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The first time it happens, it’s the familiar, resonant scent that gives her away. Ava pauses a few steps into the inviting warmth of the Warehouse library with its crackling fire and array of antiques: polished rosewood and old ink and brocade rugs, and suspended above it all—a remnant of Persephone. Long brown hair and clear grey eyes; still Midwinter, imbued in the air after her leaving just like the mythos of her name. The smell of her blood is so pungent and enticing. Ava’s intention of asking Nate to cross reference a text on Gorgons by Agency request is lost to the furtive racing of her own pulse, the unneeded breath she expels from her lungs as it all washes over her; it’s entirely too human a reaction.
She folds her broad arms in front of her chest as though obscuring some unsavory part of herself from the light, and wets her lips, attempting to school her composure cool and impassive as she asks, though really more interrogates, “What did the Detective want? She was not on schedule to be here today.”
She can hear Nate stooped somewhere behind the towering shelves, singing to himself in Farsi. He emerges at her question with a stack of worn leather tomes propped carefully on one arm, and a warm smile all too knowing for Ava’s liking. She feels slightly unmade under a benign scrutiny that’s known her every tell for hundreds of years, and privately laments, not for the first time, the doing away with armor a few centuries back - chiefly helmets with visors. Her complexion is too pale for this, every flush of color smeared across her cheeks like a rowan berry, blooming and ripened. It is testament to the accord of their longstanding friendship that it goes unremarked upon. Or maybe just a testament to Nate’s infinite resource of kindness.
“She came to borrow a selection from the library,” he tells her, sounding very pleasant and good-natured as if to counter Ava’s stiff, broiling tension. Ever the contrast, ever the foil. “You’ve only just missed her, I’m afraid.”
It is a strange thing to feel all at once so mournful and triumphant, and to keep either expression from crossing her features.
“I’m surprised you let her walk out with it, unscathed. You can be rather territorial with your collection,” Ava says, and presses on glibly, before Nate can rise to the teasing glint in her eye, and not because of her urgent desire to know the purpose of Detective Schulz’s visit–-of course. She moves to take a faltering step forward. “Was it research related?”
“No, it was one of your books, actually. A, hm—curious choice really,” Nate says thoughtfully, teeth gliding over the bow of his full bottom lip. “That first edition of Dracula you picked up in Edinburgh years ago.”
Ava absorbs this information in like a vapor, nostrils flaring, chest expanding, her own lips pursed into a thin line. She is no avid reader in the way Nate is, scouring shelves in pursuit of knowledge and fictitious escapism, but she will indulge every now and again with the great adventure tales throughout time; stories of heroes overcoming trials in the face of impossible odds. Swords and action and expedition and the like—for strategic purposes and not the fanciful cling to human interest that Nate ascribes to. Dracula had fallen outside of this boundary, and had only been purchased out of vigilance for a novel that had brought their kind under public scrutiny. If the humans were writing fabrications about them, even on a fictitious pretense, it paid to know what was being spread. It had been full of the expected drivel, Stoker polluting the minds of impressionable Victorian age readers, enough to make Ava pause and recite passages scornfully aloud to Nate, who had long finished it all in one sitting. She’d shelved the copy to be lost amidst his ever expanding collection. Over a century later, when it had come up in conversation with Persephone (a throw away line, really) she had never expected…never could have anticipated-–
“Ava?” Concern twists a notch between Nate’s dark brows, and he shifts the slipping stack in his hands to sit upon his hip before closing the distance and wrapping a hand about her arm. “Forgive me, I really should have asked you first--only I didn’t think you would miss it. I’ve never known you to read a book more than once, and you’ve never looked on that one favorably. It does make sense, her interest, given what we are…” he trails off looking distracted, then clears his throat. “However embellished the telling. She did promise to take good care of it, and return it when she’s finished.”
“It’s alright,” Ava lies quickly before she comes across as too affected, squaring her shoulders and ordering her thoughts into strict line. “She is free to borrow whatever she likes. As a member of our team, this facility is for her use also.”
Nate pierces her with one of his russet looks of open sincerity. “Home, Ava. This is our home now. And one I hope Posy feels comfortable sharing.”
“You were always too prone to sentiment, my friend,” Ava chides, though it is said with an undercurrent of fondness and a returning smile.
“I suppose that’s why the Agency paired us together. One of us has to be.” Nate’s soft, resonant chuckle fills the room, and despite the unease welling in her throat, Ava joins him, uncrossing her arms to aid in his failing feat of book juggling.
—-
And so Ava pretends she doesn’t know. She goes about her usual routine, scheduled down to the minute, and the genius of its design is that it gives her little chance to dwell on the connotations of the borrowed book too keenly. Of course, it could mean nothing. Or anything, or everything. It disturbs her, if she’s being entirely honest.
