I had another strange ocean dream. I was standing on the shore of a black ocean at night, and the sand beneath my feet kept shifting, no matter how hard I tried to stay still. I had to walk along it, faster and faster, until I was running, and it still kept sucking away. The tide went out and I ran down past the waterline, hoping the water-packed sand would be less treacherous, but then the stars were obscured by a huge wave of black and a roaring sound began—
My nightmare was interrupted by a familiar weight at the end of my bed. I moved my feet so that Minnie could come near.
But the weight increased. It rolled alongside me, and I wondered if it was part of my dream, or one of those dreams—even worse than the one I’d been having—where you wake up and none of your limbs work, the kind that inspired alien-abduction stories, as if aliens were the worst things there were. The weight crept higher, to be beside me, taking up more space than Minnie ever had. It fit against me, hip to hip, back to chest, the curve of legs to legs. Frizzy hair tickled underneath my chin.
I don’t think I could have been so still if I hadn’t been so exhausted. But I didn’t blink my eyes open, or scream, or shift around in bed. I thought one thing, What if she bites me? but I wasn’t alarmed by this, only deeply tired at the thought of having to be afraid again.
And then she turned to pick up my arm from where it’d been folded up against my chest to wrap it around herself, and tuck my hand against her cheek. I thought I could feel the beating of her heart, but then realized that was silly, that it just must be my own. Exhausted, I inhaled the sweet-sour scent of Anna’s still unwashed hair, sighed, and went back to sleep.
When I woke up I was stiff and my room was pitch-black. I checked my face for a blindfold, and then remembered the blackout sheet I’d put up over my own dark curtains. I went through my pockets and found my cell phone.
Seven fifty-five. Dark outside now, for sure, and I wasn’t any less tired. I sat up in my bed and turned on my lamp, registering that thanks to my prior exhaustion, not only was I still filthy, but all of my bedsheets were as well. I turned toward my closet, and saw its door was open.
“Ladies?” I asked, then, “Minnie?”
No response from the living room, but I heard a frightened meow from beneath my bed. I knelt down on the floor and reached out to Minnie with my hand.
“I promise you, Minnie, when I’m done with this, you’re never going to have to hide again.”
Minnie licked my extended finger as if she was sealing a pact, and I rose to walk to the living room.
Halfway down my short hallway, I realized my living room smelled. Not like fresh dirt or old sex, but like blood and bodily fluids. I ran the last few steps to turn and see Sike sprawled out on my couch like a homicide victim, and Anna nowhere to be found.
“Sike?” I dropped to my knees beside her. My instinct was to put fingers to her throat, to feel for a pulse, but—to do so would have been to stick my fingers into one of several open gashes. “Dear God, Sike—” I put my hand in front of her nose instead, and watched for her chest to rise.
“Mr. Weatherton?” she asked.
“No. It’s Edie. Stay here,” I said, though she wasn’t in danger of going anywhere. I ran to the bathroom for the plastic bin where I kept everything I’d ever “stolen” from the hospital. Maybe a hundred alcohol swipes were littered over a dense core of gauze, half-finished rolls of tape, and other stray hospital things. I grabbed a towel on my way out.
“We should wash all this out, Sike.” Sike didn’t look drained so much as she looked gnawed upon. There were multiple puncture wounds, so many that they merged together—like Anna had bitten her and then shaken her like a merciless dog. Any career Sike might have had in modeling was now at an end.
“She needed it,” Sike said. “I told her it was okay.”
I tried to parse the little girl that’d snuggled beside me, asleep, with the thing that’d left these marks, and failed. “Don’t make excuses for her. She’s mostly immortal. You’re not. Can you sit up?”
She tried to nod, hissed in pain, then tilted forward ever so slightly. I shoved the towel beneath her, for all the good it’d do now—my poor couch was ruined. I got a washcloth, soaked it in saline—an intentional hospital steal, after I’d once gotten a really bad cut on my knee—and patted her neck a few times with it, wishing the washcloth were sterile too.
“It’ll heal. Mr. Weatherton will help.”
“Help how? More blood?” I opened up every piece of gauze I had and moistened them with saline. We hadn’t broached the topic of Anna yet. I couldn’t leave her like this.
Sike smiled weakly. “I am feeling human again.”
I snorted. I folded up the wet pieces of gauze and wedged them into the flayed pieces of her neck. Then I found a roll of pressure tape and pulled off strips long enough to keep them there.
I did a serviceable job. By the time I was done, she looked all right. Even paler than usual, which was pretty damn pale, but instead of a victim she looked like an accident survivor.
“You could have woken me up, you know,” I said when I was through. When had this happened? Before Anna’d curled up against me, or after?
“I was a bit occupied, you know,” she said with my tone back at me.
“What, with all the bleeding?”
Sike pursed her lips, then reached up to the back of the couch and pulled herself upright. The towel tried to follow her until I yanked it off.
“Well,” I said, looking around my room. “She’s not in my oven, is she?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” If I had had my old dining room set, this was where I would have sat down, on one of the extra chairs it would have provided. I sat down, cross-legged, on the floor. “So where is she?”
“She went out.”
“Out … where?”
“You don’t know what it was like. You can’t possibly understand,” Sike began. “She has not been truly free for a century—”
“What?” I put my hands to my head. It felt like the wind was punched out of me. “Are you kidding? She left? Why?”
“It’s not for one such as I to question—”
“What. The. Hell.” I pointed at her neck. “Are you really going to feed me the party line?”
“You don’t understand—” She tried to look away, then gasped in pain at the movement.
