“The books, stupid. Every vampire buys every vampire book ever published, just in case. Why do you think the ridiculous things sell so well? We read the first few pages. If there’s no code, we toss the things, sell them on eBay, or better still, burn them. That way no mortal can know which book the code will be in, and no one will ever know.”
I shake my head. “Amazing. So just how long has this little ‘system’ been going on?”
He smirks, still holding fast to Wyatt’s neck as he pockets the three precious flash drives.
“Ever heard of a little book called Dracula?”
“What?”
“Of course we used a different code back then, so good luck solving that one after all these years, but yes . . . The first-ever book about vampires was also used as an invitation to the first conclave. So if you think I’m going to let some teenage wannabe writer ruin our first conclave in a decade, you have another think coming.”
I hold up the phone again, tempted to shine it in his direction, but he hides behind Wyatt.
“So what if the plans for the conclave change?” I ask. “How would you alert all the vampires in time?”
“We couldn’t, you fool! I just told you, no one knows the addresses of every vampire on the planet. It would be too dangerous if the authorities were to catch us and break one of us. We are anonymous and care to keep it that way. Conclave is a duty, and we keep it religiously.”
Now I smile at my phone. “So if I were to, say, type in the message—the entire message—in a text message, and send it to every media outlet in this country, you and the entire vampire race would pretty much be hosed, right? There’d be no way to alert everyone in time, and—”
“Nora,” Reece says, desperate now and peering over Wyatt’s head with eyes so dark they might have been underground. “If you even so much as threaten such a whimsy, I will literally tear your friend here apart and feed him to you, ounce by ounce. Then I will make it my life’s mission to hunt down anyone you’ve ever known and kill them so slowly they will beg to die. Beg to die, that is, right in front of your eyes.”
“How ya gonna do that”—I poise my finger over the Send button—“with the authorities hunting you down and—?”
I feel cold flesh shoving my hand away. The phone hits the floor, where a familiar size-eight sparkly pink sneaker smashes it to smithereens.
Reece smiles. “Abby, wonderful.”
I turn to face my assailant and slap the sear marks on her face. As she screams, I turn, grabbing the metal bars, shaking them in my fists, pleading with Reece. “I didn’t do it. The secret stops here. Take me! Let him go! I finished the book, it will be published, the conclave will go on, with or without me. Just let him go, and turn me instead.”
“Oh,” he says as Abby stirs behind me, “I intend to.”
He bites Wyatt anyway. As if for spite, as if for show, as if to punish me, he sinks his fangs into the soft flesh of Wyatt’s throat. I can hear the soft, delicate pop as the flesh is punctured and they slice in, ever deeper, as Wyatt squirms and my heart quietly breaks.
The rage boils in me, and now I know how it must feel to hate as the vampires hate.
While Reece gorges on Wyatt’s blood, I let the rage wash over me until it blinds the old me and embraces the new. Despite our friendship, I can’t see my BFF—only the bloodsucker she’s become. I step over Abby, step on Abby, and grab the laptop from the floor. I hold it close against Abby’s flesh, searing her throat and left shoulder like a rib eye on a flaming hot grill. She is beyond pain, beyond agony, lying limp among the debris of my broken, ruined phone.
I step into the cage, where Reece is in too much ecstasy over Wyatt’s young, fresh, hot blood to see me. Until it’s too late.
He looks up, and I smash the laptop into his face, again and again, searing it so close it will take months, maybe years, for his vampire powers to recover. And when his beautiful face is burnt nearly beyond recognition, I keep smashing until the monitor breaks, and I shove the broken shards of glass into and through his smoking, blackened, wizened flesh.
I grab the three flash drives from Reece’s smoldering pocket and yank Wyatt off the floor, slinging one of his arms over my shoulder and dragging him out of the cage. I slam the doors shut, sliding the padlock into place as Reece rises, growling, screaming with a rage unlike I’ve ever witnessed.
Chapter 24
The Mercedes is lightning fast, and it doesn’t hurt that I know exactly where I’m going.
