Carmilla Read online

  When Carmilla thrashes around, Perry says, “We need more rope, maybe zip ties. I saw that on Law & Order.”

  LaFontaine grabs the zip ties and adds them to the arsenal of rope and duct tape already securing Carmilla. One after another.

  Zip.

  Zip.

  Zip.

  It’s the last zip tie around her wrists that cracks her.

  “Fine. It’s true, I am a vampire. It doesn’t take a genius to confirm that. But I didn’t touch those two girls. I was here with Laura. Alone.”

  Danny flinches.

  Carm is pleased with herself when she sees Danny boiling mad. “Then I got ambushed by the frat toddlers and Red.”

  If looks could kill, Danny just took Carmilla out.

  “The Zetas practiced karate on my ribs and legs. LaFontaine here was swinging a blender at me while the rest of you knocked me to the floor and dogpiled me. Or don’t you remember that?”

  I curl my lip. “What about an accomplice? A vampire in training or something?”

  “You’ve met me? Do I seem like I play well with others?”

  Fine. I’ve had it with this. “If you aren’t snacking on these girls, then why are you stalking them?”

  “Oh, aren’t you cute? I don’t have to stalk anyone. I get plenty of invitations. I’m popular.” Voice dripping with all the sexy. Ignore it, Hollis, I plead with myself.

  “You’re a vampire.”

  “But not a kidnapper. Big difference, cupcake.”

  I turn to the others. “What are we going to do with her? She just admitted that she is a vampire. She could kill us all.”

  “If I wanted to do that, you wouldn’t be here right now. Believe me. I’m a lover, not a fighter.” She directs that last sentence right to me. My cheeks are on fire.

  Perry speaks up. “That’s insane. There’s no such thing as a vampire. This is all Stephenie Meyer’s fault. We could call Student Health Services. They’re loaded up with meds. We can’t keep her here. Can we?”

  “Sure we can.” I’m bound and determined to get through to her. I just can’t look into her eyes or I’ll be toast. There’s no way that she doesn’t have the answers we’re looking for. If she didn’t take the girls, she knows who did. She has to.

  The lights flicker. What the hell?

  “Are you going to help us or not?”

  Her silent glare is my answer.

  • TEN •

  For the last week, we’ve been taking turns babysitting Carmilla so that each of us can catch some sleep and make it to a few classes. I untie her when she’s on my watch, since I have the guilties from the whole takedown plan.

  I still can’t get her to talk to me. I offered her my cookies and she snubbed me. She’s dug in her heels and isn’t giving in. Not one single word. I guess I can’t blame her but I’ll keep trying anyway. Being nice to her makes me feel better about how horribly I treated her.

  It’s day seven and Carmilla still isn’t giving us any information, her lips solidly pressed together. Not even water could get through. Either she can really keep a secret or she’s a glutton for punishment. The ropes lie on the floor next to her. I catch her rubbing her wrists.

  She’s appearing a little worse for the wear, if you ask me. Her skin is so pale that it’s almost translucent. Her head flops to the side. I really do feel for her. She’s so helpless.

  “If you tell me what we want to know, I’ll give you a sip of blood,” I tell her. LaFontaine stocked the fridge. “Carm?”

  She doesn’t say a word.

  A knock on the door distracts me. Danny and Perry rush to open it and block the view of Carmilla from whoever’s there. There’s been a steady stream of her admirers loitering in the hallway outside our room since she’s gone MIA from the party circuit. She’s right about one thing. She’s quite popular.

  “No, she hasn’t come back,” I hear Danny lie. She slams the door. Danny shoots me an exasperated look.

  I whirl around toward Carmilla. “I know you left a trail of broken hearts in your wake, but any more of your one-night stands shows up, I’m going to start spraying them with water like stray cats.”

  No response. She glazes over, then her neck gives way, her chin hits her chest. Shit. Her eyes are rolling in her head.

  “Carm!” I panic, then rush to the fridge and grab a blood bag, placing it in her mouth and squeezing lightly. Nothing happens.

