Chapter 32

32

When Naomi opens the door, the room falls silent. Ilie sits on the floor, Tatiana and Elisa are on the beds, and Henry hovers over them. They stare at us.

“Hello, loves,” Ilie says after a beat.

“Hey,” Naomi says. “Are we interrupting?”

“They shouldn’t come,” Tatiana says. “They will mess it up somehow.”

“Thanks!” Naomi says, maybe offended. I’m not. Tatiana’s probably right.

“You think we should separate?” Elisa asks.

“We’re not separating,” Henry says. “They’ll come. They’ll be lookouts.”

“Yes, lookouts,” Ilie says. “Good idea.”

“It’s getting late,” Henry says. “Gather your things.”

He strides past us out the door without acknowledging me. I follow him across the hall into our room.

“Henry,” I say as the door slams behind us.

He grabs my suitcase and the empty cooler. “Do you have everything?”

“I think so. But, hey. Wait. Slow down,” I say. He won’t look at me. There’s a shift in his posture, in how he carries himself. He’s tense. “I didn’t mean to…I don’t know—pressure you into a blood heist tonight.”

“This is what we do.” He attempts to pass me, but the space between me and the wall is too narrow.

“Wait. Henry.” I reach out and turn his face to mine.

Our eyes meet, and he sighs. “Let me keep my promise. Let me do something good for you. Please.”

My mouth falls open, but no sound emerges, no words. He has once again rendered me speechless. “I…”

“We need to leave now so we arrive just as it closes. The timing is important.”

I don’t have an argument, since this whole thing is motivated by me. By my angst over how we acquire blood. By my blabbing to Ms.Alice about our supply. So I step aside and let him pass. I trail him out into the hall, where Tatiana and Elisa whisper to each other. Ilie opens the door for Naomi, who dances out of their room wearing Tatiana’s cat-eye sunglasses, which I assume she stole.

“How do I look?” she asks me.

“Like a reclusive movie star who’s murdered every husband she’s ever had.”

“That’s exactly what I was going for.”

We all head to the elevator and ride it down. Tatiana snatches her sunglasses back from Naomi, who pouts. We step out into the lobby, and thankfully no one’s there. Because there’s a phantom ache in my throat. I’m thirsty. I wonder if Naomi is, too.

We go through the doors, emerge from under the awning, and bristle at the light. The sun faints into the horizon and orange hues seep through the trees, branches reaching up toward a purple darkness. I beg the night to come faster. We need it. Need its cover.

Naomi lights a cigarette, takes two drags, then tosses it into some dirty parking-lot snow.

“This isn’t exactly an inconspicuous getaway car,” I mumble to Naomi as we climb into the camper.

Ilie’s in the back with Tatiana. He’s completely naked and she’s lying across the seats with her arms crossed—bored or displeased or both.

“You could have knocked. I am modest, you know,” Ilie says, winking.

“Um…” I say, trying to avert my eyes, but the space is too small.

He pulls on a pair of slacks. “This is my new look. Regular guy. Very professional.”

“It’s a good look,” Naomi says, sitting opposite Tatiana. I squeeze in beside her.

“Everyone ready?” Elisa asks rhetorically, turning on the radio before anyone can answer. It’s an oldies station playing “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens.

“Oh, hell yes,” Naomi says, shimmying.

“This is a bad sign,” I whisper.

“How?” she asks.

“First we hear a Buddy Holly song in the hotel shuttle. Now Ritchie Valens.”

“It’s not like we’re on our way to the airport,” she says, which shuts me up.

Tatiana yawns, stretches to sit. She wears jeans and a sweater, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her in anything other than lingerie or pajamas. She pulls her cherry red hair into a bun while she looks from me to Naomi and back to me.

“Do not involve yourselves,” she says, “if things go wrong.”

“What do you mean, if things go wrong?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes.

“We will handle,” Ilie says, zipping up a navy fleece. “That is all she means.”

“Got it,” Naomi says.

Ilie ties his hair back, pulls on a beanie, clears his throat, and in a startlingly good American accent asks, “How do I look?”

“So handsome,” Naomi says, swooning. “Like an Ivy League dropout who ended up modeling for J.Crew.”

I doubt he understands the reference, but he laughs anyway. He grabs her by the waist, tilts his head so he can go for her neck, kiss her there. She gives a playful squeal. I wonder if she misses Lee or if he seems like a distant memory, the way Joel does. It’s been five days, I think, since I last saw him, but it might as well be fifty years.

He’ll move on fast in my absence. Maybe he’ll cheat on the next one, or maybe he’ll be happier with her. Maybe he’ll be faithful. Maybe he’ll put all my things in a box in the basement, and eventually his new wife will donate them or throw them away. All the things I was attached to, that made it seem too difficult to leave. My things. The house. The peach tree.

My whole world, everything I cared so much about, abandoned, and it bothers me not at all. I wish I could do the same with my emotional baggage. Just let it go.

Elisa makes a sharp turn, and Ilie rolls onto me.

“Sorry, my love,” he says, slipping back into his own accent. “Don’t tell Henry. He will get jealous.”

He’s chipper as ever, and that should put me at ease about the imminent robbery. But there’s this persistent nag, anxiety pinching me from the inside. I’m thirsty, but this is something else. A different sensation. There’s an urgency about this excursion that seems ill-advised.

