Use the ritual. Make me human. Then the images came back, and my palms began to emit light. I could feel the burn on the sides of my thighs.
I looked into Vicken’s eyes. The surprise and anger on his face was a mix of emotion I knew all too well.
I deserve it, Lenah. Don’t I?
I closed my eyes to Vicken concentrating on the moment, what I needed to do in order to gain the strength. Rhode’s face illuminated the darkness in my mind.
Rhode on the hill in the dreamlike meadow, his top hat. His death.
I felt Justin’s hands on my hips and my love for him surged through my body. I was almost there…the power vibrated through me.
“Lenah,” Justin said, warning me. The coven was so close. I opened my eyes, focusing on Gavin’s hand.
He pulled back his hand, knife at the ready….
I looked up and locked my gaze with Vicken again and said, “I suggest you duck.”
I raised my arms from my sides and brought them above my head with such a deafening clap that when my palms hit, an explosive blast of white light reverberated throughout the room. Ripple effects caused the gym floor to crack in thousands of places; the windows imploded, and a dust cloud mushroomed.
And then, for one moment, there was silence.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Lenah!?” Justin’s voice cracked.
“I’m here,” I said.
The room was filled with smoke. I was lying stomach down on the floor. When I raised my head, I could see that the smoke was actually dust. Thousands of particles of dust that filled the room, so I could hardly see in front of me. The windows at the back of the room had been blown out, and the dust was moving around in circles from the air rushing in.
A man in the corner groaned. I looked left.
I saw a pair of black boots, ankle on top of ankle, coming out from behind the bleachers. Vicken Clough had survived.
I waved a hand in front of my face, brushing dust particles away so I could see. An alarm started to echo and once I cocked my head to the side to listen, I realized that it was coming from Hopper.
Then I noticed what was in the middle of the room.
“Help Vicken,” I said to Justin.
“Vicken? What? I thought you were going to kill—”
“Please, just do it,” I begged. Justin ran to the bleachers.
The alarm blared on. Soon students would wake and the authorities would come. I took long strides to the middle of the room and looked down. There were three distinct piles of dust in the places where Heath, Gavin, and Song had been standing. Except, they weren’t glittering like Rhode’s dust did. They were just dust, like fire place ash. And then I heard a voice….
HATHERSAGE, ENGLAND
OCTOBER 31, 1899
“Lenah!” Song called to me from the front entrance. The sun just tipped below the horizon. From the long hallway I could see my coven congregating on the front step. Song was dressed in all black, and Vicken looked dapper in his black dress pants, heather-gray vest, and black top hat. It was fashion at the end of the nineteenth century. And we had the money to prove it.
A photographer stood in front of the open door. He readied a camera, which was shaped like a box on three long legs. The man with a camera waited for us to get into position for the photograph. He held the camera in the palm of both hands, and looked through a tube at the top, a view finder. I sauntered out of the front hallway into the doorway entrance. Next to me Song, Heath, Gavin, and, of course, Vicken, waited.
Vicken held a goblet. The red contents inside swished in the glass as he handed it to me. “A fine English red,” he said with a smile.
My eyes darted to the cameraman. “Ready now?” he asked me. “While we still have the light?”
I raised my goblet in the air….
Lenah!” Justin’s voice broke my memory and my eyes focused on the piles of dust. “We have to go!” I turned to see that Justin was holding up Vicken. The blast had knocked Vicken silly, and his knees kept giving out. I had never seen this happen to a vampire before. The alarm shrieked on.
Somewhere in the not so far distance there were police sirens.
We started for the broken windows.
I took a swig from the goblet, swirling it in my mouth. Gavin, Heath, Vicken, and Song stood in a circle around me.
“This photograph will commemorate our bond. It will represent all of the lonely-hearted, pathetic souls who will lie at our feet.” I moved so that I stood between Vicken and Song. Heath and Gavin took position on the other side of me. We draped over one another like snakes in the heat, dangling over branches.
I wrapped my arm around Song’s back as the photographer readied the camera. I held the goblet in my left hand, lifted it into the air, and then took one more sip before placing it down so I could take the picture. With a film of blood running down my front teeth, I repositioned myself between Vicken and Song.
“Evil be he who thinketh evil?” I said, lifting my chin to the air. “Let them remember this.”
“Go! Go!” Justin called once we were out of the gym. As I climbed out, I glanced one more time at the ashy piles of dust in the middle of the floor. The coven, my brothers, were gone. I held Vicken under his shoulder, with Justin holding him up on the other side. We ran into the woods that separated the beach from the campus. Vicken tried to lift his feet, but every time he took a step his legs would wobble. He kept looking at the ground as though he didn’t have the strength to lift his head.
“Not the boat!” Justin said.
“Why not? We have to get out of here,” I said, while trying to hold Vicken up.
“No, we have to stay on campus. If we go on the boat, the cops will hear the motors. Just leave it. People park at the dock all the time.”
I could see the beach, but Justin was right.
