“Um, yes, it is. You have a horn coming out of your wrist. And did you say ‘we’? There are more of you?”
He nodded.
“Your family?” she guessed.
He hesitated and then nodded again. “Our birth families all rejected us when we began exhibiting signs of what we were. The Karkadanns adopted us.”
“I spent the night with unicorns?”
“I spent the night with a vampire.”
He’d known what she was all along. He’d known what she was when she’d appeared at his window. He’d known what she was earlier when he’d found her on his roof . . . when he’d led her to his roof. She thought back to that chase. He’d wanted her to know where he lived. But why? “You knew what I was, and you still invited me in.”
“I had to be sure,” he said.
“Sure of what?”
“That you’d changed enough,” he said. “That it had worked. You were next to me all night, and you never so much as looked at my neck. So I knew.”
She remembered when he’d picked her up that first morning after she’d left Zeke and Matt. He’d driven her to the library and then watched her while she was out on the field. He’d been the first person she’d met at high school. None of that was an accident or a coincidence. “You . . .”
“You’re going to attack again, aren’t you?” He raised his sword-horn a split second before she punched him. Her fist impacted on the side of the horn. It felt like punching steel. She winced, but she didn’t stop.
“Do you”—she hit again—“have any”—hit—“idea what you’ve done?” Lunging low, she knocked his feet out from under him. He lost his balance. She leaped onto him. He wasn’t fast enough to flip away. “You changed me! You’ve made me lose who I am. Lose my Family. Lose my world!” With each accusation, she landed a blow. Her eyes blurred until she couldn’t see him. Her strikes lost power. She put her hands over her face.
And she cried.
She felt his arms slip around her as he sat up. He drew her against his chest and held her as she wept. She heard his heart beat as she leaned against him, and she felt him breathing, as deeply and evenly as the human that she’d thought he was.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Are you?” she demanded.
He hesitated. “No.”
Pearl drew away from him. “Why? Why do it? Was it to save lives? I’m a minor vampire. Before you came along, I sipped from a few here and there.” She thought of Brad, and she felt the strange ache that she could now name—her conscience. “But now I’ve endangered four hundred lives.”
“You were trying to save them in there,” Evan said. “You were about to reveal yourself, sacrifice your safety, for them.” He sounded admiring.
“Until you stopped me,” Pearl said.
Evan looked over Pearl’s head. “Until we stopped you,” he corrected.
Pearl turned around to see Bethany walking through the woods toward them. Her strawberry-blonde curls had been flattened by the rain so they clung to her forehead and cheeks like limp yarn. The pine needles squished and crunched under her feet. She ducked under tree branches that rained more water down on her.
“Don’t tell me she’s a were-unicorn too?” Pearl asked.
“One hundred percent human.” Bethany beamed at Pearl. “So I assume he showed you his fancy horse trick? Pretty neat, huh?”
Pearl crossed her arms.
Bethany’s smile faded. “You’re mad at us. I knew you’d be mad at us! But you were a psychotic killer before. Aren’t you so much happier this way? You can feel emotions! You can have friends! You can experience love!”
“And loss,” Pearl said softly. “Either I lose my Family, or all those people die.”
Bethany looked over her shoulder at Evan. “You didn’t tell her?”
“Been busy,” he said, standing. He dusted the leaves and dirt off his clothes.
“So you were in on this with him?” Pearl asked.
Bethany raised her hand as if in class. “Actually, it was my idea.”
Evan caught Pearl’s arms to prevent her from lunging at Bethany. Bethany let out a shriek and scurried behind a tree. Pearl shrugged him off. “I’m not going to hurt her,” She said. “She gave me a notebook.”
He released her. “Wish I’d thought of that.”
“You stabbed me,” Pearl said. “I’d need a whole stationery store to fix that.” She glared at Bethany. “Come out and tell me what the master plan for world domination is.”
“No domination,” Bethany said. “We’re the good guys.”
“Debatable,” Pearl said. “But go on.”
“Do you promise you won’t attack me?” Bethany asked. She clutched the tree trunk as if it would protect her.
