Dont wake, p.1
dont wake, page 1
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sarah
Copyright © Sarah
All rights reserved.
https://linktr.ee/littlegreyache
This is a work of fiction.
All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional.
Any resemblance to real people or incidents is entirely coincidental.
First Printing: October 2022, US
ISBN 9781387594917
Independently Published
Cover Design: Sarah
Editing: Karin Kempert
Interior Design: Ink and Earth Studio
For Rabbit, who never stops reading over my shoulder.
Even in the dark.
Especially in the dark.
I guess the first thing you’ll want to know is where I’m from. But that’s boring. Ask where I’ve been. About Chongqing. About São Joaquim. Ask me about the two months of polar night we spent in Tromsø. Ask why it’s always more fun to haunt a city that still has a few believers.
“There,” Chelsea says, tossing hair dyed to match the same clove-dark shade of mine in satisfaction while I stare out the bay window at the quaint little mailboxes in front of the quaint little houses across from our own quaint little home-for-now. “You know what I love most about moving?”
You don’t have to ask this one anything. She’ll tell you.
A police car rolls slowly by, rumbling over wet gravel and swallowing the near-silent pat of my more affable half’s bare feet crossing the wood floor.
“I mean, besides everything.”
I scoff.
Ask me what I love about moving.
“What?” Five-foot-three, an inch and two centuries on me asks, not waiting for the answer she already knows. A razor slices through packing tape, and newspaper scuffs along cardboard as she searches another box. “New job.
New people. New name …”
Same characters. Same scene. And what’s in yet another name?
We are what we are.
“We get to be whoever we want, every time.”
She says it with two steel nails between her teeth, then hammers one into the wall while I stare out at peeling white picket fences, kids on big wheels, and an empty porch swing.
We just got here, and I’m already restless.
“It’s exciting,” my sister on paper adds, hanging another antique mirror. I watch the reflection of her in the window, checking her reflection in the 19th century looking glass. She practices a pouty smile, then ravishes it with a real one. “Makes me feel young again.”
I don’t bother turning to face her. “Then you be the little sister this time.”
“Ha, I wish I could. Senior year. How do you not love it? All the hormones. The adrenaline. Everything’s either the end of the world or just beginning, and everyone’s always hot and bothered about … Everything … ”
She trails off, searching through boxes as I cross my arms, staring harder out the window.
Ask me what hot and bothered really sounds like.
What adrenaline tastes like.
It isn’t high school.
“You’ll find someone,” she says. “Just like you always do. And then you won’t want to leave this place either. Just like you never want to leave anywhere when things start getting … ”
Say it, I think. When things start getting interesting.
Good.
Real.
“Dangerous,” the closest thing to family I’ve got on Earth finishes.
I leave the window and head for the door, the thick soles of my boots beating a deeper rhythm than her naked steps.
“Where are you going?”
“You’re boring in your old age.” I show her my eyes so she knows I’m not being mean, but I do mean it.
“You’re reckless in yours.”
“I’m going for a walk.”
“Don’t you want to unpack your things?”
I glance around all the boxes with an obvious eyebrow raised, tilting my head as she does the same. All these things are her things.
“Okay, let’s go together then. We’ll get you new stuff.”
Shaking my head, I step outside alone and start walking without her. I pull my sunglasses down from my hair and my hood up over it, and walk all the way to ‘town’. Then all the way through it. I walk until it’s dark and I’ve run out of paved road, and then I keep walking, following a river into the night instead of turning around because you know what I love about moving?
Nothing.
I don’t want new stuff. I don’t want to pick a new fake name. I don’t want to start over again just so we can leave the best parts behind.
Again.
Straying from the river, I wander into the woods until I come to a clearing and lay down in the soft grass, half-gazing half-glaring up at the harvest moon. Lost and found in her wise light, every part of me blushes warm, tensing with the memories of everything she’s seen me do.
I hate starting over. It’s boring to the point of torture, and it’s getting worse.
But ask me what I love.
Ask what I cherish so deep it turns my whole body into a broken heartbeat.
Ask me what I’d crawl for, any number of miles, down on all fours until I ache on the outside like I do on the inside, for just one single drop of right now.
A sorely lonesome groan escapes my throat, echoing between the junipers and hemlocks as my pocket vibrates. Staying on my back, I bring the phone to my ear. My only friend is already talking.
“I ordered you some clothes. And a bed, so you can do your brooding here instead of the forest floor.”
I don’t bother answering because it doesn’t matter. I stare up at my mother instead, lighting up the whole sky. She’s so full tonight. I can’t help the jealousy blooming like blackthorn in my ribcage.
