The vampire was searching for something.
Without looking, I reached behind me and grabbed a fistful of Erik’s shirt, pulling him closer to me. I forced my mind to ignore the scent of him, instead focusing on the danger ahead of us. I led us into the apartment slowly, afraid that at any moment we would be attacked.
But we never were. Through each room, around every corner, the place seemed empty. No sign of the vampire, no sign of Erik’s uncle. It was as though they’d vanished. The noise I’d heard when we first got here was gone as well, which meant one of two things: Either they were really gone, or Erik’s uncle was.
“Please stay here,” I whispered to Erik, my voice so low even I could barely hear it.
“NO,” he mouthed back, practically pushing me forward. I wanted to shake him and say “I can’t watch you and save your uncle, too,” but I didn’t. Instead, I kept walking through the apartment, the master bedroom the only room yet to be searched.
When we made it to the door, I turned to Erik. “Once I open this,” I whispered, pointing over my shoulder to the door behind me, “you stay back.” I could feel venom dripping from my veins, which had been exposed this entire time and I hadn’t even known it. Erik obviously understood that I was dead serious, because he didn’t protest, only nodded in agreement. Satisfied that I had finally gotten through to him, I flung open the door, ready to strike.
Once in the bedroom, all I saw was blood. Covering everything.
The walls were splattered with it, blotches of deep crimson spotting the almost-white wallpaper, the thick carpet, the olive green bedding. My stomach lurched with hunger at the overwhelming scent of it and I had to fight with everything human inside me to remain calm. Erik practically gasped from behind me and stepped to my side. I instinctively threw an arm out to stop him.
“No,” I whispered, pointing to the bathroom off to our left. I could hear noises coming from inside, sounds of pain and vengeance. I slowly moved away from Erik and headed in the direction of the half-open doorway, more blood caking the exposed tiles of the floor. As I was ready to lunge in and stop the monster responsible for the carnage, the door flew wide open and a blur of black teeming with the stench of death bolted from the room.
My body was thrown back against a large armoire, shattering the wood and sending my brain into stunning dizziness. I almost blacked out, but knew that I couldn’t if I expected to keep myself—and Erik and his uncle—alive. I jumped to my feet, ignoring the shooting pain running from my hips to my head, coming face to face with the vampire.
He was about my height, and most likely my weight too, by the looks of him, with wild eyes and super-pale skin. A set of bloody fangs hung in the open space of his mouth, and he smelled foul. Like, worse-than-undead foul. Even though I felt pretty evenly matched against him, I knew that he had just fed, and would be a lot stronger than me.
Not that that was gonna keep me from killing him.
I didn’t think, only reacted. I leaned over, shoved Erik through the doorway back into the hall, and leapt forward at the vampire. We fell back onto the bloodied bed with me on top of him, his arms around my back. I tried leaning forward so I could sink my fangs into his neck, but the squeeze hold he had on me was breathtaking. I could feel my ribs ready to cave under the pressure, my lungs nearing asphyxiation. If I didn’t do something, I would be dead soon—or very close to it.
I started shifting my body, thrashing like crazy from side to side, hoping to break free. I didn’t, but I did manage to move one leg from his side to in between his legs…which gave me the perfect advantage to show him what a Super Knee to the groin felt like. One thing I’d learned about vampires? It might be hard as hell to kill them, but they still felt pain.
His arms immediately fell from my sides and went to his crotch as he cried and yelled out. I didn’t waste any more time, falling onto his chest and piercing the vein running up his neck with my fangs. The taste was worse than awful, his undead blood turning my stomach. But I drank it anyway, sucking in even the tiniest bit of fuel it provided, just in case he had a friend waiting in the bathroom. The vampire’s hands clutched and clawed at my back and head, trying to pry my teeth from him, but it was a pointless effort. Within seconds, his arms went limp by his sides, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he stopped moving. I kept my fangs in his neck a few more seconds just to be sure I finished him off before climbing off the bed and heading toward the bathroom. I used the back of my hand to wipe blood from my lips before going inside.
