Текст книги "Hot for slayer"

Автор книги: Ali Hazelwood

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Chapter 6

Iguess Lazlo is wearing a towel around his hips.

But spiritually, culturally, metaphysically, he feels naked. And yes, he does have ink all over his body, but it seems to be less focused on narrating the misdeeds of Vlad the Impaler and more on commemorating . . . his childhood, perhaps? Family? For the most part, it’s that same old Hungarian script as on his neck and arms, but I also spot flowers that I’ve only ever seen in Eastern Europe, a castle, a coat of arms. On his chest, right on top of his heart, is an ornate Venetian eye mask that looks eerily familiar, but I cannot place it.

“Why are you holding your breath?” he asks after a long stretch of staring, because I’ve been a little too immobile. Vampires do need air, but given the slow crawl of our metabolism, not nearly as much as humans. I could inhale one day, exhale the following, and still be in peak shape.

And yet, I’m suddenly winded. “Sorry, I was just . . . admiring.”

His eyebrow rises.

“The artwork,” I hurry to add.

“Sure. Right. Because it’s the first time you’ve seen it.”

“Yeah, of course it is.” Why is he smiling like we’re sharing an inside joke? “When would I have seen it?”

He stares as if to challenge me, then folds his arms in a beautiful ripple of muscles and colorful ink. “This place feels familiar. But I’m sure you’ll tell me that I’ve never been in your apartment.”

If he had, I’d be dead. “Maybe you did some pest control work for the previous tenant?”

“I must have done a piss-poor job of it, considering.”

“Considering what?”

He points at a spot above my head. When I turn around, there is a giant—

“Spider!” I scream, running to duck behind Lazlo. It’s big and streaked in yellow and gross, and God, I’ve always hated arthropods.

“Interesting,” Lazlo muses.

I whimper, “What?”

“An entomologist who is afraid of spiders.” He turns to face me. “How unusual.”

Shit. Fuck. I straighten and collect myself. “It’s a very rude assumption,” I say haughtily, “that just because I study insects, I have to like all types of—”

“I have a lot of scars,” he interrupts, conversational. “All over my body.”

“ . . . Okay.”

“Some are big.” He points at a thick, knotty line that bisects the middle of his abdomen. “I wonder how I got this one. It must have been deep.”

Unless I’m mistaken, I gave it to him in Bath during the 1800s. I was having a grand old time choosing ribbons for my bonnet when he galloped into town and forced me to move to France, where Napoleon was still pursuing his military dreams.

I clear my throat. “Pest control is a dangerous profession.”

“Must be,” he says, meaning: No, it isn’t.

“Does it hurt?”

“No. But since you asked, something is bothering my left rib. Could you check?”

Absolutely fucking no, I plan to say. But just like all the other noes I should have said today, it remains stuck in my throat, and I’m somehow sliding my fingers up his flank and over his flank.

For a split second, we both freeze, and I’m not the only one who’s not breathing. The room falls into an unnatural layered silence. Lazlo glances down at me with that inquisitive, slightly accusing expression that seems to chew at the lining of my stomach, and I try to return the stare without looking too wide-eyed and guilty, but there is something here. Something that jumps from me to him, that flows from him to me. A current, a heat, a moment of confusion and deluge that clogs my senses, and . . .

You’re just not used to touch, I tell myself.

Yes. That’s it. It must have been a handful of years since the last time. I like to choose very bad people as meals, so I limit my physical contact with them, while Lazlo . . . He is not food. He is a person, an immortal just like me, surprisingly solid in a world where everything drifts past, disappearing too quickly.

It’s disorienting, is all.

“Why are your hands so cold?” he asks, voice curt and gravelly.

“Bad circulation,” I mumble, hurrying to bend my neck and search for the wound he mentioned. “Vitamin deficiencies. Gets chilly at night outside.”

“You just gave me three different excuses.”

“I gave three reasons, all valid, so get off my– Shit. There’s a shard of glass stuck between your lowest two ribs. I think you may have healed around it.”

“Can you take it out?”

“I’d have to cut it open a bit. You’d bleed again.”

“That’s fine.”

It’s not fine at all. But I do it, taking one of the thirty switchblades hidden around my place, carving a small cut over the one already healed.

I’m not an unfledged youth. My bloodlust is long quenched, and I can control my impulses even when I’m injured or hurt or approaching starvation. The scent of Lazlo does not make me lose my mind, because I’m better than that.

But God, it’s sweet.

