Barely a day younger than she looks every morning on the train.
August runs the twelve blocks home without stopping.
* * *
August’s first word was “case.”
It wasn’t a cute word for the baby book like “mama” (she called her mother Suzette as a toddler) or “dada” (never had one, just a sperm donor a week after her mom’s thirty-seventh birthday). It wasn’t something that would magically make her judgmental grandparents and their old New Orleans money decide they cared to speak to her mom or know August, like maybe “tax evasion” or “Huey P. Long.” It wasn’t even something cool.
No, it was simply the word she heard most while her mother taped episodes of Dateline and read crime novels out loud to her squishy baby form and worked the one great missing persons case of their lives.
Case.
She took developmental psych her sophomore year, so she knows crucial developmental phases. Age three, learning how to read, so she could hand her mom the file that starts with M instead of N. Age five, able to carry on a conversation independently, like explaining tearfully to the man at the front desk of a French Quarter apartment building how she’d gotten lost, so her mom could scavenge his files while he was distracted. It’s hardwired.
It’s too easy, now, to dig it all back out.
She’s sitting on her bedroom floor, photo on one side, notebook on the other filled with five front-and-back pages of notes and questions and half-formed theories like hot zombie? and marty mcfly??? Her bedspread is burritoed around her like a foil shock blanket on a plane crash survivor. She’s gone full True Detective. It’s been four hours.
She’s unearthed her mother’s LexisNexis password, filed three public records requests online, put holds on five different books at the library. She’s shaking down double-digit pages of Google search results, trying to find some kind of answer that isn’t completely batshit fucking insane. “Immortal hottie” has no relevant returns, only people in goth bands who look like Kylo Ren.
She’s taken the photo out of the frame, looked at it under natural light, LED light, yellow light, held it inches from her face, walked down to the pawn shop next to Niko’s work and bought a fucking magnifying glass to examine it. No evidence that it’s been doctored. Only the faded shape of Jane, tattoos and dimple and cocky set of her hips, the continuing, impossible fact that she’s there. Forty-five years ago, she’s there.
She said it, that day she told August her name. She worked at Billy’s.
She never mentioned when.
August paces her room, trying to make sense of what she knows. Jane worked at Pancake Billy’s when it opened in 1976, long enough for an off-menu item to be named after her. She’s intimately familiar with the workings of the Q, and presumably lives in either Brooklyn or Manhattan.
The scraps of Craigslist posts and articles and police reports and one 2015 People of the City Instagram post with Jane blurry in the background are all August has to go on. She’s searched every possible permutation of Jane Su she can think of, alternate spellings and romanizations—Sou, Soo, So, Soh. No luck.
But there’s something else, a pattern she’s starting to piece together, one she probably would have figured out if she weren’t always so determined to reason things away.
How Jane never had a heavier coat than her leather jacket, even when it was punishingly cold back in January. How she didn’t know who Joy Division was, the mess of her cassette collection, that she has a cassette player in the first place. It shouldn’t have been easy to always catch her train. They should have missed each other, just once. But they never have, not since the first week.
She … God. What if …
August pulls her laptop into her lap. Her hands hover indecisively over the keys.
Jane doesn’t age. She’s magnetic and charming and gorgeous. She … kind of lives underground.
The cursor on the Google search bar blinks expectantly. August blinks back.
Through a slight fog of hysteria, she remembers those weird dudes from Billy’s talking about the vampire community. She was pretty sure that was some kind of BDSM role-play thing. But what if—
August snaps her laptop shut.
Jesus Christ. What is she thinking? That Jane is some thousand-year-old succubus who’s really into punk music but can’t keep her references straight? That she spends her nights haunting the tunnels, eating rats and getting horned up over O-positive and using her supernatural charm to maneuver SPF 75 out