anightwithoutstarsfinal

by Unknown

  Then I remembered everyone was dead or dying and the world was ending and I was most likely being hunted down by a psychopathic vampire chick and suddenly I didn’t feel like grinning anymore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I Sleep Next to a Boy

  Between them, Travis and Maximus managed to drag my dad out of bed and haul him up two flights of stairs to the fifth flour. I was in charge of the supplies which didn’t really seem fair since I had to make two trips to their one, but I didn’t complain. People were having their blood sucked out of them and I had to carry three bags up some stairs. What was there to complain about?

  Dad got his own room. Travis and I took the adjoining one. It was sparsely decorated with a queen-sized bed that had been stripped of all its linens and a single bureau shoved up against the back wall. The bathroom was tiny, with a narrow counter, blue porcelain toilet, and standing shower. I made Travis and Maximus wait out in the hall while I peed.

  I changed into my pajamas and hopped up on the bed before I called them back in. The mattress was hard as a rock, but it was still a mattress, and just sitting on it summoned a yawn of epic proportions. When was the last time I’d slept more than two or three hours? I couldn’t remember.

  “I flushed the toilet,” I told Maximus. The last one into the room he closed the door behind him and locked it. Travis sat at the foot of the bed, drawing one long, gangly leg up to his chest. In the muted light filtering in through the window I couldn’t gauge his expression, but the lines of his body were tense. “Hope that’s okay.”

  Maximus leaned against the bureau and crossed his arms. “It’s fine. They’ll most likely cut the water lines soon though, so if you want to take a shower do it tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow morning.” I didn’t relish the idea of going to sleep covered in dried sweat and blood, but I couldn’t think of a more vulnerable position than being naked in the shower. What would I do if a drinker attacked? Hit him with a loofah?

  “How do you know that?” Travis asked.

  I poked him in the back with my foot. “How do I know what?”

  “Not you, Maximus. How do you know the water lines will be cut? How do you know those… those things don’t like heights? How do you know about them at all?”

  Practical, dependable Travis. I started to lean forward and tell him Maximus was the king of evading questions, but Maximus’ next words effectively turned me into a mute.

  “Because what is happening to your town happened to mine.”

  In the silence that followed his stunning revelation you could have heard a pin drop. For a few seconds I even forgot to breathe. The sharp ache in my chest reminded me to start again and I exhaled the pent up air in my lungs with a loud whoosh.

  “What?” I managed. “I don’t… how could… what?”

  The bureau creaked under Maximus’ weight as he sat on the edge. Moonlight slashed across his chest, turning his jacket silver and leaving his face hidden in shadow. “I was only four years old,” he began quietly. “I don’t remember much of anything. Except for the screams. My town was smaller than yours, a tiny logging village at the base of a mountain. In one night they killed everyone. It was a slaughter. My parents hid me away in a woodbin. The next morning a family passing through found me wandering down the road covered in blood. They took me to the nearest police station, two hours away. I tried to explain what I’d seen, but the authorities thought my story of blood and monsters with silver fangs was nothing more than a terrified delusion. By the time they got to my town the drinkers had covered up everything, and it was eventually forgotten.”

  A chill passed between my shoulder blades. “How do you cover up murdering an entire town?”

  “The same way they’ve been doing it for centuries. This time it was a pipeline leak. After they killed everyone and drained the bodies they lit the entire town on fire. Before it’s been an earthquake. A flood. A wildfire. Any disaster, natural or otherwise, will suffice. People have a way of turning a blind eye to what they do not want to see and the drinkers make certain those who do are duly compensated.”

  “And your parents?” I whispered.

  “Both killed,” he said flatly.

  Both killed… No wonder Maximus had evaded my questions. I knew I bristled like an angry bear if anyone ever dared ask where my mom had gone. It was bad enough having to explain she’d left Dad and I for some biker dude with a mustache. I couldn’t imagine telling people she’d been murdered… and not having a single person believe me.

