Evernight With Bonus Materials

by Claudia Gray

  One of Lucas’s hands balled into a fist, and for a moment I thought he might hit Eduardo. Calling Lucas a coward was manifestly unfair, but this wasn’t the time to argue about it. I put a hand on his arm, trying to calm him.

  It was Kate who intervened, though. “Eduardo, can it. Lucas, get them in the warehouse.” She never looked away from the horizon, from the attackers she knew were coming. “We need all three of you to start packing our supplies. Fast as you can.”

  Eduardo turned to her. “No way are we running from this, Kate.”

  “You like fighting more than you like staying alive,” Kate said, never meeting his eyes. “But I try to think like Patton. I don’t run this group so everyone can die for the cause. I run it so the vampires have to die for theirs.”

  The shapes in the brush all rustled as one, moving closer. Lucas tensed, and I realized he could see them in the dark as well as I could. Ever since I’d first drunk his blood, he’d developed the first stirrings of vampiric power. That meant he knew what I knew: We didn’t have much time. Minutes, maybe.

  “Raquel, come on,” Lucas said, but she stubbornly remained by Dana’s side, shaking her head.

  “This isn’t safe,” I tried. “Please, Raquel, you could be killed.”

  Her voice trembled as she answered, but she said only, “I’m done with running.”

  Dana set aside the crossbow she’d been loading and faced Raquel. Her entire body seemed to vibrate with energy. She had been the one to spot the vampires, the one who had known about the danger longest—and she was already in battle mode. Yet she spoke gently to Raquel. “Packing up our stuff isn’t running. Okay? It’s something we need to do, because we’re going to have to get out of here, either after the fight or during it.”

  “Not if we win,” Raquel began, but stopped when she saw Dana’s expression.

  “They know our location now,” Lucas said. “More vampires will come. We’ve got to run. Help us get ready to run. That’s the best thing you can do right now.”

  Raquel never looked away from Dana as her face shifted from determination to resignation. “Next time,” she said. “Next time I’ll know how to fight.”

  “We’ll be in this together next time,” Dana agreed. Her gaze shifted to the brush and the pursuers. Nobody needed vampire senses to know how close they were now. “Get your butt out of here.”

  I grabbed Raquel’s hand and pulled her back into the warehouse. After a few days being confined here, always with dozens of people around, I felt weird seeing it almost empty. The blankets were disheveled, and some of the cots had been tipped over in the rush. Still in shock, I started folding a blanket.

  “Screw the blankets.” Lucas headed toward the weapons lockers. Almost everything had been taken by the hunters, but there were still a few stakes, arrows, and canisters of holy water.

  “We get the ammo ready. The rest we can replace.”

  “Of course.” I should have thought of that. But how could I? My brain was stuck, like when the needle of Dad’s record player caught in the scratches of his old jazz records: Are my parents outside? Is Balthazar? Will Black Cross kill people that I care about, people who are probably only trying to rescue me?

  Outside I heard a shout—then a scream.

  All three of us froze. The noise swelled outside from a few cries to a roar, and the metal wall of the warehouse thudded. It wasn’t a body—a rock, maybe, or a misfired arrow—but Raquel and I jumped.

  Lucas shook it off fastest. “Pack this stuff up. When they call for us, we’re gonna have about two minutes to get our gear into the vans. That’s it.”

  We got to work. It was difficult to concentrate. The cacophony outside frightened me, not only because of my fear for the others but also because it reminded me powerfully of the last Black Cross battle I’d witnessed: the burning of Evernight. My back still ached from the fall I’d taken while running across the flaming roof, and I imagined I could still taste smoke and ash. Before, I’d been able to comfort myself by thinking that it was all over—but it wasn’t. As long as Lucas and I were stuck with Black Cross, the battles would always follow us. Danger would always be near.

  With every shout, every thud, Lucas seemed to get more worked up. He wasn’t used to staying out of fights; he was more likely to start them.

  Trunk shut, locked, moving on. Do they want to take the wood that hasn’t been carved into stakes yet? Surely not—they can get wood anywhere, right? I kept trying to figure it out, working as fast as I could. Next to me, Raquel was simply grabbing armfuls of junk and dumping it into boxes without even checking to see what it was. She probably had the right idea.

