By the time I finished the chorus, I was coming around the block of my house, ten miles away. I skidded to a stop. I hadn’t even broken a sweat. I laughed with the joy of it. If only I could do this in the daylight! Think of how small my carbon footprint would be!
I was still laughing breathlessly when my hypervamped awareness caught the impression of movement out of the corner of my eye. I swiveled my head, like an animal tracking a scent. Out of the shadowy tangle of hedges, a tall, pale figure materialized briefly. Ghostly skin flashed and then disappeared.
Someone was stalking through the bushes around my house.
I had no doubt it was a vampire. But what kind? Was s/he friendly?
Vampires could move stealthily when they needed to too. Kicking off my shoes, I tiptoed along the sidewalk. The pavement felt cool and damp with evening dew. My socks snagged slightly on the roughness, which sounded loud to my ears. I had to assume that the intruder was as supersensitive to noise as I was, so I was about to slip them off when my cell phone bleeped.
The clamor might as well have been a cannon going off.
Whoever had been sneaking around dashed through the underbrush with an explosion of speed and leaves.
“Crap,” I muttered, especially since the guilty flight of the prowler indicated that the vampire in question was probably not of the friendly variety. Elias, for instance, wouldn’t have run off.
When the phone rang again, I scrambled to retrieve it from my pocket. Irritated, I flipped it open without even checking caller ID. “What?” I hissed.
“Still feeling vampy, eh?” It was Nikolai. There was something in his tone I wasn’t sure I liked. Was it threatening or ... did he sound turned on?
“You sure call me a lot for a guy I broke up with.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. I’d scored a hit, though I wasn’t proud of that. I needed to learn to curb my impulse to blurt out the first thing on my mind when I was upset.
Nikolai cleared his throat finally. “Yeah, well, I was going to tell you how I fixed that, but I guess you don’t care. Oh, and I’m no longer an apprentice hunter.”
“You ... ? What?” But I was talking into dead air. He’d hung up.
Chapter Five
I stared at the neon green “call ended” message on the screen, and tried to catch my breath. What had he just said? He was no longer an apprentice? Did he mean he quit or did he graduate? But ... but there was only one way to become a full-fledged hunter!
My finger jabbed the redial button. It rang through to voice mail. He must have turned off his phone. That Nik was a much better drama queen than I was just made me angrier. “If you mean what I think you do, we are so over. For good.”
My heart hammered in my ear. The air was cool enough that my breath misted in sharp puffs. Perhaps the interloper had come to warn me of Nik’s new hunter status. But if the vampires knew, why wouldn’t Elias have come himself?
Unless he couldn’t. Because ... because he was ...
Oh no! Nikolai couldn’t have, could he?
I struggled to remember exactly what Nik had said when he’d arranged our date. Something about a “game changer”?
I had to find out if Elias was okay.
“Come back!” I shouted into the neighbor’s shrubs. I frantically dashed through into the “naturalized” landscape, my stocking feet squishing wetly in moss and fern. “Come back!”
But the vampire—friend or foe—was long gone.
How was I going to find out if Elias was okay? I vaulted the fence between the yards in a bound worthy of a superhero. Rather than take the time to go up the stairs, I scrambled over the porch railing. It wobbled, threatening to give way under my weight. Instead, the wood gave a loud groan of protest. I pulled at the door, surprised to find it locked.
Had Mom gone to bed?
Stretching up on my toes, I peeped through the door windows. Everything looked dark. But that could just mean that she was in the back office/craft room upstairs.
I dug out my keys. My thought was that I’d leave the sock “welcome” in the window for Elias. And then ...
Wait, I guess.
Hmmm, that plan sounded pretty frustrating, actually. But what else could I do? Even though I’d been the vampire princess for a couple of months now, I didn’t go into the underground unescorted very often. St. Paul was riddled with natural sandstone caves, abandoned rail tunnels, bootleggers’ caves, and sewers. It would be pretty easy to get lost down there. According to Elias, one of the main jobs of the Igors, besides watching over me, was to keep the urban spelunkers from invading vampire lairs.
