She went home. She didn’t know what else to do.
The apartment was dark and quiet, just as she had left it a week earlier. Ardeth turned on the hall light and looked around. Everything looked familiar, her books, her furniture, the shoes scattering the hallway. But nothing felt like hers any more. It was as if she stood in one of the showpiece homes used to display furniture and an interior decorator’s sense of personal style. All the pieces were in place but no one lived there.
She drifted into the bedroom and looked down for a moment at her unmade bed. Should she try to sleep here, for when the dawn came? Don’t go home, Rozokov had said. She felt a rush of anger filling her mouth with a sudden bitter taste. You left me, she thought accusingly at the darkness around her. You left me. He had reasons, she knew, and all of them were correct. But the anger felt better than the lost emptiness and she clung to it, letting it curl comfortably around her heart.
She could not stay here. Rozokov had been right about one thing—whoever was behind all this must never know she had not died at the asylum. She had to leave every trace of her former self behind. That would not be hard. “We are who we were,” Rozokov had said. But I don’t have to be, she thought defiantly. I can be anything I want—and I don’t want to be her any more.
She looked around the dimly lit room and caught the edge of her reflection in the mirror. That story was a myth as well, it seemed. She stepped forward to stare at her reflected image. Her hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a dark blood stain on the collar of her stolen shirt. Her face looked thinner, cheekbones in high relief where they had once been merely the underpinning of her soft profile. Her eyes were still hazel but the russet in the mix had darkened. They would refract red, as Rozokov’s had.
But she still looked like Ardeth. She would have to cut her hair, dye it too. She touched the lank tangles. She needed a shower badly. Her new vampiric body did not seem to sweat but her old human one had gone days without a proper bath. She glanced at the bedside clock radio. It was 4:30 in the morning—would anyone in the building be awake, or notice the sound coming from her supposedly deserted apartment? She weighed that thought for a moment, then decided the risk was slight.
She went into the bathroom, quietly closing the door. She stripped beneath the bright overhead light and then she stared for a moment at her body. The bruises had all faded, healing along with her rejuvenation, but she still looked pale and worn. Even the blood she had taken during the slaughter at the asylum had not been enough to counteract the days of hardship.
She turned away from the stark image in the mirror and bent over the tub. She turned on the taps and hesitantly put one finger underneath the flow. Another myth gone; the water was no more than a little too hot.
She slid into the spray with a sigh, luxuriating in the warm water on her skin. She scrubbed away the sweat, dirt and fear, washed the oil and despair out of her tangled hair. She spent far longer than she should have under the comforting spray but carefully cleaned the bathroom after, wiping down the shower and walls, then folding the towel and restoring it to the closet. Unless someone were to inspect the room in the next hour, no one would be able to tell she had been there.
Ardeth picked up her abandoned clothes, and padded to the bedroom, not bothering to turn on the light. Clean now, she had no desire to don her stolen clothing again. Still, how much did she dare to take from her own closet? How much did she even want to? The clothes there were the skin of the old Ardeth, and she had shed that with the dirt that had covered her undead body. In the end she settled for clean underwear, a Black Sun T-shirt donated to the bottom of her drawer by Sara, and her battered black running shoes. She slithered back into her stolen jeans and kept Roias’s leather jacket. The other dirty clothes she left by the door, to dump in a garbage can when she left the building.
She paused, wondering if there was anything else she could take. This would be her last time here, after all. Most of the things she had valued a week ago meant nothing to her now. But there were one or two items she could use in the creation of her new self. She hunted through the closet and drawers (she had almost stopped thinking of them as hers) and found a pair of wrap-around black sunglasses (a joke from a friend, she did not recall who) and a pair of earrings. The earrings had been a present from Sara, who had dared her to wear them. She never had. They had been too big, too unusual for the person she had been then. Now, the almost gothic look of the faces, the spread wings and the blood-red stones dangling from the metal angels had an ironic appeal. She tucked them into the pocket of her leather jacket.
The last thing she took was the cache of money her former self had kept stored in one of her books. There were nearly three hundred dollars there, and Ardeth stuffed the bills into her back pocket. Even vampires needed money, she supposed, and she was not sure how she would get more. Could she work? The thought of being a vampiric night-shift worker made her smile, even as she rejected the idea. The old Ardeth would have dutifully gone out and got a job in an all-night cafe. The new Ardeth, being dead, was going to make the most of the rebirth she had been offered.
She turned out the lights and slipped out the apartment door, locking it behind her. On the street, she started walking south, towards the bright glow of the downtown core. There, the city lived at night. And so would she.
At the edge of Chinatown, she found an abandoned house. Ardeth hovered on the sidewalk for a moment, studying the darkened houses surrounding it, then ducked between the overgrown hedges and approached. All the windows were boarded up and she could make out the dark tracings of cryptic graffiti on some. She moved down the narrow pathway between the house and its neighbour, stepping over broken roof tiles and scattered garbage. Maple trees hung over the overgrown yard and lilac bushes clustered protectively against the back.
She pushed her way into the bushes and found the window screened and boarded like the rest. Did you think they’d conveniently leave it open for you? she asked herself sarcastically. She ran her fingers over the wood and found the cool metal head of a nail. The window frame must be wood, she thought, and found a narrow gap between the brick surrounding the window and the boards. She slid her fingers into the space and pulled, leaning backwards into the bushes until she felt the board yield beneath her fingers.
“Shit,” Ardeth breathed, as one nail broke to the quick. She sucked the sore finger for a moment, then pulled off another board. Finally she had a hole big enough to wriggle through. She took the shattered boards with her and propped them against the window from the inside, some small concealment for the hole she had made.
After inspecting her camouflage, she straightened up and looked around. She had expected to find the house empty but there was a couch and chair in the room, dust-covered and forlorn. In the next room she found a table and four chairs, sitting in wait as if expecting the owners to return at any moment. One was on an angle, as if someone had just pushed it away from the table to rise. For a moment, Ardeth froze, afraid that someone shared her refuge. She listened intently, stretched out tentatively with the new senses she could barely feel. But there was nothing, only stillness and dust.
She shivered and moved into the next room. I could go upstairs, she thought. There might be beds waiting like in some cautionary fairy tale. But the thought of sinking into stale, dusty sheets disgusted her and the upper storeys seemed somehow dangerous, exposed.
The basement, however, felt safe. It was unfinished and low-ceilinged, but the cold dampness didn’t seem to penetrate her new skin and the weight of the house over her was oddly comforting. No one will come here, she told herself, even if someone else, kids or squatters, breaks into the house, no one will come here.
She found a crawlspace behind the dead furnace and curled up in it, Roias’s jacket pillowing her head. She wondered where Rozokov was, where he had found shelter. “You’ll see,” she whispered defiantly to the darkness and hugged herself, her arms tight across her chest, to hold in the sudden emptiness that filled her.