Always has been. Every time we fought, every blade I sank into his flesh, every breakneck chase, the allure of his blood was there, calling. I’ve injured and killed plenty of slayers before him, and they all repulsed me, but Lazlo . . . I have no idea why his specific blood feels so overpoweringly, mouthwateringly delicious, but now that the glass splint is out, I should probably take a step back.

Yeah.

I’m gonna.

Any second now.

“All new,” I say, not meeting his eyes. My voice trembles. The wound is already closing, and I’m scurrying to the sink to wash the drops of his blood off my hands, but once the faucet is on, I cannot help staring at the running water like it’s my enemy, because it would be such a waste to give up this precious—

It’s a truly terrible idea, but my thumb and forefinger are already inside my mouth, licked clean, before I’m even aware of it. The taste of the blood, even just a few scant drops, awakens my sluggish, dormant body in a way gallons of plasma could never accomplish. Heat blooms and fires through my nerve endings. I feel the telltale itch of my fangs pushing against the roof of my mouth, elongating, and I have to grab the edge of the sink so tight, I’ll never get my security deposit back.

Then Lazlo comes to a stop beside me. “Already feels better,” he’s saying. “Thanks.”

Before turning around, I beg my fangs to retreat. Promise them lots of firm necks to bite into, very soon, if they behave. “You’re welcome.” I take a fortifying breath and then face him. “I’m going to make food now. Hope mac and cheese is all right. I also got you spare clothes, they’re in that paper bag over there.”

“You are getting warmer,” he murmurs. Not suggestively. An observation, followed by the back of his hand tracing my cheek. As if to probe a portentous flush with his knuckles.

I swallow. “Yeah.”

“Good.” His hand lingers. When it finally drops to his side, his mouth curves downward, like he’s displeased to no longer be touching me. “Your body found some B12.”

“Guess so.” I try for my most triumphant smile and start puttering around the kitchen, letting out a relieved breath when he leaves to get dressed. The apartment came furnished, which is the only reason I have kitchen utensils. Unfortunately, by the time Lazlo comes back wearing his new and annoyingly flattering clothes, the stove looks like it just hosted a rave.

“I’m sure you’re good at other things, Ethel,” he says with an undertone of warmth. He wrestles control of the pot so effortlessly, I’m still wondering what happened ten minutes later when we sit at the table with steaming plates in front of us.

There is no damn way my kind and his have ever done this before. Sharing a meal, that is. Talking politely. Even just not killing each other. I wish I had a group chat to share this fantastic occurrence with. Even a single friend would do. Maybe I should yell it out of the window and hope the raccoons will hear.

“So,” he asks while demolishing the food, “where did we meet?”

“Me and you?”

He nods.

I play with a few shells trapped within each other. “Well, we . . . I’m a little older than you.”

“By how much?”

“Not sure.” Lazlo appeared during my third century, and was relatively easy to overpower in our first few encounters, which I attributed to him not having fully grown into his slayer strength.

How I miss those days.

“You were just doing your job,” I add.

“Here in New York?”

No, because at the time I wasn’t aware of the existence of this continent is not the best answer. I lived in Córdoba back then, because it was one of the largest cities in the world, and I desperately tried to go unobserved. By then, I was very much an adolescent vampire, still sorting myself out. I had retained an appreciation for human life, was years from deconstructing the Christian notions of good and evil the abbess had inculcated, and after every meal I drank, I spent several regretful weeks in feverish prayers for forgiveness. I hated killing people so much, I’d resorted to skulking around places where healthy humans might drop almost-dead at any second, in the hope of finding a guilt-free meal. Jousting tournaments, for the most part.

Pathetic, I know.

“In the suburbs,” I lie. “You were with your . . . boss.” Or mentor. Or something. An older slayer whose name I never learned. “He quit shortly after.” I killed him. But he so had it coming.

“Were we nemeses from the start?” It’s obvious that the question is meant to make fun of me, and it’s obvious that he wants me to notice. So I pretend not to.

“Pretty much.”

In fact, I remember his eyes on me from across the square, constant, never leaving. I thought—stupidly, mistakenly, disappointingly—that maybe that handsome young man was attracted to me. In less than two minutes, not only had I concocted a backstory for us (he had seen me at the market and become infatuated despite my intimidating riches and beauty) but also a future (I would reassure him that his lack of wealth mattered nothing to me; we would talk for hours and fall deeply for each other; I would confess my vampiric nature, and after a brief spell of appalment, he would realize that not even my monstrous character could stand in the way of our love; then, forever would begin). As I said, I was very much an adolescent. Still, this was an uncharacteristically pipe-y dream, even for me.