  Something slammed hard into the metal wall again, and I gasped. Lucas didn’t tell me it was going to be all right; instead, he grabbed a stake.

  At that moment, two sprawling figures burst through one of the side doors. Even my vampire senses couldn’t tell me which was my own kind and which was the Black Cross hunter, because they were too tangled together—a blur of motion, sweat, and snarled curses. They staggered toward us, oblivious to our presence, only to their life-and-death struggle. The half-open door behind them showed a sliver of light, and let the screams come through even louder.

  “Do something,” Raquel whispered. “Lucas, you know what to do, right?”

  Lucas leaped forward, farther and faster than a mere human should’ve been able to, and swung his stake into the fray. Instantly one of the figures froze; the stake had paralyzed the vampire. I looked at his still face—green eyes, fair hair, features frozen in horror—and felt a flash of sympathy for him in the instant before the Black Cross hunter slid a long, broad blade from his belt and severed his opponent’s head with a single stroke. The vampire shuddered once, then crumbled to oily dust upon the floor.

  The vampire had been an old one, then; there was very little left of the mortal man he’d been. As the others stood there, looking down at the remains, I could only wonder if this had been one of my parents’ friends. I hadn’t recognized him, but whoever he’d been, he’d come here in the belief he was helping me.

  “How did you even do that?” Raquel said. “That was, like, superhuman.” She meant it only as a compliment, and luckily the Black Cross hunter was too exhausted and relieved to notice that Lucas had just called upon vampire power.

  My eyes sought Lucas’s. I was relieved to see no triumph there, only a plea for understanding. When he’d been forced to choose, he had to protect his fellow hunter. I got that. What I didn’t get was what would have happened if this vampire had been my mother or father.

  Eduardo leaned in through the open doorway, panting but somehow exhilarated by the fight. “We’ve pushed them back. Won’t have long before they return, though. We’ve got to load up now.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Someplace we can do real training. Get you new recruits into shape.” Eduardo glanced at me as he spoke, and although he didn’t look friendly, he looked—well, like possibly he hated me less. Now that I was a potential soldier, maybe he finally saw me as useful. But then his grin changed, becoming more cynical as he turned toward Lucas. “You won’t have any more excuses to run from a fight next time.”

  Lucas looked like he might punch Eduardo in the jaw, so I grabbed his hand. His temper sometimes threatened to get the better of him.

  “Come on, people!” Kate called from outside the warehouse.

  “Let’s move!”

  Excerpt from AFTERLIFE

  Chapter One

  “SUNRISE IS COMING,” BALTHAZAR SAID.

  Those were the first words anyone had spoken aloud in hours. Although I didn’t want to hear anything Balthazar had to say—about this or anything else—I knew he was right. Vampires could always feel the approaching dawn deep in their bones.

  Could Lucas feel it, too?

  We sat in the projection room of an abandoned theater, where the poster-covered walls still bore marks from last night’s battle. Vic, the only human in the roo
m, dozed on Ranulf’s shoulder, his sandy hair mussed from sleep; Ranulf sat quietly, bloodstained ax across his lap as though he expected more danger at any second. His long, thin face and bowl haircut had never made him look more like a medieval saint. Balthazar stood in the far corner of the room, keeping his distance out of respect for my grief. Yet his height and his broad shoulders meant he took up more than his share of room.

  I cradled Lucas’s head in my lap. Had I been alive, or a vampire, so many hours without moving would have made me stiff. As a ghost, though, freed of the demands of a physical body, I’d been able to hold him through the whole long night of his death. I brushed back my long red hair, trying not to notice that the ends had trailed in Lucas’s blood.

  Charity had murdered him in front of my eyes, taking advantage of Lucas’s desire to protect me rather than himself. It was her latest and most horrible attempt to hurt me, driven by her hatred for anybody who mattered to Balthazar, her brother and sire. She’d violated a vampire taboo by biting someone another vampire had bitten first—who had, in effect, been prepared for the transformation from living to undead. Lucas was supposedly mine to turn, or no one’s. But Charity hadn’t cared about any taboos in a long time. She didn’t care about anyone or anything except her twisted relationship with Balthazar.

