Note: The follow chapter has child neglect/abandonment.
It was almost like a puzzle, and that bit of reading was the final piece.
After that day, the girl began to open up to all five of them. Not entirely, she still wasn't speaking, but she wasn't hiding or eyeing sharp teeth in fear either. At least, not as badly as when she first came to the hotel.
Still, Drac tried to keep his fangs from showing as little as possible around her. Especially when they read, which was becoming an actual nightly thing.
(The girl had finally passed out that fateful day at around the midpoint of chapter three, curled up in a ball on the couch and using a decorative throw as a blanket. He'd put the ribbon bookmark one page further back than he actually was, carefully scooped the girl up, and brought her back to her room.
A familiar feeling had swelled in his chest when he pulled the covers over her shoulders and smoothed her hair away from her forehead. He hoped the new development would last.)
It did.
The very next day, when he and Ericka had finished getting ready for bed, there was a tiny knock on the door. On the other side was the girl, wearing her new pajamas - a light green button-up with long sleeves, and pajama pants of the same color - and holding the book out like a trophy.
Ericka blinked down at them both, brows lifted in both surprise and confusion. "Do you want us to read to you?"
The girl nodded, smiling almost proudly.
Drac took the moment to explain. "I… might have started a new part of her routine."
The girl grinned wider, nodding.
"She likes the pirate voices."
Another nod.
"Well…" Ericka grinned back and stepped aside. "Come on, get in here." The girl ran past her and further into the room, and Ericka laughed and followed her. "I gotta hear this 'pirate voice' now."
"I'll have you know, I do an amazing Billy Bones."
The girl started to get braver and braver around him, testing her boundaries in the way only children could.
"I see you over there," he spoke into an empty lobby early one morning. In his peripheral vision, he saw something shift in the shadows, and his ears caught a faint, stifled laugh. "You know you're not supposed to be down here."
"It's cool, pops, Patricia… no? Okay, she's with me and Dennis. We're showing her where a pirate would hide treasure in this place."
Drac very, very faintly regretted grabbing Treasure Island that day. Well, that book in particular, not the actual act of reading. "There's nowhere a pirate would hide gold, Johnny."
"You don't know that. Come on, you two, let's keep looking."
"Keep away from the pool!" Dracula yelled down the hall at them.
He thought he heard the girl gasp in delight.
Well, they'd get to that later.
It turned out Treasure Island really was a bad idea for bedtime reading.
The pirates, the lure of hidden gold, the betrayal and adventure on high seas, it turned out to be much too exciting to actually lull the girl to sleep. After each chapter, she just stared at the ceiling, wide-eyed, for a little bit, then they could hear her moving around inside her room.
At first Ericka had assumed she was having trouble getting comfortable, but then when they actually checked in on her, they found she'd managed to push the comforter to the floor around the bed, drag a corner of the sheets up and tie it to the bedpost, and was standing with one foot atop the footboard.
Essentially, she'd turned her bed into a boat and the comforter into the ocean.
"O-kay…" Ericka said, clapping her hands together after a brief staring contest between the child and the two adults. "Let's… get this put back together, and we'll keep Treasure Island for nighttime. You can pick something else for bed."
"Are you sure you want me to keep reading to you like this? You're ten, you don't think it's 'uncool?'"
The girl made a face like she smelled something rotten, shoving the book at him again. He could almost hear her saying Don't say 'uncool,' it's weird.
"Okay, okay…" Drac feigned defeat as he took the book from her, sitting on the edge of her bed. They'd worked out a system for the reading - her room for the bedtime stories in case she fell asleep quickly, either their room or the den for daytime reading. He checked the cover - and his brows lifted. "This one?" he asked, looking down at her. "Are you sure?"
She nodded.
There wasn't anything wrong with the book, and it wasn't inappropriate - he remembered reading it with Mavis herself when she was a child. It was just…
This one was a monster book.
She obviously didn't know, Drac told himself. She might not have been able to be in many libraries or bookstores - and even if she had, she definitely wouldn't have seen many vampire-written books. So she probably thought it was another human book.
He was still going to read it, of course.
"Okay. Here we go. 'On a dark winter night, when the fog was so low and thick that one needed a lantern to walk through his yard, an vampire girl with an odd look in her eye sat in a cab with her father…'"
On Saturday, Ericka found the girl walking back from Mavis's apartment, her steps slow and her expression confused. In her arms she held a coloring book and the 124-count box of crayons Dracula had gifted her.
("It has a sharpener, Ericka, look!" he had said, almost giddy.
It was sweet, she thought, how rapidly he'd started to dote on her.)