But when Lazlo came after me brandishing one of his favorite weapons, two sickle blades tied together with a metal chain, I wised up real quick.

“It was one-sided,” he tells me after he’s done chewing. “From you.”

“What?”

“The dislike.”

“I assure you, it was not.”

“And I assure you, when I look at you, I feel anything but that.” A pause. “Why are you not eating?”

“Oh. Um, I was so hungry, I scarfed down a candy bar at the register,” I recite. It’s the one excuse I could come up with, and he doesn’t buy it, but he accepts my plate when I push it in his direction.

The sweet heat of his blood still churns through my body.

“Why did you become an entomologist?”

Christ. I can’t remember the last time someone asked me this many questions. “It wasn’t really planned.”

“How do you become something without planning to?”

Well, Lazlo, sometimes a gang of bandits decides to rob your nunnery—because why not?—and you see what’s happening to your sisters and decide that you’d rather throw yourself out of the window than allow the raiders to come any closer to you—because why not?—and a vampire passing by spots you in your last moments and decides to suck you dry—because why not?—and then you wake up in the middle of the night, and for some reason, you’re a damn vampire, too.

“It wasn’t my decision,” I tell him instead. It wasn’t my maker’s decision, either. Even vampires are not sure why some people turn and others don’t. There are necessary conditions—the person has to be on the brink of death but strong enough to sustain the transformation and some of the vampire’s blood has to be ingested by them, but it’s not as simple as that. Many tried and failed. Many didn’t mean to welcome new souls into the night, but . . . here I am.

“You enjoy it, though.”

I shouldn’t. At least, that’s the stereotype, right? Immortals are supposed to be sullen and full of regrets, always a hairbreadth away from stepping into the sun and get it all over with. But mal de vivre, meaninglessness, pain and suffering . . . They’re not really my thing. I consider myself lucky, because I’m not prone to ennui. It may sound foolish, but I never get bored of watching the trees change, of seeing girls walk around hand in hand while giggling over a text from a crush, of finding a good poem.

Immortality can mean deep thoughts and philosophical pondering and the relentless pursuit of knowledge, sure, but for me it was always the opposite. I found it so easy, falling into the day-to-day. The humdrum. Staring out of the window with an empty mind. A crossword, a walk in the rain, a well-written book. Flowers blooming.

Perhaps the abbess was right, and I romanticize insignificant things too much—although, if I recall correctly, the way she put it was more like, Life is not a brightly painted knight’s tale, Sister Aethelthryth. Stop wasting time on fancies and follies, and go scrub the privy, child. Still, I’ve learned to live in the moment, and to be happy, even on my own. I’ve learned to treasure little joys, like making other people’s lives better by lending a hand or a smile, doing small talk, laughing at bad puns.

Sometimes I’m lonely. Sometimes I want more—whatever that means. Not everything is ideal. But I’m capable of finding my own meaning.

“Yes,” I say firmly. “I didn’t choose it, but I enjoy it.”

“I feel the same,” Lazlo says after a pensive beat.

My spine straightens. “Have you remembered something?”

“No. But what you said about becoming something without wanting, and still trying to make the best out of it . . . It makes sense. On a visceral level.”

“Oh.”

We finish eating in silence—and by we, I mean he efficiently shovels food inside his mouth, and I play with the worn edges of the place mat I found in the drawers. Afterward, he stands and heads for the sink to do the dishes like it’s a reflex, a simple courtesy after a meal. I cannot help but wonder who taught him that.

Maybe he is married. Maybe during the Reign of Terror, while I was milling around the falling guillotines to get a good drink out of people who’d have died anyway (hate wasting food), Lazlo was having a beachside wedding with a colleague. Maybe his partner is currently worried sick about him, tossing and turning in the bed they usually share, because he hasn’t come home and . . .

My train of thought stops, and my head explodes into a panic.

“You okay?” he asks, still drying the plates we used as though he heard my entire brain detonate.

“Yeah,” I say. But no, I’m not okay. Because I just remembered something very important.

There are no beds in this apartment.

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Chapter 7

Vampires don’t sleep.

It’s part of the whole curse thing—no rest, no quiet, no respite from our evil deeds. We are condemned to an eternity of staring at empty walls and reflecting on what we have done, all in the hope of atoning for our very existence. The possibilities for self-flagellation are endless.

But my white-hot take is that I’ve done nothing wrong, at least not since I began observing a strictly asshole-tarian diet. So I politely excused myself from the pity party and retooled that time for playing sudoku.

