Instinctually, I raised my right hand and knocked on the wall. First, the sun. It sounded solid. Just when my skin hit the wood, I realized that Vicken, too, had stood in this spot examining the engravings.
Stay…, said a voice in my mind. A voice that sounded just like Rhode’s.
I knocked on the sun shape again. This time when my knuckle tapped it, like a child’s shape game the sun moved out of place in the wood. I used my fingertips to grip the circular shape and tried to wiggle it out of the wall. One wrong move and it could fall back into the wood or perhaps get stuck.
When I finally got my fingernails dug into the wooden shape, I slid it out. The small sun with its spiky perimeter lay in the palm of my hand. Behind it, in the blackness of the interior of the wall, was a piece of parchment, rolled with a red ribbon.
The creeping feeling of the coven’s presence entered my mind. They were on their way back. I could see them in my head. I concentrated on the parchment. I unrolled it and found two pages. The first was a recipe.
INGREDIENTS:
Amber resin
White candles
Blood from a vampire no younger than 500 years…
I read the recipe. I would need assorted herbs, thyme, and a silver knife to complete the ritual. At the bottom it said, in bold handwriting, Rhode’s handwriting, INTENT.
On the second page was a poem—no, at closer look, I realized it was a chant. The chant that Rhode must have said while completing the ritual.
I release you __________ (name of vampire)
Vampire must now slice the wrist with a silver blade.
I release you __________.
I stand as your guardian. I cast away my being to you.
Vampire should allow other to take life blood.
I cast away my life. Take on this blood.
Believe…and be free.
Beneath the chant, which was easy, really, were special instructions about the candles and the herbs I needed to burn before the ritual. At the bottom of the page there was one more sentence and I knew Rhode hadn’t failed me.
Lenah, be safe.
I didn’t know if Rhode’s words were meant for me to find or if they were just the thoughts he had in the moment and he wrote them down on the paper. I hoped he meant them for me.
“Lenah!”
It was Heath calling me from the first-floor landing. I stuffed Rhode’s papers in the pockets of my pants.
“Lenah!”
I called back and descended.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Come,” Heath instructed. Once I reached the first floor we walked down a long hallway toward the ballroom. This was the same ballroom where I murdered the Dutch woman. The door was closed, and the hallway had a gray aura. No lights were lit. Heath grasped the door handle, which was still shaped like a dagger pointed down to the floor. Once the door opened, the ballroom was dark, lit only by candles on the poles that supported the ceiling. Red candles, flickering against the shine of the parquet floor.
There, curled into a ball in the center of the room, was a little girl, a child with hair the color of sunbleached beach grass. Standing in a semicircle, each smiling at me, was the coven. The little girl was curled in a fetal position on the floor. It took everything inside me not to rush to her and hold her against my chest.
Vicken, Gavin, and Song stood in their crescent shape. I gulped when Heath shut the door behind me. I glanced at Vicken’s dark eyes; he had done this on purpose. The vampire rage swelled inside of me. The burning irrational thoughts clouded my mind for one moment. So I walked, swaying my hips. I sauntered toward the girl. This pleased the coven. As I got closer to her, I saw that the girl was no more than five or six years old. She had soiled her pink dinner dress. I pointed to her. “This is my welcoming gift?”
The coven, including Vicken, raised their heads in confidence.
“Four months late,” I spat.
This caused a shift. Song gulped. I made sure to keep my hands in my pockets.
“We were unsure, Lenah,” Song attempted to say. “You have been so removed.”
“Leave us,” I commanded. The coven didn’t move.
The little girl kept her hands covering her eyes.
“Leave us!” I yelled so that they had no choice but to obey. I was their maker, their queen. They turned obediently. Vicken was the last to leave. I spun around, my teeth gritted; I wished I could have spit fire at him.
“Mine,” I snarled, and bared my fangs. “And do not let me hear you idling by the door,” I commanded.
I waited until I heard their footsteps and quiet grumblings. Only Gavin seemed to be pleased by my sudden anger. Once they were really gone to the third floor, I raced to her side.
“Look at me,” I whispered. The little girl was shaking so uncontrollably, I held her close to me until it subsided.
“I want my mommy and daddy,” she cried into my chest. I could feel her tears soak through my T-shirt. I would have spilled rivers with her. I raised her face and when I watched her small blue eyes examine my face, she broke into more tears. “You look funny,” she cried. “You look like them.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jennie.”
“Well, Jennie. I’m going to take you home now.”
Her eyes lightened and she stopped crying for a moment, only to hiccup silently.
“What town do you live in?” I asked.
“Offerton.”
Great. Offerton was the name of a town near my home. The idiots didn’t even go one county over.
The instant I took this child and sped off in the car it would be obvious what I had done. It would have shown with absolute certainty that I was no ordinary vampire. One act would reveal that I was no longer their queen and that I retained my humanity. It would mean my instant death, and it didn’t matter. I had to do this. I stood up, and Jennie followed, gathering her dress in her hands. Her patent leather shoes clicked on the floor.
