by P. C. Cast
“Let’s get Heath,” I told Persephone. She swung into her ground-eating canter easily and I was amazed to see that the snow and ice seemed to fly back from her hooves as we magically blasted through the night under the watchful eye of the Goddess who was, herself, Night personified.
My journey was surprisingly fast. We cantered down Utica Street until we came to the exit to the Broken Arrow Expressway. Barricades were up with flashing lights warning that the expressway was closed. I felt myself smiling as I guided Persephone neatly around the barricades onto the utterly deserted highway. Then I gave the mare her head and she galloped downtown. I clung to her, leaning low over her neck. With the blanket streaming out behind us I imagined that I looked like the heroine in an old historical romance novel, and wished I was galloping to a naughty keg party with someone my kingly father had decided was inappropriate instead of heading into hell.
I steered Persephone to the exit that would take us to the Performing Arts Center and the old depot beyond it. I hadn’t seen anyone between midtown and the highway, but now I saw occasional shufflings of street people around the bus station and noticed an occasional cop car here and there. We’re silent . . . ghosts . . . no one can see us. No one can hear us. I kept the prayer going in my mind. No one so much as glanced in our direction. It really was as if I’d turned into a ghost, which wasn’t a thought I found very comforting.
I slowed Persephone as we passed the Performing Arts Center and trotted over the wide bridge that spanned the confusing side-by-side meshing of old railroad tracks. When we reached the center of the bridge I stopped Persephone and stared down at the abandoned depot building that sat below us dark and silent. Thanks to Mrs. Brown, my ex-art teacher at South Intermediate High School, I knew it used to be a beautiful art deco building that had been abandoned and eventually looted when the trains stopped running. Now it looked like something that should be in the Gotham City of the Batman Dark Night comics. (Yes, I know. I’m a dork.) It had those huge arched windows that reminded me of teeth between two towers that looked like perfectly creepy haunted castles.
“And we have to go down there,” I told Persephone. She was breathing hard from our ride, but she didn’t seem particularly worried, which I hoped was a good sign. You know, animals being able to sense bad stuff and all.
We finished crossing the bridge and I found the broken little side road that led down to the depot. The track level was dark. Really dark. That shouldn’t have bothered me, what with my excellent fledgling night vision, but it did. The truth was that I was totally creeped out as Persephone walked to the building and I began slowly circling it, looking for the basement entrance Heath had described.
It didn’t take long to find the rusted iron grill that appeared to be an impassable barrier. I didn’t let myself hesitate and think about how completely afraid I was. I got off Persephone and led her over to the covered entryway so she’d be out of the wind and protected from most of the snow. I looped her reins around a metal thingie, laid the extra blanket over her back, and spent as long as I could patting her and telling her what a brave, sweet girl she was and that I’d be back real soon. I was working toward that self-fulfilling prophecy thing, and hoped if I kept saying it, it would be true. Walking away from Persephone was hard. I guess I hadn’t realized how comforting her presence had been. I could have used some of that comfort as I stood in front of the iron grill and tried to squint into the darkness beyond.
I couldn’t see anything except the indistinct shape of a huge dark room. The basement of the creepy unfortunately-not-abandoned building. Great. Heath is down there, I reminded myself, grabbed the edge of the grill, and pulled. It opened easily, which I took to be evidence of how often it must be used. Again, great.
The basement was not as awful as I’d imagined it would be. Stripes of weak light filtered between the barred, ground-level windows and I could clearly see that homeless people must have been using the room. Actually, there was a lot of stuff left from them: big boxes, dirty blankets, even a shopping cart (Who knows how they managed to get that down there?). But, weirdly, not one homeless person was present. It was like a homeless ghost town, which was doubly weird when I considered the weather. Wouldn’t tonight be the perfect night to retreat to the comparative warmth and shelter of this basement, versus trying to find someplace warm and dry on the streets or smush into the Y? And it had been snowing for days. So, realistically, this room should be packed with the people who had brought the boxes and stuff down here to begin with.
Of course if scary undead creatures had been using the basement the desertion of the homeless folks made much more sense.
