Page 25 of Thrall
“He didn’t bite me,” Pallas said. “I got very, very lucky that night. If I hadn’t run through here completely by chance, I don’t think I’d be talking to you right now.”
Lucy could hear Pallas’s quick rabbit heartbeats again in the silence that followed. “What does he look like?”
“You don’t remember?” Pallas said.
“I don’t remember anything,” Lucy said.
Pallas nodded. “If he passed us now,” she finally said, “you’d think he was anyone else. That’s how he hunts. He just looks normal.”
Lucy’s own pulse fluttered loudly—loudly enough that it felt impossible that no one but she could hear it. He looked like a person. That was what she remembered, too. But in the days since, the thought of it no longer made sense to her. What kind of thing could upend her life—so many lives—so completely, and still look human?
“Why did you stay here, after?” Natalie said. “I think I would have transferred.”
It was a bit blunter than Lucy would have put it, but Pallas didn’t seem to mind the question. “That would have made sense, right?” she said. “I was like you, Lucy. I got here late. Did my first year at community college to save money, then transferred in starting my sophomore year. I was planning to wait until my junior year, actually. But my biology teacher at the community college sent one of my papers to the chair of the neuroscience department here at Rollins, and he recruited me. Got me a special scholarship, too.”
That same clouded look passed over her face again. “Stubbornness really is a fatal flaw, isn’t it? I guess I thought—why do I have to give this up, just for him?”
“You worked hard to get here,” Lucy said. She couldn’t say she didn’t understand that.
“And it was more than that, too,” Pallas said. “I had been here for just a few days when I was attacked, like you. There was no one I could talk to, except the campus police, and they didn’t believe me. They thought it was one of the underground frats pulling a prank on some poor transfer student. No one looked into it. And I knew that if I didn’t stay, no one ever would.”
Pallas looked almost sheepish as she shrugged. “I guess I have something in common with Natalie, here. I don’t like to see people hurt on my watch, either. But even after I started Pallas Radio, I was out of my depth. Addison disappeared right before winter break the same year I was attacked. Sadie disappeared almost a year ago, a few weeks after classes started. And it’s not just Rollins students. If you know what to look for, you see signs of him in the news around here: hunting accidents, lost hikers, strange nursing home deaths, mauled rabbits.”
“But Rollins students seem to have a special place in his heart,” Mila said grimly. “He always comes back here. And when he finds a victim, he toys with them first. People have called into the show about Sadie and Addison. They say that they looked strange and sick in the days before they disappeared. So if we see a student acting erratically or looking ill, we keep an eye on them.”
Pallas nodded. “Mila and I both took jobs on campus that would bring us into contact with as many students as possible. We have the show, of course. But Mila also has her RA work. I started peer counseling, volunteering with orientation groups. We had a lot of false alarms over the years. We missed Sadie completely. But thankfully Mila didn’t miss you.”
Reluctantly, Lucy turned her attention back to Mila, who was studying the weapon in her lap. “You knew right away,” she said.
“About two seconds after we started talking,” Mila said. “So I went and told the boss, here, and we tried to figure out how we could approach you without scaring you off. Guess we had some mixed success there.”
“Well, now that youhavefound me…what do we do?” Lucy asked.
Pallas laughed. It was the most uncertain sound Lucy had heard from her so far. “The only thing wecando,” she said. “We have to stop him from hurting you again. Which means we have to kill him.”
Once again, Lucy was not a fan of this new, microscopic awareness of her body. When she swallowed, she could feel the movement of it all the way down. “I mean…” she said. “I’d be all for it. But aren’t there like…professionals?”
“You’d think,” Mila said. “But in the past three years, Pallas and I pulled together money to hire two people who turned out to be scammers, and one probably legit guy who fell down a steam tunnel halfway through the night and broke his ankle. If Buffy Summers exists, she’s not making house calls. And when our only real resource is the internet, it’s not that easy to tell who’s real and who’s role-playing.”
Mila ran one careful finger down the loose arrow now resting at her side. It seemed that one more piece of vampire lore was true—and Mila expected to drive that arrow right through their “friend’s” heart. “So if someone has to kill him,” she continued, “I’m it.”
“You will,” Pallas said. “This is as close as we’ve ever been.”
Mila straightened, and her face lost a little of its characteristic ease. Though her next wordswere addressed to Lucy, she was still looking at Pallas out of the corner of her eye. “I’m ready for whatever I need to do,” she finally said. “The problem is, he’s ready, too.”
Lucy could feel Natalie trying to catch her eye, though she didn’t dare return the gesture in front of their audience. But she noticed the same thread of tension that Natalie must have. It was the first time since Pallas arrived that Mila seemed just slightly out of step with her.
“All right…” Lucy said. “One more question. You said you don’t think I’m turning into a vampire on the phone the other night. So whatishappening to me?”
The tension in Pallas’s face shifted. It was still uncertainty, but a kind she seemed more comfortable with. “It’s hard to say this for sure,” she said. “My sources are basically the weirdest self-published books on the internet and monsterfucker forums that may or may not be a lot of wishful thinking. If what I’ve read is true, the bite causes some kind of preliminary infection, something that primes your body for the transformation. But without the reciprocal consumption of blood, the transformation isn’t complete. Basically, he can’t just drink from you. You have to drink from him in return.”
“And let’s say I don’t do that,” Lucy pressed. “Does the infection go away?”
“I think so?” Pallas grimaced. “Again, I’m relying mostly on vampire dating forums, here. But I’ve seen more than one poster on those sites warning against letting your partner feed from you too much in a short period of time. The only one of them to elaborate just wrote that it made things, quote, ‘weird.’”
“Weird how?” Lucy said.
Pallas’s mouth thinned. “I found a thread where someone asked exactly that,” she said. “But they took it to DMs.”
