After my transformation ended, we found Hafsah just in time.
Mercifully, she didn’t have a roommate. Her parents were both doctors and so could afford the almost double-rent premium on the Foxglove single dorms with en-suites.
I could barely walk from the residual aches and pains caused by the transformation. My wrists were red raw from yanking fiercely at the pair of handcuffs Lottie had used to restrain me, and my throat was like sandpaper from Dark Alice’s hostile takeover.
Pure adrenaline propelled me down the corridor to dorm 3-14, vial filled with tincture clutched in my palm so tightly that the glass was warmed through. I’d already pricked myself with the blood sugar needle and added the metallic crimson to the elderflower so that it was ready to administer the second we got to Hafsah.
Sure enough, her groans seeped through the old wooden door.
‘Hafsah?’ I said in a low voice, mouth close to the keyhole. ‘Hafsah, it’s me and Lottie. We have the tincture. Open up?’
No response, just the sound of a weary body being dragged along the carpet towards the door.
‘Stand back,’ I whispered to Lottie. ‘You’ve already done enough. I’m not letting you put yourself in any more danger.’
‘Whatever, I can take her,’ Lottie said measuredly. ‘Neither of you work out.’ She flexed her bicep, which popped up through her pink Ellesse sweater. I couldn’t hold back the smile, despite the situation. She wassucha jock.
Hafsah’s expression when she opened the door would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Fear and hatred waged a violent war behind her dark brown eyes. Her face was slick with rivulets of mascara, and her chest heaved with pain and desperation. She was on her hands and knees on the carpet, limbs trembling and convulsing. The room behind her was filled with childhood paraphernalia; tamagotchis and Pokémon cards, stacks of manga and Studio Ghibli figurines, kawaii plush animals and an art print of Goku fromDragon Ball Z.
‘Hey, it’s okay,’ Lottie said, voice gentle and calm. We’re here. Can we come in?’
The question was apparently rhetorical. Lottie pushed the door open and offered her a hand, but when it became clear Hafsah didn’t have the strength to take it, Lottie hauled her to her feet, tossed her over her shoulder as though she were a sack of potatoes, and carried her to the cabin bunk in a fireman’s lift. Hafsah watched in vague terror as Lottie cuffed each hand to the sides of the bed.
Slipping the tincture down Hafsah’s throat was easier than it had been in the bathroom last time – we’d arrived before she was entirely consumed by the darkness. No sooner had it hit her stomach did the shaking stop abruptly. A black veil went down behind her eyes, and Dark Hafsah emerged. She turned to stare at us, and the coldness of the glare bore right into my soul.
‘I’m going to kill you fuckingbitches,’ the voice uttered, a grinding of metal and a crunching of bones.
‘Cool,’ Lottie said nonchalantly, settling herself down cross-legged on the floor. ‘Let me know when you’re done?’
‘Where did you get the cuffs, by the way?’ I whispered to her. ‘Youngman’s Hardware?’
She looked at me with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. ‘Who says I didn’t already have them?’
Feeling my cheeks pinken, I had to forcibly banish the sight of her in her fuchsia underwear from my mind.
Seeing that I looked flustered, she laughed and said, ‘I’m kidding. I got them at Youngman’s last time I was in town.’ An odd little smile. ‘I’ve never even kissed another person before.’
This caught me off guard. ‘Really? Surely you could’ve had your pick of anyone you wanted.’ I gestured to her face and general physique.
She bit her lip. ‘Did you just compliment me?’
‘Absolutely not,’ I rebutted, my cheeks growing even hotter.
She shrugged and picked at a thread in her ripped jeans. ‘I just never felt any desire to kiss anyone. At least not until . . .’
When she didn’t finish, I quirked an eyebrow. ‘Until what?’ I racked my brains, trying to remember whether I’d seen her go out on any dates.
‘Never mind,’ she said, just as Hafsah muttered something about using tendons as toothpicks.
*
‘Why did we have less time?’ Hafsah asked, a few hours later, watching as Lottie uncuffed her from the bunk. The mascara had dried down her cheeks like crude black arteries. ‘It was supposed to be a month. Why wasn’t it a month?’ She rubbed at her wrists, red welts matching my own.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. I sat in her desk chair, elbows resting on the desk and my forehead slumped into the heels of my hands. Pain and exhaustion and a deep pit of hunger had rendered me weak.
Hafsah climbed unsteadily down the steps of her cabin bunk and crossed into the en-suite, where she plucked a baby wipe from a freshly opened packet and rubbed the make-up from her cheeks. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ve saved me twice now.’