While my apartment does have a bedroom—mostly packed with clothes, books, and the equipment I have accumulated over years of taking up, and almost instantly quitting, all kinds of crafts—it doesn’t have a bed.

Which, I realize now, is only slightly less suspicious than putting a coffin in my living space.

“You are a horse,” Lazlo says. He surveys the room from behind me, cross-armed.

“How do you remember that horses sleep standing up but not what gluten is?”

“Maybe gluten is another one of my nemeses.” He gives a skeptical glance to my stack of friendship-bracelets kits, then moves back to the living room. “You sleep on the couch,” he says in his usual pragmatic, matter-of-fact tone.

Not asking but informing.

I decide to piggyback on that. “Of course. But it’s okay, you can take it. I think I have an air mattress”—fun fact: I know I do not—“so I can—”

“No.”

I halt, momentarily speechless. “No?”

“We both sleep on the couch,” he declares. “Together.”

“We can’t sleep together.”

“Are there laws against it?”

“No.”

“Then we sleep together.”

Goddamn this man. “No, we don’t. What if you have a family? How would your partner feel about that? How would your kids react to Daddy sharing a love seat with—”

“I’m not married.” His tone is final. “And I have no children. Some things, a man just knows about himself.”

My eyebrow lifts. “Really?”

“Really.” He turns away and starts stripping the cushions off the couch to make it more spacious.

“Out of curiosity,” I ask, peeved, “what else does ‘a man just know about himself’ despite a dire case of sudden-onset global amnesia? The date of his last colonoscopy? The best brand of jigsaw? How to build a ham radio– What the hell are you—”

He is, quite clearly, gripping my wrist and pulling me toward the couch. It should trigger my fight reflex and make me headbutt him in the nose, but for some reason it doesn’t. A moment later, I’m horizontal with him, wedged tight between the length of his body and the back of the couch.

“Oh,” I hear myself say.

Just that: Oh.

Lazlo’s reply is a vague grunt, followed by a tightening of his grip. I can feel every cord of his muscles pressing against me, and it should be a new and destabilizing experience, but it seems disturbingly familiar.

He and I, after all, have been this close before.

On the numerous occasions that he tried to kill me.

“I don’t think this is—”

“Hush,” he says gently. He’s as hot as the sun’s core. I must be the opposite, because he murmurs something about my icy limbs and how my poor body must have misplaced all its vitamins, and what can we do to find it again?

If you only knew, I think darkly, trying to free myself without too much conviction. The truth is, this is very enjoyable. Being surrounded. Pressed in. Bundled. It’s evolutionary: My kind was programmed to enjoy tiny, suffocating spaces where the sun cannot reach. And boy, does this specific slayer provide.

It’s cozy. And cozy is pleasant. And pleasant—the little things that give joy—is something one learns to value when approaching one-point-four millennia alive.

And yet. “By doing this, you’re probably destroying your decades-long marriage,” I mumble against the unwieldy pillow of his biceps. “I just hope you have nice feet.”

“Why?”

“You’re going to have to sell lots of pictures of them to afford a divorce lawyer.” He hums, patient, clearly confident about the state of his toes. “Seriously, Lazlo, this is a bad idea.”

“Stop fidgeting, I’m dozing off.”

“Didn’t you sleep all day?” I mumble, perhaps more harshly than he deserves, considering his recently concussed status. Maybe too late, it occurs to me that I should pretend to breathe. “Listen, since neither of us knows whether you are in a relationship, I think that—”

An impatient sigh interrupts me, and he crowds me even more against the cushions, which presses him close enough to me that . . . Oh my God. Is that a stake in his pocket, or is he just glad to see me?

“Ethel, stop it.”

“Stop what? I’m only—”

“The bugs, the job, the nemeses stuff. You don’t have to tell me the truth, but you can stop pretending.”

“Pretending what?”

His chest heaves. “I might not remember my name, or anything about who I am. But I could never be near you and not know exactly what you are to me.” A second later, he falls asleep, leaving me to stare at the chevron pattern of the couch for eight straight hours as I try not to enjoy the heat of his body against mine, desperate to decipher exactly what his last words meant.

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Chapter 8

The following morning I realize that, to my utmost shock, Lazlo will need to be fed once more. And in five hours—perhaps even fewer, considering his size—we’ll be here all over again. Because his kind needs food multiple times a day.

Absurd.