  “But you never forgot,” Travis said.

  “I never forgot. When I was old enough I sought out other survivors and learned everything I could about them. I’ve traveled the world, always trying to get one step ahead. Helping when I can. Killing them when I’m able. There’s a group of us who fight, but we’re spread too thin. The drinkers have had centuries to perfect mass murder.” He hesitated. Rubbed his jaw. “Although this time it’s different.”

  I pressed back against the headrest until I could feel every bump of my spine against the wood. “They’re not hiding the bodies. They’re not covering it up.”

  The whites of Maximus’ eyes flashed as his gaze cut to mine. “You’re right. They’re not.”

  “This is nuts,” Travis muttered before he stood up and went into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him and locked it. Within seconds came the sound of running water as he turned on the shower.

  “He’ll be out in three minutes tops,” I estimated. “Travis is a total wimp.”

  “He’s tougher than you think he is.”

  “Travis?” I snorted. “Are we talking about the same person? Tall, skinny guy with freckles and red hair? Don’t get me wrong, I love him to death, but I’ve beaten him at arm wrestling. Using my left hand. And, to be clear, I’m a righty.”

  Maximus pushed away from the bureau. “Sometimes the ones we are the closest to surprise us the most.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What do you want it to mean?”

  “Oh, enough with the riddles.” Annoyed, I crossed my arms over my chest and scowled. “You’re not freaking Batman.”

  Maximus’ teeth flashed white in the darkness as he smiled. “Does Batman speak in riddles?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. You should have told me about what happened to your parents.”

  “You didn’t ask,” he said simply.

  “Didn’t ask?” Curling my hand into a fist I slammed it down on the mattress with enough force to send a cloud of dust spinning up into the air. Choking on the scent of must and mothballs I cried, “Are you kidding me? All I’ve done since I met you is ask questions!”

  This time when he appeared suddenly beside me I didn’t jump. I was starting to get used to his sudden movements, along with the fact that I couldn’t anticipate them. He rested his arm against the top of the headboard and leaned towards me, close enough so I could make out each individual lash framing his cool gray eyes. His voice huskier than I’d ever heard it, he said, “Maybe you didn’t ask the right ones.”

  I was surprised the lights didn’t come on with the amount of electricity crackling between us. I’d tried hard to fight it, but the truth was undeniable. I was attracted to Maximus. It wasn’t only his physical appearance that drew me (although the tall, dark, and handsome thing, while totally cliché, worked really well for him). He had a haunting quality about him. A kind of gruff gentleness beneath the hard exterior. As the donkey from Shrek would say, the guy had layers.

  I bit my bottom lip. It wasn’t a provocative gesture, merely a nervous one. When his gaze lowered to my mouth I sucked in a startled breath of air. My eyes felt too big for my face and my heart was beating like a drum inside my chest. I’d never felt this way with a boy before. Not with Travis. Certainly not with Everett.

  I wanted to say something witty, but my tongue was refusing to cooperate. Where was the girl who’d stared a drinker down and all but dared him to do his worst? Hid
ing, that’s where. Hiding behind a tongue-tied nervous twit who wouldn’t have been able to string a complete sentence together if her life depended on it. “I… Uh… The thing is…”

  “I’m not going to kiss you.”

  Well then.

  “Who said I wanted you to?” I snapped, even though my burning face said otherwise. My fingers dug into the mattress, anchoring me to the bed.

  “I want to,” he said quietly. In the shifting light his eyes were silver, the pupils dark and dilated, and even though he’d said he wasn’t going to kiss me (rude) he didn’t step back. His expression may have been calm, even a little cocky, but the muscles in the arm he had propped against the headrest were hard as stone, bulging out beneath the sleeve of his black t-shirt. When had he taken off his jacket? I didn’t have the faintest idea. “I want to kiss you more than I’ve ever wanted anything else.”

  Goosebumps broke out on my arms and my shiver had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. “Then why… why don’t you?” I’d meant to come across as bold, but my damn tongue twisted up again and I sounded hesitant. Even a little afraid.

