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Lucy doesn’t realize it until a few days later, but her whole team did die, at the Mill. It makes her feel the tiniest bit better, actually. She didn’t survive them, after all.
She died, too, and when she woke up, everything was so different she didn’t realize that the crippling malaise, her paleness, her all-consuming hunger that couldn’t seem to be slaked, was not borne of grief but rather something more insidious.
She’s picking at a rasher of bacon in the kitchen, mind numb. The trial was yesterday, and though her mother hasn’t said anything, she can tell when she does open her mouth, it’s going to be a doozy.
Lucy doesn’t know what to do with herself; she’s not working, and all her friends are dead. She walks around the village for a while, visiting the Remembrance Pillar in the square, though not overly long, as the villagers mutter angrily to themselves when they see her.
Somehow, she ends up in the little alley behind the butcher’s shop. It’s getting on twilight, so everyone’s hurrying to shut down and get home before the dead wake and come to kill them.
She stumbles as she walks down the alley. The butcher’s apprentice, Clay, sees her as he’s locking up the back. “Wait,” she says, swaying forward.
“Are you ill?” he inquires politely. His younger sister works for Jacob’s, on a different team. Maybe she’s told him how it really is. Who knows.
“Can I get some water?” she whispers, and he clenches his jaw, glancing at the darkening sky.
“I need to go,” he says urgently, but he guides her inside. “Lock up after ye?” She nods, and then he’s gone.
She goes to the massive refrigerated room, opens it. Stands there, cool air rolling out like mist. Cuts of meat hang from hooks, smaller ones wrapped in plastic and sat on the shelves. There’s something darkly appealing about the tender haunch of lamb, something that makes her want to sink her teeth in, but it’s not quite right.
And then she finds the deli cups of pig’s blood. The first swallow is disgusting and the second is like liquid pleasure, like chocolate, like an orgasm, like the way cake smells and coffee should taste, like Norrie’s lips when they’re pink and kiss-bitten.
She stands in the refrigerator, having drained every single deli cup full of blood, and she feels… not exactly like herself, but a lot better than she has for the last few days. The rioting, aching hunger has been soothed. She runs her tongue over her teeth and traces the sharp edges of her canines. Her stomach jumps, desire punching through her, as she imagines biting someone.
Somehow, she walked away from the Mill as a vampire.
Guess it’s time to leave Cheviot Hills.
***
Ghost hunting is perfect for her, now. She’s not sure what will happen if she gets ghost touched but she’s betting her chances are better than before. And her Listening seems to have improved. She’d already been sensitive, gifted, but this was ridiculous.
She can move about during the day, but she doesn’t like it, and prefers to be awake at night. And when she loses her Talent, she can be a London Night Cab driver. Maybe she’d even help keep some kids safe. And take a few sups here and there to sustain herself.
She’d noticed she could, well, sip on people, if she got skin to skin contact. The young father on the train who she’d sat next to had been wearing short sleeves, and Lucy had accidentally brushed his arm with her pinky a few times. Warmth suffused her, and the man had yawned, scratching idly at his skin, but there were no obvious signs of damage, of the little sips she’d taken. Hmm. Interesting.
It’s desperation that drives her to Lockwood and Co. Those deli cups seem a long time ago, and Lucy’s still devastated that the larger agencies won’t take her. She’d been counting on them - with their large swathes of agents and support staff - to nourish her. She resolves to not stay long.
Lockwood and Co. is a two person agency with no support staff, and worse yet they’re teenage boys, chronically hungry and shoveling food in their mouths, so surely they’ll notice that she doesn’t eat much? She can eat, she just doesn’t enjoy it, it’s like chewing ash, and if she has too much, she’ll vomit. Even so, she takes a strange pleasure in consuming the biscuits they’ve offered her.
George is plump with blood, rich and heady, she can smell it from here. She wants to run her lips along his wrist, trace the artery along his forearm, lay a kiss in the tender meat of his bicep. Lockwood is so pale she almost mistakes him for a vampire, too, but she can see his pulse jumping in the elegant column of his throat. She’s hungry in a way she’s rarely experienced; it’s a belly hunger and something deeper. She wants them.
But Lockwood is unexpectedly thoughtful, even if he is infuriating and reckless, and then George has to start being unexpectedly kind, too. It was worth eating that horrid pizza, to just feel like she had something in common with someone else. A bridge from her past to her future, sitting outside a greasy Italian restaurant, dripping marinara onto the concrete.
Luckily for her, Lockwood’s a touchy bastard, always wanting to hold her hand. George, used to Lockwood’s demand for physical closeness, doesn’t seem bothered when Lucy presses in close, their arms touching on the couch while he reads his comic books and she props her sketchbook against her crossed ankle.
Little sips, and they feel like static, like a charge. She’s careful; it can make them tired, sleepy, so she only ever takes in the cozy nest of the library after a case or in the morning, when they’re abuzz from too much caffeine, anyway.
Silver doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on her, and she can still see her reflection. She’s physically stronger now, too. Carrying a bag full of chains no longer seems as daunting as it used to. But aside from her preference to be awake at night, and oh yes, the diet of blood, things seem more or less the same.
She still misses Norrie fiercely, even as Portland Row becomes more and more synonymous with home. She used to supplement her little sips from the boys, in the beginning, worried she’d tire them. But as time has gone on, she’s, well, she’d developed a taste for them. Other people just don’t satisfy her the same way. And pig’s blood… she cringes, remembering how good she’d found it then. She doesn’t think she could stomach it, now.
She wears thin clothes around the house. Shorts and camis when she can get away with it - anything that will let her skin brush theirs easier, more often. George has taken to blushing around her, and she has to swallow back her desire, seeing his beautiful brown skin suffused with blood, excited by her proximity.
George tastes smooth, velvety, like dark, bitter chocolate, like iron and spice. His bones are strong and Lucy bets his marrow is sweet. Lockwood is bright, like candied orange peel, and it’s so specific and so delicious and god, when she gets them together, drawing from them both, Lockwood’s fingers smoothing over her palm, George’s chin hooked over her bare shoulder, she can barely keep herself from swooning.
Dual desires war within her. She wants them, wants to sink her teeth into ripe, tender flesh, drink rich hot blood straight from the artery, penetrate and take, and she wants them to do the same to her, or its spiritual equivalent; wants them inside her, taking pleasure from her body as surely as she takes from theirs.
There’s a metaphor here about moths and flames, but she’s not sure who’s on fire because sometimes it feels like they all are. She can hardly stand it. But she does, because she loves them. She won’t hurt them. She won’t. She won’t.