“Seeker,” I said, and we moved toward the pathway. Through the trees, back on campus, there were people swarming out of their dorms. I knew we would have to carefully sneak back to Seeker.
“Lenah,” Vicken whispered. “There’s something wrong. My chest.”
“Stop,” I said to Justin.
“We can’t. Look,” Justin said, and pointed. Police cars screamed to a stop in front of the gymnasium. Lights flickered on in the nearby dorms, and campus security were already getting out of their cars. “We have to get back to Seeker as fast as possible.”
I suddenly felt a tugging, something making my stomach feel as though it were turning in on itself, and I had to let go of Vicken. But we had to keep going and I knew what was wrong. I grabbed at my stomach for an instant.
It was the loss. The loss of the coven. The magic was breaking apart.
“You okay?” Justin asked as he held Vicken.
“Yeah,” I said, retaking my position to carry half of Vicken’s weight.
Then I looked far into the woods, down near where the chapel stood. Suleen stood in the darkness in his traditional Indian garb. He raised a palm to me and then brought it to his heart.
“Lenah, are you still here?” Vicken whispered.
I looked down at Vicken for just an instant. When I looked back to Suleen, he had gone. I didn’t have time to wonder how and why he was there. I wanted to ask him so many questions, but there was no sign of the vampire in white.
Justin started walking, and we crossed over a pathway. We headed behind the science buildings back toward Seeker.
“Lenah?” Vicken said.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m still here.”
Once we were far enough up the path, I looked back at Hopper. The rhythmic red and blue lights from ambulances and police cars filled the darkness.
Someone had to have found Tony by now. I wondered who would call his family.
My heart hurt.
After we broke into the delivery entrance of Seeker, I helped Justin carry Vicken up to my room. As we lifted him stair by stair, I knew why I had saved him. He was just like me. A victim, bound to love someone who was no long
er available. He lived in an eternity of hell and I wasn’t going to allow that to happen anymore. Justin grabbed glances at me as he reached out for my left hand. He held it tight. We stood in front of my bedroom door.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he whispered.
Vicken groaned. Both of our eyes darted to him. We could hear students running down the stairs below us, eager to find out what all the commotion was about.
“Lenah,” Justin said, and squeezed my hand to regain my attention. “I have to know what you’re thinking.”
I looked up at Justin’s caring eyes and said, “How would you feel if you’d just killed your family?”
We laid Vicken down on my bed.
“Lenah…,” he called, but put his arm over his eyes. I closed the door behind me, and Justin and I sat down on the couch. I put my head in my hands. Soon, Justin’s strong palm was running up and down my back. I looked up at him, and he smiled gently. I leaned over and rested my head on his chest. It was at least two or three in the morning.
As Justin sipped a glass of water, I stared at the curtain pulled over the sliding-porch door. With my head still against his shoulder, I thought of the morning that Rhode died and how the curtain billowed in and out. That it had looked as though it were breathing.
“What should we do? About Vicken?” Justin asked.
I shook my head. “I’m all he has. He wants the ritual so badly,” I said.
“But you already said you needed to be five hundred or older for it to work. And it killed Rhode.”
“It’s really the intent of the ritual that is the most powerful aspect.”
“What do you mean? About the intent?”
“I mean,” I said, twisting the onyx ring on my ring finger, “that I would want Vicken to live as a human. And I in turn would want to have to die.”
I looked down at the ring, realizing that I had forgotten I had worn it throughout this entire year. It had been my talisman, the one item, besides Rhode’s ashes, that I’d taken with me from place to place.
“Do you?” Justin asked. “Do you want to die?”
“I want the cycle to end. And in some way, it has,” I said.
In that moment, I knew what I had to do. Just as I had known that night at winter prom when I left Justin in the ballroom. Even if I died, as Rhode said was a possibility, even if it didn’t work, Vicken couldn’t stay a vampire and neither could I. And maybe I’d known it all along and it was why I’d come back to Wickham and had worked so long to find the ritual.
“I need you to do something for me,” I said, sitting up and looking at Justin. He was war torn. His blond hair was slick with sweat and his face was smeared with dust, the dust of dead vampires.
“Sure,” he said, brushing my hair back with his palm.
“Will you go see if they have taken Tony’s body? I can’t do it, but I need to know.”
“Sure,” he said, and kissed my forehead. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
Once he left and the door closed behind him, I opened the door to the patio, allowing the air to scoot under the curtain and into the apartment. I went into the kitchen and stood in front of the black canisters that rested on the counter. Inside them were herbs and spices.
I unrolled the ritual parchment still hiding in my pocket. I picked out thyme, for regeneration of the soul. As I walked back toward the bedroom, I raised onto my tiptoes and took a white candle from the iron wall sconces.
I opened the door to my bedroom.
Vicken lay on the bed, his arm over his eyes. I shut the door behind me and pressed my back against the door.
After a moment he said, “I feel as though I am split. In a thousand pieces. Drawn and quartered.”
“It will pass,” I said.
