Page 60 of Thrall
“Don’t get in her head,” Lucy snapped.
“Frankly, I don’t need to,” Hiro said. “It’s pouring out of her every time she looks at you. She thinks that this is how he must have looked before he died. And she’s probably right.”
“You need to stop attending classes, at the very least,” Laurentius said. “They’re an unnecessary drain on your energy.”
“I’m not doing that,” Lucy said. “If I survive this, I’m going to end up weeks behind.”
“And if you don’t survive this, you’ll never attend classes again,” Laurentius said. “Seems like simple math to me.”
“I came here to go tocollege,” she shot back. “If I don’t actually get to go to college, all of this would have been for nothing.”
“That’s a patently ridiculous thing to say,” said Laurentius. “You came here because you wanted to live your life, correct? As of now, your classes are a risk to your survival. Why not cut them out?”
“Dear,” Hiro said gently. “Perhaps this is one of those things we no longer understand. Obsession is a very human foible, isn’t it?”
The word stopped Lucy short. “I’m not obsessed.”
“Oh, child.” Hiro’s sympathy had shifted over into pity. Lucy had much preferred the sympathy. “Your leader has devoted three years to chasing Vanya’s shadow. Your archer still half believes she should trade her life for the one she lost. And you’ve traveled all this way, far from your only family, because your own home felt like rot and decay to you. Even your friend, the one who got hurt yesterday, would risk her life for the kind of loyalty I doubt many of her peers would give her in turn. Obsession is the mortal’s bread and butter. Even little Vanya still carries his grudges from life.”
Lucy sat back on the bed. The fight, for the time being, had gone out of her. “You know what he was like when he was alive?”
“I only know what he told us, back when we were on better terms,” Hiro said. “You read that article I sent you, didn’t you?”
Lucy nodded. “He was a Russian aristocrat.”
“And as he tells it, he was the darling of the old empire,” Hiro said with a grand wave of a hand. “A prodigious fighter, a talented musician. A playmate of Tsar Nicholas’s little daughters. And in the years leading up to his death, a loyal soldier to his honored father and brother.” He took a sip of his tea. Lucy wondered if it tasted like anything. “Bullshit, of course. His thoughts are almost as open as a mortal man’s. He was a second son. He’s never gotten over being a second son. He died like a second son, cowering under a table and watching his parents beg for the life of his brother. And worse, it was some passing monster that brought his family to its end. If the Bolsheviks had gotten them months later—well, at least that would have been a story.”
“He’s not what I’d call a complicated specimen,” Laurentius said. “People like Ivan Volkov fall into two molds. They enjoy their neglect, or they come to resent it. I don’t think you have to guess which type our boy falls into. He was never given the keys to the kingdom, so he decided he had to create one.”
“Three college students aren’t a kingdom,” Lucy said.
“You assume he’s in a hurry,” Laurentius said. “And if he gets his way, it won’t be three for much longer.”
Lucy’s head swam, her mind full enough to burst. Hiro rose gracefully to his feet and crossed the room to squeeze her shoulder.
“I should go entertain your lovely bodyguard before she shoots us both,” he said. “Why don’t you and Laurentius stay and chat for a while longer?”
Apparently, it wasn’t a difficult process, leaving someone’s mind. In the space of a blink, Hiro was there, and then gone.
She lifted her attention to Laurentius’s clouded face. “I apologize if he seemed flippant,” he finally said. “Human nature was of interest to him in life. It has remained so in his undeath. I suppose to humans, it sounds insensitive.”
Lucy summoned a smile.God. She really was tired. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s not as insensitive as you.”
Laurentius actually laughed. Just once, but he made no attempt to hide it. “Yes,” he said, “that’s true.”
The silence that followed was expectant. Lucy had the feeling that she was being invited to explain why she was here. But she waited until Laurentius put the question into words. “You didn’t really come here to practice something you already know, did you? Are you doubting your human friends?”
“Not doubting…exactly,” Lucy said.Doubtmade it seem like it was their fault, somehow. It was the furthest thing from their fault. But still. “We took a risk, and Natalie paid for it. If we take more risks, we’ll probably keep on paying for it. But…if we keep playing it safe. If we keep waiting for him to make a stupid mistake. Then Mila thinks I might not last.”
She confessed the next part much more quietly. “And I think she’s right.”
Laurentius’s ever-present look of consternation had faded into the background again. His moments of blankness no longer scared Lucy. But they did mean he was thinking of something that he didn’t want her to read.
“Those aren’t your only options,” he said.
Lucy straightened. Even in her mind, Mila’s twin bed creaked. “I’m listening.”
But Laurentius didn’t have the face of someone who was presenting a solution. His scowl carved deep lines across his handsome face. “It’s not a cure-all,” he said. “And in some respects, it presents more problems than solutions. We’d obviously have to move up our departure timeline—none of us will want to be on this campus when he finds out. But in many ways, we’ve just been dragging our feet, anyway. It will be good to leave. And we don’t have much to carry—not much that matters.”
