“She was becoming . . . a liability,” he explains without sympathy or concern.
“Abby? Little Abby? Vegetarian, pacifist, wimpus extraordinaire Abby? A liability? How?”
“She hated us,” he spits, finally showing some emotion. “She hated Bianca, hated me for turning Bianca. I heard her twice in class talking about vampires. Apropos of nothing, mind you. Just, ‘Blah, blah, blah; by the way, did you know vampires go to school here?’ What was I supposed to do? No one believed her, thankfully, but I couldn’t risk her saying the right words at the right time to the right person and finding an ally at Nightshade Academy.”
I shake my head, tears flowing freely now. I try to make my voice sound steely as I say, “You shouldn’t have done that,” but I fail and whimper instead.
“Really?” he says, suddenly interested. “And why’s that?”
And so I play it, the only card I have left, slapping it on the table. “It’s done,” I say, shoulders drooping. “I’m out. You lied, so it’s over. Forget you. Forget your stupid book. We’re done.”
He stands, seeming taller than ever before.
I inch back, away from him, but the room is so small there’s nowhere else to go.
He stands erect, his fists clenched, his eyes as black as night, his fangs glistening like diamonds in the flickering candlelight as they threaten to literally erupt from his upper jaw in a spasm of pure rage. “Nora, you try my patience. You really do. Bianca? Abby? My dear, let me assure you, they are just the beginning. Wyatt is next. Do you no longer care about your friend?”
“I care. I just don’t believe you anymore. I think the minute I’m through with that book, the moment I type the last word on the last page, you’ll kill him, and then you’ll kill me, so why bother? You might as well kill us both now, because I’m not typing another single word for you. Ever!”
He smiles now, suspecting it’s an empty threat, perhaps even knowing so. “Believe me or don’t believe me, but know this. Unless you start writing immediately, I will relish turning Wyatt, drive straight to Nightshade Academy, and run amok. Blood will fill the halls, the classrooms, the very gym. I will turn everyone you’ve ever known, everyone you’ve sat next to, in front of, or behind.
“Every teacher you’ve ever had, your principal, your coach, your counselor, the janitor—they will all be vampires before you can say, ‘I shouldn’t have threatened Reece.’ Hundreds will lose their lives, all because of your stubbornness. Generations will be lost, futures ruined, all because you choose to grow petty and tiresome.”
He moves so close, so fast, I barely have time to flinch. From a few feet away he is suddenly face-to-face with me, so that I can admire every inch of his curving, elaborate fangs, watch them glisten in the firelight as he sneers at me maliciously.
“Kill you? Why, I wouldn’t dream of it! It will be my undying duty to force you to watch the mayhem you’ve caused, and every tear you spill will be like nectar to me, dear girl. Your pain will be my ultimate reward, and trust me: your pain will be intense, historic . . . epic.”
He takes one step toward the opening of the small room, motioning toward Wyatt’s unconscious body in chains.
“Shall I begin, Nora? Shall I get to work . . . or shall you?”
I shiver, dry my tears, and sit.
He smiles, turning ugly with each corner of upturned lip, with each visible tooth. Leaving the room, he hisses over his shoulder, “There is work to do. I suggest you get to it.”
And of course, that’s exactly what I do.
Chapter 19
I find the code at exactly 3:19 a.m.
The vampires, all three of them, Abby included, are out in the vacant lot that borders the warehouse, snacking on field mice, gophers, rabbits, raccoons, bobcats, and who knows what else they can scrounge up with their nasty night vision and creepy claws. I can hear them, hissing triumphantly each time they snag another field creature from its burrow.
Abby’s voice is particularly grating. I’d expected her to turn gradually, to at least retain some last vestiges of humanity until the bloodlust conquered her completely, but she’s worse than the rest. She’s like that Catholic schoolgirl who’s a goody-goody until her seventeenth birthday, and the first time her folks go away for the weekend, she throws the house party to end all house parties, doing a striptease while singing karaoke, sucking body shots off burly jocks, and out-tramping the tramps.