Erik was already there, inside the waterless bathtub and cradling his uncle like he had Lila’s lifeless body the night she died. I fought back tears—and the mesmerizing scent of his uncle’s spilled blood—as I knelt down beside them.
“Is he…alive?”
“Yeah, but barely,” Erik said, wiping blood from his uncle’s forehead. Adam moaned and shifted a bit in his nephew’s arms before slowly opening his eyes. I had no clue what type of injuries he had sustained, his body completely covered with his own blood.
“Do you remember anything?” I asked him, sorry for having to question a man who had literally just survived the worst attack of his life.
Adam cleared his throat and tried to sit up; Erik kept an arm over his chest, preventing him. “He was here when I got home,” Adam said, his words dripping with pain and fear. “About an hour ago.” Oh god, he’d endured all of this for an hour? My heart went out to him.
“Do you know how he got in, Uncle Adam?” Erik asked. Though he wouldn’t show them, I could hear tears behind his voice.
“Not sure,” Adam said. “Fire escape?” Without thinking, I jumped up and ran to the large double window of the living room, careful not to disturb anything that may offer some clue as to who the now-dead vampire was—or who he was working for. Tiny shards of glass littered the floor behind the overturned sofa, and a soft, icy breeze filtered in through the hole just above the window’s lock.
“It was the fire escape,” I announced once back in the bathroom. Erik had managed to sit his uncle upright and was now out of the tub, his clothing covered in blood. I swallowed the want climbing my throat. “Broke the glass above the lock,” I went on, feeling as though silence would be unbearable.
“Dammit!” Erik began pacing the tiny room, running a bloody hand through his hair.
“Erik, I’m so sorry about this,” I said, reaching out to him.
“What? Why? This isn’t your fault.” He only looked at me briefly as he kept up his assault on the tile beneath his feet, leaving streaked prints in his wake.
“It is,” I said, turning from him to Adam, who seemed to be coming to more and more. “None of this would’ve happened had I not come out of that coffin.”
Self-loathing, party of one?
“What the hell are you talking about, Ava?” Erik finally stopped pacing and faced me. “Kayla said they’ve been planning something like this for centuries. It has nothing to do with you.”
“A-Ava?” Adam’s weak voice pulled my attention away from feeling sorry for myself.
“What is it, Uncle Adam?” Erik asked, moving past me and going to his uncle. He knelt down next to the tub and brushed some matted hair from his uncle’s face.
Adam didn’t acknowledge him, his terrified eyes focused on me. “Y-your name…is Ava?”
“Yeah,” I finally said, my own voice coming out weak. Why did my name matter so much to him?
“That’s Ava, Uncle Adam,” Erik said, almost with a smile—which was weird given our current circumstances. “The girl I told you about?”
He had told his uncle, the man who raised him and Lila, about me? What had he said? Who did he tell his uncle I was? Questions bombarded my mind, mixing with the questions about tonight’s events already living there.
“You didn’t say she was…a vampire,” Adam said. My skin went cold.
“H-how did you know that?�
�� Erik stammered, his eyes flashing from his uncle to me over and over.
“Because,” Adam said, grunting as he tried to sit up more in the bloody bathtub, “she’s the one that monster was after.”
WELCOME HOME
This isn’t your fault,” Erik said again as he and I crept from Adam’s bedroom, closing the door behind us. It took all of Erik’s strength and most of mine to pull his battered uncle from the bathtub and put him to bed. There was really no point in trying to clean up, since the place looked like the inside of a heart attack, so we simply tossed a fresh blanket onto the bed and he was asleep before his head hit the pillow. Erik did clean the blood from his face and arms so I wouldn’t have to stare at it—only smell it.
I made a beeline for the living room, copying Erik’s pacing from earlier. As thoughts of what had happened to Adam nearly broke me down, Erik came over and grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Ava, stop,” he said, his warm hands sending chills up my arms. “I know what you’re doing.”