Don’t think about it. Find the drainage grate and then find Heath.
The grate wasn’t hard to find. I just headed for the darkest, nastiest corner of the room, and there was a metal grate on the floor. Yep. Right in the corner. On the floor. Never, in a gazillion years would I have ever even considered touching the disgusting thing, let along lifting it and going down there.
Naturally, that’s what I had to do.
The grate lifted as easily as the outside “barrier” had opened, telling me (again) that I wasn’t the only person/fledgling/human/ creature who had come this way recently. There was an iron ladder thing that I had to climb down, probably about ten feet. Then I dropped to the floor of the tunnel. And that’s exactly what it was—a big, damp sewer tunnel. Oh, and it was dark, too. Really dark. I stood there for a while letting my night vision accustom itself to the dense darkness, but I couldn’t just stand there for very long. The need to find Heath was like an itch beneath my skin. It goaded me on.
“Keep to the right,” I whispered. Then I shut up because even that little sound echoed around me. I turned to the right and started to walk as quickly as I was able.
Heath had been telling the truth. There were lots of tunnels. They split off over and over again, reminding me of worm holes burrowed into the ground. At first I saw more evidence that homeless people had been down here, too. But after a few righthand turns, the boxes and scattered trash and blankets stopped. There was nothing but damp and dark. The tunnels had gone from being smooth and round and as civilized as I imagined well-made tunnels could be to absolute crap. The sides of the walls looked like they had been gouged out by very drunk Tolkien dwarfs (again, I am aware that I’m a dork). It was cold, too, but I didn’t really feel it.
I kept to the right, hoping that Heath had known what he was talking about. I thought about stopping long enough to concentrate on his blood so that I could hook into our Imprint again, but the urgency I felt wouldn’t let me stop. I. Had. To. Find. Heath.
I smelled them before I heard the hissing and rustling and actually saw them. It was that musty, old, wrong scent I’d noticed every time I’d seen one of them at the wall. I realized it was the smell of death, and then wondered how I didn’t recognize it earlier.
Then the darkness that I’d become so accustomed to gave way to a faint, flickering light. I stopped to focus myself. You can do this, Z. You’ve been Chosen by your Goddess. You kicked vampyre ghost ass. This is something you can definitely handle.
I was still trying to “focus” (aka, talk myself into being brave) when Heath screamed. Then there was no more time for focusing or internal pep talks. I ran forward toward Heath’s scream. Okay, I probably should explain that vampyres are stronger and faster than humans, and even though I’m still just a fledgling, I’m a very weird fledgling. So when I say I ran—I mean I seriously moved fast—fast and silent. I found them in what must have been seconds, but felt like hours. They were in the little alcove at the end of the crude tunnel. The lantern I’d noticed before was hanging from a rusty nail, throwing their shadows grotesquely against the crudely curved walls. They had formed a half circle around Heath. He was standing on the dirty mattress and his back was pressed to the wall. Somehow he’d gotten the duct tape off his ankles, but his wrists were still securely bound together. He had a new cut on his right arm and the scent of hi
s blood was thick and seductive.
And that was my last goad. Heath belonged to me—despite my confusion about the whole blood issue, and despite my feelings for Erik. Heath was mine and no one else was ever, ever going to feed from what was mine.
I burst through the circle of hissing creatures like I was a bowling ball and they were brainless pins, and moved to his side.
“Zo!” He looked deliriously happy for a split second, and then, just like a guy, he tried to push me behind him. “Watch out! Their teeth and claws are really sharp.” He added in a whisper, “You really didn’t bring the SWAT team?”
It was easy to keep him from pushing me anywhere. I mean, he’s cute and all, but he is just a human. I patted his bound hands where he clutched my arm and smiled at him, and with one slash of my thumbnail I cut through the gray tape that held his wrists. His eyes widened as he pulled his hands apart.
I grinned at him. My fear was gone. Now I was just incredibly pissed. “What I brought is better than a SWAT team. Just stay behind me and watch.”