  Wherever she was now, she was no doubt reveling in the fact that she’d broken my heart, and that she’d thrust Lucas into the very last place he would ever want to be.

  I’d rather be dead, Lucas had always said. When I was alive and so much more innocent, I had dreamed of him becoming a vampire with me. But he had been raised by the hunters of Black Cross, who loathed the undead and pursued them with the passion of a cult. Turning into a vampire had always been his ultimate nightmare.

  Now that nightmare had come true.

  “How long?” I said.

  “Minutes.” Balthazar took one step forward, saw the expression on my face, and came no closer. “Vic should go.”

  “What’s happening?” Vic’s voice was scratchy with sleep. He pushed himself upright, and his expression shifted from confusion to horror as he looked at Lucas’s body, bloody and pale on the floor. “Oh. I—for a sec, I thought I’d just had a nightmare or something. But this—it’s real.”

  Balthazar shook his head. “I’m sorry, Vic, but you need to leave.”

  I realized what Balthazar meant. My parents, who had always wanted me to follow in their footsteps, had told me about the first hours of the transition. When Lucas rose as a vampire, he would want fresh blood—want it desperately, as much as he could get. In the first frenzy of awakening, his hunger could push every other thought out of his mind.

  He’d be hungry enough to kill.

  Vic didn’t know any of that. “Come on, Balthazar. I’ve gone this far with you guys. I don’t want to leave Lucas now.”

  “Balthazar is correct,” Ranulf said. “It is safer that you leave.”

  “What do you mean, safer?”

  “Vic, go,” I said. I hated to push him away, but if he didn’t understand what was going on here, he needed a dose of harsh reality. “If you want to survive, go.”

  Vic’s face paled.

  More gently, Balthazar added, “This is no place for the living. This belongs to the dead.”

  Vic ran his hands through his shaggy hair, nodded once at Ranulf and walked out of the projection room. Probably he would head home, where he’d try to do something useful—clean house, maybe, or make food nobody else could eat. Human concerns seemed very distant at that moment.

  Now that Vic had left, I could finally voice the thought that had been haunting me for hours. “Should we—” My throat choked up, and I had to swallow hard. “Should we let this happen?”

  “You mean that you believe we should destroy Lucas.” From anybody else, this would have sounded too harsh to bear; from Ranulf, it was simple, calm fact. “That we should prevent him from rising as a vampire, and accept this as his final death.”

  “I don’t want to do that. I can’t begin to tell you how much I don’t want that,” I answered. Every word I spoke felt like blood being squeezed from my heart. “But I know it’s what Lucas would want.” Didn’t loving someone mean putting their wishes first, even with something as terrible as this?

  Balthazar shook his head. “Don’t do it.”

  “You sound very sure.” I tried to say it calmly. Still, I was so angry at Balthazar that I could hardly look at him; he’d brought Lucas into the battle against Charity, even though he knew Lucas was numb with grief and unable to fight at his best. It felt like Lucas’s death was as much his fault as Charity’s. “Are you just telling me what I want to hear?”

  Balthazar frowned. “When have I ever done that? Bianca, listen to me. If you’d asked me the day before I became a vampire whether I’d want to rise as undead, I would have said no.”

  “You would still say no, if you had the chance. If you could go back. Wouldn’t you?” I demanded.

  That caught him off guard. “We aren’t only talking about me. Think about your parents. About Patrice, and Ranulf, the other vampires you know. Would they really be better off rotting in their graves?”

  Some vampires were okay, weren’t they? That was true of most of the ones I’d ever known. My parents had known centuries of happiness and love together. Lucas and I could have that, maybe. I knew he hated the idea of being a vampire—but only two short years ago, he’d hated all vampires with blind, unthinking prejudice. He’d come so far so quickly; surely he could come to accept himself in time.

  It was worth a chance. It had to be. Everything in my heart told me that Lucas deserved another chance, and that we deserved another hope of being together.

