No, that’s not entirely correct. His seat isn’t empty, because Reece is using it as a footstool.
“Get off!” I shout, slapping his feet away before I sit down.
“Testy,” he says, looking refreshed and at peace as he keeps his size-twelve boots right where they were.
Bianca is at his side, dutiful but not looking quite so hot.
Whatever deterioration she started yesterday is still going on today, only . . . double-time.
Her hair is limp, the roots dirty and brown in the center of her scalp.
Her skin is pale, bordering on gray, her eyes dark where they were once green, yellow where they were once white.
She covers them quickly with big Gucci sunglasses when she sees me studying her, but it’s too late. Her hand is shaking, and I see moisture on her palms and armpits.
I think back to the vampire lore I studied to write Better off Bled #2, which features a pivotal scene in which Scarlet is forced, chained to the wall, by Count Victus to watch a friend of hers turn, the vampire term for becoming one of them. I described then the same symptoms I’m seeing now: limp hair, dull eyes, excessive sweating, shallow breath, a change in eye color, pale skin as the human body is literally transformed into the living dead.
According to my research, it is supposed to take seventy-two hours, meaning Bianca is already halfway there, presuming Reece turned her the day she went missing.
I almost feel pity for her, what she must be going through, the changes in her body—the pain and discomfort—as her dead cells are overtaken by silent predators, blood-hungry cells taking over and changing everything, inside and out.
Then I imagine how much stronger, more vicious and evil she’ll be tomorrow, and the image quickly fades.
I take my seat, breathing heavily, sliding forward to distance myself from Reece and Bianca.
I’m not alone. Even Bianca’s once-faithful girlfriends—minions, I call them, while Abby prefers the term posse—have distanced themselves, taking seats on the other side of the room.
It’s as if they think whatever she has might be catching.
So now it’s just the happy couple, feet up on Wyatt’s chair, as Mrs. Armbruster clears her throat. “Nora,” she says, imperiously, as she does everything. “Might I have a word up at my desk, please?”
Abby looks at me questioningly before I get out of my seat and trudge to the teacher’s big, oak desk, acutely aware that I haven’t bathed in twenty-four hours and barely had time to brush my teeth, let alone match my socks, before rushing out of the dorm that morning.
“Nora,” Mrs. Armbruster whispers, a concerned look on her face as her bifocals rest on her large, pendulous breasts, “have you seen Wyatt this morning?”
I shake my head, afraid if I speak, my voice will crack and give Reece that much more ammunition.
“Well”—Mrs. Armbruster sighs, her sad, hazel eyes looking tired and wan—“I’m very concerned. He’s such a sweet boy, and I know he has many demands on his time—you all do, and don’t I know it—but he always gets to homeroom on time. And you, too, and Abby. And now you’re rushing in late, looking like something the cat dragged in, barking orders at that horrible Bianca and that dramatic new student, Reece.
“Is everything quite all right? I know it can be stressful, all these grown-up demands on you, your talent, your time—and you’re still just children, the way I see it. We have excellent counselors here, if you’re . . . troubled. Or if Wyatt is, or if you’re troubled because Wyatt is.”
I smile, looking into her eyes surrounded by deep laugh lines and lit by kindness.
Is she ready to hear that vampires really exist?
That they go to her school?
That they sit in the back of her classroom?
“No, it’s just typical teenage drama, Mrs. Armbruster. Promise. We’ll straighten it out on our own time, and we won’t disrespect you by being late again.”
Mrs. Armbruster frowns, shakes her head. “It’s not me I’m worried about, dear. Just remember . . . I’m here, whatever you need.”
I smile, walk slowly back to my seat, and give her a reassuring wink when I’m finally sitting down, but she’s already gently snoozing.
Abby looks over at me and whispers, “What was that all about?”
“Nothing,” I whisper back. “She just—”
But Abby’s phone is vibrating, and I know what that means: another early call, some reshoots on her new movie, a photo shoot, whatever. We all know the drill by now.
Even Mrs. Armbruster recognizes the telltale ringtone from Abby’s agent and has an office pass waiting for her by the time my best friend gathers up her big purse and clomps from the class, giving me a rushed smile over her shoulder before the real world takes her away.
Once the door has closed behind her, Mrs. Armbruster is silently dozing again above her roll book. When the scattered clusters of cliques and plotters have gone back to their hushed conversations, Reece leans forward until his lips are mere centimeters from my ear.
My entire body wants to bolt, to scream, but I force myself to sit straight and quietly and not move a muscle, lest he think I’m weak again.
“And then there was one,” he says, breath oozing across the nape of my neck, caressing the very spot where he bit Bianca.
“If it’s the right one,” I say through gritted teeth, “one is all it takes.”
And just like that, the bell rings. For once I’m the one with the last word!
I rush from class on shaky legs, clear of the door and deep into the halls before Reece and Bianca can even rise.
Chapter 14
And still, Reece beats me to my locker. How—when I left the room a full minute before he did—is anybody’s guess.
He stands in front of it and won’t budge, even when kids on either side of him give us dirty looks and whisper not so subtly.
