We raced for the parking lot. My clunker was so old I had to use a key to let myself in and manually open the other locks. It cost us. The principal had stopped at the edge of the lot, but the cops were breathing down our necks one row away when I slammed the car into gear and backed out at ludicrous speed. Bella didn’t even have her door fully shut. It scraped against the much nicer car next to mine. I’d pay for it later—Agents Stick and Stuffed would, anyway. I wondered how they’d feel about me running from the law.
“Whoo hoo!” Ulric said as we shot out of the lot like a bat outta hell. “Way to go, Gen.”
I rolled my eyes at the rearview mirror. “Yeah, because running from the cops doesn’t make us look at all guilty. Bella, what were you thinking?”
“That it’s all my fault. I tried to get through the day, but I have to see Bram. To tell him I’m sorry.”
“Bella, we keep telling you it isn’t your fault. You want to blame someone, blame octo-jock,” I said.
“Octo-jock?” Ulric asked, amused.
“Yeah, too many tentacles.”
“I knew I liked you.”
I looked away from the warmth of his smile. I felt good and bad all at the same time. Part of me had the warm fuzzies about being part of a group again. I hadn’t realized how much I liked high school and my clique until they were taken away from me, but then I froze up at the remembrance that this was a role I was playing. I couldn’t afford friendships that could cloud my judgment, and I’d be moving on when all was said and done. The thought stung more than it should have. These weren’t my people, I told myself—no color palette, death poetry, so many piercings I wondered why they didn’t spring a leak. It didn’t help, but I might as well get used to it. I had an eternal lifetime of good-byes to look forward to.
“I don’t know what got into those guys,” Lily said. “I mean, Nat’s always been a putz, but Kevin’s usually pretty decent … for a jock.”
“Something in the water,” Ulric answered, joking, but I made a mental note. “A lot of weirdness going on. And I’m not just talking about Lily’s love life.”
“Bite me, Toby,” she snapped back. There was silence, and I felt like some kind of line had been crossed. Finally, Lily said, “Sorry.”
Ulric nodded tersely, and we sat in silence for the rest of the ride.
6
It was a straight shot up Route 9 and probably wouldn’t have taken long if it hadn’t been for the zillion traffic lights. We might not have hit them all, but we gave it our best shot. We passed two malls without even turning in, and that almost killed me all over again. I only managed because I was thinking of Bram, his perfect skull bashed in, lying in a coma. I wondered what a sip of vampire blood could do for him. But if we didn’t finish the ritual blood exchange, would it kill him? Or make him stronger? They hadn’t covered that in spy school. I doubted it was because they didn’t have the answer—they probably knew more about us than we did ourselves.
That was what held us, beyond the fact that the Feds knew our identities and could hunt us down if we chose to bolt instead of cooperate. They knew things they hadn’t yet shared. Things like the key to the sunscreen potion used in our bottled blood. Maybe even what Bobby’s dam, the wench Mellisande, had done to her own sire Alistaire to twist him nearly beyond recognition, and how to reverse it.
As Alistaire stood when I’d last seen him, as he stood now, he was a danger to everyone. A triple threat—psychic, unstoppable, and mad as a hatter—but I couldn’t forget that he’d let me live, temporarily anyway. He did sort of imply that all bets were off should our paths cross again. Maybe even that he was going to do his very best to make that happen.
“You think he’ll be okay, right?” Bella asked, and for a minute I couldn’t think who she was talking about, my thoughts had wandered so far. “And Gavin and Byron too?”
“Bram’s going to be fine,” I answered, with more certainty than I felt. I couldn’t imagine what the police could hold Byron and Gavin on, since neither had thrown a single punch.
“You don’t know that,” Bella said faintly.
“I have a strong premonition,” I said. I had to steer things back around to the arcane somehow. My investigation so far had only led me to more questions. No answers that I could use to barter with the Feds.
“You mean, like a vision?” Lily asked. “I get those sometimes.”
“Not as strong as all that, though I wish. Maybe you can work with me, teach me how to get more in touch with my powers.”
