole body screamed it.
Between the low light and the surge of adrenaline, all four buildings looked the same. She darted to the wrong dorm first. And once she correctly located Quincey’s front entrance, she realized, with a jolt, that she didn’t have her ID for the card swipe. She knocked softly, at first. Then, when she remembered that the RA’s dorm was a ways down the hall, she pounded with both fists.
She forgot, until she saw the rumpled figure emerge, exactly who the building’s RA was. But making a better second impression wasn’t her first priority at the moment.
Lucy?Mila mouthed, her brown eyes narrowed in sleepy confusion. She padded across the hall and, with aclick, pulled open the heavy outer door. “What’s wrong?” she rasped. “Are you okay?”
“Sorry.” Lucy’s own voice startled her: It was a cracked whisper even rougher than Mila’s. Her throat felt sore. “I think I was sleepwalking.”
Mila’s brow smoothed out, softening the rest of her face. She moved to the side of the door’s threshold, motioning for Lucy to come in.
“You’re certainly having a day, aren’t you?” she muttered. “Is your room unlocked, you think? Or is your roommate there to let us in?”
“I…” Lucy blinked, hard. Had Whitney come home? She was usually a light sleeper, so she didn’t think she’d missed it. Though she usually wouldn’t sleep through climbing out of bed, descending a flight of stairs, and walking outside, either. “I’m not sure.”
“I’ll get my keys and walk you up,” Mila said. “Wait here a second?”
Lucy watched Mila disappear around the corner toward her room, then slumped back against the textured cool of the concrete of the wall.
She could feel one last bead of sweat slipping down her neck—a slow, lukewarm slide. Absently, she reached up to swipe it away with two fingers.
They came away red.
And for the second time that day, she smelled it. That bright metallic tang.