About half an hour before sunrise, I disentangle myself from him and sneak out to the corner bodega. I buy eggs, bacon, vegetables, pasta, fruit, and something called Pop-Tarts that must have been invented while I was blinking. I stroll back home, baffled that human society has managed to evolve past the hunter-gatherer stage, given the farcical amount of time they dedicate to eating.

Meanwhile, I think with a self-satisfied pat on my own back, I last drank two weeks ago—a guy who worked as a fixer for the Nestlé executive board—and barring unforeseen circumstances, I won’t need to be topped off for three or four more.

Although, something within me asks, wouldn’t a sip of Lazlo be good? Delectable. Thick and rich and unlike anything you’ve ever tasted. It would sit heavy in your belly, power your nerve endings, and you’d finally feel so warm that—

I mentally slap the idiotic voice inside my head, grateful for the distraction when someone asks, “Trick or treat?”

I glance down, and down, to find an adorable little girl staring up at me. She’s wearing a black cape and plastic fangs, pearl white against her dark skin. Someone drew a shiny, remarkably realistic trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth. Next to her, a blond boy holds something that closely resembles a wooden stake.

“I’m so sorry,” one of the adult women standing behind them says. “Hey, you two. We’re on our way to school. And trick-or-treating is not for the middle of a busy street—”

“I don’t mind,” I say with a smile, crouching down to the children’s height. “I like your costumes,” I tell them.

“Thank you,” the girl says solemnly. “I’m going to be a vampire when I grow up.”

“And I’m going to be a vampire hunter,” says the boy. “And we’re going to get married.”

I try not to choke on my tongue. “Good luck with that,” I mutter, because they’re definitely going to need it. I dig the box of Frosted S’mores Pop-Tarts out of my “Save the Bees” reusable shopping bag and split the contents evenly between their satchels. Judging from the hug they exchange, the pastries must be a hit.

Sorry, Lazlo. But they never pledged to maul me and eradicate my people, so they deserved the tarts that pop more than you do.

Back upstairs, I find him awake, standing in the small kitchen. “You went out early,” he says, like it’s totally normal for him to wait for me shirtless and freshly showered. “You’re a morning person.”

Ha. “Yeah. Sure.”

“You are well rested.”

“Right.” I’m starting to find it more amusing than irritating, the way he states things about me instead of asking questions, and that worries me a bit. Only slightly less than the fact that he has already drawn and latched together all the blackout curtains, despite sunrise being five minutes away.

“How did you know—”

“You are allergic to the sun,” he simply says, like it’s an explanation, and then gets up to take the bag from me and begins putting away the groceries.

He’s been here for twelve hours, and we somehow have a routine.

I need to get him out of here stat.

“You hungry?” I ask as he lines boxes of pasta in the empty cupboard.

“Very.”

“I’ll make some eggs, then. It might, um, take me a while. Maybe you can have this in the meantime?” I throw an apple in his direction—which turns out to be a mistake when, in the blink of an eye, Lazlo grabs a knife from the wooden block and uses it to slash the fruit into four pieces.

While it’s still in the air.

The chunks hit the ground with dull thuds, and we stare at them for a long stretch of silence.

Then I clear my throat. “I didn’t know that an apple murdered your family.”

“I . . . did not mean to do that.” He scratches the back of his neck.

“Right. No, I know. You cut the apple into four identical pieces by accident.”

“It was a reflex.” He twirls the knife in his fingers with a dexterity that would leave me less unsettled if I didn’t know he developed it to kill me, specifically. “But.”

“But?”

He sheathes the blade inside the wooden block. “If I asked you why I’m so good with a knife, would you tell me that it’s because of my pest control background?”

I force myself to swallow. There is something painfully heavy about lying to someone who knows that he’s not being told the truth, but . . . what alternative do I have? “I can’t imagine any other reason.”

This time, his sigh is barely perceptible, but his lips are thin. “Then I won’t ask, Ethel.”

He crouches to pick up the apple, and I get to work on his eggs, wondering when I got so bad at gaslighting people.

“I didn’t know those eggs murdered your family,” he tells me after I smash the third shell against the edge of a bowl. The last time I made an omelet, I didn’t have vampiric strength, and adjusting is taking a minute, but– “I’ve got it now, I’ve got it,” I protest, but before I can redeem my kitchen skills, Lazlo is standing behind me, gently prying the eggs from my fingers, taking over. His arms bracket me on each side, and his chin brushes the crown of my head as he works with a cursory, expert grace that I find equally pleasing and irritating.

