Page 62 of Fang Fiction

“Why am I not surprised?” Tess smiled despite herself.

“We’d let one poor soul a day win big, so everyone wanted to gamble with us, they all thought they’d be the lucky one. Little did they know we were stealing from everyone else. It was more money than we’d ever seen—it was nothing of course. Enough to eat, buy candies from street carts.”

“It sounds fun,” Tess said gently.

“It was, yeah.” Callum was wistful, but then his face hardened. “Anyway, kids went missing all the time there. We figured some died in the machines, some got sick, some ran off. But when Konstantin turned us into vampires, we realized what was really going on.”

“You mean…”

“That the man who rescued us from poverty was the one killing all our friends, stealing them from their beds and draining their blood?” Callum folded his arms. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean. Kinda put us off the idea of killing humans.”

“And then he made you do the same thing to other humans that he’d done to your friends,” Tess said. “That must have been awful.”

“It was a nightmare.” Callum set his jaw. “One I couldn’t wake up from for a hundred years.”

“Was it…easier, being here?” Tess asked carefully. “Like, you were somewhere new, away from him—like you could close that old chapter of your life, finally be free of it?”

Callum didn’t answer—just looked at Tess with a kind of awe.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “did I say something wrong?”

“No.” He shook his head. “It’s just—you’re the first person to notice I felt that way.”

“Oh.” Tess looked down at Octavia’s watercolors. “I guess I’ve felt that way too.”

“When you left school?” he asked. She looked up sharply.

“How did you…”

“Not every day you hear about someone dropping out of a PhD program to work in a hotel. Figured there was more to the story.”

All this time, Tess had been studying Callum, paying careful attention to see how this person matched up—or didn’t—with a character she felt like she’d known for years. It had never occurred to her until this moment that he might be paying the same kind of attention to her.

“Can I ask you a question?” she asked, and he nodded. “Why did you come to the moonflower meadow?”

“Worried about you getting captured, wasn’t I?” he said casually. “Couldn’t very well have Felix using you for information on our clan.”

“Oh,” Tess said, unsure why she suddenly felt so disappointed. “That makes sense.”

“Speaking of information.” Callum nodded toward the stacks of notebooks on Octavia’s desk. “You take half, I’ll take half?”

Tess and Callum started paging through Octavia’s piles of notebooks, and soon the only sound in the room was the shuffling of papers. Trying to follow Octavia’s train of thought was a challenge—sentence fragments didn’t match up, one thought about Konstantin would bleed into a paragraph about the River Styx and ships made of bone. Even when Octavia’s writing was more cogent, Tess found her own thoughts kept slipping back to Callum: the feeling of his hand on her thigh, the notion that he cared at all what she thought of him, the revelation that he’d never kill a human by choice. At every turn he was subverting her expectations—but did that even matter? It didn’t change the fact that she was trapped on this island, and that this stack of papers hadn’t given her a single idea of what to do about it. She glanced over at Callum, but he looked equally frustrated—he set his notebook down with a thwack.

“Going that well?” she asked.

“I’ve got bloody nothing,” he grumbled. “You?”

“Same.” Tess sighed. She was starting to wonder if Callum was right—maybe Octavia’s research really had been a waste of time. “How are you feeling? Do you want some more blood?”

“I’m fine,” he demurred, but she noticed him wince when he shifted in his seat.

“You’re not,” she said. “Why don’t you head back to your rooms and lie down? I’ll get some cloves from the orchard to make you a tea. Sylvie said that would help with the pain.”

“You shouldn’t go alone.” Callum sat up straight, clenching his teeth. “I’ll come with you.”

“Please, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m not even leaving the compound. I’ll be fine.”

Tess didn’t wait to see if he’d argue more. A walk in the fresh air was exactly what she needed—plus, she could pick some apples to bring to Artie. The compound’s hallways were blessedly empty, and Tess made it outside without incident. The day was cool and windy, with purple-hued clouds swirling above, threatening to open up and unleash a storm. Tess had no idea if it ever actually rained on the Isle—the place was so lush, she thought it probably must, but then again, anything was possible here. Still, she heard an ominous rumble of thunder in the distance, so she figured she’d better not waste too much time finding the trees she needed.