Page 41 of A Malicious Menagerie
A long, tense moment passes before her voice, just as rusty with disuse as Chase’s, wheezes out, “Yes.”
I bite my lip, not sure how to ask what I want to know. How do I ask her if she’s more coherent now because she ate two days ago? My stomach churns at the thought of bringing up Eddie and his savage demise. Figuring the best way to gather data is to perform an experiment, I untuck my shirt and begin unzipping my fanny pack. “Are you hungry? I stopped by the hospital and picked up some blood. Sorry, it’s expired, but—”
I cut off with a squeal when I glance up to see the vampire has somehow silently traversed about ten yards within seconds. She has her hands wrapped around the bars, and unlike Chase’s, her hands are so small that her fingers don’t meet around the unforgiving metal. I notice that her skin is clean compared to when I last saw her, the dirt scrubbed away and her hair tidied and pushed back from her face. Even her dress, though still stained and wrinkled, looks like it’s been rinsed.
Now that she’s less disheveled, she looks more… well, human. With her thick black mane out of the way, I can see she has smooth, unblemished brown skin with a short, slightly upturned nose, bow-shaped lips, and delicately arched brows. Honestly, she’s… stunning. Like, could-be-a-model stunning.
Well, I guess the crimson eyes might put some people off, but honestly, as frightening as they are, they’re alsooddly mesmerizing.
And then there’s the fangs…
The vampire is staring intently at the hint of red visible through the zipper of my fanny pack, but when she meets my eye again, she looks mostly in control. “You brought blood… for me?”
“I did.” I pull a pint from the bag and weigh it in my hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring any sooner. John… he told me that you only have to eat every few weeks. I didn’t realize that if you ate more frequently…”
The woman is quiet for a moment, her eyes continuously trailing back to the blood even as she fights herself to hold my gaze. “It’s hard,” she murmurs, her voice so quiet I have to lean closer to hear her. “The longer I go hungry, the worse the bloodlust is. Sometimes I’m so lost in it that I lose days or weeks. Then, I wake up, and I’ve hurt someone again.” Her voice breaks. She looks away, but not before I see a ruby droplet roll down her cheek, leaving a rivulet of red in its wake. I realize with consternation that she’s crying blood.
“Are you okay?” I ask, alarmed, but she only dashes at the crimson track on her cheek, smearing it over her skin.
“Another side effect of being a vampire,” she says bitterly. “Not that I’ve ever been a pretty crier, but at least the sight didn’t used to make people run screaming.”
“How…” I hesitate before forcing myself to ask, “How did it happen? Were you bitten?”
“I must have been,” she says, her forehead furrowed. She tilts her head and tugs her hair back behind her neck to show me two silvery punctures over her jugular that mar her otherwise flawless skin. “I have the scar, but I don’t remember it happening. I was walking back to my dorm, I remember that, then I woke up in the hospital. They thought I’d passed out after partying too hard. They couldn’t find any alcohol or drugs in my system, but they certainly didn’t believe me when I told them I’d just been on my way home from a night class. I didn’t notice the scar until after they released me. Then came the fevers… then the migraines that felt like they were going to split my skull wide open… and then, I died.”
My jaw drops. “Youdied?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know what else to call it. I felt it—felt my heart stop, felt my instinct to breathe dry up, felt everything grind to a halt. And yet… I’m still here. Existing.”
My brain can’t comprehend how that might be. She looks so… alive. Sure, there’s a pallor underlying her rich brown skin, but she’s so young and pretty if… sad. “How did you end up here?”
She flinches, and I regret asking. Still, she replies reluctantly. “I was… hunting, when they ambushed me. It was hard those first few weeks to learn where and how to hunt. I figured out quickly that the people I feed from don’t remember what happened to them. It must be something in my fangs, or maybe my saliva? That must be why I can’t remember being bitten. But the people I bit also didn’t seem to be turning into vampires, either. Once the initial…fervorwore off, I was able to slow down and keep tabs on the people I drank from. Even weeks later, none of them had changed. I don’t know why I was different, but it was a relief not to be condemning anyone else to this fate.”
“How…” I hesitate. “How long have you been a vampire?”
I fight to keep my expression neutral when she gives me a date. Nearly twenty years ago. She still looks like a fresh-faced college freshman… well, except for the blood stains and the flash of fangs I can’t help but focus on every time her lips part.
“Oh,” I exclaim with a start, realizing that I’ve been so caught up in her story that I forgot why I was here. “I don’t mean to torture you. Here.”
I’m careful when reaching out with the bag of blood to keep as much distance between us as I can. Though the vampire snatches the pint out of my hand so quickly that I don’t actually see her move, her fingers only barely brush my palm.
Without preamble, she bares her teeth, exposing those wickedly pointed fangs, before using them to pierce the thick plastic. She holds the bag to her lips, drinking deeply, and I watch, enthralled, as it shrivels and deflates in seconds. When she lowers the plastic carcass, her lips are red-tinged, as if she just applied lipstick, though this feeding was much neater than when she drank from Eddie. “Another, please?” she asks tentatively, her voicesmall and ashamed as she holds out the remains of her meal.
I quickly pluck the trash from her hand, still careful not to give her a chance to get a grip on me, before passing her a second bag. Again, she uses her unnatural canines to puncture the bag, but this time, she drinks more slowly. Her long, dark eyelashes flicker down to hide her sanguine irises as she savors the meal. Once the pint is depleted, she offers me the empty bag and shakes her head when I offer her a third. “That’s plenty, thank you.”
“I’ll keep the rest for later,” I promise her, tucking away the leftovers. “How often do youactuallyneed to eat?”
She fidgets, tucking her hair behind a small ear. “Every two or three days, ideally. A week is a stretch.”
I can only stare at her, horrified. I’ve been working here a little over a month now, and we’ve never fed her. The only blood she’s had in all that time has been from Eddie and now these couple of stored pints.
I want to apologize. Want to tell her it’s not her fault that Mathis looks at her and sees a weapon and a commodity instead of a woman. But she won’t meet my eyes, and she’s twisting the hem of her dress in her hands nervously. I don’t want to make her feel any more awkward or like a freak than she likely already does. Instead, I ask, “What’s your name?”
She blinks at me blankly for a moment, as if it’s been so long since she’s thought of it that she has to reach deep inside her memory to find it. “Delia,” she replies at last, her voice lilting at the end as if it’s more question than statement.
Dredging up any excess cheer I have in my body, I smile at her. “Hi, Delia. It’s nice to meet you.”
Another glistening red tear tracks down her cheek, and this time, she lets it be. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Anna.”
