A Dreadful Thing

12: THE BLOODLESS GIRL

TWELVE: THE BLOODLESS GIRL

Vera

When Vera discovered the existence of the Seraphium, it explained quite a few things in her life.

Even her parents, two dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers who worked in the city and didn't have much consideration or patience for spiritual beings, elves, and pseudo-gods, took the news of their daughter's inhumanity rather well. They spent their days on Wall Street and dealt in numbers; however impossible, when peculiarities added up, too many incidents the doctors couldn't explain, they accepted the truth that Vera was different in a manner they simply couldn't comprehend.

Vera spent her childhood in and out of institutes and private schools paid to look the other way if odd events occurred around her. Then, it was hired tutors—and then no one at all, Vera stuck reading books in the apartment alone, kept away from the people walking the street below. Sometimes, she'd sit on the balcony and watch them, wondering where they were going, what their life was like, wanting to go to the park, the mall, the museum—anywhere else. She'd lean on the railing and watch for hours.

As much as she'd longed to leave, she was also afraid. Afraid it would happen again.

When the Seraphium arrived to tell Vera of her identity the year before, she felt as if all the missing pieces in her life had suddenly found their place. Her heart soared. Surely they would know how to fix it. Surely they would know what to do.

But they didn't. Talents, they told her, were as varied as snowflakes, and not always friendly or safe for their user. She would need to exert control on her own—but control came from practice, from use, and Vera had sent half a dozen dormmates screaming from the room in her first year alone.

She did not want to use it. She would find another way.

In many aspects, Bilarthus Academy mirrored the schools she'd attended on the mainland. There were cliques and gossips, jocks who played Feingarde, the alternative crowd, those more focused on their studies—and, of course, the bullies. The bullies were quick to put a damper on Vera's excitement when they discovered she was demi-human, or "Bloodless" as the kids liked to spit. While the Masters assured her there was no calculable difference between a demi-human Seraphium and a full-blooded one, some people simply wouldn't let her forget it.

She often pondered her own beginnings and the lineages of those around her, quick to learn the names of her peers' patron Seraphs and the stories behind them. Most she found too fantastical to believe they existed at all, and in her more analytic moods, she theorized the Seraphs had, to some extent, been deified by their children—turned into young gods, their beings conflated beyond what was feasible to happen. She kept that belief in her own chest; God forbid she make the snide remarks worse.

Vera had been prepared for another year of barbs and solitude, of spending all her time in a carrel in the library or shutting herself away in the Chronicle Chamber—when Orla Tiernan arrived.

Vera could admit she'd probably latched onto the other girl much too quickly, but she was lonely, and she thought Orla might be, too. She was a strange girl—a bit shabby around the edges, too thin, with eyes that shone with suspicion at every turn, and her accent came out as a bizarre mix of Northeastern bled through with Southern Irish. She'd come to Bilarthus with one bag, and that was it. Her clothes, though clean, appeared as if they'd gone through the wash a few dozen times, and more than one shirt had speckled bleach stains as if someone had been clumsy while doing the laundry. In a few short days, Vera had caught her mumbling to her shadow more than once.

Orla's background didn't add up. Like her parents, Vera often thought of the world in terms of numbers, and Orla Tiernan was an outlier in her interquartile range, skewing the data. It bothered Vera, an impatient itch at the back of her mind wanting an explanation, but she quashed her curiosity.