I was simply going to die.
The car ride went as quickly as the walk to the car did. Me in the back, Lucas driving up front.
I guess Ivy felt no need to be there. Lucas would do it quickly.
Well, as quick as dying in the sunlight could be.
Raven had done it. I could too.
Finally, we pulled up, and Lucas didn’t have to force me out of the car. I just got out.
I wasn’t going to make this any more difficult than it needed to be.
It’s funny. When I became a vampire and realized I was going to live forever, death became something that was no longer a concern to me. And I realized that in that moment, instead of feeling free, I had felt uneasy, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself then. Or ever.
I had escaped, in a way, just as every immortal did, but here I was, about to leave the Earth.
And I felt uneasy.
And maybe that’s the thing.
Being alive is hard.
Whether you’re vampire or human.
I climbed the ladder first, Lucas behind me, as the first pink and orange rays of light hung over the horizon.
I remembered how much I loved sunrises.
I jumped down onto the hard concrete floor and wondered why exactly I was doing this.
I might be able to overpower Lucas. At least enough to postpone the process. Maybe even to run away.
Maybe the others were right. Maybe I could run away. Move to another city, move on. But then I would always be running. And anyway, if I dug down deep, I knew this was what I should do. And then I got angry.
This was not where I was supposed to be. I was the rebalancer.
I was supposed to stop Ivy, rebalance the order, and go about my way. Not die in the process.
The Three had never told me anything about that.
I wondered then, the thing that had been on my mind but had never quite made it to the surface.
Who were The Three? What were they?
Were they vampire? Had they been vampire? They certainly weren’t human.
The image of the left-hand female entered my mind—the way she spoke to me on my level after leaving her throne, the way that she had entered my mind when I was healing in bed. And I felt...betrayed.
She had lied.
And here I was, bearing the brunt of that lie.
I never wanted this. I just wanted to live a normal life. A normal human life.
Lucas pushed me in the back, not hard, just enough to move me forward, and I checked once again. I went down into that place inside of me, the deepest place, where I could access The Three, maybe even access the order itself to confirm this was what I really should do.
If I was honest with myself, I knew I couldn’t resist whatever it told me.
With Lucas off to the side, unraveling rope in my periphery, I closed my eyes and went there. I knew I was in the right place.
I exhaled, knowing it was one of my last, and waited quietly.
“Are you going to struggle?” Lucas asked, pulling out more rope.
“No,” I said.
“Why?” he sneered at me. “You’re powerful. I’m the only one here. Why not take me on? Escape? Are you too weak?”
I suddenly doubted that he was the only one here, but that wasn’t the question he had asked me.
Was I too weak?
I wasn’t sure what to say. I had never felt weak before. Not even as a human, really. I was too young for that then. And certainly not as a vampire. And certainly not while hunting.
But did I feel weak knowing?
Ever since I had developed the gift, I had felt strangely powerless, though most other vampires would have considered me very powerful. It was a strange contradiction.
I had one of the rarest gifts known to immortals and a direct connection to The Three, and here I was in a warehouse about to get tied up and fried. It didn’t seem right.
I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t feel like answering Lucas.
He laughed and continued with the rope.
“How old are you?” I finally asked, my curiosity beating out my melancholy.
Lucas turned, surprised, and his purple eyes flashed at me, belying the light that still shone behind them.
I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. There was no need for us to have a conversation, but then he spoke.
“Thirty-one,” he said, and I knew he meant vampire years.
He looked about twenty-five so I put two and two together.
“Hmmmm,” was all I said at first. “Do you know how old I am?”
His eyes regarded me strangely. Part fear and part disgust.
“Three-hundred,” he answered, with a little waver to his voice.
“Three-hundred and fourteen,” I corrected and felt just a little better at besting him.
“Guess you never thought that would be all you got, huh?” he asked, and I pitied him.
“Who did you take?” I asked, feeling a boldness arising from my gut. “To make you this way. A pure immortal, right? Are they in that room?”
I pointed and he looked away.
“They’re all in that room,” he said, fingers fumbling with the rope.
“Did they know what you were doing? What you would become and where it would leave them? Or did you lie? Take what you wanted and produce an everlasting corpse?
“I can hear them, you know.” This was not entirely true, but it wasn’t entirely a lie either. “Their life force, trapped in their bodies. Flowing in endless circles.”
I thought of the scream I heard when I first walked in that room. I thought it had come from my own head, but now I realized I was hearing theirs.
“Have you ever been asleep?” I asked him, and now I felt a shakiness in his hands and voices in his head that spoke doubting words over his own thoughts, though he was still turned away from me, fumbling with more rope, always more rope.
“Probably not,” I answered myself, purposely not giving him time to answer. “It’s...interesting.”
Of course, I had never been asleep either, but then again, he was only a copycat and not a knower. And he was purposely keeping his distance from me.
