Evernight

by Claudia Gray

Chapter Sixteen

  I sat numbly on the bottom step of the staircase, listening to the preparations taking place all around me.

  Mrs. Bethany's team contained only five vampires: her, my parents, Balthazar, and Professor Iwerebon. All of them wore heavy slickers and knives strapped to their calves and forearms.

  "We should have guns." That was Balthazar. "To deal with situations like this."

  "We have only been forced to confront 'situations like this' twice in more than two hundred years." Mrs. Bethany, icier than ever. "Our abilities are usually more than sufficient to deal with humans. Or do you not feel up to the task, Mr. More?"

  Lucas is a vampire hunter. Lucas came here to kill people like my parents. He told me to distrust them; he probably thought they stole me as a baby. He tried to drive a wedge between us. I thought he was just being rude, but maybe he was really going to kill them after all.

  "I can handle myself," Balthazar said. "But it's possible that Lucas has armed himself as well. He's Black Cross. There's no way he came here unprepared. Somewhere on campus, he's got a stash of supplies. You can bet that includes weapons."

  We went up the stairs of the north tower together, and he protested the entire way. I thought it was because Lucas was scared of me, scared of vampires, but that wasn't it at all. Even when we were making out on the floor, he asked for us to be together again somewhere else.

  "The room at the top of the north tower." My voice sounded so strange, hardly like mine at all. "That's where it is."

  Mrs. Bethany drew herself up. "You knew about this?"

  "No. It's just a hunch."

  "Let's check it out." Balthazar held out his hand to help me up. "Come on."

  The room didn't look any different to me than it had when Lucas and I were up there together. Mrs. Bethany closed her eyes for a moment in dismay. "The records room. If he's been up here, he's read almost all of our history. The hiding places of so many of us—now, Black Cross knows."

  "A lot of these records are decades out of date," Dad reasoned. "The more recent years are in the computer."

  "He broke into that, too, I think," I said, remembering the day I'd found Lucas sneaking out of Mrs. Bethany's carriage house office.

  Mrs. Bethany whirled on me, her temper clearly at the breaking point. "You saw that Lucas Ross was breaking rules, yet you never warned anyone in authority. You let a member of Black Cross run rampant at Evernight for months on end, Miss Olivier. Don't think I'll forget this."

  Whenever she spoke to me like that, I usually cringed. This time, I shot back, "You're the one who admitted him in the first place!"

  After that, nobody said anything for a second. I'd spoken only to defend myself, but I realized that Mrs. Bethany had screwed up—really, seriously screwed up—and her attempt to pin the blame on me had just failed.

  Instead of strangling me, Mrs. Bethany stiffly turned back to searching the room. "Open every box. Look in every closet and in the rafters. I want to know everything Mr. Ross kept up here."

  Memories of Lucas and I together nearly overwhelmed me, but I concentrated on one moment in particular. When we'd first come into this room, Lucas had immediately taken a seat atop the long trunk against the nearby wall. I'd thought he just wanted to sit down, but maybe he'd done that for a different reason: to keep me from opening it.

  Balthazar followed my eyes. He didn't say anything out loud, but he raised one eyebrow, questioning. I nodded, and he went to the trunk and opened its lid. I couldn't see what was inside, but my mother gasped and Professor Iwerebon swore beneath his breath. "What is it?" I asked.

  Mrs. Bethany stepped closer and peered down into the trunk. Her face remained imperiously cool as she bent her knees and picked up a skull.

  I screamed, then immediately felt stupid for doing so. "That's got to be really old. I mean, look at it."

  "When we die, our bodies decompose rather rapidly, Miss Olivier." Mrs. Bethany kept turning the skull that way and this. "To be precise, they decompose to the stage they should have reached since the time of human death. Though the flesh is gone, a few scraps of skin remain—which suggests this skull belonged to a vampire who died decades ago, perhaps even a century."

  "Erich," Balthazar said suddenly. "He said once that he died in World War I. Lucas and Erich always had it in for each other. If Lucas lured him up here, and Erich had no idea that he was dealing with a Black Cross hunter, then it would've been no contest."

  "Not if Lucas had one of these." My father had opened another box nearby, from which he lifted a huge knife—no, a machete. "This thing could make quick work of any of us."

  Balthazar gave a low whistle as he looked at the blade. "Those two used to fight, but Erich always got the better of Lucas. Either Lucas threw the fights on purpose, or he knew if he showed what he could really do, we might have caught on."

  I protested, "I thought Erich ran away." Surely that had to be the truth. Lucas and Erich had fought, but Lucas couldn't have killed him.

  "We all thought that, but we were all wrong." Mrs. Bethany let Erich's skull drop unceremoniously back into the trunk. "Keep searching."

  The others did as she said. Trembling, I stepped closer to the trunk to look inside. There lay a jumble of bones, a dusty Evernight uniform, and, in the corner, a tan hoop. With a jolt I realized it was Raquel's leather bracelet, the one that had been missing. Lucas wouldn't have stolen it. No, Erich had taken it, and he'd had it on him when he died.