Oh! The Igors! They could get a message back to Elias or someone who might know if he was okay.
Now that I needed one, where were they? Oh, that’s right. I ditched them. Maybe some were hanging around anyway, doing their creepy stalker thing. Before going in, I took a look around. With my fangs still out, all life around me was illuminated. There were tons of squirrels, a raccoon family, and Mr. Becker’s mangy cat. No people of any variety.
Crap. That meant I was back to plan A: waiting.
With a sigh, I went into the house. I didn’t particularly try to be quiet. After all, Mom was a pretty heavy sleeper. She knew that when I had auditions, I came home late, so it wasn’t like she was going to be waiting up to lecture me. Besides, I had more on my mind than worrying about Mom.
What would I do if Nikolai had killed Elias? It was hard to even formulate that thought. I’d seen Nik fight a number of times, so I knew he was capable of violence. But it was one thing to protect yourself and another to kill somebody.
But did he really think of vampires as somebody? There was all that talk about sending them back to where they belonged, too.
He just couldn’t have. No, not Nikolai. The guy whose lips I’d kissed—the guy who laughed at my stupid jokes and read manga and played guitar. I mean, that person was decent, nice. Not a killer.
Maybe he was trying to tell me he quit. He was awfully mad when I’d made that snide comment about how he called all the time. Maybe he’d decided to throw it all away—for me.
My socks squished on the hardwood floor, and I tossed the sneakers I’d been carrying onto the rug next to the coat-tree. I toed off my damp stockings, and wadded them into a ball. Looking around for a place to put them, I found none, so I jammed them into the pockets of my jeans.
Upstairs was dark. Mom must have gone to bed, after all. Mindful of waking her, I waited until I shut the door to turn on the light.
When I turned around, I had to swallow a scream of surprise. Elias sat on my bed.
“How did you get past the wards ... ?” I started to ask, but then I just threw myself at him and wrapped my arms around him. I squeezed as tightly as I could, just to make sure he was really there. “I’m so glad you’re okay! I thought you were dead!”
“Well, technically, I’m kind of neither alive nor—”
“Hush,” I said, and laid my head on his shoulder. Elias put his arms around me with a light chuckle.
“What’s brought all this on?” he asked after the shaking in my shoulders had stopped, and my fangs retreated. “Why did you think I’d been injured?”
I sat back so that my back rested against the bedpost. With my legs stretched out, my bare feet nearly touched his thigh. “Nikolai told me he’s no longer an apprentice.”
Elias frowned. In the harsh overhead light, his face looked drawn, almost sickly. He ran a hand through the short hairs at the back of his neck. “I have waited here some time for you. Could more have happened?”
“More?” I poked him with my toe. “Yeah, what’s with the threshold-crossing thing? I didn’t think you could do that.”
He gave an unconcerned lift of his shoulder. “My prince’s blood has been spilled inside this house. No spell can keep a pledged knight of the realm out.”
Good to know. So the house was vulnerable to any of the “good guy” vampires, and, probably, specifically Dad’s Praetor
ian Guard. “Okay,” I murmured a bit unhappily. “So what’s going on?”
“The talisman has resurfaced.”
My mouth hung open. “You mean the talisman? The one that can enslave us?”
“The very one.”
“Where is it? Who has it?”
Elias’s mouth twitched. “The Minnesota Historical Society by way of the Smithsonian. It was spotted by one of our spies on the inside. It’s listed as ‘Snake-headed goddess figurine,’ but it is as I remember it.”
“Are you serious? The talisman is at the History Center?” Like a lot of St. Paul kids, I visited the History Center on a field trip in elementary school. The only thing I really remembered about it was a big grain elevator that we could run around inside, pretending to be wheat or corn or something like that. “I can’t believe it!”
“The Smithsonian traveling exhibit opens tomorrow.”
“What are you going to do?”