I know Abby’s moods: surly, quiet, thankful, generous, and giddy. She’s in a giddy mood now, times 817! She catches a rat, breaks its neck, and starts chowing down. It’s like Christmas, New Year’s Eve, her birthday, and her last Zombie Diaries wrap party all rolled into one.
I don’t know which sound disgusts me more: the yelps of the furry victims or the slurping of the inhuman victors.
Meanwhile, I am on page 148, almost there, nearing the finish line, with Scarlet Stain and Count Victus trapped in their third epic battle scene of the book.
My readers typically insist on a minimum of four fight scenes, so I have one to go, but I’m saving it for the big finale.
I’m stuck, as usual, trying to find a place for word #148: dark.
It shouldn’t be that hard to place: line fourteen, word eight, just as Reece taught me.
Problem is, my brain is fried!
I’m scrolling back through the previous two pages, trying to see how far I’ll have to go back to change this day scene into night—I should have read ahead on the list to know in advance before I committed myself to sunshine instead of moonlight—when I notice the two previous words highlighted in yellow for Reece to see: the and in.
Over the boisterous sounds of garden creature hunting, I think to myself, Hmm, that’s a little odd . . .
So I scroll back even more for the next three words: kept, be, and shall.
I hear the vampires sacrifice another field creature. I cringe and grab the word list from next to my laptop for a closer look. Using a sharpened pencil from an oversized porcelain cup shaped like a Buddha on the left-hand corner of my desk (that Reece, he thinks of everything), I circle the latest six words: dark the in kept be shall.
My eyes, dry and tired from another twelve-hour day of writing, blur, then clear, then blur again. But even with my constant, exhausted, overworked blur-a-vision, I can tell something isn’t right. These six words, when strung together like this, don’t just sound like random words. They sound like a phrase—an odd phrase, one that doesn’t make any sense, but a phrase nonetheless.
Is it?
Is Reece trying to talk?
To someone else?
Inside my book?
But how?
And what does it mean?
I look at the words, trying to decipher any kind of recognizable phrase, anything at all, my eyes blurring, and that’s when I flash back to when Abby got her wisdom teeth taken out last year.
It was an outpatient procedure at one of the best dentists in Beverly Hills, but since none of our parents were ever around, I had to take Abby there, wait, and then take her home, making sure she got painkiller and antinausea prescriptions on the way. Not that I’m complaining; we signed away our rights to having parental supervision when we entered Nightshade Academy for Exemplary Boys and Girls.
Naturally, the dentist’s office she chose was typical Beverly Hills. They didn’t even call it a dentist’s office; they called it a Surgical Smile Spa. (No, I’m not making that up.)
After grinding two of her wisdom teeth to a pulp and yanking them out one by one, the dentist placed Abby in one of the recovery rooms, which was bigger—and nicer—than our dorm suite at Nightshade Academy (and much bigger and much nicer than the trailer I grew up in back in Barracuda Bay).
There was a gurgling fountain in one corner, a heated, vibrating, leather recliner for Abby to doze off her anesthesia in, a matching one for me to read magazines in, a full soda-and-water bar, snacks, aromatherapy candles, and ambient music oozing from a tiny Bose sound system in the corner. En
ya, I think it was. Or Sade. Something soothing and sensual like that.
Anyway, when Abby woke up, she was still a little loopy from the anesthesia, and man, was she thirsty.
The nurse had warned me—vehemently—not to give her any water, but Abby didn’t know that. She also didn’t know how to say the word water anymore. At least, not while still coming out of the anesthesia. Everything she said came out garbled, upside down, or backward.
At one point she said, “Fountain the from it take.” She was slurring her words, sounding mushy, so it was hard to comprehend. But she just kept repeating it, like you do when someone’s hard of hearing, even though if that person can’t hear you the first time, what makes you think he’ll hear you on the one hundred first time?