“Imagine being able to think, to sense, to experience, but only from inside a shell. To be disembodied, but bound by one. That’s what being asleep is like.”
“Of course, for most of us there is a plan to wake up. But not for them.”
Lucas moved his neck around like was trying to give it a good stretch, but instead it gave the impression of a snake who had lain in the grass too long.
“Let me go in. Let me go in and speak to them. They have a long, cold journey ahead and I do represent The Three. Let me comfort them. Before I go.”
Lucas looked out the large windows at the ever deepening colors in the horizon and I knew he was estimating how much time there was before a golden sliver appeared on the edge.
“You’ve got three minutes,” he said, but it looked like his resolve was fading. His resolve to do what, I didn’t exactly know.
I walked over to the closed door where the bodies lay and didn’t know what I was doing. Only that I needed to go there.
I think I was finally getting used to the uncertainty of knowing, however odd that sounded, in the moments right before my death.
I mean, honestly, what did it matter now?
The knob on the door was hard and cold. I twisted and pushed at the same time until I could walk inside, the air fetid and chilly.
All nine. All in a row. For a moment, my imagination showed them breathing. Then I realized that couldn’t be.
They didn’t breathe. They didn’t move. They didn’t exist. But they did.
There was a girl, all the way on the end, late-teens looking, who I felt drawn to.
Stepping over the other bodies carefully, so as not to disturb them, I made my way over to the other side of the room. As I did, I wondered what it would be like for this to be my tomb.
In moments, I would only be ash,
scattered by the wind or a broom or whatever. It didn’t matter. I would return to the Earth. They never would.
But couldn’t they?
Why not? What did it matter keeping them here? They were gone. If not in body, then in consciousness, so what did it matter?
Kneeling down, I touched the girl I had come to see. Cold, hard. Still lovely looking. If she couldn’t live, she should die. Simple.
“Lucas?” I called out, and then watched as he appeared in my view in the doorway, still holding the rope. “Can we bring them out? To the sunlight? I want them to die with me in the sunlight. Release them. They don’t need to be here.”
“No,” he said and swung the rope around in his hands. “The sleeping are to stay in that room.”
“But why?” I asked. “They’re as good as dead. Why not just release them?”
“Orders,” he replied and walked out of view.
Ivy wanted to keep them for some reason.
I wished that I could get a message to Matt or to Kace or Lola and let them know that. It might be important. And if I couldn’t stop Ivy, maybe they could.
Something struck me in that moment as I kneeled by the cold, still girl. I wasn’t stopping Ivy. After I was gone, he would still be here. Still as perfectly immortal as ever.
Although I had found my desire, he would still live.
So how exactly had I rebalanced the order?
For all their power and knowledge, The Three had a lot to work on in the area of clarity.
Don’t think about it, was all I heard in my head as my mind spun this paradox around and around.
Don’t think about it.
I was going to get riddles right up until the end.
I stood up, and walked out, still as confused as ever, trying my best not to think about the problem at hand or my impending death. Only doing what felt right.
A great emptiness filled me as I stepped outside the room and into the main room of the warehouse. One golden thread could be seen above the horizon line outside the large windows.
Lucas stood in the middle of the floor with four thick ropes at his feet—one affixed to each corner of the large room.
I went to walk forward and then stopped as if an invisible hand had grabbed my shirt and yanked.
This was it.
This was my end.
4
The rope was rough against my wrist and ankles as it pulled my body taut in the middle of the floor.
I was gonna feel this. Already the sun was a little crescent over the horizon.
Lucas sat in a wooden chair, arms crossed and legs propped out in front of him, his ankles crossed as well.
He looked bored and I wondered how many times he had done this already.
“Repetitive work, huh?” I asked, letting my body relax completely against the ropes, which held me up anyway.
“You could say that,” Lucas said, and he seemed sad in a way that I couldn’t place.
“I know you’re Kace’s creator,” I said, from what felt like nowhere, and Lucas suddenly came to attention, his body and face taut.
“He told you that?” he said but didn’t look surprised.
“Of course he told me that,” I said. “Pretty important piece of information.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows and shrugged, keeping his arms and ankles crossed.
“Did you try to put him to sleep?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
The sky outside was now light blue all over, the black of the night having disappeared, and the orb of the sun was almost entirely above the horizon.
His purple eyes shined with the great brilliance of malice as he took in my captive form.
“Do you know you’re about to die?” he asked, irritation spiking his voice. “Why do you keep talking?”
I laughed out loud.
“Why not?” I asked. “What does it matter now? Why wouldn’t I talk? Ironically, I was never much of a talker in my life, but we’re the only ones here right now and I feel like talking. So why not?”
Birds chirped outside, flitting from the broken fence to pieces of garbage on the ground, taking flight again. I felt almost as free as they did.
