Immortal With a Kiss by Jacqueline Lepore

fine.”
    “I’m sorry, dear, but I find it difficult to believe that.”
    She stammered, “No, there’s nothing wrong. I don’t know anything about the book, really. Margaret . . . she gets strange ideas sometimes, that’s all.”
    “She frightens you,” I said.
    She opened her mouth but said nothing, and I realized she was too afraid to speak. My chest tightened. I was determined to help her, but how could I get her to tell me what was wrong?
    “Please, I have to go,” she said and tried to duck past me again.
    I put a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Just a minute.” I felt cruel pressing her so, but I was doing it as much for her own good as my need to learn what she knew. “I can assure you, Eustacia, I will tell no one—not a soul—of anything you say to me. No matter what. You would not be tattling to tell me because I am not interested in disciplining them. I want to help them. I want to help you.”
    I struck the right chord, for uncertainty gathered in her gaze. The poor girl wanted desperately to confide in me.
    Therefore, I pressed on. “They are sneaking out. I already know that and I have told no one. They have a group, a club of some sort, and it involves something very . . . very dark. Very dangerous.”
    “The wicked things they do!” she said in almost a moan, and reached out for me and wrapped her smaller hand in mine. I grasped that desperate hand, moved by her torment, and murmured encouragingly, “It’s all right.”
    “They like it,” she whispered, her mouth trembling. “They want me to be part . . . They say there must be seven. They say I must join them.” She stepped back suddenly, pulling her hands free and burying them in her hair.
    “Eustacia?” I reached out to comfort her and her eyes snapped up to hold my gaze.
    “I shouldn’t have told you!”
    “No, it is quite all right, I promise—”
    “If they find out, they will murder me.”
    I must say, the thrust of her terror was like a physical thing, and in the same manner that a blow to the wrist will numb the hand, so too did her fear transfix me for a moment. When she wheeled and fled out of sight, I remained frozen.
    Murder her? Surely she was exaggerating, using the term to describe the social torture the girls would put her through, excluding her from their circle, bullying her with taunts and nasty pranks.
    But I remembered the bodies Victoria Markam had seen and was uneasy. No, that was absurd. The girls were not murderers, for they were not vampires.
    However, they were clearly putting a crushing amount of pressure on her. Why—what did they want with her? They needed seven girls, Eustacia had said. I counted five students. Eustacia would make a sixth. There had to be one more I did not know to make up the septet.
    As I exited the dormitory wing, I resolved to keep an eye on Eustacia, perhaps try again to gain her trust. She could be a valuable resource to understand what was happening with the . . . well, the witches was as accurate a term as any.
    A fter luncheon, I thought I might venture out to the frozen garden, as a means to help myself think. I dressed warmly, bringing along a volume of Keats’s poetry. I had found some interesting insights about vampires and other mystical creatures in the work of the Romantic poets. Coleridge’s Christabel contained a line that had saved my life this past spring, once I realized its relevance to the strange happenings in Avebury. Other writers, too, had pondered the subject of the vampires. Polidori’s The Vampyr , Lord Byron’s Manfred —both written during a storm-ravaged summer the two men spent trapped indoors while they were vacationing with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley on the shores of Lake Geneva. The two writers’ accounts were ominously acute in describing the vampire sensibility. I had often wondered what transpired that summer, for it was here Mary Shelley had begun her chilling Frankenstein , another story of the dead come to