“What’s there to understand? She almost killed you!”
Sike grimaced. Unfortunately for her, I liked my nursing license too much to steal narcotics.
“What happened at that garage today?”
“I saved you and your zombie boyfriend.”
“Don’t pretend that was altruism,” I said, and she snorted. “Why’d you even come to save me, if you were going to let her go?”
“Because—” Sike began, and her voice faltered.
“Because,” I began, to prompt her, but then I realized the truth. “Because it was never about me, was it.”
Sike closed her eyes. “I was sent to save her, to feed her the blood of the Rose Throne forefathers, so that she would feel indebted to us, as much as one such as she can.”
I could feel my brows furrow on my forehead. They’d sent Sike in like a human blood bag. I was revolted anew.
“But I chose to come,” she continued, and after a long pause she added, “Because I knew what it was like.”
“Tell me. I want to know.”
Sike finally opened her eyes, and stared me down. “Do you really think Sike’s my original name? And how old do you think I am?”
The pictures on Mr. November’s floor. The other girls he’d written “saved.” “You knew his name was Yuri,” I answered her.
Sike swallowed and nodded. The motion made her wince in pain. “Once upon a time, I had another name. Another life. I had a family, and a home. The Zver ruined that for me, kept me alive with the dregs of vampire blood long enough to break everything I knew inside. Yuri—the man you killed”—and here her stare hardened at me, and I realized why she’d hated me, from the beginning, when we’d first met—“Yuri saved me from them. It was accidental—he was looking for her. But when he found me, he rescued me, and others like me, and took us to the Rose Throne.”
I tensed. “Did they treat you well?”
“Well enough. He bartered for our safety. Said that if he ever found Anna, he’d give her to them.”
“So if the Rose Throne knew that the Zverskiye were…” I paused, unsure what to call what Anna and Sike had gone through—
“They would never act on their own. Yuri could be their tool, and they would sometimes give him blood, but they could never announce their interest in Anna until she was actually found. If they knew the Rose Thone was interested, they would have sent her even farther away.”
I couldn’t not ask any longer. “Why were they torturing you?”
“Why did they torture any of us?” She gave me a haunted smile. “To feed the things that protect them. The Tyeni.”
My mouth went dry. The Shadows had the hospital to feed on. Was that what the Zverskiye were feeding with the sorrows of little girls?
“Their ways are the old ways, some of the oldest among us. Their daytimers are bound through strict tradition. Each eldest child from a family will go on to become a full-blooded Zverskiye—they have so many violent internal skirmishes, they need to continually replenish their supply of soldiers,” she said with a snort. Was Anna’s trip to America with Yuri and her brother intended to avoid that?
Sike went on. “The second oldest is drowned in the Tyeni. Metaphorically. It didn’t feel like drowning at the time.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Then what … were the pictures for?”
“To create more despair. Even distant pain caused by the Zver was theirs to claim. Imagine pain trickling like water down a cave wall, until it joins other threads of itself, finally dripping into the river flowing underneath.”
“And I thought bookies and drug running was bad,” I murmured to myself.
“Oh, no. That’s just to get money. Power’s an entirely different thing.” She closed her eyes again, and seemed to be steeling herself to attempt to stand.
“Sike—why couldn’t you just get her to stay?”
Sike stopped in her progression and looked at me. “You mean you don’t know?”
The list of everything I currently did not know would fill a fucking library. Sike saw the look on my face, and took pity on my ignorance.
“The Zver call them nochnaya. She is a vampire child from two daytimer parents, an actual child of the night. She’s the reason they keep us daytimers tame, in the hopes that someday, one of us, one of our children, will be like her.” Sike inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Right now, she is still a little girl. A hungry, angry little girl. But she can grow, and change. Because unlike all the rest of them, she is actually alive. Hadn’t you noticed it?”
I pursed my lips, remembering imagining her heart beat the night before. Maybe I hadn’t known it—but I’d felt it.
“She’ll live forever until she chooses not to,” Sike continued. “And then when she dies, and rises again after three days … To vampires, she will be like unto a god.” She looked at me, her eyes daring me to challenge her. “One doesn’t tell a god when to stay, or when to go. She wanted to be free, and so she left.”
I didn’t think Sike would have stopped Anna, even if the Rose Throne had directly told her to. There was too much similar between them. She touched her bandaged wounds with curious fingers.
“She’s been so hungry, for so long. I am lucky that she let me live.”
And the thought that I might have come into my living room and found Sike’s corpse lying on my couch was the last straw. I almost shouted at her, “You would have let her kill you?”
“I would have died for her, and welcomed it.”
I shook my head. “You can’t mean that, Sike—”
A slow, true smile spread across her face. “I’ll never be powerful enough to exact vengeance for all that was done. But someday? She will be.”
She pondered this for a cheerful moment more, before lurching up into a stand. I jumped up after her, ready to catch her if she fell.
“I have to go now to get ready for your trial,” she said, folding the tatters of her shirt over her shoulder before picking up her coat.
I shook my head. “Stay here.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah, right.” And maybe her car was so fancy it’d drive itself. “Sike, you’ve lost a lot of blood. They’ll understand.”
She shouldered her coat on, with a hiss of pain, and straightened its collar before speaking again. “Mr. Weatherton signed a contract. That is all that matters now.” She stalked toward my front door.
“Will she show up?” I called after her.
Her hand was on my door handle. “I would shrug, but it would hurt,” she said, and let herself out.
And then I was alone with my bloodstained couch. If Anna didn’t show up tonight, I wasn’t so sure Mr. Weatherton would still want the case.