  I traced a finger across Lucas’s face: his forehead, his cheekbone, and the outline of his lips. The heaviness and paleness of his body reminded me of a carving on a tombstone—fixed, unliving, unchanging.

  “It’s close,” Balthazar said. He came closer. “It’s time.”

  Ranulf nodded. “I sense it as well. You should step away, Bianca.”

  “I’m not letting go of him.”

  “Just be ready to move, then. If you have to.” Balthazar shifted his weight from one foot to the next, steadying his stance like a fighter preparing for battle.

  It’s going to be okay, Lucas, I thought, willing him to hear me past the divide between this world and the next. Wasn’t he about to cross that divide to return to me? So maybe we were close enough for him to listen. We’re dead, but we can still be together. Nothing matters more than that. We’re stronger than death. Now nothing else ever has to come between us. You and I never have to be apart again.

  I wanted him to believe that. I wanted to believe it, too.

  Lucas’s hand twitched.

  I gasped—a reflex of the body I’d created, more a memory of what shock did to a living being than anything else.

  “Be ready,” Balthazar said. He was talking to Ranulf, not to me.

  Shakily, I laid one hand upon Lucas’s chest. I realized only then that I was waiting for a heartbeat. His heart would never beat again.

  One of Lucas’s feet shifted slightly, and his head turned a couple inches to the side. “Lucas?” I whispered. He needed to understand that he wasn’t alone, before he realized anything else. “Can you hear me? It’s Bianca. I’m waiting for you.”

  He didn’t move.

  “I love you so much.” I wanted so badly to cry, but my ghostly body created no tears. “Please come back to me. Please.”

  The fingers of his right hand straightened, muscles tensing, then curled back in toward his palm.

  “Lucas, can you—”

  “No!” Lucas shoved himself away from the floor, from me, stumbling to all fours. His eyes were wild, too dazed to truly see. “No!”

  His back slammed against the wall. He stared at the three of us, his eyes displaying no recognition, no sanity. His hands pressed against the wall, fingers curved like claws, and I thought he migh
t try to dig through it. Maybe it was a vampire instinct for digging your way out of a grave.

  “Lucas, it’s okay.” I held my hands out, doing my best to remain completely solid and opaque. It was better to look as familiar as possible. “We’re here with you.”

  “He doesn’t know you yet,” Balthazar said. “He’s looking at us, but he can’t see.”

  Ranulf added, “He wants only blood.”

  At the word blood, Lucas’s head tilted, like a predator catching the scent of prey. I realized that was the only word he’d recognized.

  The man I loved had been reduced to an animal—to a monster, I realized, the sick, empty, murderous shell that Lucas had once believed every vampire to be.

  Lucas’s eyes narrowed. He bared his teeth, and with a shock I saw, for the first time, his vampire fangs. They altered his face so much that I hardly knew him, and that more than anything else tore at me. His posture shifted into a crouch, and I realized he was about to attack—any of us, all of us. Anything that moved. Me.

  Balthazar moved first. He leaped—pounced—toward Lucas, colliding with him so forcefully that the wall behind them crunched and plaster dust fell from the ceiling. Lucas threw him off, but then Ranulf was on him in an attempt to push him into a corner.

  “What are you doing?” I cried. “Stop hurting him!”

  Balthazar shook his head as he rose from the floor. “This is the only thing he understands right now, Bianca. Dominance.”

  Lucas pushed Ranulf backward, so hard that he thudded against me, and I stumbled into the old projector. Sharp metal jabbed into my shoulder. I felt pain, real pain, the kind I’d experienced back when I had a real body instead of this ghostly simulation. When I put my hand to my shoulder, I felt a lukewarm wetness beneath my fingers and pulled them away to see blood—silvery and strange. I hadn’t even realized that I still had blood now. The liquid gleamed like mercury, almost iridescent in the dim light.

  The three-way fight in front of me was growing more violent—Balthazar’s foot to Lucas’s gut, Lucas’s fist to Ranulf’s jaw—but Balthazar saw that I was injured and shouted, “Bianca, stay back! You’re bleeding!”