“DID YOU FUCKING KILL HIM?” Leandra demanded when I got back to our cabin. “God, Olympia. I would have wrung his neck.”
“Ren stopped me from doing the same.” After Phoebus dangled that tantalizing tidbit about Beatrice’s location in front of me, Ren insisted on leaving him up in that tree and going back to camp before someone caught us missing.
Leandra was the one amped up now, pacing the room and opening and closing the bathroom door as though she’d find an intruder behind it. It was hard to sit still on the bed when she exuded such frenetic energy.
“I can’t believe you left with Ren,” Leandra said. “What if you hadn’t come back? I don’t trust her to protect you.”
“I was hungry.” I did my best to make the statement sound casual and not like an all-consuming need I’d been denying myself for days. “She caught me in a compromising position.”
“And so did Nora.”
“Yes, new Nora. Because there are old Noras going back hundreds of years.”
Leandra was less phased by this revelation than I was. “I can’t believe all this happened without me.”
How upset she was genuinely surprised me. Not just at Phoebus himself, who deserved it, but the act of running off with Ren. “How would we get to you? You were deep-cleaning things. Were we supposed to hunt you down and tell Oscar we wanted to spirit you away?”
She shook her head. “Don’t you get it? You guys managed to sneak out. It would not have been that hard to come get me.” She stopped pacing and held her face in her hands. “You’re so used to doing everything alone. I thought you’d gotten over that, at least when it came to me. Next time, let me be there. You need the support.”
“I don’t always need help. Ren was there for me.”
“Fine, maybe you don’t need the help. But what if I want to be the one there for you?”
I swallowed. Sometimes, the things she did for me when I had just turned felt overbearing, but I always knew they were in good faith. I had not considered before that Leandra needed herself to be useful, too.
It struck me, then, how new I was to this. This committed relationship stuff was something I was still learning to deal with. I had done the lone wolf thing for a long time. Now, I had to get used to change if I wanted to keep the relationships I’d cultivated in my life. Being part of a team. My people skills were still pretty bad when it came to making genuine connections.
But I was giving it my best shot.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think about that. I was hot-headed. I was hungry, and I found food.” Subconsciously, I reached for the blood bag, still tucked between my shirt and overalls. “Ren caught me stealing; Nora caught us together.”
“Yes,” Leandra said curtly, “Oscar told me that he was so impressed by how progressive our relationship was.”
I snorted. It was not entirely surprising that information traveled fast in the encampment. More surprising was that Oscar chose to speak at all. He’d probably been trying to catch her reaction to report right back to Nora. “Right, well. Ren’s not exactly my type. She just used it as an excuse. We didn’t even say you and I were…open. Nora just assumed that.”
“Whatever,” Leandra said, but I could tell the idea of Ren and I together bothered her. Not in the way that Leandra and Diosa together had bothered me, but the slight level of jealousy was more endearing than I had anticipated. “Then you went out into the woods and tried to go to Faerie, and then you ran into Phoebus and beat him up, and then you negotiated with him in a tree. Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“His boyfriend’s being held hostage.”
“Yep.”
“And he knows where Beatrice is.”
“Allegedly, she has been sneaking him testosterone. Did you know they have potions for that now? Ren was telling me about it.”
“Neat. But that means Beatrice isn’t held captive.”
“I guess not? He said he hadn’t seen her in a few days.”
“Right. And then you drank a squirrel’s blood?”
I could still taste the ghost of its blood on the back of my tongue. It could have been my imagination, but the blood had almost tasted nutty. Like acorns.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Leandra tapped her chin. “We should find out what’s down those stairs.”
“Ren said to wait.”
“So now you’re just doing whatever Ren tells you?” Her tone was playful.
“Oh, shush. I’m just sharing what she said. She’s supposed to be our expert, or whatever. She thinks if we don’t plan carefully, we’ll be caught.”
“Probably true.”
“Should we wait?”
Leandra whirled toward me. “If they’re holding Phoebus’s boyfriend hostage, who’s to say they aren’t holding Beatrice down there, too? If she hasn’t been seen in a few days?”
“Jesus.” The idea of Beatrice being possibly tortured—the way I’d seen in those visions Phoebus shared with me—was unfathomable. Beatrice was too tough to get caught in a trap like that. I had imagined her sneaking around the perimeter of the encampment, kind of like Phoebus had, but more scientific. Taking notes about its dimensions, keeping track of the comings and goings of those on the inside. She was a scholar, after all.
But against all of these vampires, who was I to say that getting caught was totally impossible?
“Let’s go today,” Leandra said. “Do that door trick again when the locks kick in, and we’ll go back to Nora’s, put the code in the safe, and then head down the stairs and find out what’s lurking at the bottom.”
That sounded terribly easy. We’d lucked out before, when Ren was there to lure Nora away and Barty turned out to be a total pushover. Then, it happened to be the new Nora’s “graduation” day, so she wasn’t acclimated to the space yet. She would be there tonight, I had no doubt.