  When Lucas killed him.

  "Bianca? Honey?" My mother came to my side. She wore jeans and boots; normally she refused to dress in what she still thought of as men's clothes, but to catch Lucas, she'd made an exception. "You should go to our apartment. You don't need to see any more of this."

  "Go to the apartment and do what? Read a nice book? Listen to records? I don't think so."

  "We should be able to track him despite the rain. You will never tell anyone else at this school what transpires here tonight." Mrs. Bethany glared at me over Iwerebon's shoulder.

  Slowly I shut the lid of the trunk. "I'm coming, too."

  "Bianca?" Mom shook her head. "You don't have to do this."

  "Yes, I do."

  "Don't." Balthazar stepped closer to me. "You've never done anything like this, and Black Cross—they're good. Deadly. Lucas might be young, but he knows what he's doing. That much is obvious."

  "What Balthazar is too polite to say is that it's dangerous." Dad looked furious. His nose was red and swollen—probably broken. Even vampire injuries take a while to heal. "Lucas Ross could hurt you, even kill you."

  I shivered, but I stood my ground. "He could kill any of you. You're still going."

  "We're going to take care of everything," Balthazar insisted. "The worst part of all of this is what he did to you, Bianca. Your parents won't let Lucas get away with it, and neither will I."

  Mrs. Bethany raised one eyebrow. Obviously she didn't consider my broken heart the "worst part of all this," and I expected her to shoot me down as usual. Instead she said, "She may join us."

  My mother stared at her. "She's only a child!"

  "She was old enough to bite a human. Old enough to give him powers. That makes her old enough to face the consequences." Her gaze bored into me. "Will you require a weapon, Miss Olivier?"

  "No." I couldn't imagine plunging a knife into Lucas's body.

  Mrs. Bethany misunderstood me—on purpose, maybe. "You might as well complete your transformation tonight, I suppose."

  "Tonight?" My parents said as one.

  "All children must grow up eventually."

  She wants me to bite Lucas again. This time, she wants me to kill him. They'd set fire to the body before he could rise again as a vampire. Lucas would be gone forever.

  Mrs. Bethany went to the door and pushed it open. Balthazar draped one of the slickers across my shoulders, and I struggled to slip my arms into the overlong sleeves. "Let's go."

  We began our trip downstairs into the dark.

&nbs
p; * * *

  My parents had told me they were vampires as soon as I was old enough to understand about keeping secrets, so that was as ordinary to me as the fact that Mom's hair was the color of caramel or that Dad liked to snap his fingers to jazz from the 1950s. They drank blood at the dinner table instead of eating food, and they liked to reminisce about sailing ships and spinning wheels and, in Dad's case, the time he saw William Shakespeare acting in one of his own plays. But those were little things, more funny and endearing than frightening. I'd never thought of them as unnatural.

  As soon as we began our pursuit, I realized how little I truly knew them.

  They moved faster than I could, faster than most humans could. Lucas and I had thought we were stretching our powers when we'd run across these grounds a few weeks ago, but that was nothing compared to this. Mom, Dad, Balthazar, every one of them—they were sure-footed despite the mud and able to see their way in the dark. I had to rely on the flashes of lightning and their voices to guide me.

  "Here!" Professor Iwerebon's Nigerian accent was thicker when he was agitated. "The boy came this way."

  How could they know that? I realized that Iwerebon's hand rested upon the branches of a bush. When I touched it as well, I could feel the soft buds of new leaves fuzzy against my chilled palms. One of the branches was broken. Lucas had snapped it when he'd run by.

  He's running for his life. He must be so scared.

  He said he loved me.

  Lightning flashed once more, making it bright as day for a split second. I could see Mrs. Bethany's profile against the dark forest, and I recognized the landscape enough to know that we were very near the river. It was the first time in a while I'd had any idea where we were, because the rain clouds shrouded the stars. "This isn't one of the usual paths the students take," Mrs. Bethany said. "Black Cross would've trained him well enough to have an escape plan. That means he'd marked this route in advance."

  Thunder rolled over us, blotting out whatever Professor Iwerebon said in response. Wearily I pulled my feet out of the mud they were sinking into; Balthazar took my elbow, balancing me as I got to more solid ground.

  All this time I thought Lucas was protecting me, but instead he put me in danger. How can that be true?

  Then Balthazar's fingers tightened upon my arm. "This way. Over here."

  When lightning forked through the sky again, I saw what Balthazar had glimpsed: mucky, foot-sized holes in the mud, leading toward the river. Lucas had been forced to pull his feet out just like me. Despite the new powers we shared, he wasn't as quick or as unearthly graceful as the older vampires all around me. Lucas was just a guy, running as fast as he could through a terrible storm and knowing that, if he was captured, he might die.

  It was raining too hard for footprints like that to last long without being washed away. We'd already nearly caught up to him.

  He lied to me from the beginning. From the very first day. All those fears I had about keeping secrets from him, and Lucas was playing me for a fool every single time we kissed.