Ralph and Ollie Partied All Night Long. I repeat it to myself out loud. Wyatt, dazed and confused, rides shotgun. He’s sweating profusely, pale, with blood staining the back of his already destroyed T-shirt, while I follow the streets from the warehouse:
Rouse Street.
Andover Lane.
Oliver Street.
Principal Avenue.
Archibald Street.
Ninth Avenue.
Lavender Lane.
Ralph and Ollie Partied All Night Long.
I knew it would come in handy!
Once out of the maze Reece drove me through each morning, I hit the main drag and we’re back in business. But a long way from being in the clear. Sure, I could keep driving, gun the engine, blow through Beverly Hills, hit the freeway, and just keep going, but then what?
I have the flash drives, I have the code, but . . .
Who will believe me?
They’ll think it’s all a hoax, some viral stunt to pump up book sales.
I need a better, bigger plan, and it’s not out there on the open road. It’s here, hitting Reece when he’s down, when he’s weak.
And I think I have just the place for a final—please let it be final!—showdown.
I cruise through the streets, looking like just another spoiled rich witch in her daddy’s Mercedes, taking turns at eighty miles per hour to make sure we have enough time to finish my plan.
Once, in another life, early in my sophomore year when I dated that snowboarder who wound up breaking my heart (or so everybody thinks!), he would often take me to this cheap hotel just inside the 90210 zip code.
Keep your pants on! (I sure did.) We didn’t do much. He basically just kept a room there because (a) he was rich enough to afford it, (b) he hated dorm life at Nightshade Academy, and (c) I was the only one who knew about it. OK, sure, we’d make out—and then some—but basically he just played his video games while I munched on corn chips and read fashion magazines I’d bought at the drugstore across the street.
But here’s the thing: it was right next door to a church. A working church, the kind with mass and a gift shop and priests on the ground and collection plates and lots and lots of what I need the most right now: blessed, clean, pure holy water.
I know because every time he’d pull into the hotel parking lot in his garish, yellow SUV, we’d pass the church, and he’d say, “How convenient. You can sin at one address and then stumble next door to confess.” He must have thought it was hilarious because he said it every single time.
When I squeal into the drugstore parking lot across the street from the Jolly Roger Motel, Wyatt nearly hits his head on the dashboard. “Wuzzuwhodat?” he says, rousing from his prevampire slumber, rubbing his neck, the rims of his eyes red, his mouth dry.
“Just give me two minutes,” I say before rushing inside, hoping the thirst won’t take him in the 180 seconds I’m gone so that I find him gorging on some homeless person or skateboarder in the parking lot.
I come back three minutes later with Gatorade, Slim Jims, candy bars, and a six-pack of cheap water pistols.
He gorges all the way to the hotel, slurping and munching as if he hasn’t eaten in days.
I want to tell him to enjoy it, to warn him it’s the last human food he’ll eat, ever, that once the transformation starts—in about an hour or so—he’ll be food-free for the rest of his afterlife.
But I don’t; he’s been through so much and still has so far to go. Let him learn on his own.
&nbs
p; I stow the Mercedes around the back of the hotel, although I’m sure a slug like Reece will have some kind of tag on the car to find it—and quickly.
In fact, I’m counting on it.
I get a room in the back, in the far corner, if only to make it look like we’re actually hiding out. Once we get into the room, I stow Wyatt in the bathtub with his junk food.
“Wuzzawhynowgobyebye?” His lips are slathered in chocolate, and a beef stick pokes out the left side of his mouth like an unlit cigarette.
“Five minutes, Wyatt. That’s all I need.”
I shut the bathroom door behind me, pull the curtains, and race to the church gift shop.
I come back ten minutes later—can I help it if I got there just as a midday service got out?—with $30 worth of holy water, about five milk jugs’ worth. I sit with Wyatt and empty four of them inside the tub.
I know when he doesn’t start sizzling right away that he’s not in the grips of it yet, that he’s still more human than vampire. I smile to think that, for a little while at least, he’ll still be Wyatt—my Wyatt, the Wyatt I fell in love with, the Wyatt I’m still in love with—before he becomes Vampire Wyatt and his first instinct is to look at my throat like a giant Slim Jim!
