A Divine Kind of Sin (Marlow Series Book Two)

Alice woke in the dark with her knees already bent.

She did not remember lying down. One shoulder was jammed against a wall that gave back a dull cold, and when she tried to straighten her arm her fingers met metal. She frowned and shifted, and her forehead struck something an inch above her face. The sound was small and too close. It did not travel.

Both hands went up. Palms found a smooth lid, no seam she could get a nail under, barely room enough to curl her fingers between the surface and her mouth. Her breath came back at her, warm, wasted.

“Hello?”

The word died in the box. She shoved. The lid did not care. Panic arrived whole, not in pieces. She hit the metal with the heels of her hands, then with her fists, then kicked until her heels barked and there was still nowhere for her hips to go. The walls held her shoulders. The ceiling held her face.

“Please.”

She kept hitting until her palms stung and the dark started to feel like soil. Then the mill came back, not as a thought she invited. Trees. Patrick. Kim on her knees. Aaron’s gray skin. The stake. The pull backward. The pain in the center of her chest, and the ground, and her father’s mouth moving after the sound had already left.

Her hands stopped.

She had died. She remembered the dying more clearly than the drawer. Her fingers went to her stomach, then higher, to the place the wood had entered. She expected a ruin. She found skin. She dragged her hand across it again, slower, insulted by the smoothness. No tenderness. No crust of blood. Not even a ridge.

She pressed her palm to her chest and waited for the knock that had been there her whole life.

Nothing.

Her fingers moved to her throat, dug in, found silence. She said no, and the word was thin. Aaron’s blood came back with a taste, his hand forced past her teeth, the cold iron of it, the way he had made her swallow while Kim watched. Of course. He had put himself in her before the stake finished either of them. The wound was gone. The heart was quiet. She was awake in a box.

A cold moved through her that the metal had not caused. She had spent weeks afraid of becoming the thing that used her mouth. The drawer made the fear late. She set both palms on the lid and pushed with everything she had, not the panic this time, the refusal.

The metal gave.

It startled her so badly she almost stopped. She pushed again. The drawer rolled out on a long scrape, and light cut across her eyes, pale and mean. She threw an arm over her face. When she could stand the glare, she looked.

Steel drawers in a grid. White tile. A table with a folded sheet and nobody on it. She knew the room without having been in it. They brought the dead here. Someone had measured her, written her down, and slid her in because the gravel had looked final.

She sat up. Her legs swung over the edge and her feet found the floor, and she waited to fold. She did not fold. No swim in the head. No tear in the chest. The clothes were the ones from the mill, stiff where the blood had dried, and under them the skin was a lie. She touched the place again, angry at it.

Patrick.

He had been over her. He had been saying stay. He thought the stay had failed. She took a step toward the door, then another, bare feet almost silent on the tile. If she was what Aaron had been, walking into her father’s arms might be the second death of the night, his this time. She looked at her hands. They were her hands. That was the worst of it. No claws. No announcement. Just a girl who had climbed out of a drawer.

Her fingers stopped short of the handle.

What if I am one of them.

She closed her eyes. Beyond the door, faint and ordinary, shoes crossed a hallway. Someone was coming. She stood in the open drawer’s light with no pulse under her jaw and the taste of him still somewhere in her memory, and did not yet know whether the person in the hall was a rescue or a mistake she was about to make.

She stayed where she was and let the footsteps pass the door.

This was the moment she had been afraid of since the blood hit her tongue. A living person on the other side of a wall. She waited for the hunger to rise and take the choice away, the way Aaron’s want had taken choices. It did not rise. No pull toward the sound. No heat in the teeth. She was not craving blood at all. The absence was so complete she almost laughed, and the laugh would have been the wrong kind. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and found only the memory of iron, not a need.

For a moment she questioned it. If his blood had made her what he was, the thirst should have been the first true thing. It was not there. She did not have time to build a theory in a morgue. She brushed it off and put her hand on the handle.

The hall was dimmer than the drawer room, night lighting, a long stretch of closed doors and a cart left crooked against the wall. She slipped out and shut the morgue behind her without letting the latch speak. Bare feet. Stiff clothes. She picked a direction because standing still was how people got found, and she walked.

Footsteps again, closer, a woman’s shoes, unhurried.

Alice slid in behind a stack of boxes by a supply door and made herself narrow. The woman came into view in pale scrubs, a clipboard against her hip, eyes on a far room. She passed so near Alice could have touched the hem of her sleeve. No hunger followed her. No snarl. Only the ordinary fear of being seen. The shoes faded. The hall emptied.

Alice looked after her until the corner took her, then stepped out and kept going, deeper into the building, away from the drawer and toward whatever door still opened onto the night.

The hall ended at a stairwell with a red sign she did not bother to read. Down felt like more drawers. Up felt like people. She took the door marked exit at the side, the one with the push bar, and put her shoulder into it before she could think about alarms.

No alarm. Cold air hit her face, and the lot beyond was mostly empty, a few cars sleeping under lamps, the hospital a bright block at her back. She stood on the concrete in bloody clothes and bare feet and understood, too late, that walking out was its own kind of confession. Anyone who looked would see a girl who belonged on a table.

She kept to the shadow along the wall. The lack of hunger still bothered her more than the cold. She had swallowed him. She had died with him. The stories she had read said the thirst came first, mean and simple. Her mouth was only dry. Her chest was only quiet. If she was a vampire, she was a failed one, or a kind the pages had not bothered to name.

Patrick would be somewhere in this building, or he had been sent home to a house with her room still in it. The thought turned her toward the lit entrance and stopped her. She could not walk into a waiting room with no pulse and ask for her father. She could not know what her hands would do if the thirst arrived late, in front of him. Kim and Mani were questions with the same shape. Alive, she hoped. Hurt. Looking at a sheet someone had pulled over her face.

A car passed on the road and did not slow. Alice watched the taillights shrink and then started walking, not toward the park, not toward the mill, toward the darker side streets that led, eventually, to the only house she knew how to find. She would not go in. She told herself that with every block. She would stand where she could see the window, and she would learn whether the night had left her anyone to go back to.

The side streets were kinder than the hospital lot. Fewer lamps. No one on the sidewalks to ask why her feet were bare or why the front of her sweater had gone stiff and dark. She walked with her arms in close and listened to her own steps, waiting for the hunger to catch up like a debt. It did not. A man smoked outside a closed shop and did not look at her. She passed him and felt nothing but the urge to be past him. That should have been a comfort. It left her more lost.

The house appeared at the end of the road the way it always had, ordinary, a single light in the kitchen. She stopped under a tree that was not theirs and did not cross the last stretch of pavement. Going in had been the lie she told herself to keep walking. From here she could see the window. A shape moved behind it. Patrick. He was not asleep. He crossed the kitchen once, slow, and stopped where she could not see his face. The set of his shoulders was enough. He looked like a man who had come home because a building had told him to, not because the night was over.

Alice put her hand on the bark and stayed. If she knocked, he would open. If he opened, he would see a daughter who should have been in a drawer. She did not know what the sight would do to him. She did not know what the smell of him, alive, warm, would do to her if the thirst was only late. The kitchen light held. He did not come to the window. She watched until her eyes stung and the sting did not water, which was another wrong thing, and she did not step off the curb.

Somewhere in that house Kim’s number was probably still on his phone. Mani’s too. She had no way to know if they had walked out of the mill. The light in the kitchen was the only proof the world had not ended with her. She rested her forehead against the tree and kept her distance, a dead girl on a dark street, unwilling to finish the walk and unable to leave it.