Lily’s eyes shown when I looked into them via the rearview mirror. “Absolutely. Maybe we can try a healing spell for Bram while we’re at it.”
Bingo, I thought. I wondered if the zippy feeling I’d felt at Red Rock had anything to do with a spell. Hopefully, I’d know soon enough.
• • •
The lady at the hospital reception desk gave us the same look the woman in the school office had given me yesterday. I was tempted to stick out my tongue or cross my eyes, but I behaved myself. For once. After all, we needed her to give up Bram’s room number so we didn’t wander around aimlessly.
Ulric made the approach, hoping, I think, to charm her. He wore his most wolfish smile as he asked after Bram.
“I’ll need names and IDs,” the woman said, unimpressed by his charm. Of course, she was old enough to have been on duty the day of his birth, so that might have factored into it.
She directed us to a bank of elevators up to the fifth floor and handed us green visitor passes. They matched my eyes—the passes, not the elevators, which were an industrial gray color, stark against the white walls which were broken two-thirds of the way down by a wide strip of mustard yellow that was probably meant to be cheerful. Or to make the visitors look as jaundiced as the patients, so the latter didn’t feel so bad.
We were halfway to the elevators when I heard her pick up the phone and say into it, “Four for Thomkins on their way up.”
I didn’t think any of the others heard, since they didn’t have my vamped-out senses. I looked over my shoulder and found the reception lady staring back. “That’s right,” she said to the person on the other end of the line.
She replaced the receiver, and I knew we were screwed. I figured I could have another of my “premonitions,” about what awaited us at the other end of the elevator ride, but running again would only compound the police interest in us. Maybe I could learn something from the questioning, like the identity of the missing kids.
Sure enough, there was an armed officer waiting for us as the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor, though he wisely held off making himself known until the doors slid closed behind us. He insisted on escorting us to the visitors’ lounge and stood guard outside, promising that someone would be with us shortly. Oh joy, oh rapture.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” Ulric said, slapping the particleboard table in the midst of the 1970s Day-Glo orange chairs. “Trapped. Although,” he said slowly, “three girls, no waiting. I could do worse.”
“Dream on, loverboy,” Lily answered, with a slap to his arm.
“Go easy on him,” I said. “Every lounge needs a lizard.”
Ulric clutched his heart and fell, mock-wounded, into the closest chair. Only Bella wasn’t joining in. She slumped onto the couch, looking like guilt’s poster girl.
We cooled our heels for ten or twenty minutes that felt like a century before the door opened again, letting in the two officers we’d evaded at school. Oh yes, we were criminal masterminds.
I hadn’t gotten a good look at the detectives back at school, but now that I had … well, we had Hunky Cop and his partner Crinkly. Hunky Cop had a scar on his chin, very Indiana Jones. Without it, his fine features and long lashes might have hurled him past handsome and into pretty-boy territory. And no one wanted that.
Really. I swear.
His partner had the kind of brush-cut blond hair where you almost can’t see the gray. Almost. But you could tell his age from the crinkles—between the
brows, up around the eyes, and bracketing the mouth. His face was like a map that had been refolded one too many times. I had supreme sympathy for the collagenically challenged. The old me would have said, “You poor thing, didn’t your mama ever teach you to moisturize,” but I bit down the urge. Hard. Blood flooded my mouth, and it was so, so wrong that it whetted my appetite for more. Seriously, macking on myself ? I was officially a mutant.
“Well, kids, I guess you know you’re in a lot of trouble,” Crinkly Cop began.
“See,” said Ulric, slapping me like Lily’d slapped him. “I told you we shouldn’t have skipped fourth period.”
I rolled my eyes. They were getting quite the work-out.
Crinkly ignored him, like he hadn’t spoken. “I guess you know we’ve already talked to your friends. They had quite a lot to say.”
“I doubt it,” Lily mumbled.
Hunky turned to her. “What was that?”
“Look, they didn’t see the fight, okay?” she said vehemently.