“Tatiana,” I say. “Should we not do this?”

“There’s no talking Henry out of something once he makes up his mind,” she says, which is and isn’t an answer.

“Do not worry,” Ilie says. “We do this many times. Do we usually stake out the place for a few nights? Yes. But it is no problem. Everybody thinks about money, not blood. Most places, the security is not so much.”

“Most places,” I say.

“Here,” Henry calls from up front.

Elisa parks the van and I peer out from behind the curtain. We’re in the mostly empty parking lot of a strip mall. There’s a deli, a post office, an eye doctor, a nail salon, an AutoZone. And at the corner, an American Red Cross donation center.

My throat is bone-dry, my tongue like sandpaper, and I itch all over. That itch. That fucking itch .

Henry and Elisa come into the back.

“The collection will be sometime in the next half hour. That’s our window,” Henry says. “I’ll get the lights and cameras.”

Tatiana speaks in French. She’s animated, using her hands.

“When Tati goes in the front to distract, I will go to the back,” Ilie says. Henry tosses him a lanyard with a key card at the end, encased in plastic. “Go in, get the good stuff, get out.”

“And on your signal, Henry, I will pull the camper around the side, blocking access,” Elisa says.

“Good,” Henry says. “Sloane, you will be with Elisa, and Naomi will stay out front to make sure no one goes in behind Tati. Okay?”

“Um, okay?” I say, looking to Naomi, who nods.

“Now,” Henry says. He pounds his fist to his chest and opens the door of the camper. When he’s gone, Elisa returns up front, and I pull back the curtain to watch. He strides coolly across the parking lot with his head down, hair hanging in his face. It’s snowing, flurries appearing fast, like a magic trick, as zealous as confetti. The sun is gone, and Henry’s a shadow among shadows.

A minute passes. There’s a murky silence inside the camper. Outside, the wind sounds pained, like a scream smothered under a pillow. The illuminated signs, the streetlamps, suddenly fizz and then go dark. I think of the gas station, and a shiver hikes up my spine.

“Go,” Elisa says, and Tatiana opens the door. Naomi moves to follow her.

“No,” Tatiana says, without looking back. “Stay here.”

“But, Tati,” Ilie says, “Drago said—”

Now she turns around. “His judgment is clouded. He likes this one because she’s a beautiful waif full of angst and self-loathing, because she is like him. She inspires his need to be heroic. Once a prince, always a prince. And this one…” She points to Naomi. “This one has beguiled you and Elisa because she will go down on you both and you can all have a laugh after. Ha-ha. You do not see. They are a danger to us, and to themselves, until they commit to their existence. Until they learn that they must embrace their thirst if they ever hope to control it. The problem children will stay in the car because I say so.”

She steps out and slams the camper door shut.

Naomi and I exchange a look. She sucks air through her teeth and says, “Could be wrong, but I don’t think she likes us.”

“Elisa?” Ilie says.

“It’s okay. They’ll stay with me,” Elisa says. “Your turn.”

He shifts back into his American accent. “Awesome.”

He adjusts his beanie and then gets out of the camper, letting in a gust of cold air and snowflakes.

“Is everything cool?” Naomi asks. “I can still go out there. I won’t fuck it up. I’m not thirsty.”

“You’re not?” I ask her, the words scoring my throat.

“I feel all right,” she says. “It’s not as bad as it was.”

“No, no,” Elisa says, starting the engine. “We’ve got this. We—”

She’s interrupted by the groan of the camper. It makes the same horrible grumbling it did right before we ended up in Ms.Alice’s cannibal murder town.

The stench of exhaust is immediate and overpowering. I retch and cover my nose.

Elisa pulls out of the parking spot. The tires screech and slide, and a calamitous rattling noise harmonizes with the grumbling.

“Something tells me Ms.Alice is not as good a mechanic as she claims,” Elisa says. “On further thought, I do not think she really wanted to help us this time.”

“Well, fuck,” Naomi says.

“We should call this off, right?” I ask.

“It is already in progress,” Elisa says, turning to go behind the strip mall. “It is too late to stop it.”

“Um, I know I’m a rookie, but I don’t think it’s smart to commit a crime if you can’t then flee the scene of said crime,” I say.

“I’m with Sloane on this,” Naomi says, and it’s so good to finally be back on the same page, to be back in sync with her.

“No one will know there was a crime. If anyone notices at all, they will assume whatever is missing is due to a clerical error. They always do,” Elisa says. She doesn’t seem particularly stressed, considering the circumstances, but that does nothing to reassure me. “I will try to fix the camper.”

“And what if you can’t?” I ask.

“Then we will find another way,” she shouts over the engine. “Do not despair.”

Naomi furrows her brow, equally put off by Elisa’s optimism. She draws back the curtain as we pull up next to a dumpster on the narrow stretch of pavement behind the strip mall, which bumps against a patch of winter-bare woods. There are two cars parked in spaces that run parallel to these woods. A silver Toyota Corolla and a beat-to-shit 1990-something red convertible, the top up, one of the side-view mirrors adhered with duct tape.

As I look at these cars, inhaling the exhaust from the camper, it dawns on me.

We’ll be stealing more than blood tonight.