“I’m sorry. I think so. I don’t know for sure.”
“Yes, you do not all feel each other. I recall.”
“But you can feel this good man. This one above others.”
“Not anymore. So perhaps you are right. Perhaps he has gone on without us, too. Perhaps a dreadful thing befell them both—oh, oh, it cannot be held in me. I must fade; you must let me,” the being said, its form starting to dissolve before it even finished asking. She had to race to ask one final thing, before he was gone for good.
“What dreadful thing could have befallen them? Could someone have hurt them? A rival maybe, someone bitter about them, something untethered that stalked them, searching for people to latch on to,” she said, barely sure of what she was even thinking but needing to know. It would explain it, after all.
Why she saw them, like a warning. The sense that something was haunting them, in every flash to that past. Then the fact that Harker looked just a little like him, that Bram had said he felt like something took him over...
No, she thought.No, no, no, no. That is mad; that is impossible. Harker is not some weird thing walking around in someone else’s body. He showed his flesh and blood to you, underneath. There’s no way it could ever be the case.
But just as she did, the being spoke a final time. “They had a shadow on them, always on them. We tried to tell them that itcould not be shaken, but they did not listen. Be careful, one who is not Lilibet,” it said.
Then it was gone, and she was alone, in the Underneath.
Exhausted, suddenly. Desperately sad. And completely unsure what to do.
Sleep, her brain said.Things will make more sense in the morning.
Then before she could wonder how she might go about a thing like that, something seemed to spring up around her. Branches, bursting with flowers and moss, coiling and curling to make a kind of bower. A bed for her, it seemed—as if this place had heard what she most needed.
Because she did need it.
She drifted off before another second went by.
Chapter Seventeen
When she woke, the being was still gone. It was just her, in that cup of strange branches and flowers. They shifted about her and set her down on her bare feet, the moment she sat up. And to her surprise she found those bare feet weren’t the least bit sore. None of her muscles were. Somehow her body seemed completely replenished.
The only real problem was her mind.
It’s too many things to take in at once, she thought, as every one of them rattled around inside her head. The ball, the dancing, the whisper in her ear. The bell she’d rung, the run across the grass with her dress in her arms. And then everything that being had said. About a shadow being on Lilibet and her beloved. About Lilibet seeming like she was in danger, in a way that explained the warnings, the flashes of the past, the feeling of someone trying to guide her.
Though what Lilibet was trying to guide her to do was still unclear.
And it got even more so, when she made it to the door. She hesitated, thinking of that rabid thing beyond. But instead of warning her away, that voice whispered something else. Something more likesafe. As if somehow she’d gotten things wrong or mixed up. Imagined he played a role in all of this, when he didn’t.Maybe he just knows what happened and fears whatever it was or fears doing the same thing, she thought.He doesn’t have to have been something deranged, like the evil half of a set of vampire brothers or some monstrous double waiting to slip into someone else’s skin. And if he was somehow, why make sure you gain more power than he can hope to equal? How would that make any sense?
She just didn’t know. But it felt a little like the reveal of what was on the other side leaned weight to the latter theory. He didn’t immediately try to burst through the barrier, or scrabble at it when he found he couldn’t.
He wasn’t even standing there.
He was sitting on the grass, arms around his knees. Hugging them, almost—like he was cold, somehow. He was even shaking like he was. She thought she could hear his teeth chattering, behind his tightly pressed together lips. And his skin had an ever so slightly bluish tinge, of a kind that confused her.
But then it clicked, in her head.
It had been in that book she’d read on vampire weaknesses.When one of these creatures goes without a hungered-for food source for an extended period of time, he will begin to starve. Eventually, a kind of catatonic state will be entered, colloquially referred to as the long sleep, she remembered.
And of course if that happened...
“We need to get you inside,” she said, fast enough that her good sense simply couldn’t keep up. Though said good sense stared at her incredulously, once the words were out.At least wait until you’ve dug in to whoever Bram and Lilibet were before you start putting your head in the lion’s mouth again, it tried to tell her.
But the problem was: He seemed to think the same damn thing.
“No we,” he ground out from between gritted teeth. “You go.”
As if he didn’t like her being in immediate danger any more than she did.