“They were there,” Crinkly insisted. “We have witnesses.”
“No,” I said, drawing his attention. “It was all me. The jocks were beating on Bella, and I stepped in to help her. If the jerky jocks say otherwise, they’re lying.”
Both cops gave me the body check—up and down. I could see them mentally calculating my height and weight, trying to figure out how in the world I could have caused the damage they’d seen. Clearly, they didn’t want to discount a confession, but—
“We’d ask them, except one can’t say anything at all with his jaw wired shut. The other can’t remember.”
“Or so he says,” Hunky murmured to his partner. “Could be selective amnesia.”
“Why? Because I’m a girl ?” I taunted. It gave away that I could hear him, but he hadn’t truly been whispering. Not effectively, anyway.
Hunky looked at me. Again, measuring. “No, because he’s got about fifty pounds on you and you’re a girl,” he answered.
“Sixty at least, but who’s counting?” I said. It just slipped out.
To his left, I could see Ulric smile … and then something else caught my attention. In the lounge window, which was blurry with fingerprints smudging the cheap glass, was a face, contorted in anger. Rick’s. But why? He stared at me, his glare almost hot enough to melt through the glass and scald me.
The officers, their backs to the door, blocking us in, couldn’t see him, though Hunky Cop turned to look at my sudden preoccupation.
Rick had disappeared.
“I have to pee,” I announced suddenly, thinking that maybe Rick was trying to give me some kind of message. Maybe I could find and talk to him.
Hunky Cop looked back at me suspiciously. “Right now?”
“I can probably wait until I get to the bathroom.”
Somehow, he didn’t appreciate my humor. “Fine. I’ll walk you there.”
“And they say chivalry is dead.”
He gestured me ahead of him. I looked right and left as we walked, hoping to catch sight of Rick waving me into one of the rooms, though I had no idea how I’d ditch my escort. I didn’t see him by the time we hit the rest room, and I didn’t see any choice but to go in. No sooner was I through the door than I was slammed up against it, an inch or so of solid wood between me and Hunky Cop outside, who suddenly didn’t seem like the enemy.
Hunky pounded on the door. “You okay in there?” he called.
“I just slipped,” I called back. “Sorry! Someone spilt water.”
I looked into Rick’s eyes, which were far too close and crazed. I wanted to thrust him back and demand to know what he thought he was doing, but he had back-up in the form of a redheaded jock in gray sweats and a wife-beater T-shirt. Resigned, I let Rick keep the flaming skull on my T-shirt twisted up in his fist.
“What the hell, dirtwad? This is the ladies’ room,” I said. Luckily, pissed fit both my cover and my mood.
“You put my guys in the hospital,” Rick growled. “Nat is eating through a straw.”
“Dude, my guy isn’t eating at all, so you can back the hell up.”
I’d never seen Rick like this. If he was acting, he was doing a helluva job at it, but I thought this was something more. There was something off, like the crazy violence last night at Red Rock. It had even gotten to me. I’d broken somebody’s jaw. Only I hadn’t felt angry, just … energized. I didn’t even know if the jerky jock had really deserved it or if it was some kind of drug or spell that was speaking through his fists.
Rick pulled me toward him and slammed me back against the door again. I heard a manly yelp from outside and knew that Hunky Cop had tried to push his way in during the millisecond my body wasn’t blocking the door.
“Police!” he yelled. “I’m coming in.”
“The police, man!” the redheaded sweat-child said, as if Rick couldn’t hear for himself.
“No worries,” Rick answered.
He grabbed me to him again with one hand and flung the door open with the other, pushing me into the shocked cop with enough force that I’d have fallen if he hadn’t caught me. Rick and Red made a break for it while the cop’s arms were full and his balance was off, bolting down the hall and dodging a gurney in their way. They were gone in a flash.
Hunky Cop twitched like he was priming to run after them, but I grabbed his arms and hugged him, as if I were a shaken little girl in need of reassurance. I didn’t know what Rick had been about, but there was no need to expose us both to the cops … for now.