  "Hurry!" Mrs. Bethany urged us forward. Despite her long skirts, she could move faster than anyone else. I straggled behind, breathing hard and cold to the bone, but I was able to keep close enough to hear the rain pattering against their coats. "He will have crossed the river. We'll lose time there."

  The river.

  All my life, my parents had joked about how terrible running water was. When we took road trips, they would always try to arrange it so that we never crossed any rivers on our way. If we had to, they could do it, but usually it took a while—Dad pulling the car over once we were in sight of the bridge, Mom biting her fingernails anxiously, me laughing at them for the entire half hour or so it took them to get up the nerve. They both described their shipboard voyage to the New World as the absolute worst experience they'd ever endured.

  Vampires have trouble crossing running water. Some of the human students had wondered why the teacher chaperones traveled into Riverton ahead of us, but I'd always known it was because they wanted to cross the bridge in their own time, without revealing how badly the experience unsettled them. Now I realized that Lucas had understood, too, and he was counting on that fact to keep himself alive.

  We kept going, until the others stopped in front of me. I didn't need the lightning to show me the path anymore. Breathing hard, I caught up and kept walking past Professor Iwerebon, past Balthazar, past my parents, and finally up to Mrs. Bethany, who stood only a few feet from the bridge.

  "Wait here for us," she commanded. "We will proceed shortly." She pressed her lips together, perhaps willing herself to conquer her one weakness.

  "He'll get away." I walked past her.

  "Miss Olivier! Stop this instant!"

  My feet touched the bridge. Old wooden planks, waterlogged with rain, were easier to cross than thick mud.

  "Bianca!" That was my dad. "Bianca, wait for us. You can't do this alone."

  "Yes, I can." I started to run, drops of water pelting my face, my side aching from exertion and the raincoat heavy across my shoulders. All I wanted to do was fall down upon the bridge and cry. My body didn't have the strength for this.

  And yet I ran. I ran even though my legs were as heavy as lead, and my throat was tight with unshed tears, and my parents and my teachers and my friend were all shouting for me to come back. I ran anyway, and with every step I went faster.

  Ever since I'd come to Evernight—no, really, throughout my whole life—I'd counted on other people to take care of my problems. Nobody could take care of this for me. I had to face it myself, alone.

  I didn't know if I was chasing Lucas or running with him. I only knew I had to run.

  * * *

  After I'd made it over the river, I didn't have much trouble tracking Lucas on my own. It was dark, and I didn't have the extrasensitive sight or hearing of true vampires. However, it was obvious that he was going into Riverton, and at this point, there were only so many routes he could take that weren't far out of his way. Lucas would know that he didn't have much time to waste, and he'd want to get away as fast as possible.

  I'd spent a while at the bus station with Raquel before she left for Christmas, after Lucas was already gone. Although she'd been eager to get out of Evernight, her family wouldn't be home until late, so we'd waited for a later bus—one that left for the Boston area at 8:08. It was almost 8 now. I felt certain that Lucas was going to try to be on that next bus. The one after that one probably wasn't for another couple of hours, and that was too much leeway. Mrs. Bethany and the others would have him for sure by then. The Boston bus was Lucas's only real chance at escape.

  The downtown area was almost entirely deserted. No cars sped down the streets, and the few businesses that had bothered staying open appeared to be empty. Nobody wanted to be out on a night like this. With my hair plastered to my scalp with rain, I couldn't blame them. I looked in a couple of the open businesses, including the shop where we'd found the brooch. Lucas wasn't there.

  No, I realized. He knows that's where they'd look first.

  I knew then that I had an advantage over Mrs. Bethany and my parents, something that even their centuries of experience and supernatural senses couldn't give them. I knew Lucas; that meant I knew what he'd do.

  They, too, would probably guess that Lucas wouldn't try to hide in public. They might even make the next inference I made, which was that Lucas would hide as close to the bus station as possible, so he wouldn't be exposed in town for long before he could jump on the bus and make his getaway. However, the bus station was in the dead center of town. A dozen shops surrounded it, and as far as they knew, Lucas might be in any one of them.

  Lucas had gone with me to see an old movie and bought me the brooch at the vintage clothing shop. And he had said that he loved me.

  Which meant that maybe, just maybe, he would have chosen the same place to hide that I would have.

  I walked toward the antiques store on the southeastern corner of the square, jumpi
ng over puddles as I went. Any doubts I might've had about my hunch vanished as soon as I reached the store's back door and saw that it had been left slightly ajar.

  Slowly I pushed it open. The hinges didn't squeak, and I trod carefully upon the wooden floorboards. With the lights out, the darkness was nearly complete inside. I could barely discern the shapes of the strange items that surrounded me. At first I didn't trust my eyes: a suit of armor, a stuffed fox, a cricket bat. I realized that the jumble wasn't meaningless. These objects were the antique store's spare inventory, the things fewer people would want to buy. It felt completely surreal, as if I'd somehow fallen into a bad dream while wide awake.

  At first I tried to keep quiet, but as I stepped farther inside, I realized that could be dangerous. Lucas might hurt anyone else who was coming after him, but I still believed that he wouldn't hurt me.