“Depends on what you say,” Pearl said.
Bethany looked at Evan.
In a grave voice, as if he were narrating for the History Channel, Evan said, “For centuries were-unicorns have fought and killed vampires. It’s why we exist. We’re your natural enemy.” He sounded as if he expected an orchestra to play an ominous chord at this revelation.
“Huh,” Pearl said. “No offense, but you guys aren’t very good at it. Everyone in my Family thinks you’re mythical.”
“That’s intentional,” Evan said. “We planted the myths. It made our hunt easier.”
“Interesting,” Pearl said. “And the whole virgin-in-a-clearing thing?”
“Look, what kills vampires? Stake through the heart, right? And what do unicorns have?” Evan tapped his forehead. “Built-in stakes. All the other legends are just to obscure the truth.”
Pearl digested that. “Okay. So you stake vampires. Why did I live?”
“Well, the healing part of our myth is true,” Evan said.
Bethany burst in. “When they heal, they kind of, you know, make people more good. Wake up their conscience a bit more. At least, that’s what happened to me, when Evan’s mother saved me.” Pearl supposed this explained how the quintessential mom had saved little Bethany from Daddy: Mrs. Karkadann was a vampire slayer. Handy hobby, she thought. Bethany continued, “I should have turned out like my parents, but I didn’t. So I had an idea. What if you tried that with a vampire? Kind of insert goodness directly in. What would happen?”
“So you basically infected me,” Pearl said. “I was your lab rat.”
“Oh, no!” Bethany gasped in horror. “We never thought of you like that! You’re the first of your kind! Dawn of a new species!”
“Right,” Pearl said. “Species of one.”
Both of them shook their heads. “Only until the Fealty Ceremony,” Evan said. “It’s a brilliant plan, really. Even my mother agreed.”
Bethany blushed. “It is pretty clever. See, you’re like a carrier now. You have unicorn in your veins. So when the king drinks from you . . .”
Pearl felt her mouth drop open. “You know about the blood exchange?” The details of the Fealty Ceremony were a closely guarded vampire secret. No matter how hard Bethany studied, she couldn’t have learned about it in any library.
“We know a lot,” Evan said. “We’ve been hunting your kind for centuries. But in all those centuries, we’ve never been able to touch royalty. They’re too well guarded.”
Bethany jumped in again. “But they’re the key, you see! In the Fealty Ceremonies, all the vampires share the king’s blood. If that blood is—”
“Tainted,” Pearl interrupted. It was a rather brilliant plan. “You planned to use me to infect all the vampires at the ceremony. Out of curiosity, at what point did you intend to tell me all of this?”
Bethany and Evan looked at each other.
“Nice,” Pearl said. “So your plan was to let everything proceed. I go to the ceremony. King drinks my blood. Everyone drinks the king’s blood. Everyone becomes nice, shiny, happy friends.” She shook her head. “You realize your plan has an enormous gaping hole? Prom.”
“That is a complication,” Bethany agreed.
&
nbsp; “Serious complication,” Pearl said. “Even after they’re ‘tainted,’ the vampires will still want their feast. They won’t change instantly. I didn’t. In fact, I’m not convinced I shouldn’t tear both your throats out right now.”
Bethany skipped backward a few steps, but Evan merely smiled.
Pearl glared at him. “What?”
“I like how direct you are,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s different from my family.”
“I mean it,” she said.
“I know.”
His smile was highly disconcerting. “You’re an idiot,” she told him. “We have to cancel the prom. Your ‘brilliant’ plan isn’t worth—”
Bethany interrupted. “If we cancel prom, how will the vampires react?”
Pearl hesitated, remembering what Daddy had once said. “The king would most likely cancel the ceremony. And the Family would most definitely kill me.” Uncle Stefan would be thrilled to do the honors.
“If we could cancel the prom and still ensure that you participated in the ceremony, we’d do it in a second,” Bethany said. “But if there’s no prom and no ceremony and you’re killed . . .”
“If we lose you, we lose the best chance in centuries to prove that it’s possible to change the power dynamic between humans and vampires,” Evan said.
