“It doesn’t,” Thorpe said. “Not unless you shoot her with one of those darts, apparently.” He shook his head. “Vance was always talking about making improvements, learning new things. I guess it finally paid off.”
He looked resigned, like he’d always known it was only a matter of time before Vance gained the power to control him. Then again, Thorpe had spent decades living at the edge of nowhere, when he used to run the intermountain territory.
Maybe Vance had won that battle years ago.
“Why can you tell where they are?” I asked, “and I can’t?”
Thorpe raised an eyebrow. “I imagine I know a lot of things you don’t.”
“Care to shed some light?” I asked.
Thorpe was quiet for a moment. “Girl,” he said. “Learn to see things that aren’t there.”
Yes. Very helpful. Thank you, Thorpe. I sighed. There was one more thing I needed to do. “I need to talk to her,” I said.
“That’s a foolish idea.”
“I don’t care,” I said. I couldn’t explain to Thorpe how she was the only one who really knew what I’d been through. Everyone told me I was like Vance, but the truth was, I was like her, and she was like me.
I couldn’t leave her locked up like this. Not without trying to help her.
Thorpe shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he said.
“Probably,” I said. “But it shouldn’t be that dangerous. You can leave, if you want.”
“If you think I’m leaving you alone with her, you’re out of your mind.”
“I know you’re not afraid for my safety.”
“No,” Thorpe said. “I’m afraid for mine. You let her go and we’re all in trouble.”
I looked up at him. “You worry a lot for a man who’s resigned to his own death.”
Thorpe shook his head, pulling his pistol from his pocket. Now that I thought about it, I was surprised he hadn’t brought in his shotgun. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.
Thorpe pulled open the locker drawer. Delia lay still on the metal tray, like she was dead. She stared straight up at the ceiling. Thorpe riffled around in a drawer and came up with a roll of duct tape, which he used to bind her hands and then wrap tight around her, binding her to the tray.
“Is that necessary?” I asked. “Can’t you just let go of part of her?”
“I’m not going to chance it,” he said. “Would have done this anyway. No way of knowing how long that drug of hers will last.”
“Why didn’t she take control of Alicia and Drew?” I asked.
“I keep my mind on them,” Thorpe said. “She can fight me for control, but I’m stronger.”
“Let go of her,” I said.
“Fine,” Thorpe said, and all at once, the solid outline of her body shrunk back into dots.
“Bitch,” Delia said. She tried to spit at me, but her mouth was dry.
“You’re safe here,” I said.
“You think you’re so smart,” she said. “You think you have it all under control. Vance will come for me. He’ll show you.”
“You’re probably right,” I said.
She glared at me, then, but shut her mouth. I wondered if she’d expected me to argue with her.
I should have called Jack in for this. He had all that counseling experience. Maybe he’d know what to say. But for now, I was all she had.
“Who were you,” I asked, “before he turned you?”
“Nobody,” she said.
“No, you were somebody. Who?”
She stared sullenly the ceiling.
“I lived in Salt Lake with my parents,” I said. The memories felt like echoes of a past life. “My dad was an English professor, and my mom worked at a preschool. I was just finishing the ninth grade, and I had a heart attack, and went to the hospital. That’s how I met Vance.”
Delia kept her eyes on the ceiling.
“Who were you?” I asked.
For a long moment, she didn’t respond. But I waited.
“I had AIDS,” she said finally.
“And you met Vance at the hospital.”
“I was going to die.”
“Some people live a long time with HIV.”
“Not me,” she said. “I was already too sick. I was going to die.”
“And he saved you,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But to save you, he sucked you into hell.”
“No,” Delia said. “He made me powerful.”
I shook my head. “But not as powerful as him.”
“He’s a god,” Delia said, “and he made me one, too.”
Vance a god? He was a monster from whom there was no escape. I guessed that made him godlike, in his way.
“Who were you before the disease?” I asked. “Who were your parents?”
“What do you care?” Delia asked. She said it sarcastically, but she was actively engaging with me now, so I took that as a victory.
“I care because I think your life before matters. Vance wants to erase who we were before. That’s why he killed my parents. So he could own me himself.”
“I wish he’d killed mine,” Delia said.
“Who were they?”
For the first time, Delia looked me straight in the eye. “My mother was a whore. She sold me to her pimp when I was nine.”
She watched me, as if waiting for me to flinch. I didn’t.
“And you were living with them when you got sick?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I was living with a foster family.”
“And did they treat you well?”
“I was going to run. But then I met Vance. And he told me I didn’t have to. He took care of everything.”
So Vance had enough power to buy off the foster system, too. He was combing the city for girls no one would miss. That didn’t surprise me. I wondered what would, anymore. But Delia didn’t seem to see it that way. All she saw in Vance was her savior.
He’d done his part to convince me of that, as well.
“Did he ask your permission before he turned you?” I asked.
Delia jerked back in anger, and her body froze as Thorpe tightened his grip on her.
“It was for my own good,” she said. “I wouldn’t have believed he could help me. He had to do it.”