“What?” I asked, almost frantic. “What am I doing?”
“You’re trying to figure out how to fix all this by yourself.” He knew me, I gave him that. “But you don’t have to,” he went on, the softness of his voice and the warmth behind his words lulling me into a false sense of hope. “You don’t have to take care of everybody like you think you do.”
“Yes I do,” I said, reluctantly pulling myself from his grip. With nothing else to occupy my hands—well, nothing that wasn’t Erik—I began straightening up the disheveled room. “I have to, Erik. Can’t you see that?” I wouldn’t look at him, fearful of what his eyes may hold.
“Why do you think that?” he asked as he came over and helped me turn the sofa upright. “Why do you think that saving the world is up to only you?”
“Because…” I stopped, since I didn’t really have an answer to that. At least, not one I could put into words. I just felt like it was my job, to right all the wrongs that my being here had caused.
“You know,” he continued when I couldn’t produce words. “Uncle Adam used to say that ‘because’ is the weakest answer somebody can give you.” We slid his uncle’s desk and chair back into place, and I picked up the computer and put it on top, amazed that it wasn’t shattered. “He said that’s what people say when they don’t have an answer.” I glared at him, mad that he wouldn’t let this go—and that he was right. “And you don’t have an answer because there isn’t one, Ava. Not one that makes sense, anyway.”
“It does make sense. At least to me.” I knelt down and began scooping up scattered papers from the floor, tapping them against the wood to get them to fall in line together. The monotonous task helped my mind stay free of unwanted images of torture and pain and death. “If I hadn’t come here, if Chance hadn’t found me that night, none of this would be happening right now.”
“I’ve already told you, this would all be happening even if you weren’t here, Ava. Zyris and Sebastian—”
“—I meant that it wouldn’t be happening to you.” I stopped picking up paper and sat on the floor. “To any of you. It might have still gone down this way, but at least all of you would be safe.”
Erik sat down beside me. “You don’t know that.” His knee grazed mine, and I became fixated on the point where our jean-covered skin touched. “Who’s to say that Sebastian wouldn’t have attacked Wellesley anyway?”
“Why would he?” I asked, pulling my eyes from our knees and up to his face. “He didn’t even know you guys existed until I started killing off his family.”
“His family?”
I winced. “It’s what he calls them. It’s gross, I know. The point is, I’m the reason he’s here. And it’s up to me to stop him.”
“No, it’s up to us. We’re gonna stop him, Ava. Somehow.”
And I knew that Erik would. Or at least he’d try. Since Lila’s death, though he hadn’t been vocal about it, getting revenge on Sebastian was his main focus. I couldn’t stop him if I tried.
Which was what scared me to death.
“If anything happens to you…”
“It won’t.” He slid his hand onto my knee and gave it a squeeze before lifting it into the air and saluting me. “Scout’s honor.”
I gave a little laugh. “I think it’s more like this,” I said, lifting three fingers into the air like I had seen the boys do countless times on those Boy Scouts of America commercials.
Erik laughed a little, too. “Yeah, well, I never was a Boy Scout. Too much outdoor activity for me.”
“Really?” I said with genuine surprise. “I would’ve thought that a skilled hunter such as yourself would love showing off outdoors.”
A sly grin slid across his face. “Oh, I love showing off,” he said, his eyes rolling toward me. “But I’m much more of an indoor sports kind of guy.”
I could almost feel my cheeks blossom red. “Down, boy,” I said with a shaky voice. “We have more important things to do right now.”
He leaned back, placing his hands on the floor behind him. Though I tried not to look, I couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of the tiny muscles on the sides of his arms as they flexed. “Maybe more important, but definitely not more fun.”
Crap.
“Um, maybe we, um, need to go get Kayla and Lacey?” I was flustered, no doubt about it. Even in the midst of total trauma, Erik could get under my skin like nobody else. “They’re probably freaking out wondering where we are.”
