Sacrifice (Crave (Quality))

by Melinda Metz

  So . . . Friday. Daytime still, I think.

  Gabriel looked like hell. I mean, he looked gorgeous. He can’t help that. But he’s never been able to stay awake during the day before, and I could see the effort on his face and in his eyes. I don’t think he’ll manage it again tomorrow. But it doesn’t matter. Obviously, Ernst will keep defying the death sleep as long as I’m here. He wasn’t nearly as wrecked as Gabriel—I wonder how often he stays awake during the day? Gabriel said the older the vampire, the easier it is to resist the sleep. But Gabriel isn’t young. He’s been a vampire since the seventeenth century, and he could barely stay awake to give Ernst an explanation of what had happened. So how old must Ernst be?

  It’s strange that I don’t know. There’s so much about them I don’t know. When Gabriel and I were running from Martin, I was so focused on learning about the vampires’ strengths and weaknesses, all their rules, I guess you’d call it. I didn’t think about their history.

  Ernst made this family, that’s all I know. He was always the father, even back with the family in Greece before they were all killed. Even Sam—Dad? Sam. Too weird to call him Dad when I never met him. Even Sam considered Ernst to be his father. But when was that? How long ago? And was it in Greece? Did Sam come from Greece like Gabriel did?

  You would think I’d know things like this about my own father. His age, his history. What happened to him.

  They all call him a traitor, like he did some awful thing just by loving my mom. Even Gabriel thought that, back before he knew me. So what happened? Did they expel him from their family? Or did he leave because they were angry?

  Mom always hated my father because he left her. I always hated him for leaving me before I was even born. But now I’m starting to wonder if maybe Sam left us in order to keep Ernst from finding us. Because Ernst wants me dead. I can see it in his eyes.

  Shay dropped the pen and shook her hand, trying to ease the muscle cramp in her fingers. That was a new symptom—she’d never had trouble writing in her journal before. But then, she’d never gone for so long without blood or food either. And Martin had told her she was getting worse. He’d said she couldn’t live without Gabriel’s blood for more than a few days. It had been a day and a half since she’d had any blood.

  Are they going to let me starve? she thought, hugging herself against the chills that had begun to wrack her body. Is that what it is, starving? For a vampire, maybe. To live without blood would be to starve. But for a half vampire? Who knew?

  There was no point in thinking about what would happen now. She couldn’t escape, and Gabriel wouldn’t have another chance to save her.

  Had Ernst believed that Gabriel was trying to stop Shay from escaping? She’d been as convincing as she could, but Gabriel’s whole family knew he brought her to them because he thought she’d be safe. If Ernst didn’t believe the lie, what would happen to Gabriel for going against Ernst’s wishes?

  She needed something to distract her. She’d go crazy if she kept thinking about what she and Gabriel were facing. Shay glanced around the room. The vault. It was a mess. Cardboard boxes covered with dust, ancient chests made of wood, a huge old filing cabinet that looked as if it came from an office on Mad Men. It seemed more like an attic than some kind of dungeon.

  She could reach the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet without having to stand up. Shay grabbed the handle and yanked as hard as she could, which wasn’t very hard. It took three more tries to get the drawer open enough to look inside.

  “Files,” she murmured. “Shocker!”

  The manila folders were yellowish, and the edges of them were curled and flaked. Old, she thought. Like everything else in this place, including the vampires who lived here. She flipped open one folder and skimmed through the documents inside. They were dated from the 1950s, and they seemed to be research reports on bats and sonar for some government project. Shay ran her finger over the names listed at the end: Ernest Frankel, PhD; Rick Scott, PhD; Gabe Kahn, PhD. . . .

  “Gabriel,” Shay breathed. She’d never asked his last name, and it shocked her to see it. But Ernest and Rick—that was probably Ernst and Richard, using whatever names they hid behind back then. Who knew where the last names came from? The names probably changed every time the vampire family switched identities. Gabriel had told her they needed to do that every twenty years or so, to avoid detection by humans. So his last name wasn’t really Kahn, any more than Ernst’s was Frankel.