“Jennie, you’re going to have to help me. When I say so, you’re going to have to scream at the top of your lungs. As loud as you can. Like you just fell at the playground. Okay?”
She nodded.
“I’m going to break the window, and we’re going to crawl out.”
She nodded again.
I picked up a metal chair from the side of the room. One of the many used during Nuit Rouge.
“Ready, Jennie? When I throw this through the window, you scream.”
My hope was that they would think I was torturing her, back in my “old ways.” But I could only hope. I picked up the chair and threw it against the double-paned glass. Jennie screamed as loud as possible, and I could sense the coven’s interest. They were on the move from the third floor back down to the ballroom. I brushed the glass out of the window by taking the curtain in my hand. She wrapped her legs around my waist, and I climbed out. We ran, together, into the darkness of the night.
“Why did those men take me from Mommy and Daddy?”
We were in the woods, walking along the periphery of a main road. Jennie grasped my hand.
“Those men are dangerous and if you ever see them again, you run away.”
“What did they think you would do?” she asked. I didn’t answer.
Our steps brought us to the end of the main road. It had been four hours since I broke out of the mansion. When we turned with the road, we came upon a street with a dozen police cars out front of a small cottage. Two middle-aged people in cocktail dress paced in front of the house. The woman, with blond hair like Jennie’s, rocked back and forth on the ground, her knees to her chest, her high heels scattered by the front door.
“Jennie, listen to me. You go now. Will you promise me something?”
She nodded.
“Don’t tell anyone about me, okay?”
“Where will you go?” she asked. “Back to that house?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever go back there,” I said.
She hugged me, kissed me
delicately on the cheek, and ran down the long length of the street. Her dress bounced with her as she came closer to the house.
After a few moments, the woman on the lawn screamed.
“Jennie!”
The police swarmed around Jennie and her mother and I turned to face the woods. I walked into the thicket, into brush and trees of the dark woods. The police would check the street and I had to get away from there. I walked even deeper into the woods. I would find my way out eventually, I didn’t care. Maybe I’ll find Suleen, I thought when there was a rustle to my right, nearer, toward the road.
I turned. There, under the shadow of lush branches, stood Vicken. The woods shadowed his sharp jaw and swollen curves of his mouth. His dark hair and long sideburns were black as tar. I could see his pain in the way he tightly clenched his jaw.
“What are you?” he snarled through gritted teeth.
“Changed.”
“What happened?”
“I retained my mind. My capacity for emotions and thought,” I said, finding no reason to lie. “I feel no pain.”
“When?”
“When you remade me.”
“You forfeit your vampire life,” he said calmly, without emotion.
“I know the rules.”
He took a step closer to me so we were only a few feet apart beneath the canopy of the branches and the leaves.
“Lenah, my love for you prevents me from hurting you. But I cannot lie to them nor can I save you from what they will do. You know what will happen. They are bound to kill you.”
Flashes from Vicken’s thoughts sifted in and out of my mind: the Scottish coast, the periwinkle gown I wore the night I made him, my profile highlighted by the moon as we lay beneath the stars on thousands of different occasions.
Then my own thoughts came through: Justin’s face smiling at me at prom. Another night, the night after the club and the way his arms looked as he lifted me up to take me into my bedroom. A new memory came next—a dangerous image, the parchment in my pocket came to my thoughts, the ritual scribbled in Rhode’s languid handwriting.
I shook my head and refocused on Vicken’s eyes.
“You,” Vicken said. His eyes held shock and his jaw suddenly set so firm. “You have it,” he whispered. The dark branches canopied over us hid the beauty of the night sky, but I could see the betrayal in Vicken’s eyes. His pain was one that no human man could ever have the capacity to understand.
I tried to speak, but I could not find the words to respond. I parted my lips, but nothing would come out. Instead, Justin’s face came back to my thoughts and I knew Vicken would see and feel what I was experiencing.
Red and blue flashes from the police cars lit up the side of Vicken’s face. “It doesn’t matter if you have the ritual. I know where you will go,” he said.
“I would have gone no matter what,” I replied.
I could see in the brown of his eyes that Vicken was bound to the men back at my castle. A place I refused to ever return. I knew where I would go in that moment, where I probably would have gone, anyway, the moment I escaped from that mansion.
“Then I suggest you prepare yourself,” Vicken said. I was unsure if the next thoughts that came were Vicken’s or mine, but Justin’s broad chest and the way he glistened in the sunlight came to the forefront of my mind. Familiar words echoed in my head: Twenty minutes, or the boy dies.
If Vicken was planning to kill Justin, there was no way I would put his life on the line. This was my fight, not Justin’s.
“It is done,” Vicken said, using a phrase I had once wielded—the night I turned him into a vampire. What he meant was that it was the beginning of the end, the end of all the choices I had made that led me up to that moment in the woods. Letting go of a little girl I didn’t have the evil to kill was just proof that whatever had happened to me during the second transformation was real and permanent. He walked away from me and was part of the darkness before I could respond.