He winks at me. “Nora, what up? Isn’t it a little too soon to be bathing together? I mean, not that I mind or anything, but if that’s the case, why are we both still dressed?”
“Relax, player, it’s not what you think.”
It makes me smile to see that he’s at least somewhat disappointed.
I make him run the water until our clothes are soaked, then fill all six water pistols with the last of the undiluted holy water.
“Stay here,” I order, then walk into the other room and sit in the middle of the cheap table. It breaks under my weight (which in a past life would have really bummed me out but now just makes me grin), and I yank off all four legs, whittling each end to a fine, deadly point with my last drugstore purchase: a four-inch paring knife from the very limited housewares selection.
“Jeez.” Wyatt swallows the last of his Gatorade as he watches me from the tub. “Rambo much?”
I smile demurely, wondering if we have enough time before Vampire Armageddon to make out.
Naw, probably not.
We do anyway.
Chapter 25
We stand in the tiny closet, soaking wet.
I have four water pistols hidden strategically around my body, while Wyatt, with only his two track pants pockets, has the rest.
I have strapped the stakes to our chests—two each—with strips of spare bedding I found under the sink. We look like children playing war games in the backyard, tiny and scared, but what else can we do? This is who we are, this is where we are, and this is what we have to do if we’re going to survive. Now all we can do is wait.
It doesn’t take long.
Wyatt bolts when the hotel room door breaks in.
I yank him back, shushing him with a single quivering finger to my lips.
They tear the room apart, two wounded vampires.
Wyatt starts scratching, tearing at his clothes.
“Stop!” I mouth the word.
But he can’t.
Not now. Not when the transformation has finally started.
His clothes start smoking, and he screams, his skin turning to blisters.
Reece rips the closet door off its hinges and literally tosses it across the room. His face is a wreck; one eye is fused shut, with dried blood and scarred skin closing it completely. The other is staring out from a Halloween mask of cuts and gashes, still smoking from the UV overload.
Wyatt leaps from the closet, tearing at his clothes, yanking off his track pants and leaving on the boxers, tearing off his T-shirt to expose bright pink skin, slightly steaming like he’s just stepped out of a Jacuzzi on a cold winter’s day.
He’s scratching himself when Abby launches at him, claws out, shoulders forward, like a pro linebacker hitting a tackling dummy. (You know, if tackling dummies were hot!)
They slam straight through the wall, landing in the bathroom, where Wyatt has the presence of mind to shove Abby into the diluted holy water filling the bathtub.
She sizzles and shrieks, bucking under him like a patient being electrified for her own good, until Wyatt has a change of heart and drags her out just as quickly as he dumped her in.
She lies on the bathroom floor, her skin bleeding and steaming. She coughs up blood, racked with pain.
“It’s Abby!” Wyatt cries, patting her wounds and only making it worse.
“It’s Vampire Abby!” I shout back as Reece yanks me free of the closet, rips the stakes from the arsenal tied to my chest, tosses them to the ground, and throws me onto the nearest bed.
“Aw,” he says, pinning my arms with his knees. “True love, isn’t that sweet?”
Wyatt’s visible through the door-size hole in the cheap drywall between the main room and the bathroom. He stands, looks at the claws sticking out of his hands, licks the fangs poking out of his upper jaw, a bewildered look in his already yellow eyes. “Nora, what’s happening to me?”
“He’s happening to you!” I shout, thrashing in vain to get Reece off me.
Reece only smiles and turns to Wyatt. “Relax, my friend. You’re one of us now.”
“Never!” Wyatt lurches forward, claws and fangs out.
“Oh, no?” Reece arches his neck, poking out his fangs and coming within centimeters of my naked, defenseless throat. “Unless you want her to join you in eternity, young Wyatt, I suggest you—”
I knee him in the groin, shove him off me, and rush to Wyatt through the wide, jagged hole in the wall. We huddle in the bathroom as Reece rises from the cheap carpet in the bedroom.
