Page 67 of Thrall
Lucy inhaled sharply. So Dr. Horne, unsurprisingly, overestimated her own power on Vanya. He had no plans to spare Athena, to let her reflect well on Rollins as a graduate. He was going to kill her the moment she was no longer a student. And what could Dr. Horne do to stop it? Lucy doubted she’d even object if the next donation was big enough.
She looked back up to Whitney. She did look noticeably more gaunt than she had just a few nights ago. She and Mila had been so close to the truth the other day, wondering at the number of victims. It hadn’t seemed like enough because Vanya was starving those girls.
“What about your sisters?” Lucy said. It made her nauseous, how easily the word rolled off her tongue. But that was what they were. She herself had felt that pull to them. “Do you think they’d come after you?”
“Don’t know.” Whitney hissed with pain and adjusted her hood. The sun had lowered in the sky, but it still looked excruciating. “Addie’s strange but nice. All she talks about is how happy she is that I’m here, and that we’re all together. Sadie…I don’t know. She looks out for us. She catches rats for me when I’m too tired. But she doesn’t talk much. And when she does, it’s to make people do what he wants. She’s good at it. Even better than he is.”
Whitney glanced over her shoulder, as if expecting to see something there. Lucy couldn’t hear anyone nearby. But Lucy was a thrall, and Whitney was the real thing. Maybe she sensed something Lucy didn’t.
“You said the other night that you’d help me,” Whitney said. “Were you just saying that so I wouldn’t kill you?”
Despite herself, Lucy laughed. “A little. But I do want to help you. I just—we can’t turn you back to what you were. You already know that, right?”
“I do,” Whitney said. Though Lucy could tell that it was another thing, hearing it out loud. “God, why did I even come here? You can’t help me. You can’t even help yourself.”
Lucy winced. That was fair. “Maybe not. But there are other vampires on campus. Vampires who are planning to leave here, to get away from Vanya. If I can get you to them, maybe they’ll take you with them.”
But Whitney’s scowl only deepened. “He’s told me about your friends already. The fossil, the bunny eater. I’m not going vegetarian. I never want to touch another rodent again.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Lucy pressed. “You can feed from people. They’ll even pay you to do it—there’s a whole vampire gig economy or something, I don’t know. They can explain it better than I can. But youwouldget to leave here. You could have an actual life.”
The darker it grew outside, the more striking the shift of Whitney’s eyes was. They looked more silver than yellow now. “A life,” she said. “I’d still be a vampire. People would notice that I don’t eat. Or go out in the daytime. If I stayed around my family long enough, they would notice that I didn’t age. And if I got hungry around them…” Her hands had come up to grip the windowsill. Her knuckles were white. “I’d have to disappear, like Sadie and Addie. Or I’d have to let them figure out what I’ve become. Can your vegetarian friends explain how I’m supposed to live like that?”
Lucy bit her lip. She didn’t have long to consider her response. It was getting darker. It was only a matter of time before Mila came looking for her—and before Vanya noticed that Whitney was gone.
On top of that, she didn’t have an answer. She’d been considering the same things since the moment Laurentius offered to make her a vampire. She had no idea where she would go. What would she eat. Whether she would pretend to be normal for Jillian for a little while, or if she would let her believe that her worst nightmare came true.
But this wasn’t about her. She had a choice—or at least, she had a choice for now. Whitney hadn’t had a choice at all.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “IwishI knew what to tell you. But right now, I think there’s only one question that you need to answer. Are you willing to live this way, or not?”
Whitney didn’t hesitate. There was a ferocity in her eyes that Lucy recognized down to her bones. She’d felt it often enough over the past few days. “I want to live.”
Lucy was smiling as she shut off the water. “Good answer,” she said. “I’m going to call for Mila now. Don’t go anywhere.”
Whitney made an odd face at that. A kind of startled frown. “I know you probably don’t like her,” Lucy said, “but she has to be involved. If we want to get up to the library alive…”
Lucy trailed off. That strange look was still fixed on Whitney’s face. Her mouth was slightly open. Her stare was fixed on the opposite wall. If she were objecting to Mila, she would have said so by now. But she hadn’t said anything.
Whitney staggered forward a half step, her forehead brushing the windowpane. Then, finally, she looked down. Lucy, frozen, followed her gaze.
Whitney was wearing a ratty old academic decathlon shirt, probably the same one she’d been wearing the night she fled Quincey Hall. There were a few prominent holes worn in the fabric. It took Lucy a moment to notice that one of the holes had something protruding through it. A sharp wooden point, directly in the center of Whitney’s chest.
Whitney’s mouth opened wide, as if to scream. And then she began to melt.
Maybemeltwasn’t right. But in Lucy’s horror, she couldn’t think of another word to describe it. Whitney’s eyes dissolved into white, then gushed down her cheeks like tears. Skin melted to muscle; muscle melted to bone; her hair thinned and then crumbled away. She vanished layer by layer. Like a horrible time-lapse of rot. Like a corpse.
And the whole time, Whitney’s jaw was open wide in that terrible silent scream. Lucy’s mouth was open, too, but her scream wouldn’t come, either. There was weight against her wrists, her ankles, her throat. She strained against it. It pressed her still.
Whitney’s bones were dust by the time they hit the ground. And as the last of her crumbled away, Lucy could finally see who was standing behind her.
There was something so normal about the way he was looking at her. It was one of the first things Athena had told her, back at the chapels. That he relied on that normalcy to move beneath notice. But she understood then, for the first time, why she had walked into that kitchen and paid him no mind. His sandy-blond hair was kept in a neat, modern cut. His blue eyes could have been curious, even friendly. He had blandly symmetrical features and cookie-cutter handsomeness, and as he smiled, he could have been anyone. Lucy didn’t see the monster there on first glance. She didn’t even see the Russian aristocrat. She could have passed him dozens of times on the Rollins campus, in another life. She never would have guessed what he was.
She tried to scream again. This time she saw how he stopped her: that he lifted a hand, curled his fingers into a fist. She could feel the ghost of those fingers against her throat.
“Quiet, now,” he said. He must have had a Russian accent at one time. Now his accent was broad, nondescript American. The same voice from the kitchen. The same voice that had told her tohold still.
Tears coursed helplessly down Lucy’s face as she tried to force out a few words. He lifted his hand with a flourish, performatively relaxed his fingers. A little more air slipped down her throat, and he inclined his head. An obliging gesture.
