Page 18 of Thrall
“You already know that, caller number thirty-two,” Pallas said. “Don’t you?”
All of a sudden, Lucy’s fingers itched to turn the light back on. It didn’t feel safe anymore—it just felt like one more extension of the night beyond.
“I do,” she whispered. Because she did. The sunlight. The scent of blood. The two neat puncture marks. The simplest answer. And the correct one.
“It’s okay to be scared,” the host said.
Lucy shook her head tightly. “I can’t afford to be scared.”
“You can,” Pallas said. “Listen to me. Fear is a good thing. Fear wants to keep you alive. You’ll need it for what’s to come.”
“Am I…” Lucy thought she understood then why the host was using a euphemism on the air. The next words felt like tempting fate to say out loud. “Am I turning into a vampire?”
Pallas hummed, and it shivered through the airwaves. “The answer is complicated,” she said. “But I don’t think you are. Not yet. It’s not so easy to turn someone into something that they’re not. Like anything, there’s a…process.”
“Is that what he wants to do?” Lucy said. “Or does he just want to kill me?”
When Pallas spoke next, there was a terrible tenderness in her voice that Lucy wasn’t sure she wanted. She was too young to remember her father dying. But she was there for every minute of her grandmother’s hospice care, and then her grandfather’s. She knew the voice for breaking inevitable news.
“I don’t know what he wants,” Pallas said. “But there’s one thing I can tell you for sure. The fact that you walked away from that party Friday night? The fact that you’re still here right now, speaking to me? That’s not mercy, or carelessness. That is by design. Over the past three years, we’ve observed a specific pattern from our friend. He does not finish his chosen victims over the course of an evening. He allows them to run, and then he follows. For days, sometimes. Because he has the luxury of toying with you. Have you figured out why yet?”
Lucy pressed a hand to her mouth to stop the whimper in her throat. She hadn’t figured it out. Not before now. But in the dark of the room, she could see the echo of it: his face, still blank in her memory, turning toward her.Hold still.
“Because I’ll do whatever he says,” she whispered.
“You will,” Pallas said. “He has that power over us. But he especially has that power over you. Once he drinks from you—you are his to control. You could try to run. I’d help you, if I thought it would do any good. But all he’d have to do is crook a finger and you’d walk right back to him. He has a hold over you far stronger than your own free will. Stronger than most people’s will, I’d think.”
Pallas’s voice went a little softer. “But here’s the thing. Maybe I’m underestimating your will. Maybe he is, too.”
Lucy squeezed her eyes shut. It didn’t make much difference, here in the darkness. She could feel that bone-deep exhaustion at the edge of her awareness, threatening to tug her all the way down. Put down the phone, it said. Unlock the doors. Let whatever happens happen.
This time, though, she could track a softer, more insistent urge underneath. Like when she was twelve and home alone, and realized, in the midst of a dead sleep, that she’d left the door unlocked. She had almost dismissed the sense of wrongness then. Almost rolled over and gone back to sleep. The urge to wake up, to put a name to the wrongness, had been stronger.
But this particular wrongness was something different. It wasn’t instinct. It wasn’t her subconscious. The thoughts only felt like hers if she didn’t look at them too closely. And now that shewaslooking at them closely, this urge to give up, to give herself over—it didn’t match her voice. It was as if the font was different, the color was different. If her own thoughts were in prosaic black-and-white, these thoughts were red.
Hold still.
She pressed her nails into her palm. The bite of it was gentle, grounding.I want to live, she thought, louder than those red thoughts. It felt more impossible than it ever had. But it was still as true as it ever was.
“Will you help me?” Lucy said. It was smaller than she meant it to sound.
For the first time since Lucy turned on the broadcast, Pallas’s voice faltered. “Before we go any further,” she said, “you should know this. I can tell you what I know. I can tell you what I think will help you. But what we’re fighting? It’s already under your skin. Iwillhelp you, caller number thirty-two. It’s just that my help means nothing if you don’t fight back. Do you understand?”
Lucy laughed wetly. Fighting again. She was so tired of fighting.
But that had never stopped her before.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m way ahead of you.”
“We’ll be in touch”????
Lucy sighed as she read Natalie’s text, shifting a few times in the narrow chair/desk combo before coming to the conclusion that there was no comfortable way to sit in it.
That’s what she said.
Natalie replied.
You’re really going to tell someone they’re turning into a vampire and then hit them with a “talk later”?
