Will grunted and slapped her hand.
“Hey, no, I was just kidding. I love your spare tire. You’re way cuter than me. When we’re rock stars you’ll be in the heart-throb magazines. You’ll get all the groupies. I promise.”
“Go annoy my parents or something,” he complained, trying not to feel genuinely stung by her teasing. Lily was an asshole. It was one of her defining characteristics. But Will was sensitive about the awkwardness of his body, and thin-skinned enough for her joking to hit home.
“Don’t get pissy at me, c’mon,” Lily whined, obviously hearing the hurt under his tone. “Wi-illl… don’t.” She kissed him on the cheek, then on the mouth when he made a face at her affection. Another of Lily’s defining characteristics was that she was a notorious kiss-slut. Will had once seen her threaten to dye Russ’s hair green unless he’d make out with her. They’d all known she wasn’t joking.
“You have morning breath,” Will sniped.
“So do you, princess,” Lily retorted, crawling over him to open his bedside drawer. “Do you still keep your condoms here?”
“What? Lil, what, no, my parents are downstairs, they’ll hear —”
“I can be quiet if you can,” she challenged, grinning wolfishly. “Now shut your eyes and think of groupies.”
~
They don’t stay at Jenny’s. Will always feels a childish awkwardness around Shelly; he resents that their culture no longer recognises the two of them has having any family body between them; “ex-stepmother” isn’t any sort of anything at all. She’s never been anything but kind and loving to him, but the small spark of anger remains: why didn’t she love him enough to stay married to his father?
Instead, Sofie and Will get a room at a hostel, a clean and stark and faded space where they can stay out of the light and sleep through the day. Jenny meets them there in the late afternoon as the sun’s beginning to set.
Sofie takes them shopping as soon as it’s dark enough for Will to go outside. It’s Will’s money they’re spending, but Sofie is without question the leader. She attacks the matter of choosing their outfits with the precision and strategy of a skilled tactician.
They buy Will’s clothes first. “Dressing boys is easier,” Sofie explains. “As long as it’s well-cut and expensive, the fashion doesn’t matter as much. Vampires are all snobs.”
She outfits him with black wool pants, a black silk shirt, a long black brocade jacket with a matching vest, and—
“A cravat?” Will holds up the small scrap of wine-red fabric doubtfully. “I don’t think I’m really a cravat kind of guy.”
Sofie ignores his protests. “You can go back to spending eternity in raggedy old Racetraitor t-shirts and ripped jeans tomorrow night. For now you’re doing as I say without bitching about it, got me?”
Jenny doesn’t complain at all, instead submitting to the task of trying on endless dresses without a peep of protest. After three stores, Jenny’s doll-like compliance is starting to freak Will out a little, and Sofie seems just as rattled.
“Seriously, what the hell?” she demands from Jenny. Jenny bites her lip and looks down, an abashed expression on her face.
“It’s method acting. If vampires are snobs, like you said, then they probably all consider themselves too smart to get fooled by a con. The meeker I am, the more I’m what they expect, right? Human cattle.”
Will feels sick, but Sofie looks impressed.
In the end Sofie chooses a dark blue dress for Jenny, one that hangs off her shoulders in a soft drape, edged with navy-colored lace. For herself Sofie picks blue as well, but an ice-white blue, sleek and elegant lines of fabric clinging to her skinny hips.
“It’s cut on the bias,” she says to Jenny, which Will can only assume is a phrase with meaning in the secret language of girls.
LILY
She’s curled up on one of the sofas in the warehouse, reading Bukowski by candlelight, when Jay calls.
“I am room service’s bitch. I’m telling you, it’s true love,” he says.
“That’s because you’re not paying for it,” Lily points out. “Trust me, it loses its sheen quickly when water is twelve dollars.”
“You’re just jealous that I’ve found my perfect romance,” Jay teases blithely. Lily ignores the sting of unintended truth curling in her belly at his words, and forces a small laugh.
“When do you get back?”
“Tomorrow night, I think. There’s some big music industry thing that Blake’s put me on the guest list for next week. I’m allowed to bring friends, but I think Tommy and Michelle are going on one of their pathetic-ass ‘not dates’. You can come instead if you want, so long as you promise not to get into a fight with any vampires you see there or anything.”
Lily considers. “All right. No fighting on the premises, I cross my heart. Email me the details.”
“Will do,” Jay agrees.
“Oh, and hey,” Lily adds. “Why not invite Rose, too? She’d probably kill for an outing that’s not Peter-Pan-related.”
WILL
They arrive at the house shortly after midnight, on the night of the party. It looks no different than any of the other houses on the block—they’re all huge, beautiful, stately old buildings, kept in excellent condition—but Sofie is certain.
“Trust me,” she says, glancing at the lush-looking rooftop greenhouse just visible from street level and giving a slight shudder. “This is the one we’re looking for.”
Sure enough, the door opens easily under Will’s hand, and the air inside is filled with quiet conversation, unobtrusive music, complex perfumes, and blood. Everyone around them is impeccably dressed and perfectly confident.
“We’re doomed,” Will says. Sofie and Jenny both roll their eyes.
“We’re fine,” Jenny replies. They move over to the edge of one of the many interconnected rooms, watching the vampires and their escorts chatting together, the quiet broken by the occasional laugh. “Hey, there are people here. Like, alive people. Most of them don’t look any older than me.”