  She flipped to the next page, and her heart seemed to freeze. It was a letter to some navy science officer, and it was signed by Samuel Westcliff, PhD.

  Sam. Dad. The words swam in front of Shay’s eyes until she realized that she was crying. It was her father’s signature. Just a scrawl of letters on a yellowed old sheet of paper. But it was the first concrete evidence of her dad’s life that she’d ever seen. She had the locket he’d given her mother, the one etched with two birds in a sky that contained both a sun and a moon. But it had come to Shay through her mom. And the visions she’d had of Sam, his life, had come from Gabriel. Shay herself had never met her father, never known a single thing about him, never touched him or hugged him or heard him say her name.

  She traced his signature with the tip of her finger, trying to feel the microscopic bumps left behind by the ink. If only she could magically feel what her dad had felt when he wrote this.

  He was probably bored to tears, she thought, smiling. The Sam she had seen in her visions of Gabriel’s life was a happy, loving person. The kind of guy who wanted to be out among people, not holed up in a lab writing reports. Though that was before the massacre of the family in Greece. Gabriel had told her that everything changed after that. Sam hadn’t fully recovered his interest in life until he met her mother, decades after he wrote this letter.

  Shay dug through the rest of the papers. More stuff about sonar and something about submarines. The vampires did research for a college now, but back then they were government contractors. She didn’t see any mention of Luis or Tamara, but Millie’s name popped up here and there as a secretary. Shay couldn’t help a smile—the vampires knew how to fit in, right down to making the woman take dictation while all the men were scientists. Pretty typical for the ’50s.

  She pulled herself up to her knees and managed to get one of the higher drawers open. More files. Shay grabbed a handful at random and dropped quickly back down to the ground, her head swimming and blackness closing in around the edges of her vision. Papers flew out all over the place, but she didn’t care. If Ernst wanted to hold her captive, she got to make a mess.

  When her head cleared a little, Shay pulled a bunch of papers onto her lap and started reading. These were even older—from the 1910s. The paper was some kind of thin, crinkly stuff, and everything was written by hand. The research seemed to be about bats, but it was much more basic, just identifying different traits in order to distinguish various species. The money came from Hamilton College, and the vampire family had been based in upstate New York. This time Luis was in there—Luis Gonzalez. Gabriel’s name then had been Gabriel Makos, and Sam’s was Samuel Kazan.

  “Greek names,” Shay murmured. Were those their real last names? She knew that Gabriel had been raised in an orphanage in Greece—well, at least until Ernst had raided the place and taken him when he was five years old. Sam had been with Ernst, already an adult vampire. But they spoke as if the family had been in Greece for a long time, and Shay had always assumed that Sam was Greek. She had long, thick dark hair that her mother had always envied. Her mom’s hair was fine and blond, Irish. There was nothing Irish about Shay but her blue eyes. If Sam had been Greek, that meant Shay was half Greek.

  She felt a tiny thrill of excitement, just knowing something like that. All this family history stored here—it was her family history.

  There had to be something more about Sam. Maybe a picture or a personal letter. Something.

  Shay pulled herself to her feet and tried to ignore the dizziness the movement caused. T
here were shelves along all the walls and a collection of chests and boxes stacked on them. Some were ornate and others were just basic pine boxes. A few of them had locks, and a couple had been labeled, though the words were in some other language. German, she thought. Shay had taken two years of German in school, but these labels were so faded that it was hard to tell for sure. The one thing all the stuff in here had in common was that it all looked ancient.

  Shay opened a simple wooden box and peered inside. There was a moth-eaten doll wearing a long dress and a yellowed envelope with a lock of hair tied with a ribbon. On the envelope someone had written Millicent in beautiful script. Shay’s breath caught in her throat. This was Millie’s stuff, things from her life before she joined the family. Shay had seen a vision of the house where Millie lived as a child—in a rural place, somewhere in America. Millie had joined the family here in the U.S., just like Richard and Luis and Tamara. They were Ernst’s second family, after the massacre killed most of the first family back in Greece.