“Is that all I was to you?” He sat up slowly. His eyes were framed with black rings, and his skin had whitened. He needed blood and he needed it soon. He leaned his back against the pillows. “Just a victim? Of your dark age.”
I stepped next to the bed and placed the herbs and candle down on the night table. I tried to stay focused and I refused to look at my bedroom, the shell of my life that I left behind in December. “I do not think of you as a victim,” I said.
Vicken laughed, but then swayed a little, drunk from thirst. “Now what do we do?” he asked. “Shall we return to Hathersage? Go back to our existence? I feel awful.”
I raised a hand and held my palm an inch or two above the wick of the white candle. Using the light from within me, I set the candle aflame. Vicken looked at the candle and then at me. I slid open the drawer in my night table and found my silver letter opener. Not a knife, but it would have to do the trick. “I release you, Vicken Clough.”
Vicken’s eyes widened. “No,” he said, sitting up rigid. “I was clouded. Insane. Lenah—”
I raised the blade in the air and slashed down on my wrist so hard that a gaping wound opened. The blood started to ooze, though, as expected, there was no pain. Vicken stared at my wrist and then licked his lips even though he shook his head. “I don’t want this.”
“I release you.”
“No…,” he said, though I extended my wrist toward him.
This was what I wanted. To take back all the hundreds of years of pain and suffering. To do something right for once. To set it right. So Vicken could live, and Justin, too. If Vicken stayed a vampire, I would spend eternity fighting him. He deserved more. He deserved it back in the nineteenth century, when I promised him something I could never give.
Justin Enos was the reason I came to life. He gave me that freedom. I danced with thousands of people, I made love, and had friends. I was a full human and I had Justin and Tony to thank for it. And if anything, I owed Vicken that same chance and I owed Justin the freedom to let me go.
“I stand as your guardian,” I said to Vicken.
I used the light from my right hand to ignite the herbs. Vicken took my wrist and placed it to his mouth.
“Believe…and be free.” The smoke swirled up from the herbs on the night table. I closed my eyes and did what I had to do. And in that moment, with Justin’s face in my mind, I knew it was right.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I stumbled out of my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I fell so my back rested on the wall. I tilted my head back, with my eyes closed. I was weakened beyond my wildest imagination. Most of the blood was gone from my body. I was so exhausted that the room was off-kilter and I couldn’t focus.
To my right was the living room and, beyond that, the doorway to the patio. Dawn had broken and the sunlight was peeking in from underneath the curtain of the porch. Vicken lay in the deepest sleep he would ever experience. When he awoke, he would be Vicken again. Not the soulless angry vampire that I’d created.
The front door opened.
Justin stepped into the dorm room. His beautiful pouted mouth pointed down; the energy in his eyes was extinguished. He didn’t say anything at first. Just the noise that silence makes that can never quite be explained.
“They took his body,” Justin said. “The police.”
He finally looked up at me and his eyes rested on my right hand grasping my bleeding left wrist. He gasped and reached for me, but I put up my left hand and he stopped.
“Tell me you didn’t just do what I think you did. Tell me, Lenah, that you would have told me first.”
“I can’t.”
“Lenah…” Tears spilled out of Justin’s gorgeous green eyes. His young face contorted with pain, and the guilt surged through me. He would know heartache and grief, and I was responsible for it.
He walked toward me, but I kept my hand around my wrist, trying to keep the blood in. My body wasn’t regenerating blood, it was escaping, and soon I would be empty entirely. Justin reached for me, but I kept my hands close to my body. Stay up, I thought, and concentrated on maintaining consciousness.
He kissed me hard. I pulled away and, without a word, I slid off my onyx ring and placed it in Justin’s palm. He
looked down at it, thrown for a minute, and then back up at me.
“Don’t you see?” I said, not removing my gaze from his. His green eyes were so watery with tears. “I fell in love with you,” I continued. My knees buckled, but Justin was there to catch me. Justin swallowed hard, and another tear fell out from his eyes. He wiped it away. I was seeing double. My time was running low.
“Lenah…” Justin was crying now.
I inched to the right, toward the patio door.
“Don’t do this,” he said, as if I could change it.
“In there.” I pointed at the bedroom door. While I was dying, the vampire within Vicken was evaporating and escaping his body. “The intent was you. Your protection and freedom. That’s all I want now, is for you to be safe. You’ll wake up tomorrow with no fear. It stops with me.”
Blood seeped through the grasp around my wrist. “Please, go,” I whispered. “You don’t want to see this.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Justin said through gritted teeth. “I’m waiting here.”
If I could have cried, I would have. But there were no tears in me. I was nothing but a carcass. “Just promise me you’ll be here when he wakes up. It takes two days. Tell him my whole story. He’ll know what to do.”
“I promise,” Justin said, just when the back of my heels hit the patio door frame.
I smiled; my hands were shaking. “You brought me to life.”
Before he could respond, I turned to the door.
I thought I heard something before I stepped out into the dawn.
I think it was Justin’s knees hitting the ground. I pulled the curtain aside, and a blast of morning light hit me square in the face. I raised my hands from my sides.
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