I remembered what Jack said in the car, the power he wielded when he called Vance’s actions by name. Could I say it? Could I do that for Delia now?
“He didn’t have to rape you,” I said. The words felt ugly, but I managed to utter them.
Delia gritted her teeth. “It was for my own good.”
“Vance doesn’t care about you,” I said. “He only cares about having power over you. But that’s not your fault.”
And it wasn’t my fault, either. That was the only difference between me and Delia. Vance had never been able to completely convince me to blame myself.
Delia narrowed her eyes at me. “You will see how powerful he made me. No one can hurt me. Not you. Not your friends. No one.”
“No one,” I repeated. “Except Vance.”
“No one,” Delia said again. “But no one.”
I wasn’t going to convince her today. It would take more than one conversation to help her see the truth.
But if I could protect her from Vance, we’d have all the time it took.
“Vance can’t hurt you anymore,” I said. “I won’t let him.”
Her face contorted. “Who do you think you are?” Delia asked.
“I’m a girl like you,” I said.
“You are nothing!” she snapped. “Nothing!”
By that point, I was pretty sure she’d stopped talking to me, and started talking to some image of herself.
“We need to keep her safe,” I said, looking over at Thorpe.
“Go ahead and kill me,” Delia shouted. “It won’t change what you are.”
“First you say you’re invincible,” I said, “then you say kill me. Which is it?”
Delia spat in my direction again,
but still nothing came out.
“I don’t care what you do with her,” Thorpe said, “as long as you don’t let her go.”
“Put her back, then,” I said. “For now.”
Thorpe pulled off a short piece of tape and plastered it over Delia’s mouth, then shut the drawer. He shook his head at me. “You’re a strange girl.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I am what I am.”
Thorpe nodded, and I thought in his eyes I saw the first hint of respect.
One thing was certain. Vance wasn’t going to stop. He’d continue picking girls in the hospital. Grooming them. Turning them, manipulating them into loyalty, then taking advantage of them.
“We need help,” I said. “Vance can’t be allowed to continue to do this to people.”
“If you think you can do anything about it,” Thorpe said, “you need a different kind of help entirely.”
Seventeen
I followed Thorpe up the stairs and into the main hall of the mortuary, where we found Alicia, Drew, and Jack taking stock of weapons.
“We’ve got twelve new handguns,” Drew said. “No telling what they’ve been used for before.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Thorpe said. “As long as all we use them for is dusting corpses.”
Jack walked up and put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “For the moment.”
He pulled me into a hug, and I didn’t want to pull away.
But I did.
“What do we do now?” I asked the others. Thorpe opened his mouth and I shot him a look. “Besides sit here and wait to die.”
Thorpe shut his mouth again, and Alicia gave him a smug look. Then she turned to me. “As much as I hate to say it,” she said, “I don’t know what we can do. Vance has more resources than we do. More corpses, better vehicles, better technology—”
“That’s true,” I said. “So we need help.”
“Ha,” Thorpe said. But he didn’t call me an idiot, so I took that as an improvement.
“What about the Old Ones?” I asked Alicia. “Could they help?”
“You don’t want to talk to them,” Thorpe said. “They make me look compassionate.”
“No one makes you look compassionate,” Alicia said. “But no. I don’t think they’ll help.”
I looked down at the row of weapons on the floor. I knew how this level played out. We might be able to hole up, take on wave after wave of Vance’s corpses. But eventually, the boss would come himself.
No one could hold out forever.
“I want to meet them,” I said.
Everyone was quiet.
“We just said they won’t help you,” Thorpe said.
“That seems to be a theme,” I said. “But I have to try.”
Alicia settled back into her seat.
“You said they sent you here?” I said. “Can you get me in to see them?”
“Probably,” Alicia said. “But they aren’t the kind of people you ask for favors.”
“We’re in their territory now,” I said. “Why would they let Vance hurt us, if they protect you?”
“They don’t protect us, exactly,” Alicia said. “They protect their own power. So if you go to them, they might decide that it’s in their interest to help you, or they might decide that your presence is a threat and kill you on the spot.”
I rubbed my forehead. Maybe Thorpe was right. If all corpse leaders would kill you as soon as listen to you, maybe it was just our nature to rule as tyrants. Maybe we all deserved beheading.
But I didn’t want to rule anything. I just wanted to be free of Vance—to know he would never come after me again. And Jack wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, even now that he was a corpse. There had been a lot of terrible human kings in history, but that didn’t mean that all human rulers had to be despots.
There had to be another way. And right now, the only way I could think of to protect both of us from Vance was to find more allies. We were going to need a lot more than Thorpe’s guns when Vance came after me again.
“I still want to do it,” I said.
“I’ll drive you,” Drew said, and Alicia shot him a death look.
Drew held up his hands. “She’s right. What else are we going to do? I prefer the Old Ones to Vance, even if it’s not by much.”
Jack stood close to me. “I’m game,” he said. And while that shouldn’t have comforted me—he knew even less about this situation than I did—I was still glad to have him on my side.