“Chloe, what are you doing in the woods?”
Sighing against the sound of my latest name, my voice is empty when I answer. “Longing.”
She sighs too, resigned and relieved. She doesn’t push me to come back or hurry up and do what I do because she knows me. And if you know me, lying down to throb and thirst in the dirt is better than going back to town right now and—
“Okay,” she says.
But it isn’t.
I’m not.
“I miss Tair,” I tell her and the moon.
My last lover. Alistair. His nickname among friends, a whisper on my lips our last night together, just like tear. As in rend. As in shred. As in how it felt to have to leave him before I was finished.
We only left London two days ago. I still feel ripped in half.
“I know,” Chelsea answers gently.
“I miss Silas.” My voice wavers, and I bite my lip against crying.
My kindred. A wanderer just like me. My first and only memory of America, two hundred years ago.
“I know.”
“I miss Vova.”
Volodya. My first.
My first—
The two-syllable term of endearment breaks on my lips and my toes curl in my boots. My fist clenches cool grass, pulling it from the ground by its roots while my whole body still, still, still remembers. Thousands of years later. When I close my eyes, I can still taste snowflakes and medovukha.
“I know,” Chelsea says, soft and sad like she’s sorry.
But she doesn’t know.
She doesn’t understand.
She can’t.
She’s like me but she isn’t like me.
“I can’t keep doing this, Lilin.” I use her real name. What she really is. What she’ll always be no matter where we go or who we pretend to be. I tell her in our real language. Our dead tongue. So she can hear how deep it goes. “I can't keep leaving them unfinished.”
“We can’t go back to Newcastle."
A sea of lonely tears swells against my lashes. I know we can't go back. I know she didn’t mean to, but she got carried away. Alistair will be in the grave long before we can ever go back.
Opening my eyes, I feel like the moon is closer than before, and I meet her wide, omniscient stare with my own.
“I know it’s different for you,” my sole relative here continues. “Harder on you.” Restless need gnashes through me, but I almost smile at her choice of words.
Ask me why.
Ask me what it takes to be banished from so many cities.
To be forbidden.
To get damned.
“But I know you're not ready for Évora yet.”
I snort at the thought of The Saudade. That macabre facade. That retirement home for lost goats. The place our kind goes when we don’t know how to have fun anymore.
Ask what they call me there.
Ask me my real name.
Ask what it means.
Ask me
what I
eat.
“Look at this.”
&n
“Gross, didn’t he post that last week?”
“Now look at what she put on her story.”
Leaning back in a cheap plastic chair, I sip white milk through a red straw and let my gaze wander casually around the Aberdeen High School cafeteria. It’s packed with bright-eyed, pulse-pounding, testosterone-overflowing teenagers, and yet it’s as banal and desolate of options as the rest of this banal, desolate town.
I set the milk carton down and pick at its corner.
Restlessness gnaws at my veins, and it’s growing teeth.
This isn’t my first senior year. Not even close. These aren’t my first Olivias, Ashleys, or Grahams. My ‘sister’ and I have been doing this for over a century, all over the world. Every high school is the most mind-numbing place you can imagine, but the Home of the Bobcats in the year 2019, feels like the capital of squaresville.
“Wait, so look at what I posted.”
It’s been three weeks so far, of the same logarithms no one will ever use, Shakespeare instead of Emilia Lanier, kinematics, The Cold War, and this exact same conversation, over and over and over.
“She’s such a slut.”
I lower my lids and roll my eyes.
All over the world, all through history, some things never change.
While Olivia and Ashley lean in around Graham and her phone, I look around from class clown to class president, from clean-cut quarterback to morose loner, from hippie to hipster, to a few of the teachers in the background. James Vain. Bennett Barrow. Carl Adkins. I watch the basketball team drift in, followed by Coach Norton. Connor to his wife. Conn to the cheerleader two tables over he thinks he’s secretly fucking.
I could have any one of them.
All of them, if I wanted.
I swallow around the thought, heavy like a stone in my throat as I cross my legs under the table, tossing the bland fantasy of all four men standing over me aside. But inborn need doesn’t go quietly. I’ve been climbing the walls every night for weeks, literally. I’ve followed every barely-not-boring scent to houses that prove otherwise over and over. I’ve slipped in a few windows, but slipped right back out just as swiftly. Sorely disappointed. Craving even worse than before.
“Hey, Graham,” Aiden, a tall blond boy with muscle he has no idea what to do with, takes a seat. “Happy birthday.”
Two of his friends sit down too, and the nearness of their hard-beating hearts makes me miserably aware of my own.
