“What happened?” Rhea asked, flinching a little at the nails on a chalkboard sound of a mirror reverse shattering, and causing Gertie to glance at her.
“And who is this?”
“My acolyte, remember?” I said, because Gertie had seen her before. But it had been on a very fraught night for all of us, when a different acolyte had tried to tear apart time, so I supposed she could be forgiven for not remembering.
Come to think of it, that probably explained why Rhea was so freaked out at the concept of a vampire flitting around the timeline. She was thinking of the last time someone had tried it. It didn’t make me any happier, either, but this did not seem like the time to discuss it—or anything else. Not with a whole chorus of roars, yelps and howls shredding the air from somewhere far too close for comfort.
The sound shook the crystals in the sconces that Gertie had just repaired and reaffixed to the wall, sending prisms of light scattering everywhere. I watched the little diamond shapes dance and didn’t say anything, insulated by my burning throat and churning stomach. But my acolyte clearly felt differently. Recent events also seemed to have shaken her out of her usual reticence, and she had something to say.
“What is that?”
“Moderate your tone,” Gertie snapped, also clearly out of sorts, maybe because the wallpaper she’d just repaired had a bubble in it.
“Moderate yours!” Rhea snapped back, winning her a sharp look from Gertie and a pleading one from me.
“Rhea,” I began—
Which was as far as I got, but not because of Gertie. Rhea found herself being grabbed from behind and spun around, and then roundly slapped—by her own mother. Agnes had come in behind us and obviously objected to unwanted guests being rude to the boss. Of course, letting a guest almost be eaten counted as rude, too, but I was suspending judgement because I didn’t know all the facts yet.
And because I’d done most of the eating.
I shoved my face into my bucket and just breathed for a moment, while the girls shouted at each other.
Their tempers seemed kind of similar.
I felt someone sit beside me on the sofa after a while, and looked up to see Gertie th
rough bleary eyes. “You don’t look well,” she observed.
“Been better,” I croaked.
“I did not think your kind became ill.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “My kind?”
She pulled the collar of my old-fashioned gown, which had been designed to fit in with the times, away from my neck. And then sucked in a breath. “I thought so,” she said. “But it is still hard to see. I assume this is why you have brought your acolyte with you?”
“What?”
“For the ritual to replace you.”
I had a feeling that, somewhere along the line, I had lost the thread of this conversation. Assuming I’d ever had it. “I brought her to use the library,” I said.
This appeared to confuse Gertie.
“The library? What use is that to an Undead?”
“Undead?” I glanced around sharply, because that word could mean a lot of things, and few were good. “Where?”
Gertie frowned at me some more. “Is that not what you are?”
“What?” I looked at her in confusion.
She reached over and jerked my collar open again. “You’ve been bitten!”
It took me a moment. It had been that kind of day. “Yeah, a while ago. Nothing happened,” I said, flapping at her hand, which was threatening to strangle me. And which did me no good, except to be jerked closer.
“You call this nothing?” she demanded.