Elias glanced at me. His eyes seemed tired, heavy. “Your father wants to do nothing. There’s no way of knowing if the witches know it is the one. Our memories are as sharp as the first day we were brought over. The witches are human. They grow old and die. Those witches we fought in the secret war who are still alive are in their dotage. There is a chance it may pass undetected. Our prince, your father, is afraid that if we make a move—attempt to steal it—we will have done the hard work for them. They will simply take it from us once it’s in our possession.”
I supposed that made a kind of sense. But Elias wouldn’t have been waiting in my room in the dark just to tell me they weren’t going to do anything about it. “You disagree?”
“I think if we have spies, they have spies. If nothing else, their spies watch ours. If they don’t already know, they will soon. I want to move before we all become slaves and no longer have any will of our own.”
I’d never seen Elias like this. He faced my desk, his feet on the floor. He held his hands between his legs, and the knuckles were white with tension. He seemed ready to burst. “What’s stopping you?”
His storm gray eyes were ice hard when he turned: “Your father’s orders.”
Now I understood. Elias had broken my mother’s wards, risked potentially having to face Mom and her full-on magic, and sat in the dark all night while I was singing it up with Thompson, because he wanted me to grant him some kind of royal permission to go against my dad.
“Uh, I don’t know about this,” I admitted, pulling my legs up to hug them. It was one thing to tell some random vampire chick that it was okay for her to run off with the boy she loved, and another thing to start a rift between my dad and his trusted personal guardian.
Elias bowed his head like he was utterly defeated. “Inaction is the fool’s strategy. Action is the traitor’s. What am I to do, Princess?”
I tucked my chin up against my knees. Elias seemed to be searching my face for a clue, but I had none. My room seemed too small for this conversation. Hugging myself tighter, I asked, “If you stole the talisman, could you keep it safe?”
His head snapped up. “Your father asked me the same thing. Only when he asked, it was no simple question, but an accusation.”
I didn’t understand. “An accusation?”
Color dotted the high arches of his cheekbones. He stared at his clenched hands. In a low voice, he said, “Yes. All those years ago, when we rebelled, it was I that stole the talisman. I lost it as well.”
My mind stumbled over the magnitude of this revelation. “Are you saying that you’re the person responsible for freeing the vampires? Like, some kind of undead Abe Lincoln?”
Despite the seriousness of our conversation, Elias laughed. “More like Spartacus,” he corrected, and then his smile faded. “Perhaps my freedom too shall be short-lived.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t know many details about what the vampires called the secret wars, other than it was a bloody rebellion that ended with the talisman no longer in witch possession. I had no idea Elias had played such a key role. “Why aren’t you the prince? I mean, you were the hero of the secret war, right?”
“Your father was the architect of the plan; I was only the foot soldier who carried out his orders. And ... ultimately, I showed poor judgment. I trusted the wrong person, and the talisman slipped away into the mundane world and was lost to us.”
That didn’t sound so horrible to me. The vampires had still won their freedom. “Everyone makes mistakes.” I shrugged.
“Mine could result in enslavement of an entire people.”
I gave him a reassuring pat on the leg.
But he seemed to take my sympathy the wrong way. Stiffening, he gazed out the window as if tracking something. “I should go.”
“But what are you going to do about the talisman?”
As he pulled open the window, he sounded angry. “My duty is, apparently, to do nothing at all.”
Halfway out, he paused. He caught my eyes and held them. Should I say something? It didn’t seem right, him shackled like this. What if Dad was wrong? What if the talisman ended up back in the hands of someone willing to use it to bind us again? Then it would be more than duty that bound him; he’d be someone’s slave. I couldn’t cope with that thought.
“You should do it,” I said, my voice shaking. “Make sure no one gets the talisman.”
His eyes flashed. With a brisk nod, he disappeared into the night.