Hunky held me for another second, until I pretended to stop shivering, then gripped my forearms gently and eased me far enough away to see my face.
“Who were those guys?”
“A couple of jocks,” I said. “Ticked off that I’d hurt their friends. I told you it was me.”
He looked stunned. “Do you know their names?”
I shook my head. “I’m new here. Outside of the goths, I don’t really know anyone.”
“So you fought for a girl you’ve just met?” he asked suspiciously.
“Wouldn’t you?”
He didn’t have an answer for that. He brought me back to his partner, and they questioned us for another twenty minutes or so, but in the end, with only my account of things and no one to cry foul or press charges, there wasn’t much they could do. Oh, there’d been beer bottles and whatnot all over the site, but it was too late to check our blood alcohol levels, and unless they fingerprinted us, which in any case would only prove we’d handled the bottles, not that we’d drunk out of them, they were out of luck. But they’d be watching. That was clear enough.
By the time the questioning wound down, I was eying Hunky Cop’s neck like a junkie with the midnight munchies. It was his own fault, really. The coffee he’d had right in front of me probably qualified as cruel and unusual punishment. If he’d been drinking mochachinos, he would have gone down. My willpower only stretched so far.
And, of course, I had to decline even the sodas they offered us because of my blood-only diet. But I probably looked totally tough to the others, like “I don’t want nothin’ from you, Copper.”
Finally, Bella moaned, “Now can we see Bram?”
The cops took pity on us. “You go with them,” Crinkly said to his partner. “I want to talk to the girl a second.”
He meant me. I’d faced down worse, though, than a cop in a no-Macy’s town. I wasn’t worried.
Bella, Lily, and Ulric all looked at me to be sure I was okay with that, and I nodded them on.
“Go,” I added. “I’ll be right there.”
Hunky Copy ushered them out, Ulric shooting me backward glances until the door closed behind them.
“Girl,” Crinkly said, calling my attention back to him. “Geneva. You’re new here, so possibly you don’t understand the way things work. If someone’s knocking your friend around, you get her out of there. You don’t break some guy’s jaw and another’s arm.” He looked stern, implacable, serious.
“Yes, s
ir,” I answered, even though it hurt to say it. I’d do it again in a second if I had to, and I knew it.
“Good. Anything else happens and your name comes up, I’m locking you away until I can find something to stick you with—jaywalking, underage drinking, fake ID. I don’t like it when trouble rolls into my town.”
He sounded like he was straight out of the old west, but I was smart enough not to crack a smile.
“Understood.”
And finally, finally he led me to the others. To Bram.
Ulric tapped Lily on the shoulder, and they both shifted away from Bram’s bedside far enough to make room for me. I thought Ulric needed a second, anyway. He pretended to cough into his sleeve, but I saw him use it to wipe away a tear. I was touched that they’d give up a place for me at the bedside when I really didn’t belong. I was new and I’d failed Bram. I knew it, even if they didn’t. Super-vamp powers came with super responsibility … or something like that. Admittedly, what I remembered most about Spider-Man was that upside-down kiss. Oh, and Toby Maguire’s totally hot blue eyes.
But I wasn’t thinking about that right then. I was thinking about kohl-lined chocolate brown eyes and how really awesome it would be to see them open.
“Bram?” I whispered.
His still-perfectly-shaped head didn’t move.
“He’s breathing on his own at least,” Bella said in a hushed voice. “That’s good.”
I didn’t know what it was about hospitals that made everybody—even me—speak in whispers.
Bella was right. An oxygen tube fed into Bram’s nostrils, a heart monitor blipped away and an IV dripped, but he was breathing on his own. There was some kind of doohickey on one index finger that fed stats into yet another monitor, which beeped at intervals. It was a regular medical musical.
“Will he be okay?” I asked, turning to Officer Crinkly.
“That’s for a doctor to say.”
“But you know,” I accused him. “You’ve talked to them.”
He refused to say more, except to ask, “Do you want to see the other kids? The ones you put here?”
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