Page 29 of The Unraveling

My gaze rakes over objects in her room for a distraction so I don’t begin sobbing.

“Those are your parents . . .?” I murmur. The mirrored frame on her bedside table shows me a glimpse of my ill face, the shadows beneath my eyes and my dry, blood-stained lips.

The faces in the photo are familiar, though I can’t think of where I’ve seen them before.

“You’ve met them,” she murmurs, sprawling out behind me and resting her head on my bicep. She drapes her arm over me, and I hold it against my stomach. “You were the only reason they let me live here. The reason they overcame their discomfort of bringing their daughter all the way from Ontario to move in with a random doctor who couldn’t even share a word about my treatment.”

The woman in the photograph walks through my mind, the way she scrutinized Victor’s study and the medical equipment with pursed lips as if she was trying to confirm he was really a doctor. Her eyes darted to me between glances at the tools and machines that I could tell she wasn’t sure how to name. Daisy shadowed her with red and glossy eyes, as if she had been on the verge of tears for hours already. She was silent between her whispered pleas that her mother let her decide—how she’s an adult regardless of the help she requires.

Victor was perfectly professional, but I could tell her parents being there made him want to crawl out of his skin. He was used to patients coming alone and rarely dealt with their families except over the phone.

His hypnotist was on standby upstairs, but it was only me and my excited smile—my assurance that I had undergone and survived the treatment—which eventually convinced them to leave so Victor could begin his proposal. I was too nervous to propose the treatment myself, and I reasoned that it was better if heard from a real, practiced doctor anyway, even if the blood and venom would come from me.

Breathless, I awaited Daisy’s reaction to his show of proof—a little slice on his wrist that healed before her very eyes and his delicious promises of what may happen if the treatment worked. I sat in a chair beside her, absolutely terrified she would tell him no. Petrified she might scream and call us monsters before begging to go.

It was nearly impossible to sit still while I waited with bated breath for her to say something. After seeing Daisy’s name on that patient list, I spent so many nights poring over her little internet galleries of photos and videos that it would have felt like a real friend died if she said no. If she was hypnotized to forget our proposal—forget meeting us—and sent home to a decaying life with only six months left.

I wanted her despite Victor’s underlying hesitations.

Yet when her tears finally overflowed, sobs cracking out of her as she reached for me with weak arms and choked on her fears of dying, I could finally breathe.

“I’ve been so scared to die,” she cried as I finally hugged her warm body close, just like I’d been imagining for weeks. “I had to beg my parents to bring me.”

Desperate to cheer her up, I took her upstairs to the bedroom I spent days decorating based on her interests I glimpsed online. I wanted her to feel welcome—structurally important, not a burden.

I wanted her to accept the house—and me—as her new forever home.

“This is your room. Do you like it?”

“I really do. Remember liking how I dubbed the style Victorian dollhouse? You called me your doll,” Daisy says.

Her warm breath tickling my ear draws the bedroom from my mind and I find it circling me. It takes me a moment to split the memory from reality in front of my blurry eyes.

I cough and wipe my mouth. “What?”

Smoothing my hair against the side of my head, she says, “You’ve been mumbling like it’s the first day we met.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” I clear my throat. “Yes, I remember that.”

Tears are thick in her chuckle. “It’s okay. Don’t apologize for remembering.”

I don’t remember that exchange, though. I can’t recall the first time I fed her my blood, or even the last. I bat at the shadows in my mind to reveal more moments between us, but another glance at her bedside table only brings the recollection of Victor’s hypnotist—what on earth was his name?—standing before her parents as he smoothed over the logistical complications of them not seeing Daisy’s body when Victor offered them a pretty, white marble urn.

Last month. It was last month when we faked her death.

I should have turned her by now. I’ve been planning to. But she’s nervous about the transformation, and her birthday was close enough that she wanted just a teensy bit longer as a human. One more birthday cake. One more experience turning a year older when she was told she wouldn’t live to her twenty-first birthday.

Most of Victor’s patients are nervous, and seeing Bradley turn only days ago hasn’t helped his gentle attempts to urge her⁠—

My eyes widen with bright memories of Bradley igniting, but my stomach sinks as my mind rapidly snuffs them out, leaving only the afterimage of Daisy and me holding his shaking, sweaty hands while Victor bit him, and a flash of him waking with a wide, relieved smile on his thirst-pale face. Then, Daisy’s request for a single week more with me just in case.

I haven’t tried to convince her otherwise considering my blood has slowed her mortal walk to death. I suppose I’ve been nervous to turn my first human into a vampire, too.

“Did we know Bradley well?” I say around a quickly tightening guilty knot in my stomach.

How well did I know him? How much did I forget?

Daisy’s shoulder crackling when she shrugs makes me frown. “He came by every other day for a few hours over the past couple of months. We would all watch movies, and he and I would order supper.”