  “Drink it. I don’t want you to die, Carmilla.” This is not part of the plan! Carmilla coughs and her cheeks pink up.

  “Thank God. Let me help you sit up. Would you like some more?” She looks so forlorn that my heart aches for her. She sips again, becomes more alert.

  “Where did you manage to score that?” she whispers.

  “LaFontaine got it from the campus hospital. She told them she needed it for some experiment in bio lab. There’s more. Just in case.” I spot some blood dripping form the corner of her mouth. I take my thumb and gently clear it away. Our eyes meet once more. Carmilla flinches, jerking away from me.

  “Look, the humiliation of being held captive by a bunch of imbeciles for something I didn’t do is plenty to deal with. I don’t need you to make matters worse by wiping away my drool like I’m an infant.”

  I soften. “Just trying to help.”

  “It’s not working.”

  “Carm, if you weren’t involved, then why did it seem like you were about to eat me the night we captured you?”

  “Hold up. You thought that was me trying to eat you? Not so much.”

  “If you weren’t going to eat me …” Oh God. It was what I thought it was. “I’m not so good at reading people.”

  “Obviously, or I wouldn’t be in this situation,” she cracks.

  I smile. “So you really were hitting on me?”

  Carmilla’s face heats up. “And you were luring me into a trap. Stake me now. It would be much less mortifying than this conversation. Talk about mixed signals.”

  Talk about awkward. Danny and Perry slink out the door, and I wish I could go with them, but I have to find a way to make things right with Carmilla.

  I gather myself together and take a different approach. Because I want to. “Carm, how are we supposed to believe you if you don’t tell us your side of the story? I want to believe you, I really do. Help me help you.”

  I hope my hand on hers assures her I really mean it.

  Carmilla breathes deeply for a few moments and then it’s like she just gives in. “Buckle up, cream puff. I’ll tell you my side of the story. If you’re ready.”

  “All buckled up. Let’s get you in front of the camera.” I wheel her next to the webcam, brush her hair. She’s a hot mess. I mean, as messy as someone so gorgeous could be. Her mess is like most people’s barely rumpled look. In this case, the loss of blood gives her a ghostlike glow that I find achingly attractive.

  “This pathological need you have to document every little thing borders on obsessive,” Carmilla says. The blood is helping. She’s back.

  “Here we go. It’s your chance to convince the student body and us that you didn’t have Betty for a snack.”

  Carmilla starts rattling off her life story in such a monotone that I almost doze off. “I was born Mircalla, daughter of Count Karnstein, in Styria, a duchy of Austria, in the year 1680. Austria was plagued by repeated invasions by the Ottoman Empire, but such things meant little to a wealthy girl, except that the princes who came to my father’s estate wore uniforms that glittered with military honors. When I was eighteen, I attended a ball where I was murdered. By a vampire. That’s it in a nutshell. How’s that?”

  “Boring. Let’s make it exciting — do a … sock puppet show,” I suggest. I need to keep the viewers engaged, and these last few minutes were more like taking a Xanax.

  “You are certifiable, Hollis.”
r />   I rummage through the room to set up a makeshift stage. A sock on each arm, I start with the pink sock. “This is you. ‘Oh, I love dancing, I love balls …’ ” Carmilla can’t help lightening up. A black sock is the vampire. I attack the pink sock with the black one. “ ‘I am a vampire. I am going to eat you.’ ” I growl like a monster.

  Carmilla is amused. Who wouldn’t be? I roll off the vampire sock, swapping it for a yellow-and-green one. “ ‘Get up, beautiful lady.’ ” I hover over the Carmilla pink sock. I lift it and say, “ ‘No way, I’m a vampire. I get to sleep all day.’ ”

  Carmilla’s laugh is infectious. She continues, “The whole wide world was opened up before me in death as it never was in life. My mother hosted grand balls every night with the finest food and drink. She made sure we had the most gorgeous gowns. We danced in the mirrored hall of Versailles. We watched the birth of a new world in philosophy, science and progressive ideas.”

