“Hurry,” she said, and turned around.
As I rummaged for jeans behind her, I realized I hadn’t thought to steal blood ahead of time for the future, nor was I keen on offering up mine or my cat’s. “Hey, how have you been feeding?” I asked.
“On the homeless.” Anna sighed. “They taste like booze—it helps to mask their other flaws.”
I pulled my shirt over my head. “Ugh.”
She chuckled. “Don’t worry. I haven’t killed any of them yet.”
“Are you going to need blood tonight?”
“I can go longer than most vampires. I am used to dealing with less.”
“You might remember this article of clothing,” I said, handing it over for her to wear. Her affect was flat, the way certain schizophrenic people’s were. No life, just a dead stare, the kind I thought the phrase “thousand-yard stare” referred to in books. Only the people who wore it at the hospital weren’t survivors from back in ’Nam—they were surviving whatever personal story was playing out all the time inside their own minds.
“I don’t feel the weather as you do, human.”
I shook the coat. “We’re taking public transportation. I can’t take you in what you’re wearing. You’ll make a scene.”
She grabbed it from me, and sniffed the collar. “It smells.”
She nodded, though the hood itself did not move. “I am awake,” she said, as if that was answer enough.
I imagined her, my only witness, catching on fire or turning to stone or whatever else it was that full vampires did underneath the glare of sun. And then I shrugged that off and helped her put on three pairs of my socks so my old rain boots would fit. Last but not least came gloves. By the time I was done stuffing and layering she looked like a very unhappy Michelin man.
“Are you done yet?” she asked, as I zipped myself up in my remaining winter clothes.
All the ways this was a bad idea were like an echoing Greek chorus in my mind.
The main commuter rush home had finished, but there were still people waiting for the southbound train at the station. When it arrived and the doors opened, I walked in and Anna followed hesitantly—did the rules of invitations apply to public transportation?—and when she was done we sat together on a bench.
She stared around at the train itself, from the gum stains on the floor to the maps with multicolored tangles near the ceilings. Her gaze lingered on a poster featuring a nearly naked woman selling watches, with one hand cast out protectively, and her entire other arm covered in watches across her chest. Anna touched this image like she expected the hair to be hair, the skin to be skin, and the schnozberries to be schnozberries. I watched her, while everyone else studiously ignored her in the way only other commuters can, before she came to sit beside me again.
“Was Mr. November your uncle?” I asked. She glanced up at me, her eyes still shaded by the hood.
“His name was Yuri.” She went back to looking resolutely at the seat ahead of us.
I fully expected that to be the end of our conversation, but then she continued in her lisping accent. “We were a family of Dnevnoi, the loyal ones. As is our custom, the first child, when it was time, was pledged to our Throne. They would drink the blood, and become one of the Zverskiye. The second child was sacrificed to the Tyeni.” She closed her eyes. “I was the first child. Koschei was the second.”
Silence passed between us as the train stopped and people milled about. When it left the station, she continued.
“My parents wanted differently for us. When the revolution began, they thought we were both saved— factions in the Zverskiye were fighting as brutally as the Socialists and the Marxists were for control. In the confusion, they sent us off with Uncle Yuri to the New World to escape our respective fates.” She crossed her arms over her chest, as though she was fighting off a chill.
“When we arrived it did not take long for them to find us. In America, there were no factions, only Zver. And for them to let any Dnevnoi escape, well.…” Her voice drifted off.
We were two stops from where we needed to get off, and I wanted to know the ending. “Then what?”
“Then we were captured, separated, and I was fed to the Tyeni regardless.”
“But—” I’d seen most of her while helping her change. She had all her limbs, fingers, toes. Unless they’d taken a lung or a kidney, I wasn’t sure what she’d lost.
“Not all feeding requires teeth. And not all bites leave scars,” she said cryptically.
“What does that even mean?” I asked her.
“I would prefer not to talk about it.”
The train shuddered to a stop and a man got onto the train and walked down the aisle to purposefully sit across from us. He looked both of us over and leered. Anna hissed at him, under her breath, and he suddenly decided that seats nearer the other exit were better for him instead.
“How did you do that?” I asked her.
“Easily,” she said, and no more.
The train released us into the station and we walked up to face the cold evening outside.
We waddled down the street together toward the complex where Mr. November had lived. “What was his full name?” I asked. It might help when talking to the landlady again, assuming he’d used it.
“Yuri Arsov,” she said, trundling along beside me. The clothing had muted her feline grace, but she was still scanning back and forth across the street inside the confines of her hood.
Slow giant flakes fell from the sky. Some other time, some other place, the girl who walked beside me might have played outside of czarist mansions, throwing snowballs at daytimer children beneath the safety of the night.
We reached the complex and I rang the bell. Explaining our reasoning to the landlady this time around would be a treat, unless Anna could do that hissy thing at her.
I rang again. There was no response.
“She’s very old,” I apologized. I tried the door and it was open. It dawned on me— “Anna, I don’t think this is safe.”
“Where was he?” she asked, looking up at me. Her eyes were like burning coals inside the shadow of the hood. “Which floor? Which room?”
For a second she stared at me harder—through me, almost—and then she was gone, bolting up the stairs, faster than I could possibly follow.
I chased up after her. “Anna? Anna—wait!” Had she read my mind? Idiotically, I’d left my badge, with whatever protective qualities it possessed, at home.
When I reached the topmost floor, Mr. November’s door was open, and Anna already inside.
“I knew I’d remember his smell.”
I shut his door behind me. She was in his hall closet, standing on his sleeping bag, her face buried in his shirts. Then she began yanking them down one by one, before handing them to me. “Take these.”
“What the—” I began. She stalked down the hall into the bedroom without me. “Anna, no—”
In Mr. November’s bedroom, the girls were still waiting for us.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I’d given up on asking a lot of questions since my time as a nurse on Y4: Where do vampires come from? What happens to a werewolf’s clothing? Why are some zombies seemingly Haitian, and others typical movie-style
