Page 28 of Thrall
But Mila saw her. And whatever was happening to Lucy—to Mila, it was the worst possible outcome. Lucy felt very sure of that.
At the very least, her eyes were dry by the time she reached her door. Her face was probably a bit puffy. But thankfully Whitney, unlike Mila, was rarely all that interested in looking at her.
Lucy turned the key in the lock. And the door swung open into a darkened room.
She blinked. Her vision was much sharper in the dark after the bite—she supposed that was the infection, preparing her body for a transformation that would hopefully never come—but the sight startled her nonetheless. Whitney disliked the overhead fluorescents, but she had more floor and desk lamps than Lucy had ever seen one person fit into a small space. It didn’t seem like her to hunch over her laptop in the dark like this.
“Whitney?” Lucy called. There was an odd stillness to the room, one that was rare with Lucy’s newly sharpened hearing. If she hadn’t been looking directly at Whitney sitting at the desk, she would have thought no one was there.
“What do you want?” Whitney said, without turning away from her laptop. “I’m busy.”
Be nice, Lucy reminded herself. If she survived the next several days, she had big dreams of making it through the rest of the year without her or Whitney killing each other. “Got it,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m staying with my friend for a couple days, so I’m going to pack a few things really quickly. You don’t have to turn the light on or anything.”
Whitney didn’t seem to have any objections to that—which was good, because Lucy wasn’t planning on honoring any. She sidled in between the bed and the makeshift closet, tossed her duffel bag on the bed, and started piling up any clothes within reach that looked comfortable. A few days’ worth of clothes was probably enough. She could always come back for more if she lived longer than that.
She took stock of her packed bag. This was probably all she needed to do, for now. The fewer details she gave Whitney, the better—Mila would probably get in trouble if the school found out there was a first-year staying in her room. Even a first-year who was at least a year older than her.
Lucy snorted quietly. If Whitney thought she was a party girl now, Lucy wondered how she’d react to the idea of Lucy shacking up with an RA on the first day of classes.
“Shut the fuck up,” Whitney said under her breath.
Lucy’s whole spine stiffened.Be nice, she reminded herself again. Not to preserve her relationship with Whitney this time. But because her senses weren’t the only thing that had sharpened since the bite. Every feeling that used to be effortlessly swallowable now brimmed at the top of her throat. And of those newly crystallized feelings, the strongest was her anger.
“Whitney,” Lucy said. She thought it was remarkably calm, considering. “Don’t tell me to shut up.”
Whitney turned, just a fraction, in her chair. Her pupils were massive in the dark. “I don’t understand why you’re here,” she said tonelessly. “I told Res Life that I strongly preferred a single.”
Lucy blinked. “Yeah,” she said, “I think there’s a lottery, or—”
“Shutup!” Whitney said. “God! If you’re not talking, you’re moving. If you’re not moving, you’re breathing.”
Lucy stuck her toothbrush into her bag. More accurately, she slammed it. “Yeah, Whitney,” she said. “People need to breathe to live. You can put that in your thesis.”
Whitney’s fist came down onto her desk with a bang. A sharp groan and a caving sound, like a car wreck. And Lucy, who could now see in the dark more clearly than she’d ever seen in daylight, saw that the cheap metal and laminate had crumpled like paper around Whitney’s hand.
In the stillness that followed, Lucy could hear her own body with perfect clarity. The dutiful passages of her blood. Her breath, growing shallower and faster. It was what fear sounded like. Her vitals setting a stage for those first gasps of fight or flight.
Across the room, Whitney’s own body was silent. Lucy could have read it as absolute calm. But then she heard the noise in the pit of Whitney’s chest. The low, guttural roll of a growl. And when it made its way to the top of her throat, Whitney’s lips peeled back, showing all her teeth.
At the front of her mouth, two pointed canines glinted in the light of her laptop.
Lucy shook her head. She was barely conscious of doing it. “This isn’t funny.”
As if Whitney were the type to play jokes. As if there was any way Whitney could have known what had happened to Lucy last Friday.
“Maybe it is funny.” The air whistled in Whitney’s throat, like water filling a broken jar. “I’ve never been good at knowing what was funny.”
A noise escaped Lucy, too small and smothered to even be called a whimper. Her mind whirred, piecing together the edges of the past weekend. That first text from Whitney. The one or two unanswered texts during her absence. The knock that had woken her last night, around three thirty a.m. The gray of Whitney’s face when Lucy eased open the door.
Forgot my keys, she’d said.
And Lucy remembered how, half-asleep and already preoccupied with her own relief, she had stepped aside.Okay, she’d said.Well. Come in.
Whitney hadn’t been with family. She had never even left campus.
The strap of the duffel bag dropped from Lucy’s fingers. When her foot slid back, it bumped one of the legs of her bed.
“It happened quick,” Whitney said tonelessly. “He emailed me the day after your stupid party. Said he’d heard about my thesis from his advisor, thought we could collaborate on this paper he was working on. I didn’t know why a philosophy grad student would have heard of my paper, let alone his advisor, but I thought—best-case scenario, a publication credit while I’m still an undergrad. And if he’s full of shit, I’ll walk away.”
