Page 38 of Thrall
Her head spun, more vertigo than dizziness. She pried her eyes open to orient herself.
She was no longer in the studio at all. She was lying on dirt, breathing in the thick and wet mountain air. And far overhead, a startlingly vast blanket of stars shivered against the sky.
Lucy sat up. The sharp movement wasn’t enough to jar her out of her trance, or whatever this was. She could hear murmuring in her ear: Athena’s tone and cadence, the words inaudible. She clutched a nearby root, as if without it she’d go spinning right off the side of the earth, and strained her heightened hearing until she could make something out.
“It’s all right, Lucy,” Athena was saying. “Keep breathing.”
Lucy made herself breathe deep. She was dreaming—or something like it, anyway. She’d never had a dream look so vivid before.
Cautiously, Lucy got her legs under herself and pushed herself up. That ever-present spatial awareness had started to seep in again, even in the probably unreal landscape around her. It noted each sound and sensation. The cresting of the wind. The blades of grass against her bare ankles. The crunch of the dirt.
It felt real. As real as the cushions and wood paneling of the studio had felt just seconds ago. But already she’d been on the Rollins campus enough nights, with or without the vampire’s infection, to know that something important was missing. The nights here on the mountain were alive: with frog and cicada song, with the crawling crackle of ticks and ants through the dirt, with the rustle of nocturnal animals picking their way through the leaves. The sounds of the living were absent here. As far as Lucy could tell, the only living thing in earshot was herself.
“Athena?” she said.
“Right here.”It was a soft, barely audible murmur in her ear. “Are you all right?”
Lucy’s eyes snapped to the direction of the voice, though she already knew there was no one there. It did sound as if it was coming from the direction where Athena had been sitting when she closed her eyes. She wasn’t here on the mountain, though. She was back there, lying on the floor of the recording studio, with Natalie standing protectively at the door.
She hoped that was the case, anyway.
“I’m okay,” she said into the quiet. “I think.”
She turned in a slow circle. And she realized then that, like a slowly loading video game, the empty landscape around her was gradually filling itself in. The longer she looked, the more the faint shadows in the dark gained definition. The concrete rectangle of Quincey Hall in the distance. The tree line, directly ahead of her, leaves undulating in a wind she could neither hear nor feel. And directly beside her—
“Jesus,” Lucy blurted out. Because when she turned, she saw herself, just inches away from her own face. But it wasn’t a mirror image of her. It was a Lucy with fresh, red blood dotting the curve of her neck. A single trickle had slid down, staining the collar of her sunshine-yellow romper. The outfit she’d worn the night of the party.
Lucy shifted to look at herself, though she was hesitant to get too close. The other Lucy’s face was perfectly slack. Her pupils were flat, dull coins, blown wide in the dark. She might have been on her feet, but she didn’t look conscious. She didn’t really look alive.
That silent wind seemed to stop. The leaves stilled; the grass stopped rippling. And then, beyond the tree line, barely audible, Lucy did hear something.
Lucy, something whispered.
Every hair on Lucy’s arms pricked straight up. It was a gut-dropping chill, the kind of purely animal fear she was becoming more and more familiar with now. But if Lucy had learned anything in the past several days, it was that she had no more time to freeze in the face of that fear. However overpowering it felt, that terror was information. It meant that she was looking in the right direction.
So she shifted. She looked past the trees and into the woods. And she found two gleaming pairs of eyes nestled in the leaves. Eyes that were wholly focused on the Lucy in yellow.
Those eyes belonged to two girls. At least, they looked like girls. The one nearest to Lucy was even taller than Athena—her jeans weren’t quite long enough on her, stopping just above the ankle. Her hair was fine and straight and sleek, the kind of hair Lucy used to wish she had. When that intangible wind picked up again, her hair rocked around her like an empty swing.
And next to her, a little more nestled in the trees, was a girl who was keenly, maddeningly familiar, though Lucy was sure she didn’t know her. It wasn’t the face Lucy recognized, or the curly hair. It was the freckles. They were scattered across her broad face and her smile lines as wildly as the stars that scraped the sky above them. They were the only parts of her with any real color. The rest of her was pale and crinkled, somehow. Like a crumpled poster.
“Sadie,” Lucy whispered.
Neither of the girls moved. But both pairs of eyes smoothly, silently shifted from one Lucy to the other. And with a steady glide, like two swimmers in tandem, they opened their mouths.
Lucy gasped and stumbled, but there was nowhere to go. There was firm pressure at her back, like a wall. She twisted against it, tried to open her mouth, tried to moveanywhere.But as she grasped for purchase, someone took her arm and held it down.
“Lucy,” Athena said. The voice was right in her ear now. “Can you hear me? You’re in the studio. We’re alone here. You’re safe.”
Lucy blinked furiously. The stars had gone white-hot above her and melted together, coalescing into a single painfully bright light. It took her a full moment of squinting against it to realize they were no longer stars at all. She was looking up into the fluorescent light of the Pallas Radio recording studio. She couldn’t back away because she was still lying on the floor. As she’d suspected, she’d never left the studio at all.
And above her, where she’d always been, was Athena. She sat back, carefully removing her grip on Lucy’s arm, though her hand hovered at the ready. “Lucy?” she said. “What happened just now?”
Lucy rubbed her eyes with a shaking hand. And behind her eyelids, she could still see those two girls. Their tandem movements. Their pointed teeth.
“Addison and Sadie,” she said. “They’re not dead. They’re vampires.”
There was a strange, rote choreography to being hunted by a vampire. Not half an hour after learning that Sadie Grainger and Addison Greene were still somewhere on the Rollins campus, Lucy was frowning down at her class schedule on her phone. Her after-dark fencing class would obviously need to be dropped, which was too bad—a fencing foil wouldn’t do much harm to Vanya, but it would be nice to be the one pointing a weapon at someone, for once.