  Maximus lifted his hand off the headrest and skimmed his fingers through my hair. They caught on a tangle and I held my breath as he slowly worked it out, taking care not to yank. Even when the snarl was gone his fingers lingered in the dark curls and when he spoke his voice was whisper soft. “Because wanting is a weakness I can’t afford. You’re a distraction, Lola. A dangerous one.”

  I had to swallow twice before I could say, “I’m not trying to distract you.”

  “I know.” He smiled and stepped back. I felt a faint tug as he slipped his hand out of my hair and then there was nothing connecting us except a whole lot of chemistry. “That’s what makes you dangerous.”

  We stared at silently at each other. I didn’t know what to say, what to think. The world as I knew it was crashing down around me but in that one moment none of it mattered because my world revolved around one boy.

  “Maximus, I—”

  “Holy smokes that water is cold!” Travis came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white towel. Even with the lack of light I could see his skin was scrubbed pink, and I quickly averted my eyes.

  “Geez,” I complained, holding up a hand. “Get some clothes on, please. No one wants to see that.”

  “I left my bag out here.” He started to walk across the room and stopped abruptly in the middle. “Were you guys, uh, busy or something?”

  I looked up. Maximus was once again leaning against the bureau, but there was no denying the tension that still crackled in the air. “I, er…”

  “I was just telling Lola what I knew about the drinkers,” Maximus interceded smoothly.

  “Great!” Travis said with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. The cold shower must have bolstered his spirits. “We should learn everything we can about them.”

  “Clothes now,” I ordered. “Talk after.”

  Grumbling under his breath Travis pulled a long sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts out of his bag. Maximus and I waited without talking while he banged around in the bathroom, and I couldn’t help but smile when I heard a muffled curse through the door. “See?” I told Maximus, lifting my eyebrows. “Not so tough.”

  When Travis came back out his hair was sticking up in bright orange tufts and he was nursing his right elbow. “Hit it off the counter,” he explained with a grimace.

  “Sit next to me,” I said, patting the mattress, “before you kill yourself.”

  “So what were you guys talking about?” Travis asked once he was settled in beside me. If I weren’t so comfortable with him it probably would have been a bit weird to be sharing a bed in the dark with a boy, but since Travis was, well, Travis, it felt like second nature to tousle his hair and flick his ear.

  I could feel Maximus watching me and even though it was stupid and girlish and totally immature, I liked the idea that I was (possibly) making him a tiny bit jealous.

  “I was explaining to Lola how the drinkers hunt,” Maximus said.

  “How’s that?” Travis asked.

  “They prefer to go out alone, but every drinker belongs to a larger group called a hive. Within the hive there is a hierarchy. A leader, usually the eldest male, decides when and where the hive will attack. They are called a Vladar.”

  I remembered when Angelique left me. Before she ran back inside the house she said he’s going to be so angry. It must have been her so-called ‘Vladar’. And I’d thought Angelique was badass. I shuddered to think of what the drinker in charge of her was like.

  “The first drinker Travis and I met was a big guy,” I said. “Like, huge. But when Travis went inside the house and I told him to come out and get me he couldn’t step through the door. Why not?”

  The sound of Maximus gritting his teeth was like nails on a chalkboard. “You told a drinker to come out and get you?”

  “Lola’s kind of crazy,” Travis explained.

  I elbowed him in the ribs. “Am not. Besides at the time I didn’t know he was a drinker. I figured it out after.”

  “So you are in the habit of inviting strange men to attack you?”

  “That’s nothing,” Travis snorted. “The only reason we were at that house in the first place was to steal a car.”

  Another elbow to the ribs, harder this time. “Shut up,” I hissed.

  “Why? If Maximus is going to be helping us he should at least know that you’re a little nuts. It’s okay. It’s what I like about you. She’s the nuttiest girl I’ve ever met,” he said, speaking directly to Maximus, “but in a good way. A brave way. And in kind of a I’ll-kick-your-ass-if-you-piss-me-off way too.”