When duty parses them together again, there isn’t more than the expected consequences of being in the same room, a rehearsed script by now–“Ava.” “Detective.”--followed by averted eyes and skittish movements and silent, glorious reveling when a touch is orchestrated between them just so. Persephone, collected and brazen as ever. Ava guarded, but sparing fleeting looks to the Detective’s bag like a wounded, arrow pierced hare, once, twice, more than a few times for a book shaped indentation or perhaps some vital organ carved from her belly because it feels like she’s taken a piece of her to study under a microscope. There is always the chastisement of herself afterwards for letting her eyes and hands and thoughts stray, this cycle as infinite as humanity’s death and rebirth. And that is all.
The one true lapse in judgment she will admit to, in a clinical sort of way, like a disease of the blood—and even then only to the dark of her Spartan quarters—is when she makes the rounds on guard rotation one evening and lingers below Persephone’s window, wrapped up in her coat to watch the glow of lamp light snuff out after a long interim of waiting, and wonders with an unquenchable ache, what words did your eyes linger upon and did they make you think of me.
Other than that, it has little effect on her. Ava considers the whole endeavor a great success.
Until Dracula manifests on the shelf again in a week’s time, without notice or fanfare, as though placed by some invisible spectral hand. She has not been looking for it, she tells herself, had made frequent returns to the library to maintain security--check locks, monitor layouts; as she keeps vigil over all the rooms in their residence. And then for another week after the book’s reappearance, Ava will avoid the room as though the entire wing had been roped off and placed under strict quarantine. She will glare down anyone who brings up the fallacy in this behavior (and has already pinned Farah with her most taciturn scowl over supper).
Ultimately, she is weak; at her age-it is foolish. She is old, far too old for such nonsense and repeats that notion to herself like a mantra when, during the guise of night while the three other vampires sleep in a rare feat of synchronization, muscle memory takes her through the Warehouse like she’s headed for the gallows, and all too soon, the book is clutched beneath her white-knuckled fingers. The library feels suddenly occupied by old ghosts. The Grandfather clock Nate had acquired in Bavaria cuts the air with accusatory ticks as she smooths a hand over the leather. If it chimes, she’ll smash it, and supplicate herself before Nate later.
The years have been kinder to the novel than she’d anticipated. The gold cover is faded, the binding tattered slightly with age, but the red embossed letters declare the title boldly. She is only checking for damages. Yes, it makes sense to assess the state of so old an object after someone else has had their hands on it. She splays the book open in her palm. The flyleaf still bears Ava’s initials in Nate’s neat, narrow scrawl. He had insisted on the distinction–no one would ever guess him so possessive of his belongings. Had Persephone noticed? Did she think it had been Ava’s hand that penned it? And why did it, unfathomably, matter to her at all? Her thumb skims the pages, biting down something coiling in her gut that feels like the mounting anticipation before blood's warm ichor coats her tongue, while a part of her also knows that she is fated for disappointment.
She considers abandoning this ridiculous inspection alltogether when her finger catches a crease in the corner of an off-white page, dog-eared, nearly imperceptible. Flipping it open, she finds only the expected script. But when she runs her finger over the paper, sensitive skin traces the raised line of graphite beneath a single line.
I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.
Ava’s stomach drops out from under her, a rug pulled beneath her feet.
It is something that’s easily dismissable. A stray marking, an absent-minded pencil strike that can be explained away. Surely nothing deliberate, nothing meant to convey a message, and even if, she will not entertain such a game.
The book is shut and hastily reshelved.
She makes it as far as her hand gripping the doorknob before the antique clock pierces the masoleum-like silence with a tolling note. The sound cuts the rigid crest of Ava's shoulders and sends her reeling back to the shelf, and then hastening to her room with preternatural speed, where she leaves the offending page open on the bed and paces an indentation into her floorboards. In this brief, fleeting lapse of sanity, she allows excitement to tingle the sensitive nerve endings in her hands. I am longing to be with you. And then embarassment overcomes it when the golden threads of dawn encroach across the white duvet of her bed to shine light on this absurd, irrational thing that she's done.
She should set fire to it. She should put a stop to this. Instead, she spirits the book into her ancient lockbox and tucks the words away to nestle inside her ancient ribcage.
She will not ask Persephone what she thought of Stoker’s unflattering characterization of their kind. She will not bring this up ever again, any utterance or acknowledgement can only mean total defeat.
But Ava has always been a woman of stringent results. And so no one can hold it against her when she puts this dialogue of theirs to the test. It is merely a matter of deduction, she tells herself, curiosity at play, a possibility to eliminate and not to evoke any more ridiculous and certainly non-existent stirrings.
There is no easy way to broach the subject of books into a conversation without sounding obvious, or otherwise doing a crude impersonation of Nate, who recites literary quotes like a clergyman with scripture--she had debated roping him into this, but, true to form, had almost immediately decided against that display of weakness.
And so Ava doesn't speak of it. Instead, she texts--and it takes her a long period of concentrated effort bent over her phone to compose a vague enough message that satisfies her, and even longer still, to muster up the courage to press send.
'Detective.The Epic of Gilgamesh has insights into Sumerian mythology that might useful in your research of the supernatural.'
She immediately, of course, panics. Felled is her valor, not by ogres or demons or any manner of formidable creature, but by the simple technology that humans have developed to forgo the awkwardness of face-to-face communication. Thankfully, this dread is quickly put to rest by Persephone's almost instant reply.