Erik smiled and hopped up, extending a hand out to me. I reluctantly took it and he hoisted me up, so fast that I almost fell into him. If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed that was on purpose. “If I know Kayla,” he said, still smiling, “she’s still neck-deep in that computer.” I followed him out of Adam’s apartment and back downstairs, my mind doing somersaults over exactly how good Erik might be at those indoor sports.
“Find anything?” I asked as Erik and I filed into Adam’s dentist office. Kayla was still behind the computer, just as Erik had guessed, and Lacey was near sleep on the sofa between the two fake trees on the far wall.
“Tons,” Kayla answered, never pulling her eyes from the screen. The printer behind her was going berserk, spitting out pages and pages of what I assumed were her dad’s journal entries. “No time to go through it all now, though. So we get to do a little reading tonight.” Finally she looked at me long enough to flash an excited smile before turning back and clicking away on the mouse. I moved in behind her and began pulling pages from the printer tray, glancing at some of the stuff she had already found. Words like PROPHECY and LEGACY stood out to me, but the rest was so in-depth and technical that I didn’t really understand much.
“Looks like you are gonna be doing a little reading tonight,” I said, adding the pages back to the stack still flowing from the printer. “I don’t understand this stuff.”
“Fine with me,” she said. She clicked a few more pages on the screen before shutting the folders she had open and removing her jump drive from the port in the side of the monitor. “You know how I live for this stuff.” She jumped from the chair and began clearing the printer, stacking the papers like I had done with Adam’s scattered files upstairs. Which reminded me that she and Lacey had zero clue as to what went down.
“Um, there’s something we need to fill you guys in on,” I said, moving back across the room to where Erik stood.
“Lemme guess,” Lacey said, sitting up on the couch. Every day at school, she was the vision of perfection. Her hair was always in place (usually a ponytail, but still), flawless makeup, stylish clothes. But now, she looked tired and worn and ready to give up. Though I hated to admit it, I felt bad for her. “Some of your distant cousins decided to drop in for a family reunion?”
That bad feeling didn’t last long.
“No,” I said, rolling my eyes at her. “But a vampire did show up here.”<
br />
Kayla stopped gathering the journal pages she had printed. “What happened?” she asked, looking from me to Erik.
“It’s nothing,” Erik said, trying to play off the fact that his uncle had almost been torn apart. “A vampire got into my uncle’s place, roughed him up a bit.”
“Your uncle?” Lacey stood up from the couch. “I thought you said we wouldn’t get in trouble for this?”
“We won’t,” Erik said. “He lives here.”
“Upstairs,” Kayla added, looking over at Lacey. “Is he okay?” I almost asked how she knew about Adam’s upstairs apartment—and why she didn’t tell me—until I remembered that she and Erik and Lila were friends long before I came into the picture. Of course she knew his uncle.
“He will be,” Erik answered, smiling. Kayla smiled back and moved to hug her friend. “Ah, I wouldn’t do that,” Erik said, holding out his hands. Kayla stared at him before he pointed to his blood-soaked shirt; Kayla nodded and backed away, while I made a mental note to tell him to change clothes the first chance he got.
“And what about the vampire?” Lacey asked, fear lacing her words. “Any chance he’ll come back for the rest of us?”
“Not unless he comes back from the dead,” I responded. “Twice.”
Lacey released the pent-up air from her lungs, and her racing heartbeat slowed down a bit. “Okay, good,” she said. “Having one around at all times is more than enough, thank you very much.”
“I told you, I’m not…oh forget it. Let’s just get upstairs. We need to check on Adam anyway.” I turned and walked out of the room, frustrated at Lacey and the situation. As much as I hated what happened to Erik’s uncle, I didn’t have time to be distracted from what we were here for.
To help Chance.
I had to get him back, no matter what.
“So, fill us in,” I told Kayla once the shock of what they saw in Adam’s apartment had worn off. Well, Kayla seemed okay with the blood-spattered room; Lacey, not so much. She was curled up on the couch with Erik, who was trying to keep her from sobbing.
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