I should stiffen and push him away, but my body has already gotten used to being surrounded by his. The strength. The warmth. The sensation of being part of something. I pretend not to notice the way his lips press against the back of my head before he moves to the stove to scramble a number of eggs that could feed a family of five for two weeks.

“I had a dream,” he tells me once we’re sitting at the table. For this meal, my cover story is: Not a breakfast person. Lazlo didn’t bother reacting, as though he knows that every single thing coming out of my mouth is likely a lie.

“What kind of dream?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was a memory. You were there, though.”

My stomach sinks. “Were you chopping me into four pieces with a kitchen knife?”

“We were dancing.”

I slump, relieved. “Dancing . . . in a club?”

He shoots me a dirty look like he knows what a club is and wouldn’t be caught dead inside one. “More formal than that.” He chews some more. “I liked your dress.” A smile starts. Turns into a private thing—between Lazlo and his own thoughts. “A lot.”

“We’ve never danced together, so I don’t think it was a memory,” I say, unsure whether to be embarrassed or relieved or flattered. “Anyway, I assume you are eager to return to your own home, so—”

“No,” he says, final, happy. At ease.

By all means, Lazlo, do overstay your welcome, I think. There’s no real heat in it, though. Which is stupid. The more he sticks around, the better he’ll know me, and the easier it’ll be to track me down once he regains his memories.

I grit my teeth and plop myself down on the couch, snatching the first sudoku magazine I come across. This is not harmless. Once he remembers who he is, I’m going to have to move, and—

The cushion dips as Lazlo makes himself comfortable next to me, still half undressed. The mask tattoo under his heart shifts with every little movement, daring me to remember where I’ve seen it before. Then he grabs one of my puzzle magazines and a pencil, and begins filling in a sudoku grid with impressive speed.

I blink. Then ask, pathetically excited: “You like sudoku?”

“What?”

“The square thing you’re doing.” I lean closer. “I didn’t think you—” I snap my mouth shut. Reopen it. “Did you just write down random numbers?”

“And I do not see what you enjoy about it.”

“About what?”

“Coming up with rows of numbers. It’s poor entertainment.”

“No. No, there is an actual . . . No.” I spend the next two hours teaching a vampire slayer who was created to wipe out my bloodline how to correctly fill in a sudoku grid. He’s not at all bad at it, and I hate to acknowledge it.

“So, this is what we do during the day,” he says after a while.

“We?” I frown. “We don’t usually spend our days together.”

He smiles like I didn’t even speak.

“I’m serious. We rarely . . .” I drift off, because he’s taking a strand of my hair between his fingers and rubbing it gently, watching the flow of light orange across his own pale skin. His mouth murmurs a few words in another language—one that I speak, but I pretend not to, because this is not—

It shouldn’t—

What is even—

It’s casual, the way he tucks a lock of hair behind my ear. His touch is at once new and familiar, scorching and gentle. “Strawberry blond,” he says to himself. Then asks me, “We rarely what?”

Vampires don’t blush. We simply don’t have enough blood for it. I thank whoever cursed us for that small grace, glance away, and mumble, “Nothing.”

The rest of the day is . . .

I wish I could say that it’s terrible. That I consider walking into the sun just to escape Lazlo’s suffocating presence. But that’s not the way it goes.

He is surprisingly restful to be around, even when he teases me for holding a spoon like it’s an object of alien provenance, even when I sneak back up from the basement with my dried laundry, and he watches me fold my lingerie with a smile that says: I know who you wear it for.

In the afternoon, he collects all his weapons and begins to clean them.

“Have you—”

“No, I have not remembered,” he says. “But I feel an itch.”

“An itch,” I repeat. But I watch him polish and oil, trying not to jolt at every sound of clanking metal. My understanding is that the Hällsing Guild doesn’t micromanage, and that every slayer is allowed their weapon of choice. Or five. Given that silver, wooden stakes through the heart, or particularly garlicky Olive Garden dishes have no effect on us, and that only the sun can truly kill us, intelligent slayers (to my constant despair, Lazlo is one of them) tend to prioritize tools that will incapacitate us. Steel bolas trip and bind us, while blades can cut off limbs and make it difficult to run away. Since Lazlo has done both things to me, multiple times, I cannot help but startle when he asks, mid-sharpen:

“What do I do, Ethel?”

I blink. Force myself to calm down. “I told you, you—”

“Ethel.” He holds my gaze, still whetting his dagger with expert strokes. “What do I really do?”

I bite my lower lip. I’m going to have to lie to him again. When, exactly, did that begin to feel so abominable? “You’re right. I wasn’t truthful. The reason we know each other is . . .”