I pushed Heath to the wall and stepped in front of him as I turned to face the closing circle of . . .
Eesh! They were the most disgusting things I’d ever seen. There were probably a dozen or so of them. Their faces were white and gaunt. Their eyes glowed a dirty red. They snarled and hissed at me and I saw that their teeth were pointed and their fingernails! Ugh! Their fingernails were long and yellow and dangerous-looking.
“It’sss just a fledgling,” hissed one of them. “The Mark doesn’t make her a vampyre. It makesssss her a freak.”
I looked at the speaker. “Elliott!”
“I wasss. I’m not the Elliott you knew anymore.” Snakelike his head wove back and forth as he spoke. Then his glowing eyes flattened and he curled his lip. “I’ll ssshow you what I mean . . .”
He started to move toward me with a feral, crouching stride. The other creatures stirred, gaining bravery from him.
“Watch out, Zo, they’re coming for us,” Heath said, trying to step around in front of me.
“No they’re not,” I said. I closed my eyes for just a second and centered myself, thinking of the power and warmth of flame—the way it can cleanse as well as destroy—and I thought of Shaunee. “Come to me, flame!” My palms started to feel hot. I opened my eyes and raised my hands, which were now glowing with a brilliant yellow flame.
“Stay back, Elliott! You were a pain in the ass when you were alive, and death hasn’t changed anything.” Elliott cringed back from the light I was producing. I took a step forward, ready to tell Heath to follow me so we could get the hell outta there, but her voice made me freeze.
“You’re wrong, Zoey. Death has changed some things.”
The crowd of creatures parted to let Stevie Rae through.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The flame in my palms sputtered and faded as shock broke my concentration. “Stevie Rae!” I started to take a step toward her, but the truth of her appearance hit me and I felt my body go cold and still. She looked terrible—worse than she had in the dream vision I’d had. It wasn’t so much her pale thinness and the awful wrongness of the smell that clung to her that made her appear so changed. It was her expression. In life, Stevie Rae had been the kindest person I’d ever known. But now, whatever she was—dead, undead, bizarrely resurrected—she was different. Her eyes were cruel and flat. Her face devoid of any emotion except one, and that one emotion was hatred.
“Stevie Rae, what happened to you?”
“I died.” Her voice was only a twisted, malformed shadow of what it had once been. She still had her Okie twang, but the soft sweetness that had filled it was totally gone. She sounded like mean trailer trash.
“Are you a ghost?”
“A ghost?” Her laugh was a sneer. “No, I ain’t no damn ghost.”
I swallowed and felt a dizzy wash of hope. “So you’re alive?”
She curled her lip in a sarcastic sneer that looked so wrong on her face it made me physically sick. “You’d say I’m alive, but I’d say it’s not that simple. Then again I’m not as simple as I used to be.”
Well, at least she hadn’t hissed at me like that Elliott thing had. Stevie Rae is alive. I held tightly to that miracle, swallowed my fear and revulsion, and moving so quickly that she didn’t have time to jerk away (or bite me or whatever), I grabbed her and, ignoring the horrid way she smelled, hugged her hard. “I’m so glad you’re not dead!” I whispered to her.
It was like hugging a smelly piece of stone. She didn’t jerk away from me. She didn’t bite me. She didn’t react at all, but the creatures surrounding us did. I could hear them hissing and muttering. I let go of her and stepped back.
“Don’t touch me again,” she said.
“Stevie Rae, is there someplace we can go so we can talk? I need to get Heath home, but I can come back and meet you. Or maybe you could come back to the school with me?”
“You don’t understand anything, do you?”
“I understand that something bad has happened to you, but you’re still my best friend, so we can figure this out.”
“Zoey, you’re not going anywhere.”
“Fine,” I purposefully pretended to misunderstand her threat. “I guess we could talk here, but, well . . .” I looked around at the grossly hissing creatures. “It’s not very private, and it’s also disgusting down here.”
“Jusssst kill them!” Elliott snarled from behind Stevie Rae.
“Shut up, Elliott!” Stevie Rae and I snapped at him together. Her eyes met mine and I swear I saw a flash of something in them that was more than anger and cruelty.