“We’ve been lucky so far. It’s not going to be easy to pull off a third break-in. And who knows, that safe might not be there anymore.” I saw the response in her eyes—“we” was a generous term when I was entirely behind one of the break-ins myself.
Mercifully, she did not comment on this. “We can subdue the new Nora. Gag her and tie her up or something. You said this one was shorter?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t strong.”
“You’re stronger than I am right now. And you’ve fed recently.”
My nervous fingers found the end of my braid. I brushed the braid out with my fingertips and then divided my hair into three parts to redo it. “If we do this, there’s no going back. She’ll definitely report us. We will be caught.”
“We’ll be caught going down into whatever’s underneath us, anyway, if the apostles really are there.”
Her calling them straight-up apostles made me uncomfortable for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on. Ren had referred to them similarly, but this place was finally starting to feel like a cult, pulling on existing Christian terminology.
The unsettling feeling went deeper than the cult. It was almost as though the whole world had dropped out from under me when I turned into a vampire, and now I didn’t have anything solid to stand on. No matter how close I seemed to get, something else happened and took away my chances at stability in my life. Not even stability, but harmony, perhaps.
The one grounding thing I had was Leandra.
A pang of sadness came over me; I hadn’t seen Yuki in days. Long before I knew Leandra well enough to invite her into my apartment on that fateful night, Yuki had been there when I needed her.
A warm hand touched my cheek. “Everything okay?”
“I miss our lives,” I said. Ironic, considering we were both technically dead. “We were supposed to be happy together. Not—whatever is happening here. It was just within reach. And now it’s like this cult thing is standing in the way of it.” I sniffed. “And I miss Yuki and her dumb little cat face.”
“I miss her, too,” Leandra said with a fond smile. “I found cat hairs at the bottom of my boots the other day.”
“Will we be able to go back to that?” I asked. “Back to your lair? Hang out and watch shows together? Not a care in the world?”
Leandra kissed my forehead. “I think you’ll always have something to worry about. But you wouldn’t be you without it.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“We’ll get it back, Olympia. I promise.” She hugged me, nuzzling her head into my chest. “The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can move on and go back to our old lives.”
“Until the next major crisis.”
“Maybe.” She pulled away from me, eyes crinkling. “Maybe you need less dangerous friends.”
Her boots made an imprint in the ground when she stepped away.
I stared at the dirt floors. They looked hard, impenetrable. But if I had some semblance of my magic back…
“I have an idea.”
❧
The hard dirt of our cabin turned out to be too coarse to effectively use fae magic on. I slid my jacket between the door and the lock, like I had the other day, and when the locks clicked, we waited for the sunshine to peek out under the door, signifying that everyone had gone back inside.
It didn’t come.
Half an hour stretched into an hour. Leandra kept yawning, and I had no doubt she’d be asleep soon. We’d been here for days, and she’d had nothing to eat. She needed to get her energy back somehow.
Time passed incredibly slow. The sun still didn’t peep out, meaning Ren’s magic was still in place, keeping the dome dark and protected from the sun for whoever was out and about. When an hour and a half passed, and Leandra’s eyes became heavy and half-lidded, I cleared my throat to wake her.
“Should we go out there anyway?”
Groggily, she stretched her limbs like a cat. “I was thinking we could get caught later, rather than right away. You know, like when we’re underground, uncovering some cult-y secrets.”
“Ha, ha.” I was seated on the floor by the door, staring at the crack. Waiting for the sun to come through just a bit, like a watched phone that wouldn’t ring. “If we wait too long, we’ll miss our chance.”
“What if someone’s waiting right outside the door?”
I stuck my fingers under the crack and waved them around. Nobody came to chop them off. “I just need the dirt out there. By the planting area. The soil is good.”
Leandra sighed. “Okay, fine. Let me get my shoes back on.”
As much as it grossed me out, I stashed the blood bag in the toilet tank. It would be worse to get caught outside our cabin with it. They’d found the tablets stashed in my pillowcase, but if we made it back tonight, at least I would have time to find a new spot for these ones.
The door opened silently. When it was just a few inches ajar, I stuck my nose out. If there were people milling around, they were dead silent. The only thing I could hear was the crackling of that ever-burning fire pit at the center of the camp.
Leandra and I slid outside. We made our way along the sides of the cabins. There seemed to be no one out, but Ren’s magic wouldn’t have glitched. It had never done so before. Someone was out here. If they were hiding, lying in wait to catch us, then we were fucked.
I didn’t quite dare to go out in the open toward the gardening plots. There was nothing around the planting area to keep us from being seen. The entire encampment was too well illuminated. Instead, outside of the cabin where they prepared food, I leaned down and sank my fingers into the tender dirt like I had in the forest today.
