“Why?” I challenged the Chick.
“Because the lady said so,” Sparky answered for her.
“I want to go too.” A hand went to my hip as I said it, and I heard Chaz take a breath as if he recognized the danger sign.
“No. There, that was easy. Marcy,” Sparky said, like maybe his summons carried more weight than the Chick’s.
Marcy took a step forward, still with the death grip on my arm, which pulled me out of line. I gave her hand a squeeze, then gently pried her nails from my flesh.
“Nothing’s going to happen. Promise,” I told her.
“Pinky swear?” she whispered back.
“Absolutely.”
Chickzilla rolled her eyes skyward. “Lord, pinky swear? Where are we, grade school?”
I turned on her. “Speaking of which, the ’80s called. They want their clothing back.” Her outfit today was a baby blue unitard with a silver sheen. She looked like she belonged in some ancient video where the men wore more makeup than the women.
She actually grinned. “Nice face. Get it out of a Crackerjack box?”
“All right,” Sparky snarled. “We’re on a time table, so if you two are done with your hissy fit … ”
The Chick glared at him and started across the room to grab Marcy, since she wasn’t moving quickly enough on her own. They marched her out into the hall, the door swinging shut behind them.
No way in hell was I letting anyone I cared about end up like Rick. I had a sudden really deep suspicion about where they were taking Marcy and why, and I had a feeling she wouldn’t be coming back. I was going to get my boots on and then I was going to kick some ass.
I looked around my cot. “Who the hell has my boots?” I asked, glaring straight at Tina. “If none of you have the cojones to follow them, surrender my spikes and get out of my way.”
The boots flew across the room to land at my feet—hurled by, of all people, Chaz, who must have swiped them for Tina, because the alternative, some kind of fetish, was just too freaky to think about.
“Hair spray,” I added.
“Gina, now isn’t the time—” Tina started, and I growled.
No one else even asked. A can of superhold flew out of nowhere and I caught it one-handed. Pretty cool. I tucked it into my waistband like a pistol. Not quite pepper spray, but it would do.
“Now, where’s that trap door?” I was already cursing myself for not paying better attention.
Cassandra, the cheerleader, blew out a breath so strong it lifted her blond hair right off her face. “I’ll show you.” She glared around the room. “Any of you say a word, you’re dead meat. Get me?”
A few people nodded, but mostly no one moved at all.
“This way,” she continued.
I followed her to the very area where all the beds were stacked. She turned again to the room at large. “A little help here?”
This much they could do. The room unfroze; kids came to unstack their beds, move them away until the space was cleared. It was a good job. If I didn’t know there was a door, I’d never have seen it. For the first time, I wondered if Melli had had it installed or if it had started as some old bomb shelter or something—not that Ohio was, like, a hotbed of strategic targets.
“Anyone know the code?” I asked.
“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” ROTC-guy, Trevor, asked, stepping forward. “It’s a little complicated; it takes two.” He looked at Cassandra, who blushed.
I felt distinctly like a third wheel.
“But I don’t know it,” she admitted.
Looking into her eyes, he took her hand and then played a beat on her palm with his other hand. “It’s like dum de-adda, dum de-adda, dum de-adda, dum de-adda.”
“‘Chopsticks’?” I asked incredulously, but also quietly, because I didn’t want to be a buzzkill when they were helping me out. His part would then have to be “Heart and Soul,” the first thing any kid learned to play on the piano … even me, though the piano teacher my parents foisted on me and I mutually agreed to part ways before someone got hurt.
Cassandra nodded to Trevor that she had it, and they squatted next to the slab to play their duet. The trap door recessed into the floor and slid back.
I sat down on the edge of the opening to slide my boots on, because if I were jumping into the unknown I didn’t want it to squish between my toes. Something in the toe of one boot went crinkle-crunch. It beat ooze or squish, but not when my brain suggested bugs, or their carcasses, that could have taken up residence while I was away. I tried to tell myself it was just someone’s Corbin Bleu picture or something, and that time was awastin’. I knew Marcy was getting farther and farther away—and that was enough of a motivation to make me jump down into that hole.
Because if I was right, Marcy was Melli’s “payment” to creepy psychic guy.
He seemed like the type who enjoyed playing with his food, which should at least give me some time. I only hoped Marcy could stick it out, and that I’d come up with some kind of plan between here and there—once I figured out where “there” was.
“Wish me luck,” I said to Cassandra and Trevor.
I was surprised to hear more than two voices come back to me. It made my heart swell as I pushed off from the edge and landed hard below.
“You know, there’s a ladder,” Trevor called down … too late.
“Yeah, thanks,” I answered wryly.
I straightened up, trusting the super vamp healing to take care of the pain in my knee.
“Got a flashlight?” I asked. But nobody did, and I was on my own in the near-total dark. Once that trap door closed above me, it would be like a solar eclipse. Good thing I’d never been scared of the dark, just the creatures that skittered around in it.
