Or trying to. She would bring it up close to her eyes as if she had trouble making out the words in the dimly lit room, then sigh angrily and flip rapidly through three or four pages before repeating the operation.
“I can read, sort of,” the vampire growled. “I can understand the words. I mean, I was never a big reader before, but I knew how. But now they mostly look like weird little squiggly shapes. And even when I try hard, I can read a sentence and then forget how it started before I reach the end. It just don’t seem to matter, you know? Like whatever this asshole was trying to say about Brad and Angelina just isn’t all that important anymore.”
“You knew I was awake,” Clara said.
“Well, you sat up, for one thing. That’s a fucking easy sign right there. Plus I saw your blood go faster. When you sleep your blood slows down. Your heart beats slower. Did you know I can see your heart? It’s like I got x-ray eyes. That’s pretty cool, I guess.”
It’s seriously creepy, Clara thought. “You’re not human anymore,” she told the vampire.
“What the fuck you just say, girl?”
Clara cringed. But she knew that as long as she was engaged in a nice, civil conversation with this bloodsucker, she wasn’t being dismembered, eaten, or tortured. That was worth something. “I didn’t mean any offense. It’s just—vampires don’t care about the same things human beings care about. You’re not supposed to. Celebrity gossip has got to be pretty low on the list of things important to vampires.”
“Yeah? What’s at the top?”
Blood. Clara tried very hard not to say that out loud. Even if it was true. Blood was the single thing vampires truly cared the most about. Pretty much the only thing. “I don’t know,” she said, instead. “I guess you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.”
“I still feel pretty human. I mean, better. Stronger. But I’m still wondering about my kids, and what they’ll think about this change. And about their daddy. Except… I keep thinking about the hair on his back. It never used to bother me before, or at least, I put it out of my head. But now I keep seeing it, seeing him on top of me like I’m looking down at him from the ceiling and all I can see is this thick rug of hair. Oh, and his smell. He never would shower before we did it, that always bugged me. Now when I think about it, it kinda makes me sick.”
Vampires had their own body odor. One that didn’t wash off. They smelled like the bottom of a hamster cage—a sick hamster’s cage. It was a nasty, animal smell, very faint, but it was one of the signs a vampire was nearby. Clara could just smell it now from ten feet away.
“You’re—Hauser, right? I was there when you took the curse,” Clara said, for lack of anything better. “In the warden’s office. Where is the warden, by the way?”
“Dead,” Hauser told her. “That was pretty much the first thing Malvern did, when she woke up tonight and found out how fucked up things got during the day.”
Clara closed her eyes. If she’d had a plan—she hadn’t, not really, she knew she was screwed. But the brain kept trying to piece things together, even when all hope was gone. If she had consciously tried to think of a plan, it would have involved playing Malvern and the warden off each other. Widening the rift between the two of them. Apparently Malvern had taken the expedient course toward solving that problem.
“Hey, you. Hey,” Hauser said. She got up from the desk and took a step toward one of the other cages. “I know you’re awake.” The vampire kicked the cage and made it slide a foot and a half across the floor. Inside it someone struggled to grab at the bars and pull themselves upright.
“Laura,” Clara breathed, when she saw who it was.