Page 38 of Sore Throat, Slight Fever

Calliope lowers her sketchbook, looking at him with her head cocked to the side. “The gray suits you. And you have a very striking profile. You look distinguished.”

He snorts.

She pokes his side with the eraser end of her pencil. “It’s true. I would never lie about that.” She returns to her sketch. “Do you think I’ll live forever?”

“Your body healed after the Bite. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that you will. Let’s not test it though, okay?”

She smiles. “Deal.”

The blue jay has moved on and a mockingbird has replaced it, letting out a sharp trill above them. A squirrel scurries down the branch of a nearby tree, rustling the leaves.

She uses the side of her pinky finger to smudge something on the page. “I was trying to remember what my grandma told me about vampires. She used to try to teach me about different magical communities, which is silly looking back. She never went any farther than our own little town.”

“Where’s that?”

“Broom Hollow. When I was growing up, I hated it there. I felt suffocated. When I got married, we moved to the city, and I hated it there even more.Never thought I would long for the smallness of the Broom. I even missed going to church on Sundays, though I didn’t see the point then, grandma with her pink cotton dress and hat, always with a flower tucked into the brim. Even in winter, when the only flower in bloom was cyclamen, which she absolutely hated. She never went without a flower.”

“You could go back,” he says hesitantly. He wishes he could see her face.

“Grandma died a few years back. I went to her funeral. I don’t think there’s anything left for me in the Broom.”

“There’s always Lyon’s Cross, over on the coast.”

“Maybe.” She continues drawing, turning her head to the side, and biting her lower lip in concentration. She’s removed her sun hat and the smooth column of her neck and bare shoulders look luminescent in the sunlight.

A breeze filters through the forest, bringing the delicate scent of their surroundings: dry leaves, the heavy promise of rain, and a hint of peach-soft hyacinth petals from Calliope.

“I cut ties with a lot of the vampire community after the Second Blood War,” he finds himself saying after a few moments of silence. “Some people thought I was a hero, for finally ending it. But some never saw past the betrayal, even with the two sides coexisting. I wasn’t welcome in most places.”

She looks down at her notebook, hair falling loosefrom her hair clip. It flows over her shoulder and hides her face. “My grandma told me that the First Blood War never really ended. And what we call the Second Blood War is just a continuation of the first.”

“That’s mostly true. When the first one ended, no one had noticed that I was passing along information to the Unaligned. I had every opportunity to come clean with my brother. Even after the First War ended. But somehow, I knew it would start again. I just…I couldn’t let another war happen. Only I was too late.”

“I think it was very brave,” she says. She reaches over to squeeze his hand reassuringly before turning back to her drawing.

Rory smiles at the smudge of graphite that she leaves on his hand.

“Besides,” she adds, “and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but your brother sounded like a real jerk.”

He laughs, startled by her honesty. “He was, very much so.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Calliope drop her notebook and he turns, assuming she’s finished drawing. Her focus, however, is on the plant sprouting up from the ground between them.

“Indigo,” she says, fingering the edge of the nondescript leafy plant. “How odd. I didn’t think it grew out here.”

“That’s good though, right?”

She smiles up at him. “It’s a very good blue.”

20

The Phantom of Graeme Lake

Calliope

Calliope grinds her foraged petals with a stone mortar and pestle. Rory sits at the table, eyes trained on the newspaper spread out in front of him as he sips a glass of blood. Every moment or so, she can feel Rory’s gaze on her back as she grinds the petal into as fine a powder as she can, but whenever she glances over her shoulder, he’s focused on the newspaper spread out in front of him.

She’s not quite sure what to make of his attention. Did she share too much about herself? Maybe it’s not her. Maybe he regrets sharing too much about himself? Talking about the Blood Wars. Maybe it’s because of what he did to the man that shot her? He’s probably waiting for her to bring it up again, to needle the argument until it’s ground down to its constituent parts,like the bee balm flower in her mortar right now.

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