A Trial Week

You fall asleep at dawn with your phone on your chest, the conversation still open, and you wake at sunset to find Pickwick asleep on top of it.

You read the texts again anyway. You read them twice. You don't know what to call what happened last night, in the alley or after, but you know it ended with a moon emoji and you know you slept better than you have in nine days.

Downstairs, Liesbeth is behind the counter in a mustard-yellow sweater, writing in a ledger with a fountain pen. She doesn't look up.

"Evening," she says.

"Evening."

"There's a blood bag warming in a pot on the back stove. Don't microwave it. It gets weird."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me." She turns a page. "I've been thinking about your pastries."

You wait.

"One week," she says. "A trial. You bake at night, you put it in my case at six before you go to sleep, I sell it in the morning. Sixty-forty, my favor, because it's my case and my electricity and my oven." She finally looks up. "And you clean the oven."

"Fifty-fifty."

"Sixty-forty."

"Fifty-five, forty-five, and I make you a morning bun every day."

Something passes over her face. It might be a smile she's trying to strangle. "What's a morning bun?"

"Laminated dough, rolled with brown sugar and orange zest, baked in a muffin tin so the bottom caramelizes. You'd love it."

"You don't know what I'd love."

"I watched you eat four of my pumpkin knots at the stall when you thought I wasn't looking."

"Fifty-five, forty-five," she says crisply, and goes back to her ledger, and her ears are pink.

Neither of you mentions the alley. It sits between you on the counter like a third cup of tea nobody ordered.

Spin Cycle is on Cistern Street, a long bright room full of humming dryers and fluorescent light and a vending machine of detergent. At two in the morning it's busy: a werewolf folding fitted sheets with alarming competence, two nurses coming off a shift, a teenage-looking boy who is probably ninety.

Ptolemy Fairlamb is behind the counter in a cardigan with leather elbow patches, ironing a shirt. When he sees you he drops the iron.

"You came," he says. "Oh, you came. Sit, please, sit. Would you like a chair? A blood? A dryer sheet?"

You sit on a folding chair by the change machine. He sits across from you and folds his hands, and for a while neither of you knows what to say.

"Tell me what happened," you say finally.

He tells you. He was born in 1787 and turned in 1821, in a cholera summer, by someone he doesn't name. He's been in Hollow Hill since the thirties. He takes his blood from the Office like everyone else. But last month the Office lost a shipment, and he gave his ration to a younger vampire who was shaking, and then he was too proud to ask for more, and then it had been nine days.

"I went to the alley behind Oberholt's because I like the smell of the bread," he says miserably. "I sit there sometimes. I didn't plan to collapse. And then you were there, with your hand on my face, asking if I was all right, and I wasn't. I wasn't anything. There was only the hunger." He swallows. "I'm so sorry. I took your daylight. I know what that costs."

You think about the alley. About sunrise on your arm.

"I'm still angry," you say.

"You should be."

"But I'm also, like, so tired of being angry. I just want to know how this works."

His whole face lights up with relief. "Pamphlets," he says, and produces six of them.

The basics, according to Ptolemy and the pamphlets: The sun burns. Not instant dust, but the way a kettle burns: badly, and worse the longer you hold on. Garlic gives you an allergic reaction somewhere between hay fever and anaphylaxis. You'll heal fast from almost anything else. You show up in mirrors fine but come out blurry in photographs, "which is why we all look like Victorian ghosts on our driver's licenses." You'll sleep from sunrise to sunset whether you want to or not. Your heart won't beat.

"It doesn't beat?" You press two fingers to your wrist. Nothing. You knew. You've been not knowing it on purpose. "At all?"

"We're not alive, exactly. Not dead. Somewhere in the hallway between." He smiles, sad. "You get used to it."

"And food?"

"Tastes of nothing. Only blood tastes like anything." He pauses. "You said you've been tasting your pastries."

"Liesbeth makes me a tea. Her grandmother's recipe."

Ptolemy goes very still.

"Griet Haverlock's Tasting Tea," he says. "Goodness. She used to make it for me in 1962, when I was very low. It costs the brewer, you know. A little sleep, a little warmth, every pot. She stopped making it after a while. I don't blame her." He looks at you curiously. "Your landlady brews it for you every night?"

"Every night."

"Hm," says Ptolemy, and in that one syllable there is a whole paragraph he doesn't say.

You get home at four with a stack of pamphlets and a loaf of black-rye sourdough that Ptolemy insisted on buying from you for twenty dollars, "as reparations, the first of many."

The shop is dark except for the lamp behind the counter. Liesbeth is asleep at the counter on top of her ledger, her cheek on her arm, a pencil still in her fingers and another in her hair.

You stand there longer than you should.

She looks younger asleep. Softer. There's a crease between her eyebrows even now, like she's arguing with someone in her dream. A curl has fallen across her mouth and moves when she breathes. You think about what Ptolemy said: It costs the brewer. A little sleep. A little warmth.

You take the throw blanket off the window bench and put it over her shoulders.

She doesn't wake up. She makes a small grumpy sound and burrows into the blanket and says, very clearly, "No alphabetizing."

You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing and go to the kitchen to start the morning buns.

At six, as you're sliding the last tray into the case, the mail slot in the front door clanks.

An envelope drops to the mat. Heavy cream paper, the expensive kind, with a red wax seal pressed into the shape of a key.

Liesbeth wakes with a jolt, the blanket sliding off. She sees the envelope. Her face goes flat.

You pick it up. There are two names on it. The first, in printed letters, is Ms. L. Haverlock, re: 13 Tallow Street. The second, below it, in a looping red hand, is yours.

For Ava.

"Don't," says Liesbeth.

You open it anyway, because it has your name on it and because you're tired and because you want to know. Inside is a typed offer for the building, with a number so large you read it twice. Clipped to it is a small card in the same red ink.

Darling baker. Ask her what happens at the solstice. M.

You look up.

Liesbeth crosses the shop in three strides, takes the card out of your fingers, and holds it over the candle on the counter. The edge catches. She watches it burn down to her fingertips and drops the last black curl of it into a teacup.

She never once looks at what it says.

"Liesbeth," you say. "What happens at the solstice?"

"Go to bed, Ava," she says. "The sun's coming."