I was feeling warm, like I had too many clothes on for the weather. My heartbeat was faster.
“You know it’s very odd—vampires killing vampires. It’s very rare, in fact.”
Lucas didn’t say a word, didn’t show me his purple eyes or move a muscle.
“Usually, there’s just no reason to,” I said, and for some reason that sentence seemed to ring out louder and longer in the open space.
Despite himself, I thought, Lucas glanced at me when I said that, making direct eye contact for a fraction of a second. Maybe it had caught him off guard.
When we all watch the movies and hear the stories, vampires are monsters who attack. They’re a threat to human life (obviously) and they’re also a threat to each other.
It takes you a little while to realize that, in fact, neither is true.
For all the bodies I had racked up over the years, I didn’t consider myself a threat to human life. I was just eating.
I waited.
For a response, for the first stinging sensation as the rays of the sun hit my body, for something. But still I waited.
I heard the scrape of Lucas’s wooden chair on the concrete floor and when I looked up, I saw that he was moving it off to one side. To the shade. And, of course, I realized why no other one of Ivy’s people was here.
Although I still felt like someone was keeping an eye on us. Maybe the perimeter was guarded. In fact, it must be guarded. Lola or Kace could show up at any time. Or even Matt.
Who was now fully capable of withstanding direct sunlight.
Of course, they’d know in an instant he was no longer vampire.
I wonder what they would think had happened?
Then it struck me.
Matt needed to show up here. And knowing that it was a dumb thing to do, he probably would.
He risked death, which he had already cheated once before, and I guessed the bigger risk was being used to fuel someone’s pure immortality, and he’d end up in that room.
Yeah, it was totally dumb to show up here.
Which is exactly why I knew he would do it.
At least he would be prepared, having been immortal himself for a short time.
He wouldn’t bring any stakes to stab through anyone’s heart, no garlic, no crosses. He knew better than that. He knew only one thing killed a vampire, so he wouldn’t even try the rest.
Matt was my savior, I thought, and I laughed out loud without meaning to, making Lucas eye me even more carefully.
I laughed longer when I thought about the night when I had first met him. The way I didn’t want him around and kept trying to get rid of him.
And then I thought about when I had saved him. I really had thought I was going to kill him. I hated him, in a way, and I wanted him gone. But I had saved him.
And cursed him.
And now his curse was over, and he was going to save me.
5
My skin stung.
Like I had the beginnings of a sunburn. One that would be bad.
I alternately pulled my muscles tight against the ropes and then let them completely go, feeling how I was still pulled upward. I couldn’t drop to the floor. Maybe that was the point.
The windows had become weapons of mass destruction, though it was only me they would destroy.
I had the thought that you really could plan a mass death in this room, though. If you rounded up enough vampires. You could get rid of a few hundred at once.
That would be a lot of rope.
My eyes were dry and I tried to blink them back for comfort to no avail. I was thirsty too.
For water, not blood.
I had about fifteen minutes before I was gone, and I noticed my thoughts were dropping off. Like I didn’t have enough energy to form them. Speaking took a lot of effort too.
Lucas was probably happy about that.
He sat in his chair in the shade and examined his fingernails, looking up only every once in a while.
I wondered if he would watch me burn.
At the thought, I let my muscles go loose again and fell forward just an inch or two before the ropes caught me.
Who would Lola go hunting with now?
The thought struck me and made me really sad, but I quickly realized she had Kace. The two of them got along so well that it made me feel a little better. But, damn, we had been a potent team.
I suddenly felt a sharp sting on my right arm and when I looked down, there was a little black hole, like I had been burned with a cigarette or something. It hurt.
I had the thought that I might just pass out soon and leave this world unconscious. I wasn’t really sure. The records just didn’t have that much information about dying in the sun.
It had happened so few times.
Another one broke out on my left arm, and soon I felt pops and burns coming all over my exposed skin.
I probably looked a mess.
I hung my head, not out of despair, but in exhaustion, and I decided right then and there to let the sun take me.
I wouldn’t fight it, not anymore.
The burns hurt, but not like when I was crushed. That hurt more. So that was good.
I couldn’t activate my muscles anymore, so the ropes were holding me entirely, and I wasn’t seeing correctly either.
There was a knock on what sounded like glass and the scraping of a wooden chair against the floor. Maybe I would have an audience for my demise.
But I’d never know because I was losing consciousness.
The burning was all over now, which I only felt in the most distant of ways as if I was already leaving my body and only my mind knew that it should hurt. And so it did.
I wouldn’t be conscious when my body finally was ashes. I would exit before then.
The order had mercy.
There were more noises but I couldn’t place them. They were loud, I think. Or maybe they sounded loud in my mind as my consciousness slipped away.
I wasn’t going to make it, but I hoped that something I had done had made a difference.
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