'OK'
How anticlimatic.
And thus, the pattern repeats. After a day, the mentioned book undergoes a period of truancy from the library and Ava sets her jaw tight as the passing time peels her raw. In due course, it reappears and when there is the assurance of no one in site, she decends upon it hungrily, soft with age and stooping at the spine. In all honesty, she can recall little of the plot, had only remembered Nate gifting it to her one innumerable anniversary or birthday or celebration, and drawing similarities between herself and the titular warrior-king.
After a brief inspection, Ava finds the dog-earred page. A single line in the whole expanse of the epic poem is emphasized with the same faint pencil trace as before.
Hold my hands in yours, and we will not fear what hands like ours can do.
Something strange, and frightening shifts deep within Ava. She slams the book closed and with it under her arm, retreats.
—
“There are less complicated ways of going about this, you know.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Posy blowing steam off her frothing mug and Nate with his long fingers circled around a cup of tea as they indulge in their routine of early morning caffeine and commiseration at Haley’s. It’s all for her benefit, of course; this outpouring of longing and frustration with Ava at its contradictory core. Nate and his even-tempered assurances and three hundred year insight into the enigma of a vampire, interpreting her without insinuating, or otherwise offering a sympathetic ear to Posy's venting. He is a master of consolation, and always seems to know exactly what she needs to hear after an encounter with those shadowed green eyes hunting the set line of her collar or her spine or her neck.
And he has been an accomplice, these past few weeks, to Posy’s great interpersonal experiment.
She hadn’t entered into this with any more intention than what it’d originally began as—taking a cursory interest in a book that Ava had mentioned off-handedly. And while Wayhaven’s Public Library system was sure to carry the typical selection of classic literature, the thrumming of her heart in her ears had drawn Posy to the Warehouse and to the library carefully maintained by Nate, and to the shelf he’d more than amenably directed her to housing Ava’s century old copy of Dracula. To the pages touched by Ava's fingers and the binding that had spread upon Ava's lap and the same words that Ava's eyes had glazed over dispassionately, words that had resonated, words that Posy had singled out--perhaps a bit precociously--and maybe with an expectation that the thorough inspection Ava passes over everything that crosses in and out of her peripheral would be rewarded.
“I don’t think this is fun for her, but rather mildly tortuous,” Nate sighs like the weight of his three hundred years is finally catching up to him. “I’m worried you’ll underline a sentence that makes her break something in there. Or throw the book all together and do it damage.” The mere thought of that appears to cause him genuine distress, wrought all over his normally tempered features.
“I’m surprised you let me scribble in them at all,” Posy says, hiding the amused press of her lips behind the rim of her drink.
“Yes, well, annotating is an age-old literary practice. And I’ll always encourage reading. And affections of the heart. And–they’re not my books.” His mouth twitches, then curves, as though falling victim to his own train of persuasion. “Really, this is good for her.”
“I thought you said it was torture.”
The vampire pauses to take an indulgent sip of his tea, eyes fluttering shut briefly. “Sometimes the two pair rather nicely. Like gouda cheese and a Pinot noir.”
“Flavor analogies too? You’re in rare form today, Nate. So she has been finding them?”
“Oh, yes. The other day, I pretended not to notice her stakeout of the Mesopotamian section. Ava has many, many wonderful gifts, and subtlety is not one of them. That text she sent is evidence enough. Though I do worry you’re running out of usable material. Her tastes are…limited and narrowing.” From a leather messenger bag hanging on his seat-back, Nate procures a thick hardcover book and slides the text on castle rampart sieging across the table. “While I’m of the mind that all literature has merit, I doubt there’s any poetry in this one--I think she may be challenging you.”
Posy takes the book under palm, casting a scrutinizing gaze over it. In place of the medieval architechture that the cover depicts, she can see only Ava's wry hint of a pursed mouth smile, the shallow press of a dimple not quite formed. Your move, Detective. “There she goes underestimating me again," Posy says with resolve. "You'd think she would’ve learned better by now.”
“There is a saying about old habits. And Ava’s are as ancient and as difficult to kill as she is.”
“Yes. But my blood is very mysteriously and magically undoing, or haven’t you heard? Even on an ancient, unbreakable spell like Ava Du Mortain.”
Nate laughs richly like the brush of a low bell, and reaches across the table to offer her forearm an obliging pat, hands warmed from the Earl Grey. “Of that, there has never been any doubt. You truly are something special, Posy. To our little family, and that includes Ava. However long and…arduous that confession might come to be."
“Thank you, Nate," she responds with affectionate sincerity flitting about her throat, and then intontes, all business, "Now then. I have impenetrable fortresses to compare to Commanding Agents--which isn’t sounding all that difficult right about now.”
With that, Posy opens the book and delicately, fondly, traces the crisp signature of Ava’s initials with the wayward pad of her finger.
Nate doesn't have the heart to break the illusion and tell her he'd been the one to put them there--and really, he decides, no one is hurt by this omission.