I tried to focus on a plan and not thoughts of mice or cockroaches or millipedes. Definitely not millipedes. All those legs … I shuddered.
Several steps into the tunnel, something brushed my shoulder and I yipped before realizing it was just a string dangling from a light fixture in the ceiling. I pulled, and above me the trap door started to close. They’d waited until I had light. If I passed by a Starbucks on my way back from rescuing Marcy, the lattes were on me.
Meanwhile, I blinked against the sudden light. I was in a bunker-type area, all industrial shelves stocked with enough stuff to weather an apocalypse—if I was still baseline human, that is. I wondered how well blood would keep and whether Melli planned to stock her own donors if she was ever forced down here. But the tunnel continued on past this room, and I didn’t have time to explore. I jogged into the tunnel, hoping there was another light in it somewhere.
My knee wasn’t recovering as quickly as it should, and very nearly buckled a few strides in, which was freakish. But not as worrying as the wave of dizziness that followed. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t eaten in days—not since I’d first risen. People, I thought, could go three days without food. Was it better or worse for vamps?
Through sheer force of will I put on a burst of speed, running flat-out in spiky-heeled boots not meant for it, until I reached the end of the tunnel. I didn’t have anyone to help me with the musical code here, so I just had to hope that it was (a) the same at this end and (b) acceptable for me to do one part with each hand.
It took me a few tries, because the left hand kept wanting to do what the right hand was doing, but I finally got it and the door above slid open, showering me with a fine spray of dirt. I emerged in the woods, but a streetlight off to my right was like a beacon back to civilization. I ran toward it—and was startled to break into the school parking lot, near the gym and athletic fields. I was even more startled to see a car there waiting for me, and the door pop open at my approach.
And inside … Rick … looking halfway to dead, but still Rick. For the second time in an h
our my heart felt like someone had goosed it with, like, a thousand volts and it might as well just explode as restart.
Rick was alive. Sort of, anyway. I mean, he looked terrible: circles under the eyes, a grayish complexion, gaunt like he’d lost mass overnight, and just barely keeping himself upright by hanging onto the steering wheel of a cream-colored T-bird, a far cry from Bobby’s POS.
“Rick!” I said stupidly.
“Get in!” he answered.
I just stared. “But what … how?”
He rolled his eyes to the sky. “Didn’t you get the note?”
Note? Right, the crunchy thing in my boot, maybe. “Uh, no.”
“Whatever. Come on. Connor said to grab you.”
That, at least, made sense. Connor could have faked Rick’s death and set Rick up as his eyes on the outside. But how had he known I’d be here? Unless his note instructed me to do exactly what I was doing anyway, which had an eerie kind of inevitability to it, like the bottom falling out of the Beanie Baby market.
I shivered like someone had walked over my grave, but I got in the car. What else was I going to do? Someone had to save Marcy.
Rick peeled out before my door was even fully closed, which was when I realized I was taking for granted that we were thinking along the same lines.
“Off to save Marcy, right?” I asked.
“Who? Whatever. I’m just here to play chauffeur.”
I hoped the note in my boot was more enlightening. I reached down to unzip and Rick said, “Oh, by all means, make yourself comfortable.”
“You wish,” I sneered, shaking out the crumpled paper that had molded to my big toe. “This is all that’s coming off.”
“Pity.”
My nose kind of crinkled with ick as I unfolded the note.
Get to the high school. Someone will meet you there. You want to save your friend; I want to know about the prophecy. Come back with the information or not at all.
Short, sweet, and to the point … only without the sweet. It didn’t actually say that Rick would be the “someone” or that I should suddenly trust him as far as I could throw him, only that I would be provided with the means to find the psychic and grill him about the prophecy. Of course, I’d failed to mention to Connor that I more or less knew the prophecy already. And Connor had failed to care about Marcy, beyond using her rescue as incentive.
“Let me ask you, why does Connor need me to run his little errand?” I asked Rick, watching him closely. “Why doesn’t he make you do it?”
Rick shot me a venomous look. “You don’t know much, do you? From what I hear, the psychic doesn’t like my kind.”
“Male?”
“Breathing.”
“Oh.” I thought about that. Could be that if the psychic did like to play with his food, humans just weren’t sporting. Too quick to die.
Not a happy thought.
“You haven’t told me where we’re going,” I said finally.
“Don’t know exactly.” And yet he was twisting and turning down back roads like he had some clue, still draped over the steering wheel for support. “Connor said you’d know.”
“Oh yeah—?” Morsel, a voice whispered through my head; it felt like spiders on creepy, prickly little legs, like an invasion. Come, morsel. Come, pretty pretty pretty. Two for one. And all for me. What a treat.
“You do know you guys are being watched, right?”
–––
Rick continued, as if he hadn’t heard anything at all. No spiders were skittering through his head.
“Excuse me?” I managed to ask, distracted.
“Someone,” he said, like I was a dimwit. “Watching Melli’s place. Council, I figure. Might want to let Connor know.”
Here, morsel, the voice in my head continued to whisper, blowing tendrils of inky, multi-legged invasion through my brain.