Chapter Six
I lay awake for hours wondering if I���d made the right decision, and trying to imagine how furious my father would be when he found out what I’d done. I didn’t know him very well, despite the blood relation, but I couldn’t think of a scenario where he’d be happy that I’d turned his trusted personal guard against him.
Yet, at the same time, the more I thought about the talisman being out there, unguarded and available for the other side to snatch up and use against us, the happier I was that I’d sent Elias to get it. After all, I’d just finished reading a chapter about the horrors of slavery. I sure as hell didn’t want to live it firsthand. Okay, so Elias was apparently the same guy that lost the artifact, but in his defense, it wasn’t like it had instantly fallen into the wrong hands. The talisman had stayed buried this whole time.
Though how secret was it if the Smithsonian had it?
I supposed it was like hiding in plain sight, except with museum-quality security to back you up.
Huh.
Suddenly, I could see my dad’s point of view.
I flipped over in the sheets again, pounding my pillow with my fists in an effort to get comfortable. But suddenly, the bedsheets felt too restricting and the mattress unyielding. A car passed down the street, its engine straining and thumping bass blasting on the stereo.
The break-in was bound to make the news, and unless Elias was smart enough to steal some other random items, everyone would wonder what was so damn special about—What was it he’d called it? “Snake-headed goddess figurine.” Even the dimmest bulbs in the True Witch community would be able to put two and two together.
Crap.
I sat up, wondering if there was some way to recall Elias from his mission. Surely, he wouldn’t go out right this minute and break into the museum, would he? Maybe I could talk this over with him tomorrow, let him convince me that he knew what he was doing and that this wouldn’t be a total disaster.
Dad was going to kill me—and, hopefully, not literally.
The only silver lining was that I wouldn’t have to worry about dear Papa showing up at school tomorrow, even with the sewer access Khan had used. Apparently, you got more sensitive to light the older you were, and Dad was mighty old. If he was going to kill me—either literally or figuratively—he’d have to wait until nighttime.
Cold comfort, honestly.
To distract myself from the thoughts zipping round and round in my head, I fumbled for my iPod. It was still set to loop “Teardrops,” which only made me remember all the awful with Nikolai earlier tonigh
t. Why was I so stupid? Always blurting out the first thing that came into my head? I’d messed it up with Nik by saying something without thinking, and now I might have FUBARed vampire freedom forever.
Awesome.
After setting the player to random shuffle, I plopped back down on the bed. I stared at the shadow patterns the pine boughs made on the ceiling and concentrated on listening to the lyrics of the songs as they played.
Somehow I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up far too early, startled by the silence of an empty house.
My bedside clock showed an ungodly hour that began with a six. The tree outside my window, which was usually home to vampire knights, now seemed to be bursting with birds determined to wake me at dawn.
Despite all that, my brain much more keenly registered the absence of my mother’s presence. There were no dishes clinking in the kitchen, no muffled sighs of getting dressed, no weather radio in the bathroom murmuring about forecasted highs—nothing I’d come to associate with morning routines.
Had she left already?
Or had she never come home last night?
My mom had been a single parent my whole life, even though I found out belatedly that she was actually married to my vampire dad this whole time. I knew she was lonely sometimes. We both sighed after Chace Crawford and Justin Bieber—okay, that last one was all me, and only sophomore year—but we both teared up over the same romantic comedies where the guy went back for the girl just in the nick of time. I remember asking her, when I was young, if she ever hoped to be that heroine one day, and if I’d ever, you know, be that precocious kid who brought the two love interests together.
Sadly, my professorial mom always saw those kinds of questions as “teachable moments,” and gave impromptu lectures about the antifeminist message Hollywood perpetuated, all the while, I should add, wiping away the sentimental tears. In all my sixteen-plus years she had never, ever brought home a boyfriend.
Maybe she’d spent the night with someone last night.
Perhaps when I got downstairs and fumbled around in the pantry for something for breakfast, I’d find a note explaining that she’d finally found the love of her life, some perfectly sensitive yet just-enough-alpha man who respected her feminism and her empowerment and was totally hot.
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