Maybe it was always meant to be this way, I thought. A fight to the death.
I did not linger. I turned and raced into the darkness of the woods.
It was late afternoon in Lovers Bay, Massachusetts. It had been fourteen hours since I ran into the woods away from Vicken. I followed the road and when I got to the airport, I took an early morning flight and got back to Wickham by evening. Now that the coven knew I was alive, I had access to money again. I didn’t care that they would be able to track the flight. They knew where I was going, anyway.
I stood outside the gates of Wickham Boarding School. I could see the grounds, the meadows, and the familiar red brick of the buildings. All of it was washed in a pink, spring sunset that lit the grass and everything within me aflame. Every blade of grass glinted yellow, then green. With a blow of the wind, a rippling gold. If I were to ever get to heaven, I thought, it would look just like this.
The time had come, so I walked through the Wickham archway. The metal façades and spiked points at the top of the gates reached toward the sky. I had to be calculated in my movements. Each Wickham tree was a friendly hiding spot. Vampires are naturally able to find places to blend into the landscape, and Wickham’s campus had plenty of places to offer.
A couple hours passed and stars started to twinkle in the blue-gray sky. Students passed me, but I never met their eyes. I was looking for Justin and Justin alone. By ten p.m. I started to worry. I knew that the coven would follow me. I couldn’t hear their thoughts, but I knew that Vicken had told them I had retained my human nature. This was a break in the coven’s rules, the rules I had created. I was a vampire that could not be trusted, therefore, I needed to die. I knew that Vicken was unable to kill me because of the love-bond between us, but the other members of the coven could, and would, with ease.
I passed the Student Union. It was closed and dark. I stepped across the lighted pathway and onto the meadow between Quartz and the Union. A group of kids, seniors, scurried together in a tight group trying to make their twelve o’clock curfew. I waited in the shadows next to the Union.
I’m never going to find Justin like this, I thought.
I stepped across the meadow and was just a few feet away from the illuminated pathway in front of Quartz. I stopped in the meadow so my new appearance was still hidden in the darkness. Curtis Enos stepped out of the archway and lit a cigarette. He pulled out a cell phone and dialed. As he walked back in the direction of Seeker and the student parking lot, I trailed silently behind.
“Hey, man,” Curtis said to the person on the phone. “You guys still at Lovers Bay Tav? You’re gonna miss curfew again.”
He meant Lovers Bay Tavern, a bar at the far end of Main Street. I knew a lot of the upper classmen went there to drink if they had fake IDs. The smoke from the cigarette swirled up from Curtis’s left hand. I never knew he smoked. I wondered when he had started.
“Is my idiot brother still there?” he asked the person on the phone. At the parking lot, Curtis turned right. A collection of students were coming out of their cars and walking toward the Seeker pathway. If I knew any of them I didn’t know how I would explain my new appearance. The last thing I heard Curtis say was, “He’s there almost every night now.” I walked back into the shadows of the trees.
Back in town, the late night was my friend. It made it easy to walk on the periphery. I stayed on the outskirts of the crowds, mostly sliding along against the stone wall. I tried not to seem conspicuous. To anyone who saw me, I would look more ethereal than anything else. I had white skin now, and blue eyes that looked like marbles. I walked past the simple shops that I loved: the dress shop, the candy store, the public library, and finally at the end of the street, I came upon the tavern. I checked the street which, other than a few locals smoking cigarettes, was basically deserted. When they went back into the tavern, a rock song echoed out onto the silent street. Once the door closed, I moved from under the shadow of the trees and crossed the street.
I barely grasped the door handle when Justin e
xploded out onto the sidewalk. I backed away as Justin burst out of the door. I ran across the street and watched him from the dark protection of the stone wall.
I stayed hidden underneath the trees. There was a streetlamp to my right, far enough away that I was in the darkness. I continued to watch. He was even bigger than the last time I’d see him. His chest was more defined, but he wasn’t shaved and his hair wasn’t short and trim. Long strands fell askew and the style was kind of shaggy, so it fell into his eyes. Nowhere was the collected, happy boy I’d left that winter. He held his hand over his stomach, bent over, and threw up in a corner just shy of the doorway.
Justin sat down in front of the tavern with his legs stretched out in front of him. He spit once on the ground next to him and leaned his head back to rest on the brick wall of the building behind him. He closed his eyes. I stepped out of the shadow again and quickly crossed the street. He sniffed a bit, so his sleek nose scrunched up.
I squatted down directly in front of him. Justin opened his eyes, but the green pupils slid to the back of his head. He tried to lift his head and when he finally succeeded, his eyes looked forward. He locked eyes on me and narrowed his focus. His eyebrows furrowed. He jutted his chin out to really try and get a better look. His eyes went wide, and then he started to laugh—hysterically. “That’s funny.” He pointed at me, laughed, and pointed at me again.
Infinite Days Page 24