I aim for the two stakes tied to Wyatt’s chest, grab one with each hand, and step through the door.
Reece shoves me back into the bathroom, his arms still so powerful that if I hadn’t slammed headfirst into Wyatt, I would have surely gone into the next room. Or, at least, parts of me would have.
As it is, I land against Wyatt’s stony flesh, my neck pushing one way, my body pulling another. I’m sore and bruised everywhere and shaking with violence and fear and pain.
Wyatt grabs me, frantically, and turns his back to Reece.
I am trapped between my vampire kind-of boyfriend and the bathroom wall, nowhere to go as Reece claws at Wyatt’s back, tearing at bare skin. Blood pools on the bathroom floor.
“Wyatt!” I shout as Reece pulls him slowly back, back toward the hole in the door.
“Nora!” he shouts, fear bringing his fangs forward to full point, nearly four inches of hungry, trembling fangs mere centimeters from my face.
I see my future in those long, sharp teeth: I see Reece tearing at him, eventually yanking him away and finding me—and then turning me. There is no avoiding it. There is no way out but this. This isn’t one of the scenes in my stupid books, and I’m no Scarlet Stain. I can’t break his arm with a karate chop or rig the shower curtain into a parachute and fly away from this one.
This is real life, strange as it all may be, and here is where this life—my life—must end.
Reece is too strong. Even with a face full of laptop glass and UV rays, even wounded and weakened, he is tearing Wyatt to bits.
The only way to stop it is to sacrifice myself.
To release my bond to humanity, to become . . . immortal.
I grab Wyatt, embracing him, once again bringing his head to my neck, like that day in the commons at school.
It seems so long ago, yet I know it wasn’t.
But it was a simpler, more innocent time. He was human then, warm and soft and tender to the touch, his lips so warm and fang-free, his tongue so eager, his hands so firm and self-assured as they pulled me toward him like he’d done it a thousand times before—like he was a pro, taking control, calling the shots.
But now it’s my turn to take control, to call the shots, to pull him close, ever closer, t
o me. Not as a ruse to fool Bianca this time, but for the real deal.
“Nora!” he shouts, too weak from blood loss to resist.
Before Reece can yank him away, before I can chicken out, I jam his fangs into my throat like a can opener, plunging them deeper, deeper, into the skin, past the skin, until I can literally feel the connection between us, between his teeth and my jugular, the biggest, fattest, most powerful vein in the human body.
It breaks like a sewer main, spewing blood into those fangs like that gum with the soft, squishy, squirty middle, his vampire venom mixing with mine.
The sensation is immediate, the power immense, the rush incredible.
I can feel our DNA fusing, my humanity drifting, my blood pumping, nearly boiling with the power, the fear, of immortality.
And I’m so glad, no matter what happens next, that it’s Wyatt who turns me and not Reece.
Or Bianca.
Or even Abby.
I don’t pass out so much as slump.
Down the dirty tiles of the bathroom wall, down onto the wet floor, which vaguely sizzles against my bare ankles in a not entirely unpleasant way.
Wyatt still stands, wiping the blood—my blood—from his lips.
As if he’s embarrassed, as if he’s ashamed, of what he’s done. Scratch that—of what I’ve done.
Reece immediately stops his assault on Wyatt’s back and squeezes through the hole in the crumbling drywall to see for himself if I’ve really done what he thinks I’ve done. I don’t disappoint.
Standing calmly next to Wyatt—as if 2.7 seconds earlier he wasn’t trying to claw his way to his spinal cord—Reece looks down almost wistfully. “It’s a shame, really. I was looking forward to tasting her myself.”
He slaps Wyatt on his torn back. “Ah well, young man, to the victor go the spoils, eh?”
“Now what?” Wyatt pulls a dry towel from a rack on the dirty yellow wall and wraps his snacks in it. He’s bathed in a halo of red light as my human sight gives way to creepy vampire vision.
The Vampire Book of the Month Club Page 13