At one point I thought she said, “Ferngully is a lake.”
Then it sounded like, “Rockefeller’s on the take.”
I made the international scrunched-up face for Huh? and she slapped her thighs, repeating herself over and over—“Fountain the from it take”—until the nurse came back into the recovery room, checked her out, gave me her prescriptions to be filled, and released us.
The walk to the car was confusing and probably painful, the sunlight hitting her in the face. She winced as I slid her into the passenger seat of her black Lexus. That shut her up, and she quit going on and on about “Fountain the from it take.”
I didn’t think twice about it until I was coming back to the car, her two prescriptions in hand, and Abby was sitting there in the passenger seat, clear-eyed and frowning at me, her face pale, her eyes quite bright.
“Why didn’t you give me the drink I asked for?” she said, arms crossed.
“What drink? When?”
“Back in the recovery room,” she said very clearly. “I asked you for a drink out of the fountain.”
As I pulled out into traffic and hugged the right lane, I said, “No, you didn’t. You said ‘Fountain the from it take.’”
She slapped her thigh again and said, “No, I was saying, ‘Take it from the fountain!’ But I didn’t want the nurse to hear, so I said it backward. Gosh, some BFF you are. I could have died of thirst in there. What if we were on some superduper spy mission trying to save the world and you missed my code? We need to work on that.”
We never did, of course. Abby’s codes were mostly in her mind, and we’d certainly never agreed beforehand to speak backward, sideways, Pig Latin, or French after her surgery!
The memory fresh in my mind, the sounds of dying field mice ringing in my ears, the vampire’s bloodlust making me sick to my gullet, I open a fresh document and type in the phrase as it’s found in the book: dark the in kept be shall.
They sit there at the top of that blank page and, reading them from back to front, I suddenly see what Reece is really trying to say: shall be kept in the dark.
I stare at the words, play with them 101 different ways, but only this way makes sense.
It’s no coincidence. It can’t be.
Reece isn’t forcing me to write a book about vampires.
He’s writing a book for vampires.
And he’s using me to do it.
But why?
Chapter 20
At hour seventeen on the seventh day of the winter solstice in the year of our Lord 2017 shall we meet on the banks of Lake Hammer in west Texas for the purposes of conveying this year’s business to include a restructuring of the ruling party and also lifting the ban on turning male vampires it has come to the Council’s attention that several members of the Rothchild clan have been breaking the ban in the decade since our last conclave the Council wishes to remind our international brothers and sisters that they should be in country for ten days prior to conclave to avoid any unnecessary delays it is very important that all or as many of us as possible attend the conclave and spread the new bylaws passed to those who cannot attend for whatever reason all nonvampire friends and family shall be kept in the dark about conclave it is to last four full days and on the fifth day as is our custom we shall feast the town of Hammer has a population of thirty thousand which I’m sure you’ll agree is more than enough if we share until then rest and travel safely in good time.
This is what the words on the spreadsheet say when you read them backward.
This is the code Reece is using in the fifth Better off Bled book.
Why he forced me to write the book.
Why he stalked me for who knows how long, hunted me down, enrolled in my school, charmed me, made one friend a vampire and the other a victim and ruined my life.
The words on the spreadsheet aren’t just random keywords he’s using to boost my book sales or further some secret cause. They aren’t even random at all. It’s a coded message buried in the book, one word on each page, so cleverly hidden you couldn’t find it, not in a million years, if you didn’t know two very important things:
The code itself
The fact that you had to read it backward
As the vampires finish their hunting trip, I print the coded message, fold it, and slip it inside a rarely used pocket deep inside my leather messenger bag.
Then I stare at the latest page of the book and wonder why.
Why me?
It’s not just because I write vampire books.
Dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of writers do that.
But he doesn’t care about the guts of the book. The plot, the details, the pacing, the tone, the theme—all those things I’ve been working so hard to finesse since he kidnapped Wyatt and brought me to this place—mean little to him. Mean nothing.