  I raised my fist to thump him in the thigh. Reconsidered. “That’s actually the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “I know.”

  “Can we get back to the subject at hand?” Maximus’ tone was cold. “If the drinker could not come outside, then he must have been given a direct order by his master to remain in the house. Orders such as those are very difficult for drinkers to break. If he could have come after you he would have. Of this I have no doubt.”

  “You speak, like, really well,” Travis said.

  “He’s Canadian,” I supplied.

  “Really? That’s cool. So how often do they need to… you know…feed?”

  “Once a week would be ideal, but a drinker can gorge itself on upwards of two hundred people per year.”

  I did the math quickly in my head and immediately wished that I hadn’t. Two hundred people a year… That was only one hundred and sixty-five shy of one person a day.

  “Do they get all the nutrients they need from the blood or do they have to eat other parts of the body too?”

  I made a face. “Ew, Travis. That’s disgusting.”

  Something flickered in Maximus’ eyes. Something I couldn’t quite make out in the dark. Comprehension? It was impossible to tell. “The blood will suffice, but on occasion one will develop a taste for human flesh. Skin. Bones. Some even eat the hair.”

  As if sucking blood out of a human’s neck wasn’t gross enough. “And you said to kill them you have to hit them in the head and the chest.”

  Maximus nodded. “You must pierce the brain and the heart. A gun is the most practical weapon, but a knife will do as well.”

  Or a horseshoe, I thought silently. Of course, that had only wounded Angelique, not killed her. Although looking back now it’d been well worth the effort.

  “What about cutting off their heads?” Travis asked. “Will that work?”

  “It will remove the brain from the body, but you are still left with the heart.”

  “So they run around all zombie like?” Travis’ eyes widened. “Neat.”

  “Neat is not how I would describe a drinker in a mindless rage ripping people limb from limb,” Maximus said coolly.

  “I only meant—”

  “I will return in the morning,” Maximus interrupted. “Stay in the room. Do not leave
until the sun has fully risen.”

  The slam of the door echoed in the sudden silence, and I flicked Travis’ ear extra hard. “Nice work, genius. You pissed off the only guy who knows what’s going on.”

  “I wasn’t trying to,” Travis said defensively. “He’s just really touchy.”

  “He’s something,” I agreed.

  Travis rubbed his ear. “He’s a little more than that, Lola. Are you sure we can trust him? I mean, he knows lots of stuff, but how do we know for sure he’s not a drinker himself?”

  The idea was so preposterous I laughed. “He’s not a drinker, Travis. Get real.”

  “But how do we know for certain? He could be. Or maybe he’s working for them.”

  “He’s not,” I said shortly.

  “But how do you know?”

  “Because he killed one of them right in front of me.”

  Travis’ mouth dropped open. “He did?”

  “He did,” I confirmed. “Shot him in the head and the heart and the drinker went poof. Just vanished, like it was never there to begin with.”

  “Weird.”

  “It was definitely pretty weird.” I huffed out a breath and stared up at the ceiling. “All of this is weird.”

  “Makes our lives from before seem pretty easy, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, even though I’d never thought of Travis’ life as being hard to begin with. What did he have to complain about? I mean, he wasn’t going to be Prom King or anything, but he was the smartest kid in our class with a full scholarship all but guaranteed. He had a mom who gave a shit. A dad who remembered his birthday. What more could you want?

  “I know you think I had it pretty easy,” he continued as though reading my mind. “And I did, compared to what you had to go through with your mom and sister and stuff, but… No one’s life is perfect, Lola.”

  The unfamiliar edge in his voice had me looking at him in surprise and, if I were being honest with myself, a little bit of annoyance. “Your mom makes pasta from scratch. From scratch,” I emphasized. “Whose mom does that? I know your parents are divorced, but at least your dad didn’t take off to California with some floozy.”