  Shay knew that Millie’s parents died of influenza. Maybe Ernst and Gabriel had somehow gotten inside the house, collected some of Millie’s things to take with her when they brought her into their vampire family?

  She moved to the next box, this one a tiny chest painted black. There were photos inside, the sort of sepia-toned ones you would find in history textbooks. Gingerly, Shay leafed through them, afraid they would fall apart. She gazed at the faces, searching for Gabriel or for her father. But the only person she recognized was Tamara, sitting rigidly on a chair next to a man who looked just like her. The clothes were fancy, but dated. Long skirts, a hat on the man. It was impossible to tell when the picture had been taken, but it definitely looked older than anything else Shay had seen yet. She turned it over. There was a stamp on the back, probably from the photographer. But the letters were from the Russian alphabet.

  “Tamara’s life,” Shay murmured. She had joined the family late, already a vampire. Gabriel hadn’t said a lot about Tamara, and Shay wondered if it was because he hadn’t helped raise her, the way he had with Millie.

  Shay skipped the next few boxes, looking for one that was older or that had Gabriel’s stuff in it. There was a box filled with what looked like leather-bound journals, and each was labeled with Ernst’s name. But they were just ledgers filled with numbers. Then there was a big chest with iron hinges, and inside was nothing but a bunch of glass vases, each one wrapped in cloth.

  “I guess every family has its sentimental attachments,” she muttered, thinking about the shoe box full of old Barbies that her mom still had stored up in their attic.

  Tucked into the corner of the chest was a smaller box made out of some kind of stone, and inlaid in the top was a design—two birds flying across a sky with a sun and a moon both.

  Shay stared at it for a long moment, wondering if she’d gotten so weak that she was seeing things. That design . . . it was the same as the design on her locket.

  Fingers trembling, she opened the box. There was a small sheet of fragile, parchmentlike paper inside, covered with spidery writing in thick black ink, complete with smudges and blots.

  It was in German.

  “This was for my child, but my child went before me,” Shay said slowly, translating the old words. “Now it is for you, child of my heart. I cannot bear the pain any longer. I seek the sun. Your love, my Samuel, must be enough for him.”

  Shay frowned, squinting at the letter. It was written to Sam, that much was clear. Was it a suicide note? For a vampire to seek the sun . . . that was death. The sun burned them; she knew that from her visions of Gabriel’s life. Sam had spoken of it on the day that Gabriel became a vampire. Sam had told him of a vampire he’d known, one who had exposed herself to daylight—

  “Gret!” Shay cried. The memory rushed back as if it were hers instead of Gabriel’s. Sam had told him the story of Gret, Ernst’s wife, who had sought the sun. And all they’d found of her was a pile of black ash.

  Shay turned the paper over, careful not to jostle it too much. Gret had died before Gabriel was even born, and Gabriel was around four hundred years old. Who knew how old this suicide note was?

  There was nothing else. Just the note and the box, with the birds, the sun and moon. Shay reached up and unclasped the chain around her neck, sliding the locket off. She laid it gently in the stone box, where it fit perfectly. Did Gret’s note refer to her locket? Had she been walking around with a piece of six-hundred-year-old jewelry around her neck for all this time? She’d had no idea how valuable it was, only that it was meaningful to her because it came from her father.

  It was meaningful to him because it came from his mother, Shay thought. His vampire mother.

  Sam must have kept the locket, with Gret’s last letter. Kept it for all those centuries until he fell in love with her mom. She’d seen in her visions that he planned to give it to her mother when they decided to get married. When they knew they were going to have a baby.

  She slid the locket back onto her chain and put it around her neck, forcing her weak fingers to work the tiny clasp. Then, exhausted, Shay closed her eyes for a moment, reliving the visions she’d had of Gabriel’s long life.