While the five of them take turns stealing fries, grooming their hair, and sniping impishly at each other, I focus on paying just enough attention to fit in. To play my part. To act like the jaded new girl while decades of restlessness teethe on me, and I count the hours until sundown.
“What about you, Ghost? You coming?” Moreno, another boy asks, licking lips as he looks me up and down.
Ghost.
The nickname I didn’t ask for but got on my first day here because I’m so pale. Because they believe the story. That Lilin and I are sisters whose mom and dad died in a car crash. That the house we ‘live’ in now belonged to our grandparents. That Chelsea Bardot is a bright young surgeon, and Chloe Bardot is a sullen high school senior that keeps to herself. That she’s 26 and I’m 18.
“To the party,” Oliva continues.
“It’s gonna be so wild,” Graham promises.
There isn’t a single bead of wildness for miles in any direction.
I’ve looked.
But I shrug. What else am I going to do?
“Okay, but who’s coming with me today?”
Picking my milk back up, I take another sip and drift on the chorus of curse words and coltish laughs. I let my eyes wander over Adam’s apples and Spartan jawlines. Derisive grins and red-blooded cheeks. I’ll never touch a boy that looks the same age as me again, but that doesn’t mean being surrounded by so much unreserved nerve and raw sinew isn’t mildly inspiring, or that a starving girl can’t look.
I know how it would go though, and it’s not worth it.
I don’t want something that’s over in thirty seconds when I’ve got eternity to fill.
“What, no, you have to. Don’t make me go alone,” Graham says. Aiden and his friends have left, and she’s begging Ashley with indignant eyes.
“I thought you were going,” Ashley says to Olivia.
“I’m beyond grounded,” Olivia replies. “My parents caught me with Kaylee again.”
Restlessness that’s sharper with each passing day digs deeper into my sides. I press my lips together and exhale slowly through my nose.
“Ash, they don’t have to know it’s a tattoo shop. Just tell them we’re going to the beach.”
“You know I’m bad at lying. My mom can always tell.”
“Ugh, so do it by text,” Graham whines.
Hunger twists and thrashes under the surface of my skin, tossing and turning into desperation so dangerous, I can hear it.
“Do you know how dumb I’ll look going alone? And you know I hate driving by myself.”
Terribly familiar, so-small weeping sounds start so low in my eardrums, the hair on the back of my neck stands up.
“I’ll be there for your party,” Ashley offers.
“Who am I supposed to talk to while it’s happening? Who’s going to tell me if it’s spelled wrong?”
“You’re getting a dreamcatcher.”
Inborn need whimpers deep, deep within my inner ear. A small siren only audible to me. A warning of the wail it will become if I don’t—
“Oh my god, Ash,” Graham snaps. “I’m nervous, okay?” Then she softens her tone. “Please,” she says, maybe even sincerely. “I need some support here.”
Ask me what I need.
Ask what silences the siren inside me.
“Graham … ”
“It’ll be fun,” the birthday girl sing-songs desperately. “There’ll be hot guys there.”
My ears perk up.
“I swear. Come on. There’s this one, I think his real name’s Brandon, but he goes by Birds. Look at his Insta.”
“I’ll go.” I speak up before she can get back into her phone.
Everyone looks at me, and I shrug again. Grabbing a fry. Keeping it careless.
“I mean, I don’t have a curfew or anything. So, if Ashley can’t go with you, I can.”
Greybrook is forty five minutes from Aberdreen, tops. But it’s forty five minutes of listening to Graham Campbell. So it feels like six months.
She rambles about Olivia and Ashley first. Then about their parents. Then about her own. Then a song she loves comes on, so she turns it up and rolls down the windows, and all I can think suddenly is how I miss doing stuff like this with Lilin.
Prowling.
Playing.
Chelsea, I remind myself as we cruise along the thriving, green tree-lined two lane road. She’s Chelsea this time, and we don't paint towns red anymore. Hiding in plain sight is our thing now.
When people look at my compatriot, they see there’s something otherly about her. Something missing. Young people are especially quick to notice. That’s why she’s never the one in high school. The more full of life you are, the easier you can tell she isn’t.
Not me though.
My hazel-blue gaze is lush with life, as soft and warm as a virgin’s. Youthful. Curious. Inviting. I have the most alive eyes you’ll ever see.
And it isn’t just my eyes.
Everything about me is soft and warm with promise. From my softly dark brown hair, to my even softer, peaches and cream kissed skin. My voice is as silken with heat as the last, melting beam of a summer sunset, and if you get close enough, you’ll swear I smell like home to you. Whether it’s a time you miss or a place you’ve never been. I’ll bloom nostalgia and longing inside you the moment you breathe me in.