My lips curled. “Ew, ew, ew!” Everything in me shrieked that we should turn and run, put the pedal to the metal. “We’re supposed to go toward that?”
“Toward what?”
“That,” I answered, wanting to beat at my own head to stop the psychic infestation, which was still skittering through my brain. The whispers seemed to slip into all the dark pathways, opening the Pandora’s box of fears I locked away.
“Turn,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Which way?”
Back, I wanted to tell him. “Left,” I said instead.
Rick took the next left, into an abandoned industrial site blocked off by an iron gate gone to rust. The headlights swept it, and with a “Holy crap” Rick stopped short. “This is as far as I go,” he said.
I was guessing the place had finally gotten to him as well. Maybe he was getting some hint of the whispers that were now so loud, so overlapping, they nearly drowned out the sound of his voice.
Against my will, my hand reached for the door handle and I stumbled onto the cracked drive before I could stop myself. Whatever this thing was, I couldn’t just shake it off like I had Connor’s little compulsion. It was more primal and powerful than that. Than me.
If I lived through this, Connor was dead meat. “You’ll wait!” I called back to Rick.
“For a while,” he agreed—sort of.
It was going to have to be enough, because my feet were already carrying me onward. I couldn’t help but wonder why Connor didn’t just grill the boogeyman himself if it was so important to him. Maybe he was afraid Melli would notice his absence, though I’d bet he just didn’t want to get within spitting distance of the psycho-psychic.
I discovered that if I fought the compulsion really hard, I could stop myself from skirting around that gate, from going farther up the walk toward the building that was a mere blocky shape in the distance … if I wanted to shake, sweat, and generally jitter like a junky. But I was a ma’am on a mission, and I would go on. The T-bird’s headlights illuminated my path to hell—which, contrary to popular belief, was completely unpaved.
Between lack of food and the free-for-all going on in my head, I was really shaky by the time I neared the building, which looked like it should probably be condemned. Come on, bit bit bit. Come, morsel. I’d never been so creeped out in all my life, not even when Larissa’d had that Halloween slumber party where we watched the Nightmare on Elm Street marathon and her boyfriend jumped out at us in a Freddy Krueger mask.
“Get the hell out of my head!” I screamed, mentally and physically. Maybe I had some vain hope that our psychic connection ran both ways and I could somehow make him recoil, but mostly I just couldn’t take it any more. I wanted to drown out the whispers, if only for a second.
Hysterical laughter filled my head. The mind of a teenaged girl is indeed a terrifying thing.
Steam didn’t actually come out of my ears, but it was a very near thing. I was eager now for the showdown, and the anticipation propelled me the last few feet toward the warped warehouse door. It stood ajar, like nothing within the building had anything to fear from without. Boarded-up windows gave no clue of what beckoned.
The knob I reached for had been painted in the same flaking black as the door itself. Even with the compulsion on me, it looked totally too grody to touch. I grasped at the bottom of my cami—the thing was destined for the incinerator at this point anyway—and used it to pull the door toward me. It groaned at the movement, paint flecking off the whole way.
Inside it was pitch dark, except for the light I was letting in from outside and a weird glow off to the right. My eyes adjusted in, like, no time flat, but they needn’t have bothered. There was nothing to see here unless abandoned warehouses buttered your bread. Personally, debris, cobwebs, a lifetime supply of dust, and creepy things scurrying along the floor didn’t do it for me. And the smell. If I actually had to breathe, I’d probably choke on the air, which
was thick and heavy with the scent of voided bowels and spoiling meat, blood, and mold.
“Anyone here?” I called—but, you know, not too loudly.
Come, morsel, the voice said, giving me the jitters. Toward the light, the better to see you, my dear.
It’s your freak show, I responded mentally.
The whispering in my head quieted all of the sudden as if listening, then answered, “Out of the mouths of babes.”
Only this time the voice wasn’t in my head—and that didn’t make it any better. It was again that high-pitched croon. I bet he drove the neighborhood dogs to distraction.
I followed the sound, into a dark room lit only by a lantern in the center. I kicked something and it rolled before me … sounded like bone, not that I was any expert. I tried not to look, but it was instinctual … and it was a bone. Femur, maybe, or some other long bone. Big enough to be … my brain balked. The bone rattled into others like it, the remains of several meals at least. And there, cowering in the corner, was Marcy.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Y-y-yes,” she answered unconvincingly.
“Great. Run!”
She cut her gaze toward the boogeyman and then bolted for the doorway. I stepped aside to let her through, but in one quick leap, more worthy of a grasshopper than anything human-shaped, the psychic cut her off.
Marcy screamed as he grabbed her shoulders and thrust her back, into a pile of bones, like she was a mere rag doll. I stooped to pick up a weapon, not that I thought it would do me any good against him. It didn’t make me feel much more powerful than my blazing fury alone.
“Trade,” I said, hefting the—I looked down—skull. It was all I could do not to scream. “Her for me.”
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