Once they are gone, he asks, “Have you ever skipped school? In all your days at Nightshade Academy, have you ever once just . . . ditched?”
“What do you think?” I ask, clutching my AP English book to my chest.
“I think it’s a good time to start.” He leads me by the arm through the emptying commons and out toward the student parking lot.
I don’t resist. I follow him willingly, eagerly, because of one thing: Wyatt.
He must have him hidden somewhere. It’s the only explanation.
He races across the lot, head down, hands in his pockets, the California sun bright and clear across what little of his pale skin remains not covered by his leather jacket, long skinny jeans, thick black boots, dark sunglasses, and backward baseball cap.
I linger as he opens the door to a gleaming silver Mercedes, making him get in first to avoid any more exposure to the harsh light of day.
“I thought your kind avoided the sun at all costs,” I murmur as I slide into the leather of the passenger seat and close the heavy door.
“The older you are,” he says, pushing a glowing blue button on the dashboard as the engine purrs to life, “the more resistant you are to the UV rays.”
“Resistant?” I ask as he cruises from the crowded parking lot of Nightshade Academy and out into the sparse midmorning traffic. “But not immune?”
“Never immune, dear Nora. At least, not while one is still alive.”
“Where are you taking me?” I ask as we cruise past Rodeo Drive and into—and then quickly out of—Beverly Hills proper.
It feels odd to be on the road—to be anywhere other than the marble-lined halls of Nightshade Academy—this early in the day.
The sky above is a pristine California blue, little white clouds few and far between.
The air has a hushed feel to it, and not just because we’re trapped in this coffin of a car. It’s like life is on hold, for everybody, until I get this mess sorted out.
Traffic is still thick with go-getters hustling between lanes, but few are as aggressive as Reece as he steers the silver bullet of a car through the pr
istine streets.
Huge mansions dot our path, giving way to gleaming office buildings wedged between old-school mission-style offices with Spanish-style roofs or sleek, modern-looking cafés lined with uncomfortable-looking metal tables for two, few of them bustling at this early hour.
Every building has character, that tragically hip and loaded-with-history silver-screen character, and how I wish I could just step out at the next light and take leave of this claustrophobic car and angry driver.
How I wish I could walk away from the way this story is unfolding and trash this plotline the way I’ve been trashing so many of Scarlet Stain’s lately.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a trash bin for life, where you could drag all the scary, rotten, evil, mean, wicked moments and delete them permanently?
But even those computer files are never truly gone, I’ve heard. Instead, they haunt the innards of your computer where they lurk, just out of sight.
No, there is no way to delete or rewrite this particular scene. For once, I’m not the author. Reece is.
“We’re going to a place where you’ll be spending a lot of time,” he says as the neighborhoods we pass through suddenly grow more urban, then industrial, then . . . deserted.
I watch the streets zip past the tinted windows, darker than must be legal, hoping to remember where he’s taking me.
“No need to memorize the details,” he says impatiently, as if this is amateur hour on some prime-time cop show and he’s the crusty veteran policeman to my eager but clueless rookie. “I’m not kidnapping you, after all. You’ll be free to come or go as you please. But I promise you that once you hear my offer, you’ll find it hard to resist.”
Ugh. Nothing worse than a smug-ass vampire.
We ride in silence for another few minutes, the beauty, history, and charm of Beverly Hills long gone as we pass derelict brick factories and junkyards until we come to a large warehouse at the end of an industrial cul-de-sac. It is bordered on one side by an empty field, on the other by a fenced-in lot full of rusty cars.
He pulls around to the back of the warehouse, a long and dusty journey in itself, and as we emerge from the car, I hear nothing but the hum of vehicles flying by on the distant highway and crickets chirping in the vacant lot next door.
“Peaceful, isn’t it?” he asks over his shoulder. A gleaming new padlock hangs from a twisting length of rusty chain link around two door handles, and he slides a small key in, his long pale fingers are swift and agile. He pauses abruptly. “So peaceful,” he repeats, as if to himself. “No one to hear you scream, Nora. No one to run to if you dared. No one to listen to your story if you found the courage to tell it. This is my kind of place.” Then, quickly, he returns to the lock.
The chain falls to the ground, where he leaves it—no need to worry about anyone breaking in or neighbors stumbling across it.
We both step over it to enter the main doorway. Inside, the floor is rough concrete covered by years, maybe decades, of dust, sand, and rat droppings. It is vast and hopeless.
The walls are a drab tan, covered with grime and dust and oil and grease and the odd swatch of indecipherable graffiti, long since faded.
The skeleton of old, rusty machinery sits here and there, with no rhyme or reason, their working parts long ago raided for metals and anything else the squatters who spent time here could pawn, recycle, or perhaps stab each other with.
It goes on forever, longer than it is wide, and endlessly long at that.
Dozens—who knows, maybe hundreds—of broken windowpanes circle the ceiling. They let in dusty, diffused light that takes so long to get to the floor, it’s orange and muted by the time it arrives.
The warehouse is at least three or four stories tall, but there are no other floors, save for an office way in the back, roughly the size of my mom’s old trailer, accessed by a single, steep metal staircase that’s missing about half the rungs in the middle. The office windows are broken, with toilet paper hanging out of one and reaching almost all the way to the floor below. It’s the kind of place you could ride a bike around three or four times, front to back, back to front, and be winded.