  They loved one another, these vampires. Sam and Gabriel considered themselves brothers, and they thought of Ernst as their father. Ernst took orphaned children and raised them like family, and when they grew up, the children became vampires too. There was a ritual, and once they did it, they were joined together. Gabriel always spoke of his family as if it was the most important thing in the world to him. Shay’s visions had shown that too.

  How do good people do something like this? she thought. How can they love each other but hate me so much? Not just me—they hate so much of the world, the whole human world.

  She opened her eyes and gazed at the door. Ernst had thrown her in here—literally thrown her. He hadn’t even given her a glass of water. And she wasn’t sure he would ever come back.

  I’m going to die in here, Shay thought. I won’t ever see Gabriel again. And wherever my father went, he won’t even know what happened to me. He left us so that this wouldn’t happen, and it’s happening anyway.

  A tear made its way down her cheek, tickling her skin, but Shay didn’t bother to wipe it away. The effort would take too much strength. She lay down on the cold floor, resting her head because it felt so heavy, like a cinder block. The locket slipped out from under her shirt, and Shay instinctively wrapped her fingers around it. That’s what she always did during a transfusion, or when she was stressed, or scared.

  “Where did you go, Sam?” she whispered, holding on to the locket. “You could have protected me better if you’d stayed.”

  He was awake.

  Giving in to the death sleep was nothing like falling asleep as a human, not that Gabriel had clear memories of that anymore. But watching Shay sleep during their time together had reminded him of the soft, slow trickle of sleep into a human’s body. The death sleep was sudden, overwhelming, complete. The sun came, and your body shut down.

  But waking up was the same. Humans woke slowly sometimes, quickly other times. Vampires did too.

  Tonight Gabriel was awake immediately. On guard, fear racing through him, just the way he’d finally given in to the death sleep earlier. Ernst must have moved him to his room. He didn’t remember anything other than Shay being dragged away and the thick door closing between them. Despair combined with the strength of the sun was too much to fight, and he’d let the death sleep overtake him.

  But now the sun was gone and his senses were sharp. He had to get to Shay. She wouldn’t survive long without his blood. But how? His brothers and sisters would be awake now too. He couldn’t fight them all. He hadn’t even been able to fight just Ernst.

  “Gabriel, come.” Ernst’s voice was clipped, but not angry. Gabriel opened his eyes and turned to see his father in the open door. A burst of fury shot through him—the doors locked from the inside, for protection. They all felt safe locke
d in their rooms, and to violate that privacy was an insult. No one in the family would ever open another’s door unless there was some grave emergency.

  Ernst never closed my door, he realized. His father had probably sat and watched him sleep all day long, just to be sure that he was safe. Or maybe to be sure that Gabriel didn’t wake up again. Maybe Ernst hadn’t entirely believed that Gabriel wasn’t trying to rescue Shay. It was impossible to tell.

  “We’re going to restore the communion,” Ernst said. “You’ve been apart from the family for too long.”

  He walked off into the common room, and Gabriel had no choice but to follow. The others were all there, even Tamara.

  “You made it back okay,” he said, smiling at her.

  “I drove your car off a cliff and hid in the caves. The bats kept me company while I slept,” she told him. Her voice was friendly, but he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Even when he’d been in communion with his family, Tamara had been a mystery. She’d been with them for fifty years or so, but she was the only vampire he’d ever met who hadn’t grown up in the family. The only vampire besides Ernst, in fact, who he hadn’t helped raise from childhood. Richard, Luis, Millie—Gabriel had known them all as tiny children, had taught them the ways of the family, had participated in the blood ritual when they gave up the sun. They were his siblings, but also almost like adopted children to him, the same way he had been to Sam. Sam had been his brother, true, but Sam had also been a second father to him.

  “Has anyone checked on the halfblood?” Richard asked.

  Gabriel’s jaw tightened at the impersonal way he spoke of Shay, but he was afraid to say anything. He had no plan now, no way to get Shay out of the vault. But the longer he could keep the others from knowing that he wanted to save her, the more freedom he would have to figure something out.