He gave me that admittedly juicy story line only to throw me off track. What he wanted was a warm body—a human body—to sit at this laptop day and night until the manuscript was through, until each word of the code was safely buried in the guts of this book, right where he wanted them. Just as planned.
What did Reece say, way back when, when I asked him if he was going to turn me?
“Of course not,” he said. “You would be useless to me then.”
Useless.
To.
Me.
It made me feel safe at the time, like the folks with immunity on Survivor, but now I know it’s yet another clue, just like the backward words he’s using for the code.
Digging deeper, racking my memory, weak and confused as it is, I flash back to when Reece called me a liar. When he called my bluff about the page count. He was sitting in this very chair, the laptop right in front of him, and yet he printed the pages and read them that way.
Why?
At the time I figured he was just old school—like Mrs. Armbruster or some other more technically challenged teachers at Nightshade—and preferred reading print to online, but now? I stand up, step back from the desk, and look at my laptop.
What is it about my laptop Reece doesn’t like?
It can’t be the shiny cover, because he wouldn’t care if he couldn’t see his reflection, and I already know he’s a vampire, so . . . what else?
It can’t be the electricity, because he uses electric stuff all the time: his car, his portable razor, the fridge under my desk where he stocked all that Jolt Cola that turned me into a lean, mean writing machine.
So what else?
What else would make him print the pages instead of reading them off the screen?
Why in the world would an impatient thug like Reece waste all that time and energy waiting for 120-plus pages to print out when he could just as easily open my laptop and read it on that nice, big, wide . . . glowing . . . screen?
That’s it: the screen!
But not just any screen: the glowing screen.
My laptop was open when I left it sitting there untended, and he caught me in a lie.
But first he closed it.
I think of Bianca and how often she used her cell phone before Reece turned her. You couldn’t get that witch off the thing, day or night. Now she never uses it at all.
Come to think of it, Reece doesn’t even
seem to own a cell phone. I never saw him text or call anyone.
I hear them outside, laughing, high off their bloodlust, sated from their kills, chattering as dawn approaches. They stumble into the warehouse like drunks off a three-day bender, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, their skin alive, their dark eyes liquid and all-seeing.
Bianca kicks off her shoes, Reece pulls off his boots, but Abby leaves on her sparkly pink sneakers to dance around the vast empty warehouse, drunk on quarts of fresh blood, tempting Wyatt in his cage with a blood-splattered hoodoo dance.
I shut my laptop tight and stand near it. “Abby!” I shout, seeing an opportunity to test my theory. “Quit teasing him like that. Abby, come here!”
Reece looks up, sees me standing there, defenseless, no weapons, no training, just another mortal bookworm at his mercy. He ignores me and goes back to polishing the dirt off his boots by the front door.
Abby saunters over, haughty, strong, immortal, and asks with a sigh, “What is it, Nora? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Busy doing what? Sucking the life out of field mice? Have you already forgotten you’re a vegetarian?”
“I’ve forgotten a lot of things,” she says, eyes dark, skin supple, fangs plumping out her lips in a way that makes her look seductive and unwholesome. Always Abby has been the safe one, the only starlet in town who hasn’t been to rehab or jail. Now, though she still looks like Abby, she looks like . . . Evil Abby. She may be prettier, but she’s lost that human touch, that grace and gentleness and humor that drew me to her like I was drawn to Wyatt. “Not that you’d care,” she says, looking with disdain at my desk, my pillows, my flickering candles.
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, Abby, for what’s happened to you.”
“Sorry? I should thank you, deserting me like that, leaving me all alone to fend for myself. I never knew how strong I was until Bianca released me from my human bondage!”
“Human bondage?” I snort. “I don’t know what’s worse: Vampire Abby or your last Zombie Diaries script.”
The Vampire Book of the Month Club Page 11
