Numbly, I grabbed a robe off the floor and my cane. Tying the robe, I limped to the bedroom doorway and yelled down the stairs. “Who is it?”
“It’s Lydia.”
She didn’t give a last name, but I didn’t need one. The only Lydia I knew of was Anastasia’s girlfriend, the woman who Caroline had changed. We hadn’t officially met, although I’d seen her after the attack while she’d been unconscious.
When I didn’t respond right away, she knocked sharply on the door again. “Open up, Miss Bernard. We need to talk.”
I let my head fall forward with a thunk against the door frame, which was unhelpful on so many levels. Lydia was here? Was she looking for Anastasia? Oh, God—I glanced down the hall, expecting to see the red pool of Anastasia’s blood, but instead I saw that the floor on either side of the bathroom floor had been ripped up. Eli must have gotten the carpet knife from my duffel and cut out a big piece of carpet and a smaller piece of linoleum. I stepped closer. There was still a pinkish stain on the floor underneath, but it looked damp. I sniffed the air.
Bleach. I’d trained him well.
“Miss Bernard!” Lydia yelled again, through the door. “I know you’re in there. If you don’t open this door, I’m going to come through it.” There was no anger in her voice, just determination.
“One second,” I called down. “I need to get dressed, and I’m injured. I’ll be right there.”
There was a brief silence, and then another shout from the other side of the front door. “Three minutes.”
I had to get her away from the house before Eli returned. On autopilot, I yanked open the drawer where I kept my running clothes and pulled out baggy sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a running jacket with a collar. I dressed as quickly as my knee brace would allow, zipping the running jacket all the way up. I checked the mirror. The jacket hid the bruises that Anastasia had left on my neck. I rushed out to bump down the steps on my butt, the fastest way to get down.
How much did Lydia know? What would happen if she found out that I’d killed Ana? Did she already know? How could she already know? Stop, Scarlett, I told myself. The important thing was to get Lydia away from the house before Eli got back. If she found out that he wasn’t a werewolf anymore, my whole life would implode.
Before I opened the door I grabbed my dirty coat o’ nine pockets off the floor so I could transfer my wallet and keys to the pockets of my sweatpants. After a moment of hesitation, I put the Taser in my jacket pocket too. Just in case. I felt terrible about Ana, but not enough to let Lydia kill me, if it came down to it.
I swung the front door open. Lydia, who had been surveying the street, turned her head to eyeball me. She was a petite Asian woman with the kind of enviably glossy hair that women are always flipping around in shampoo ads. I knew from when I’d seen her before that she had a climbing vine tattooed on one arm, but today it was hidden by a leather bomber jacket that she wore over tight jeans and a ribbed tank. You could see her lacy black bra pretty clearly through her shirt. Lydia’s eyes were outlined in thick rings of black kohl, which would have looked trashy on me. On her, they perfectly complimented the whole “exotic badass” look.
I had an instant to take all of that in before Lydia’s eyes widened, and although she was motionless, she seemed to lose her balance suddenly, putting a hand out to the door frame to steady herself as she bent almost double. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “Oh . . . you . . . wow.”
“Sorry . . . ,” I said uncertainly. I had been expecting her to . . . I don’t know, slap me across the face the second I opened the door. But I’d forgotten that Lydia was a new werewolf. “It has kind of a strong effect the first time. Are you okay?” I saw something clear dripping onto the porch underneath her, and for a stupid moment I thought the overcast gray skies had yielded some rain. But when Lydia lifted her head, I saw her wet eyes. Her lips trembled like she was struggling to speak.
“There’s a diner a couple of doors down,” I offered, desperate to get away from Molly’s house. “We could talk there.” She nodded, and I stumped down the porch steps to the sidewalk, taking off at as brisk a pace as I could manage. Which wasn’t very brisk at all.
I was discovering that you could learn a lot about people by how they walked when you couldn’t walk very well. Lydia was fairly patient about it, taking small, slow steps to accommodate my speed. Or maybe she was still off balance because of my radius.
“This is the place?” she asked, as we rounded a small apartment building and the diner came into view. It was the first time she’d spoken since we’d left Molly’s house. I nodded. It was just a greasy spoon, with lots of emphasis on the “greasy.” I generally only stopped in when I was hungover or hiding from Molly, who would never frequent a place that allowed homeless people to sit at the counter for the cost of a cup of coffee.
A little bell chimed as Lydia opened the front door. We didn’t talk to each other as we passed the Seat Yourself sign and headed to one of the booths against the far wall, nor as a depressingly indifferent waitress took our orders for coffee. I don’t know about Lydia, but as I looked around, I found the atmosphere comforting. It was so steeped in the tiny rituals of humanity: fixing your coffee, checking your teeth in a compact, signing credit card receipts. If we had to have this very uncivilized conversation, I was grateful we could have it somewhere so civilized. Well, relatively speaking.