Bethany was nearly hopping up and down. “It could lead to the end of hunting! It could show the way to peace! We’ve never had an opportunity like this before!”
“It’s worth the risk,” Evan said.
Both of them looked so ridiculously innocent and excited. It would have been sweet if it weren’t so idiotic.
“We’ll find a way to ensure the students’ safety,” Bethany promised. “Evan, think your family would be willing to chaperone?”
Pearl wanted to shake both of them. “Have you ever seen a horde of bloodthirsty vampires? You’d better have one very extended family.”
“We can do it,” Evan said. “Really, how many vampires are we talking about? A dozen or so young vampires, your family, and the royal retinue, right?”
Pearl wanted to smack him again. “No. It’s me, my Family, the royal retinue, and every last vamp in the grand ol’ state of Connecticut. At the last RSVP count, we were up to one hundred five.”
Both Bethany and Evan were silent.
“We may need to amend the plan a bit,” Bethany squeaked.
Chapter
TWENTY-SIX
The funny thing was that even despite the dire seriousness of the situation, Pearl could tell it bothered Bethany to cut class. She’d insisted that she had to participate in the emergency meeting with Evan’s family, and she’d offered to drive, but every few minutes Bethany glanced in the rearview mirror as if she expected the principal to charge up the street behind them, brandishing a pitchfork and a detention slip.
Pearl rolled her eyes. “The teachers are not the big bad scary monsters. Take it from me, one of the big bad scary monsters.”
At a red light, Bethany looked at Pearl with ridiculously wide, innocent eyes. “You aren’t a monster. Not anymore. I’m not scared of you.”
“You should be,” Pearl said. “This isn’t natural. What I feel . . . what I think . . . your pet horsey put this all inside of me. I’m your Frankenstein’s monster.”
Behind her in the backseat, Evan said, “Your thoughts are your own. All I did was . . . heal the broken parts inside you. I woke up your soul, that’s all.”
Pearl turned her head away from both of them. She looked at her reflection in the window, as if it could show her her soul. Rain continued to fall, tracing jagged lines down her reflection as if she were covered in tears.
“Also, I’m not a ‘pet horsey,’” Evan said.
A few minutes later they reached Evan’s house. They spilled out of the minivan and into the house. Evan’s parents plus three of his siblings were already in the kitchen.
Without any preamble, Evan said, “We discovered when and where the Connecticut Fealty Ceremony will be.” He gestured to Pearl. “Go on, you can tell them.”
The words stuck in her throat. She looked at these faces—vampire hunter faces—and she couldn’t speak. Sandy, Evan’s mother, smiled at her encouragingly, as if she were a sitcom mom urging her wayward daughter to tell the truth about a bad report card. Evan’s father, Donald, kept his face neutral, an expression Pearl was sure he’d had to practice. Like Sandy’s, his face was lined with smile marks, and his pink nose marked him as someone who blushed easily. At the table Evan’s siblings were not so calm. Lizzie folded her hands on the table in front of her. Her knuckles were as white as pearls. One brother, Marcus, fidgeted in his chair, rocking back and forth so that the chair legs squeaked on the linoleum. A second brother, Allen or Alex or another A name, looked tense enough to leap up like a cat if Pearl so much as twitched.
“I can’t,” Pearl said to Evan. She bolted outside into the rain.
“Stay. Explain,” Evan ordered Bethany. Pearl heard his footsteps behind her. But she had a head start. She threw the door open. Twisting around, she grabbed the porch gutter. She propelled herself up onto the roof, and she scrambled up to the peak. The roof tiles were slick, and she slipped twice before she stood at the top.
A few seconds later Evan launched himself onto the roof. “You like roofs,” he grunted as he scrambled up the wet slope.
“Roofs are dramatic,” she said. “Vampires have a fine sense of drama.”
He stood next to her, balancing with bent knees. Rain spattered him as if the clouds were spitting. “So . . .” He let the word dangle, as if this were a casual conversation.
“So,” she said.
“You okay?” he asked.