  This explains her infatuation with philosophers and all of the parties. It’s who she is.

  Now I’m the one who’s mesmerized. By her storytelling, her cunning, her beauty. I’m falling under her spell all over again. I get up and dance around the room with sock puppets on my arms as she relates her tale.

  “Every twenty years, we returned to Silas. The college was home to a long line of vampires, including my mother. Every twenty years we came back to perform a strange game that involved capturing five girls. Mother would arrange for me to befriend a young girl. She’d set it up so I was left behind at a ball and counted on me being taken in by a kind stranger and his daughter or niece. It worked every time.”

  I’m captivated.

  “The girl and I would become inseparable. That’s when dear old Mom would work her magic and the girl would suddenly get sick. She’d start to exhibit strange behavior, not acting like herself.”

  “Sounds familiar …” I say. Same pattern here.

  “It made them easy prey. Then, I would take them to my mother. Once my mother was ready, we’d start the cycle all over again. Until there were five.”

  I cease dancing. That’s a lot to comprehend. “You’re not exactly making a great case for yourself right now. You delivered these girls to your mother and never saw them again? Sounds like kidnapping to me.” What did her mother even do with them? I wonder.

  Carm interrupts my thoughts. “I was never the abductor. I was the lure. That’s how I met Ell. In 1872.” I note a change in her voice. Sorrow sneaks in. “All I wanted to do was sail to New York City to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It had just opened and I longed to visit, but Mother was a stickler for the game. The game began as it always did. An unsuspecting girl and her father offered me shelter when I was abandoned. A fast friendship formed. Only this time nothing was a lie. I cared about Ell. Deeply.”

  I use the socks to get to the truth. “ ‘Oh, my heart beats only for you. I will not let you go. I love you.’ ‘I love you more.’ ” The socks wrestle. I’m sure I appear and sound like an idiot, but this is getting deep.

  Carmilla’s voice goes low. “When it came time for me to take Ell to my mother, I couldn’t give her up. I planned our escape and went ahead of her to make all of the necessary arrangements.”

  It’s alarming to hear her so vulnerable, so I try to keep things light. I flail a sock around. “ ‘Life will be so much bigger than you ever imagined. Theater, concerts, the freedom to be ourselves.’ ”

  Carmilla forges ahead, racked with pain. “Before Ell could join me, it happened. Disaster struck. My mother got to her first and told her that I was the one luring girls and then killing them. Ell believed her and told her all our secrets, along with my well-thought-out plan. Then she led my mother right to me. The price for my disobedience was to watch Ell be taken to her doom. After, my mother had me sealed in a coffin filled with blood so that I would waste my long centuries in the dark.”

  That revelation sends my sock puppets crashing to my sides. Suddenly my dad doesn’t seem so bad at all. I reach for Carmilla’s shaking hand.

  “I rotted under the earth for decades, until the war. When the war ended, so did my punishment, and I walked off the battlefield in Austria to meet the twentieth century. Bonus of being a vampire, we don’t die unless you stake us. My mother found me in Paris in the early 1950s and didn’t have the heart to reinter me. She figured I was of more use to her at Silas University. She made me leave Paris to help her once more. The details changed but the game did not. I was to meet girls on campus, make friends. Then my mother did with them as she saw fit. Whatever that was.”

  I stand up. “So nothing changed for you?”

  “It did. This time I only pretended to play along. I ruined opportunities every chance I could, sending girls back to safety. The little revenges I got on my mother were sweet. I never knew what she did with the girls once they were taken, so I decided to bide my time until I learned the truth about what I had been a part of for so long.”

  That’s why Sarah Jane and Natalie returned the first time. Carm intervened before her mother could lead them to their demise. The girls in my footage weren’t her victims — she was actually thwarting her mother’s attempts to kidnap them.

  I’m stunned. “So you’ve been helping girls escape, not kidnapping them?” I really had this all wrong.

  “You got it, cream puff,” she says, pointing at me.

  I have to ask, “Did you help Betty?”

  “I wish I had. She was never on my list of students to befriend.”