"Hey, honeyseal," Ericka called to her, bending slightly to be closer to her level. "What's wrong?"
The girl bit her lip, looking over her shoulder at the rooms she'd just left.
"Ohhh… Honey, Mavis and Johnny took Dennis to a movie. They'll be back in a few hours."
The girl looked up, distress and confusion warring in her eyes.
"They just took him for a 'Parent-and-Child Night Out.' They'll be back." Her hand lifted and tousled her hair. She noticed the flicker of something in the girl's eyes, but didn't comment on it. "They probably thought you wouldn't want to come with them. It is pretty loud out there."
The girl's gaze moved to the floor. She pressed her lips tightly together.
"If it'll make you feel better, we'll ask if they can invite you next time. Or, hey, you know what! We'll take you somewhere. Me and Drac," she clarified when the girl looked puzzled.
(In the back of her mind, she quickly made a mental note to tell her husband about the sudden future plan. But, she thought, remembering how excited he'd seemed when the crayons were purchased, somehow she doubted he'd mind at all.)
"When you're ready to go out again, we'll take you wherever you like. Shopping, an arcade, a movie… we'll do our own Parent-Child Night. What do you think?"
Something else appeared in the girl's eyes. But she just nodded, clutching her crayons like a lifeline.
"'I will return for you,' her father said. 'I will only be gone a short while, and when I return for you, you and your companion will be so clever and grown-up that I'll barely recognize you.'
'You could never not recognize me, Father,' said Sasha."
Drac noticed the girl was trembling a bit. He paused, but she didn't have any reaction beyond that. Maybe she was just getting emotional over the book? She'd gasped a few times during Treasure Island, and had shaken like a leaf when Jim was listening to Silver in the apple barrel.
"'And I know you and Mother will return for me and Anya. You don't have to promise me anything, because I already know it.'"
There was a small noise. It took Drac a moment to realize what it was.
And when he did realize, his heart dropped.
"...in't… wan'me…"
She'd spoken again. For the first time since her first night here, she'd spoken. Her voice was clearer, not raspy anymore, but it was still low and ached with something too big for a child.
"What was that?" he asked, starting to close the book.
The girl lay on her side, her back to him as she curled into a ball. For a moment she didn't answer, and he thought either she was ignoring him or she had already fallen asleep and he'd imagined it.
But then he heard her draw in a shaking breath, and she spoke again: "Mine… didn't want me…"
Now he did close the book, setting it on the side table. "Who didn't?" Drac asked softly, though he suspected he already knew.
"My… my parents… m-my family…" Her trembling got worse, as he started to approach her, he saw she was gripping the blankets in tight, trembling fists. "I wasn't good enough," she whispered. "I wasn't fast like they were, I got too close t-to the port towns and liked to watch everybody there, when we took off our coats I always wanted to play more and play with the human kids. I was different… so they left me behind."
He moved from the chair to the edge of the bed.
"Someone found us, found our coats nearby. We ran to get them before he could - I w-wasn't fast enough, and a h-hunter took my coat, because it was the last one. And my parents…"
Drac put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, but didn't move him away.
"I- I cried and I yelled 'Come back! Wait!' But they didn't come back." A hiccup, or maybe a sob, escaped her throat, and her body jerked from the force of it. "They were glad to get rid of me, b-because nobody would want-"
"Oh, oh-oh-oh, shhh…" He scooted closer, carefully lifting her up and holding her to him. It was an instinctive gesture, one left over from nightmares and tears from a long time ago.
The girl didn't try to get away, just pressed her face to his pajamas and cried, tiny sobs that she was trying to hold back, trying to be brave about.
"Shhh-sh… it's okay… it's okay now…"
"Why wasn't…. Wasn't I good?" she sobbed weakly.
"Hey, hey, none of that," he whispered, almost sternly. "It's not your job to be 'good enough.' You didn't have to do anything. It's not your fault, girl, it's not your fault…"
She hiccupped, wiping her tears against his shirt.
"We won't leave you," Drac found himself saying before he could realize. "Nobody here is leaving you… We wouldn't ever do that."
Another weak sniffle. A wet little cough.
"You can stay here as long as you want to. Nobody's leaving you or sending you away, no matter what happens, girl."
The child in his arms sniffed again. And then, her voice thick: "A-Aislin."
"...what?"
"M-my name. 's Aislin…" She kept her face hidden as she spoke.
For a moment, Drac said nothing. Her name. They had her name. Finally, he looked down at the top of her head, and moved one of his hands to smooth her hair.
"...it's nice to meet you, Aislin."