She considered it. “No, really not okay. You know, this conscience thing is a bitch. I don’t want the humans to die.” Blinking away raindrops, she looked at him. “Yes, I can admit that.”
He half smiled. “Happy to hear it.”
“But I’d rather not aid in the slaughter of my Family, either,” she said.
“The goal is to change them, not kill them.”
“Your family . . . they’re vampire hunters. It’s what they do, what they’re designed to do,” Pearl said. “You said so yourself.”
He nodded. “Then help us find a way to do this with the least number of casualties.”
“That’s a ridiculously unvampiric goal,” Pearl said.
“For this to work, we need you,” Evan said. “Otherwise . . .”
Pearl waved her hand. “Bloodbath. Vampires and humans die. You sure know how to sweet-talk a girl, don’t you?” She started down the roof, deliberately skidding down the slick shingles.
Evan didn’t move. “Pearl.”
At the lip of the roof, she looked back up at him. His shirt, wet from the rain, stuck to his chest and arms. Drops of water clung to his hair.
“I meant what I said. Your thoughts are your own. Your choices . . . your own. And you . . .” He looked down at the roof tiles as if embarrassed to meet her eyes. “You impress me.”
She almost smiled. “Getting better at the sweet talk.” She turned and leaped off the roof. As she landed, she called up, “A bit more practice, and you’ll find me in your bed again.”
She heard him slip and then slide his way to the edge of the roof with a loud “Oof!” She laughed. He jumped down next to her, landing with a splash in a puddle. They went inside together.
Pearl didn’t offer an explanation or an apology. She didn’t owe them either, as far as she was concerned. She was doing this for Bethany, Evan, Sana, Tara, Matt, and Zeke—and, she hoped, for her Family too, though she doubted they’d see it that way. Marching into the kitchen, she said, “Paper?” Evan fetched her a pad of paper covered in smiley faces. She scowled at it. “Pen?” He handed her a pen, and she began to draw a blueprint of the mansion, as well as the tunnel system that led into the cellar. “At sundown the ceremony guests will enter the mansion’s cellar via an underground tunnel. Meanwhile, upstairs, t
he prom-goers will arrive through the main entrance to the mansion.” She dripped on the paper, blurring the ink.
“And you?” Evan’s brother Marcus asked. “Are you with the vampires or the humans?” He fingered his wrist, and Pearl thought of Evan’s swordlike horn. She tensed, calculating the distance to the exit.
Evan glared at him. “She’s helping us.”
Marcus spread his hands to show innocence. “Just working through the logistics.”
Evan’s father, Donald, spoke, his voice gentle, as if Pearl were a deer he didn’t want to startle. His mannerisms reminded her of Evan. “Can you walk us through the ceremony timeline?”
“First, the king and his retinue will make their grand entrance,” Pearl said. “All of the young vampires will be introduced, and the king will drink from each of us. Then the king will share his blood with the full assembly.”
Evan’s brother Allen swallowed hard, as if attempting not to gag.
Sandy jotted a few notes. “How much time will there be between the ritual drinking of blood and the feast?” She was all business, and Pearl suddenly could imagine her as a woman who could go toe-to-toe with Daddy.
“An hour,” Pearl said. “There’s a lot of waltzing.”
“And where will your attack begin?” Marcus asked.
Evan bristled at the word “your,” but it didn’t faze Pearl. He wasn’t wrong. She had set all this in motion. Pearl said, “There are two sets of stairs from the cellar into the mansion. One of them leads directly into the ballroom—it’s here, obscured by a tapestry. And the other is down this hall near the restrooms.” She pointed at her drawing. “My Family has blocked access to the bulk of the mansion so that once the front door is closed, the feast can’t flee.”
Sandy tapped the map. “Marcus, after Pearl goes downstairs, you and Melinda will barricade the cellar door in the hall. Evan and Lizzie, after Pearl completes her mission and rejoins us, you will barricade the cellar door in the ballroom. Allen, you’ll patrol the grounds with William. Brooke and Louis will assist Donald and me with the evacuation.”
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