“You know they can’t live now that they’ve sssseen us,” Elliott said. The other creatures stirred restlessly, making evil little noises of agreement.
Then a girl stepped out of the pack of creatures. She obviously used to be beautiful. Even now there was an eerie, surreal allure about her. She was tall and blond, and she moved more gracefully than the others. But when I looked into her red eyes I saw only meanness.
“If you can’t do it, I will. I’ll take the male first. I don’t mind that his blood has been tainted by Imprint. It’s still warm and alive,” she said, and she seemed to dance toward Heath.
I stepped in front of him, blocking her path. “Touch him and you die. Again,” I said.
Stevie Rae interrupted her hissing laughter.
“Get back with the others, Venus. You don’t strike until I tell you to.”
Venus. The name triggered my memory. “Venus Davis?” I said.
The pretty blonde narrowed her eyes at me. “How do you know me, fledgling?”
“She knows a lot of stuff,” Heath said, stepping around me. He was using what I used to call his football player voice. He sounded tough and pissed and totally ready for a fight. “And I’m about sick of all of you fucked-up creatures.”
“Why is that speaking?” Stevie Rae spat.
I sighed and rolled my eyes. I agreed with Heath—I was totally sick of all of this scary weirdness. It was time we got out of there, and it was also time my best friend started acting like the person I’d glimpsed hiding in her eyes. “He isn’t a that. He’s Heath. Remember, Stevie Rae? My ex-boyfriend?”
“Zo. I am not your ex-boyfriend. I’m your boyfriend.”
“Heath. I told you before that this can’t possibly work out between us.”
“Come on, Zo, we’re Imprinted. That means it’s you and me, baby!” He grinned at me as if we were in the middle of a prom instead of in the middle of a group of undead creatures that wanted to eat us.
“That was an accident, and we’re gonna have to talk about it, but this is definitely not the time.”
“Oh, Zo, you know you love me.” Heath’s grin didn’t fade one bit.
“Heath, you are the most stubborn kid I’ve ever known.” He winked at me and I couldn’t help smiling back at him. “Fine. I love you.”
“What’sss happening . . .” the gross Elliott creature hiss
ed. The rest of the horrid things that surrounded us moved restlessly, and Venus glided one step closer to Heath. I forced myself not to shiver or scream or whatever. Instead, a weird calm came over me. I looked at Stevie Rae, and suddenly knew what I needed to say. I put my hands on my hips and faced her.
“Tell him,” I said. “Tell all of them.”
“Tell them what?” She narrowed her garnet eyes dangerously.
“Tell them what’s happening here. You know. I know you do.”
Stevie Rae’s face contorted, and the words sounded like they were being wrenched from her throat. “Humanity! They’re showing their humanity.” The creatures snarled like she’d just thrown holy water on them (and please, that’s such an untrue cliché about vampyres).
“Weakness! It’s why we’re stronger than they are.” Venus curled her lip. “Because it’s a weakness we don’t have anymore.”
I ignored Venus. I ignored Elliott. Hell, I ignored them all and stared at Stevie Rae, forcing her to meet my eyes, and forcing myself not to look away or flinch as hers glowed hot and red.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“She’s right,” Stevie Rae said. Her voice was cold and mean. “When we died, so did our humanity.”
“That might be true with them, but I don’t believe it’s true with you,” I said.
“You don’t know anything about this, Zoey,” Stevie Rae said.
“I don’t have to. I know you, and I know our Goddess, and that’s all I need to know.”
“She’s not my Goddess anymore.”
“Really, just like your mamma’s not your mamma anymore?” I knew I’d hit a nerve when I saw her jerk as if she were in physical pain.
“I don’t have a mamma. I’m not a human anymore.”
“Big f-ing deal. Technically, I’m not a human anymore, either. I’m somewhere in the middle of the Change, which makes me a little of this and a lot of that. Hell, the only one here who’s still human is Heath.”
“Not that I hold your un-human-ness against you guys,” Heath said.