Here and there random signs of human life appear: a discarded milk crate, a broken beer bottle, a can with the top cut off and full of sand and cigarette butts, a crumpled Nacho Tacos bag.
We stand just inside the doorway for a quiet moment. Our eyes—or perhaps just my eyes—adjust to the dim lighting. He marches forward, no doubt expecting me to follow. Dutifully, without argument, I do. Our careful footsteps echo across the wide expanse, the whole warehouse endless and broken and rusty and gross.
Except . . .
Except for a section there to the left, which has been swept, sanded, smoothed, tiled, and separated by three oriental screens. They are beautiful, luxurious, and I’m immediately drawn to them. I step closer without asking permission, and Reece follows without giving any. They look so out of place in this depressing dungeon.
“What is this place?” I ask, moving steadily toward the red-and-black screens, which are covered with traditional Japanese drawings: sumo wrestlers and petite women in flowing kimonos. Each screen has four panels, and the tops billow in alternating silky white drapes that cascade down to cover the gaps where the screens bend.
“This?” Reece asks, dangerously close to the back of my neck as I approach the opening of the three bordering screens. “This is for you, Nora. This is all for you.”
I enter the opening of the room (I don’t know what else to call it), stepping onto a grand woven black-and-red silk rug that covers the entire floor.
In the middle of the rug is a big black desk, the kind only an author could fully appreciate—a place to spend a lot of time, with plenty of room up top for papers and books and pages and drafts and pens and pencils and sodas and open bags of chips but also plenty of legroom below for fidgeting when the ideas just won’t come but the pages are due anyway.
If I had a house of my own, somewhere up in the Hills, with a home office, a great view, lots of windows to let in all that beautiful California sun, and hardwood floors to roll my chair across, it’s just the kind of desk I would choose.
On top of the desk is a laptop, but not just any laptop. It’s the exact same model and year of the one I use to tap out all the Better off Bled books, down to the ergonomic wrist guard and the sleek metallic skin. Nearby is a wireless printer, just as sleek and making me wonder how he could know the very tech I use and feel so comfortable with.
In the space between each of the ornate oriental screens are towering wrought-iron candelabras in all different sizes, the kind you see in Hollywood movies where they have unlimited budgets and a team of people whose whole job, every day, is simply to light the sets.
In all of the candleholders sit flickering candles—long ones and short ones and tan ones and white ones and ivory ones—that fill the roomy space with the scents of ginger and nutmeg.
Thick satin throw pillows as big as couch cushions in all colors of the rainbow lean against each side of the desk.
I approach it cautiously, my hand coming to rest on one of those expensive, space-age, ergonomically correct chairs: the kind with gears and levers and pulleys and hydraulics that hiss when you finally take a seat.
The laptop is open, the screen black.
I brush my finger gently across the mouse pad and the screen flickers to life, revealing a new document, the screen mostly white except for some big, bold type in the middle of the page.
I recognize it immediately as a title page. This is what it says:
Better off Bled #5:
Scarlet’s Symphony of Pain
by Nora Falcon
“What do you think?” Reece asks from the entrance, standing just to the side and looking at me rather than at the glowing laptop screen. “Catchy, huh?”
I turn toward him, his slim body suddenly seeming to block the opening to my private, if glorified cubicle.
Trying to sound brave and dismissive
, I say, “Plenty catchy. I wish you luck with it. My lawyers might have some issues with the title and the subtitle and the byline, of course, but other than that, you should be OK. I already told you—”
“Before you answer,” he interrupts, sliding a remote control out of his jacket pocket, “I want you to see something.”
“I don’t want to see something.” I stay put. “I’ve seen quite enough.”
“No,” he says, his voice deep and deadly. “You’ve never seen anything quite like this.” And with that dramatic announcement, he steps to the side while pressing a small red button at the top of the remote.
I look past him and focus on a large cube in the middle of the empty warehouse floor. I don’t know how I could have missed it when I first walked in, other than the vibrant oriental screens drawing my attention in the opposite direction.
The cube is covered with shimmering silver curtains. They’re so shimmery, so thin, they might even be parachutes for all I know. They’re billowing now but not from any breeze. Something in the remote has triggered a switch at the top of the cube, and now the curtains fall down the sides of the cube like a waterfall, pooling in great quivering heaps onto the floor.
It’s no square; it’s a cage.
Inside the cage, arms chained above his head, feet barely touching the floor, is Wyatt.
Chapter 15
“Take him down,” I say, rushing out of the frilly room and across the pitted, dusty floor toward the cage.
Reece follows me slowly, dawdling, stepping on glass and rusty tin and not saying a single word as I take in the scene.
Wyatt is still wearing the black track pants from the other day at Hallowed Grounds. His chest is still covered by the too-snug gray T-shirt, coated with the grime of the warehouse and streaked with sweat, probably some tears, and the slightest trace of blood just under his sagging chin. His dirty head lolls across his chest.
The Vampire Book of the Month Club Page 8