“The sun hasn’t been down for long,” I said. “Can we make it tonight?”
“My hearse is destroyed,” Thorpe said.
Drew shrugged. “But we have plenty of cars. And theirs are sun proof.”
He studied the guns, picked out a pistol, and motioned for me to follow him toward the back door.
Alicia came with us, even though she clearly still didn’t approve. Thorpe, on the other hand, did not.
“Someone has to stay and watch the mortuary,” Alicia said.
Drew shook his head. “Someone’s afraid that the Old Ones will think he’s making trouble.”
“Better that he stay behind, then,” I said. “I’m not looking to make things harder for him.”
“More that we have,” Jack added.
“Yes,” I said. “That.”
Drew opened one of the cars—a long sedan with tinted windows all the way around. I wondered if Vance had some kind of special licensing to keep himself from getting pulled over. He almost certainly had tracking in the cars, which meant he’d know exactly where we were.
But if he couldn’t follow us much past the edge of his territory, we’d be safer there than we would here.
“How long is the drive?” I asked.
Drew put a cooler in the trunk and climbed in, and Alicia took the front seat, leaving Jack and me with the back. “Two hours, without traffic. And we should be well past the evening traffic by the time we get to the city.”
That was good. Even if the Old Ones rebuffed us, we should be able to get back to the mortuary before dawn.
We pulled out onto the road. “So these Old Ones,” I said. “What should I know about not pissing them off?”
Alicia sighed. “Don’t threaten the status quo. They keep the west coast region under control—they prevent stupid stiffs from turning every actor in Hollywood, for example. Take down anyone who might expose us to the public. Instrumental things like that. If they think you’re going to disturb the peace, then you’re in trouble.”
“I’m not disturbing the peace,” I said.
Jack went back to over-extending his knuckles. “Vance is evil, but does he keep the peace?”
“From their perspective he does,” Alicia said. She looked over her shoulder at me.
“But Vance entering their territory to get to me would be a disturbance, wouldn’t it?”
“It might,” Alicia said. “But if they kill you, he doesn’t have to.”
Jack put his hand on my arm, and I found myself leaning into him in the back seat, letting him drape his arm around me. His scent still clung to his clothes, and I found myself wishing I still had mine, stupid as that was.
Maybe, after all these months, I was still in mourning for myself.
We rolled into Los Angeles two and a half hours after we left Baker. The lights of the city didn’t rise out of the horizon the way Vegas had—instead the collection grew gradually, with the buildings getting taller and closer and brighter as we went. Where the strip felt like a fake street front, Los Angeles grew organically into a bright, flashy, creeping leviathan.
On the street, I saw a man in a suit with dark, gelled hair, and my whole body quivered.
“Does it ever go away?” I asked Drew.
“What?”
“Waiting for him to find you?”
Drew sighed. “No,” he said. “At least, it hasn’t for me.”
Jack squeezed my wrist, and Alicia leaned her head back, listening.
�
�Even with Thorpe to protect you, you’re still waiting,” I said.
“It’s not like it’s on my mind every second. But there are moments, like when you first showed up at the house, when I wonder: is this going to be the thing that brings Vance down on us?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never meant to put anyone in danger. It just seems to happen, wherever I go.”
“That’s life on the run from Vance,” Drew said. “It’s better than nothing.”
I looked over at Jack, and couldn’t help but wonder if I could fairly say that was true.
Alicia directed Drew through the downtown traffic. The city lights glowed through the windshield, twinkling like little stars. I wondered how such old corpses came to live in a city known for its sunshine. It didn’t matter, though. Daylight was daylight. The overcast sun would burn just as surely as the direct one. Slower, perhaps, but not enough to make day travel possible without sunsuits.
We finally pulled up in front of a gym, and Alicia pointed toward the parking garage.
“Here we are,” Alicia said.
“The Old Ones live in a gym?” I asked.
“Beneath it. They’ve owned the place for decades.”
“Awesome,” Jack said.
I wasn’t sure about that. I supposed a gym wasn’t any stranger than a hospital, though I hoped that these corpse lords weren’t living off their members, the way Vance did off his patients.
Alicia led Jack and me out of the parking garage and up the stairs to the front entryway. The floors shone like a basketball court. We pushed open the glass doors in front of the reception desk, soaking in the overpowering smell of sweat and bodies. The effect was something like opening the oven on Thanksgiving, just as a thirty-pound turkey roasts to perfection, while giblet gravy simmers on the stove above. My salivary glands tingled, even if they didn’t actually produce spit.
“How can they live under this?” I muttered.
“They’re well fed,” Alicia said.
Alicia walked up to the reception desk, where a girl in a sports bra smiled at her. Behind her was a poster advertising a monthly blood drive.
That answered my question about what the Old Ones ate.
Alicia flashed a membership pass. “They’re using two of my guest passes,” she said, handing over two tickets. The girl looked us over. “You’ll tell them the rules?”
Long Dark Night Page 16
