Chapter 3 Mara

ESTELLA

I didn't sleep well that night. I told myself it was the case.

By morning I'd mostly convinced myself of it. I filed Roman Montreux under 'problem to manage' the same way I filed everything else that threatened to take up more space in my head than I wanted to give it, and I went to open the shop like it was any other day.

Lola clocked it anyway. She always did.

"You're doing the thing again," she said, setting a mug down in front of me before I'd even asked.

"What thing."

"The thing where you decide something bothered you and then spend all morning pretending it didn't." She leaned against the counter. "Was it the vampire?"

How did she even know that? "It was the case."

"Uh-huh."

I didn't dignify that with anything else, and she let it go, because that was the deal between us. She'd poke once. If I didn't bite, she'd drop it. I loved her for that more than I ever told her.

The bell rang around noon, and I didn't look up right away. I was elbow-deep in restocking the back shelf, half-listening for Lola's voice to greet whoever it was, but her greeting didn't come.

The silence went on a second too long, and something in my chest reacted before my brain caught up to why. I turned around.

Mara was standing just inside the door. My adoptive sister.

I hadn't seen her in nine years. She looked older like life has been hard on her. She was thinner, looked tired around the eyes, dressed like someone who'd left somewhere in a hurry and hadn't planned past the leaving.

My body went cold before I decided anything about how I felt.

For a second, just a second, I wasn't standing in my bookstore. I was back there...

*The window in the door had a wire mesh through the glass, the kind that left little diamond shapes if you pressed your face close enough. Mara's face was on the other side of it. She wasn't crying—I remember that the most—she never cried, and I was, and she just stood there and watched them take me down the hall.

Someone grabbed my arm. I screamed, but that didn't stop them. They took me inside a sterile white room, set me on a creaky bed. And before I knew what was going on, my skin was pricked with a needle.*

I blinked, chasing the unbidden memory away. The shop came back — the shelves, the window light, the smell of old paper instead of antiseptic. My hand tightened on the edge of the counter without my permission.

"Estella." Mara's voice hadn't changed. That was almost the worst part. "I know I shouldn't be here."

"Then why are you." It came out colder than I meant it to.

"I need to talk to you." Her eyes went to the back of the shop, then to the window behind her, like she was checking whether the someone had followed her in. "It's important."

"Everything's important to somebody." I went back to the shelf, because if I kept my hands moving I didn't have to decide what expression my face would carry. "You have five minutes."

"Estella--"

"Five minutes, Mara." I didn't turn around. "That's what you get. Use them wisely."

I heard her breathe out behind me. "Something is happening," she began. "Things from... from back then. It's not staying buried."

My hands halted on the shelf. "Be specific," I spat.

"I don't know how to be specific. That's the problem." Her voice stayed low, controlled, but there was something under it. "Things are showing up. People connected to it. I've seen-- I think something's looking for what got left unfinished."

"Unfinished," I repeated.

"From the facility."

I turned around at that. Slowly. I made sure my face didn't give her anything, because whatever this was, whatever she wanted, she didn't get to see what those two words still did to me.

"You don't get to say that word to me like it's nothing," I spoke through clenched jaw.

"I'm not saying it's nothing. I'm saying it's not over." She took a step closer, and I didn't move, and something in her expression flickered like she'd noticed that I hadn't. "I wouldn't have come here if I had anywhere else to go. You know that. You know I wouldn't."

"I don't know anything about you anymore." That part was true, and it felt good to say. "You made sure of that."

She made an expression of guilt, or maybe shame. I didn't have room to feel for either. Not from her.

"There's a name attached to it," she said quietly. "To whatever's resurfacing. Your name."

The shop went very silent. Even the noise from the street outside seemed to pause for a second.

"My name?" I asked, incredulously.

"Your name, Estella. It's tied to whatever this is. I don't know how or why, I just know I've heard it, twice now, from people I shouldn't have been anywhere near." Her voice was tight, the way mine got when I was refusing to let something show. "I wouldn't lie about this."

I didn't answer right away. I was filing it, cataloguing it, refusing to let it become feeling before it had finished being information. Grafters acting wrong. Vampires going missing. A vampire king crossing the country. And now my own name, surfacing out of a place I'd spent nine years trying to make sure could never touch me again.

That wasn't four unrelated problems anymore.

"Who else knows you're here," I said.

"No one. I made sure."

"Made sure how?"

"Estella, please—"

"Made sure how, Mara?!"

"I wasn't followed," she sighed. "I checked. I've been checking for weeks."

"How long has this been happening?"

"Long enough that I stopped sleeping." Her voice thinned out. "I didn't come here because I think you owe me anything. I know you don't. I came because I don't have anyone else who'd understand what this actually is, and because whatever's looking for what was left unfinished, it's not going to stop with me."

I looked at her for a long moment. "I'm not doing this because of you," I said finally.

"I know."

"I'm doing it because I don't walk into unknowns blind, and you're handing me one whether I want it or not."

"I know that too."

I exhaled slowly, and something in my chest that had been braced since the bell rang loosened by exactly one degree, no more.

"Sit," I said, nodding toward the back table. "Start from the beginning. And Mara," She looked at me. "Don't waste my five minutes on an apology I won't listen to."

She nodded, and for the first time since she'd walked in, she looked less like the girl on the other side of that mesh window and more like someone who'd finally run out of places left to run.

I sat down across from her, kept my hands flat on the table where I could see them, and waited for her to tell me exactly how deep this went.