  I sigh. “So someone Betty knew — someone she thought was a friend — was in fact a vampire. And they kidnapped her for your mother before you could help her?”

  She nods.

  There’s still hope, then. “We’ll just find your mother and get the missing kids back before they end up as dinner.”

  Carmilla bursts into uncontrollable laughter. “My mother will scoop your eyeballs out and serve them in martinis. You’re already petrified of her.”

  She’s obviously delirious. “I haven’t even met your mother, so I can’t be afraid of her.”

  Carm cocks her head. “Yes, you have. My mother is the dean.”

  • ELEVEN •

  In light of all of the revelations last night, Danny, Perry, LaFontaine and I are weighing the merits of releasing Carmilla. She made a compelling argument that she was only an accessory to the crimes — I mean, I’m convinced. But still, she did participate in tricking girls so her mother could dine on them or do whatever she does.

  Perry is adamant. “Laura, we have to let her go. If the dean finds out we’re holding a hostage, do you know how much trouble we can get in? She can take away my floor monitor status.”

  Girls are missing. Another is dead. The dean’s a full-on killer with a posse of killer vampires.

  “That’s what you’re worried about?” LaFontaine asks.

  “I worked hard to get here, ” Perry snarls.

  Danny jumps in. “We can’t let her go until we have a plan.”

  “If you want to go after the dean, have at it,” Carmilla says. “I’ll be just fine here binge-watching Orange Is the New Black. Fair warning. You better bring an army. That woman fights dirty.”

  LaFontaine sizes her up. “I’m just throwing this out there. She is a vampire and the possibility of her attacking us is still very much on the table. We need to get some rest before we play our next card, whatever that is. So my vote is to take precautions and leave her as is.”

  “That’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had,” Perry admits grudgingly.

  LaFontaine says, “Let’s get going.” Perry tags along, leaving Carmilla and me alone.

  I bring Carmilla some more blood. Call it a peace offering. “Sorry about this, but I need to get some sleep, get my strength back for tomorrow when we go after the dean. Your teeth in my neck aren’t part of the plan, so the ropes stay. For n
ow.”

  Carmilla settles back into her funk and I crawl into the safety of my bed.

  With the covers tucked tightly around my head, I fall into a deep slumber until I hear a male voice in my room. I could have sworn I locked the door. I stay very still, not moving a muscle. I eavesdrop as he speaks to Carmilla, and I swear it sounds just like Will, Kirsch’s Zeta bro. Odd, since they aren’t exactly friends. She was ready to rip his spleen out, as I recall.

  “Pathetic. I can’t believe you let those imbeciles capture you. Mother sent me to find out if you dealt with your roommate situation.” He’s yelling through his teeth. I peek out from under my blanket.

  My mind is reeling. Mother? What roommate situation?

  “Guessing by the lump on the bed and the ropes around your arms, I take it that’s a no.”

  “I’ll take you down, Will,” Carmilla threatens.

  I hear him snicker. I mean, she’s tied up. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll cut the ties off but we’ve got to grab your prissy little roommate and be done with her. Mother is on the warpath.”

  I see him cut the ropes, so I open my mouth. “Will, you need to get away from her. She’s a vampire.”

  An evil frown spreads across his chiseled jaw as he frees her. Then he spits out something none of his frat brothers would want to hear. “She’s not the only one.” Will lunges for my neck! Oh God, another vampire! I dive out of his way, kicking as I fall, catching him right in the ribs. He yelps, then strikes back. Carmilla munches my cookies with her untied hands, watching us duke it out but not attempting to help at all.

  “My father taught me Krav Maga,” I brag.

  Will takes another swing at me. “I miss the 1930s when girls didn’t attack.”

  “So inconvenient when they fight back,” Carmilla muses while chewing.

  “Laugh it up all you want, kitten, Mother isn’t going to be too amused that I had to finish your job since you dropped the ball,” he taunts her.

  “You’re such a mommy’s boy,” she scoffs. I snort because she’s getting under his skin, and Will takes another swipe to get me back.