My magic spread to the edges of the camp right away and stopped as though hitting a dead end. It was uncanny how perfectly circular the space was. The dirt went down deeper but had no connection to the Mayfair woods. It didn’t even feel like we were in Mayfair at all. I wondered if it would be possible to go to Faerie from here, but then, there weren’t really any substantial trees I could use to get there.
The earth was shallower than I expected—basement-level, perhaps, but not deep enough that they could have a whole series of underground cabins down there for the inner circle to live in. My silly fantasies about what secrets they kept were getting out of hand. It was extra frustrating not even knowing what to look for.
As before, I could sense the flora—the plants Nora and I worked on so hard these past few days, imbued with Ren’s magic—but nothing else. No signs of life. No one like Phoebus, the way his magic had called to me like a beacon. I wished Beatrice was around, if only to ask her questions about how our magic worked together. If Phoebus’s boyfriend would have traces of Phoebus’s potent magic on him, or something. If he did, I couldn’t sense anything. There were no disturbances in the earth. Not even worms in the dirt.
I took my hand back and muffled a frustrated scream.
“Nothing?” Leandra whispered. She was supposed to be our lookout, but she was looking at me more than out.
“Nothing.”
“Can you sense how many passageways there are? That might be useful.”
“I can’t sense things like that unless there’s living plant life showing the way, or something moving, or…or if I’m in Faerie.”
“Which you can’t get to here, I’m assuming.”
“Nope.”
Leandra surveyed the land for a moment and then dodged out of our hiding spot. I bit down the urge to call out so hard that I tasted blood. She came back with a pile of rocks, some in her hands and some poking out of the pocket of her overalls. They were more like decorative pebbles that surrounded the food prep cabin.
“What if we try a fairy circle?” she asked.
“That’s more for tricking other people,” I said.
Already, she crouched on her knees, shifting the pebbles around to a shape that could vaguely be called round. If you squinted at it. Really hard.
I felt in my bones how ineffective the fairy circle would be. Not only was it the wrong shape, but it was devoid of life. “Let’s get to Nora’s? And not leave evidence we were here?”
Pouting, Leandra kicked the pebbles.
I took her hand and she led the way back over to Nora’s cabin. The place felt like a labyrinth. I was grateful at least one of us knew the lay of the land from our cult duties. The gardening was nice, but it only let me explore one area of the camp.
Leandra skidded to a stop. I lurched forward, knocking into her back, but she stood her ground, her body taut as a bow.
“Le—?”
She waved at me. Signaling for me to shut the fuck up. I straightened my braid as I got on my tip-toes to peer over her shoulder.
Just cabins. And more cabins. The same ones we’d been looking at the whole time we’d been here.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Do you not see what’s missing?”
“How can I see something that’s missing?”
Leandra turned back to me, exasperated. And then she pointed, and I saw what I couldn’t see.
Nora’s cabin wasn’t there. It was like it had never been there. The ground was perfectly smooth where it used to be.
“Well, that’s uncanny,” I said at normal volume.
Leandra didn’t get the chance to shush me. All of the lights around the encampment, magical and oil lamp alike, went dark.
Her fingers dug into my arm, grounding me. It wasn’t just that it was dark. The space was a void—an endless abyss. If I hadn’t just been looking out at the cabins, I wouldn’t have known anything existed here.
The sounds of our ragged breathing filled the air. They didn’t even echo. Neither of us dared to say anything. I was suddenly certain that we’d been caught. That we would never find our way out of this place.
My panic grew into the darkness, seeming to fill the space. Leandra’s grip on my arm was so tight that it hurt. I opened my mouth to say something, to ask her if we should keep moving and try to get out of here, but I couldn’t make any noise come out. My whole body was paralyzed with fear.
A skittering sound came from our left.
We jumped in unison. Leandra’s other arm came around me, holding me protectively. The soft skin of her lips brushed my forehead.
The lights came back to life all at once.
I flinched at the sudden change, shielding my face. Voices echoed around the encampment, almost chanting, speaking in unison. My eyes adjusted and I lowered my hand. Leandra’s grip around me tightened even more, crushing my ribs against her.
There were at least thirty vampires standing where Nora’s cabin had been.
They made concentric semi-circles. Twelve of them in the back in plain clothes. Those were so far away that I couldn’t make out their faces. Twelve of them in the middle in dark cloaks with the hoods pushed back. I recognized new Nora and Oscar among these, along with the two people I always saw washing clothes.
At the front were six cloaked figures, their hoods pulled over their heads. They held hands. Against each of their chests glimmered six identical red gems. I saw glimpses of red-cast chins as they shifted, as their lips moved in tandem with each other.
This was the cult stuff I’d been waiting for since I got here. I was still completely unprepared for how it actually looked. How eerie it made me feel.
From the middle row, Oscar stepped forward. His underused voice boomed in the encampment.
“Olympia Carter and Leandra. It’s time for your initiation.”