“Yes,” Sofie says, voice sharp as poison. “But they’re not the ones I’m looking for.”
Jenny looks confused. “Why not?”
“They don’t want to be saved. They came by choice. They’re disgusting.”
Will thinks of Jay, of Jay’s heated protests when Will tried to argue about Blake. He wonders what Sofie would say if she knew. “It’s not that simple,” Will protests. “Some of them might have been kids like you. This might be the only life they know.”
“If I knew better than to stay in that world, they should too,” Sofie shoots back.
“That’s not fair. Just because you were able to doesn’t mean you can demand that everyone have that same strength.”
Sofie gives him a longsuffering look, shaking her head. “I guess it makes sense for a vampire to have a bleeding heart. We’re wasting time, anyway. You two, stay down here, draw lots of attention. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She slips off into one of the other rooms, blending into the mingling groups and vanishing from view.
Jenny holds out her hand to Will. “Care to dance?”
~
They socialise their hearts out. Jenny, with her natural ability to strike up a conversation with anyone, drags Will from group to group, introducing him as her brother, the great musical talent recently moved to town. Most of the vampires seem far more interested in her than in him, which makes Will’s skin crawl, but Jenny acts as if she’s blind to the attention being paid to her.
They dance. They nod and smile and listen to vampires and humans talk about themselves, about places, about historical events long since passed into dusty books.
A few hours after their arrival, they take a break from the whirl of the ballroom and find a quiet spot near the refreshments table. They’ve been doing their best not to come too close to it, but don’t want to be conspicuous in their avoidance. They haven’t seen Sofie since she left them.
Two vampires
, each dressed in a sheathlike black cocktail dress, approach them. Their matching smiles unnerve Will, but he smiles back as politely as he can.
“Good evening,” he greets them.
“You’ve been invited upstairs,” one of the vampires says.
“Come with us, we’ll show you,” the other says.
“We’re actually pretty good down here, thanks,” Jenny says, sounding nervous. Nobody’s remarked on the fact that she’s a human with no scars, yet, but the charade will be harder to pull off if they’re forced to meet one-on-one with anybody.
“Oh, no, come,” the vampires say together. “You must come.”
They can’t easily refuse without risking Sofie’s cover, so Jenny and Will follow the pair up the wide foyer staircase to the upper level of the house.
“Just through here,” one of the pair says—Will can’t tell them apart at all—and gestures to a door, which she opens as they approach.
The room through the door looks like the set of a clichéd action movie, set up for the scene where the super-villain interrogates the hero and explains every intricacy of the evil plan. Sofie is sitting on a chair, arms tied behind her back at an angle that’s probably painful. Her lip is swollen and split, hair a tangle around her face. There’s a tear and a dark stain on her dress. A dark-haired vampire in an elegant tuxedo stands beside her, keeping guard. The vampire beside Will takes hold of his upper arm, gripping hard enough that he winces at the pressure.
“Ow!” Jenny objects, trying to shrug off a similar hold on her own arm from the other vampire beside her. Will hushes her with a hiss.
If the vampire leaning against the front of the wide antique desk were human, Will would place her in her late twenties. Her hair’s a candy-caramel color, a glossy brown fall halfway down her back. She’s wearing a sleek business suit, light grey, the skirt short enough to show off the toned, tanned—spray-on, Will assumes, since sunbathing and tanning beds aren’t an option—lines of her legs. She has designer glasses perched on her nose, which Will knows must be for vanity—her dark red eyes must be as sharp as any other vampire’s. Everything about her whispers money and power, a lot of both.
“Cora Diaz,” she tells Will and Jenny in a cool, professional tone. “I represent the interests of Mr. Grigori.”
“So she’s basically a vampire lawyer,” Sofie says, sneering.
“Vampires have little time for due process,” Cora retorts, a snakelike smile on her glossy mouth. “I merely have to decide what your sentences are.”
“What are we charged with?” Will asks, as if it wasn’t obvious. Cora crosses her arms, shifting her slim weight onto her left leg and raising one eyebrow.
“Dissolution of assets.”
“Freeing the livestock,” offers Sofie with a cheeky grin. If they weren’t in dire peril, Will would be sorely tempted to put his palm over his face. He gives a longsuffering sigh. Sofie is very bad at knowing when to keep her cards close to her chest in the game of life.
“Indeed,” Cora agrees dryly. “My client is quite distressed over -”
“I bet the eight little girls and three teenagers I set free are laughing it up, though, so in the balance it’s not a complete downer.” Sofie’s voice is chatty, and she gives Jenny and Will a brilliant smile. She’s more animated and energetic than Will has ever seen her. She seems utterly delighted by the whole situation, as if they weren’t currently at the mercy of several obviously merciless vampires.
“What do Jenny and I have to do with that?” Will interrupts, staying calm. “We’ve been downstairs all night.”
“I am not an idiot, Mr. Cooper,” Cora tells him in the same cool tone as all her other statements. “I know exactly who you and your sister are. It’s a shame you chose such a suicidal course so early in your life. You might have become somebody interesting in a few hundred years.” She addresses the vampire beside him, still gripping his arm vice-tight. “Upstairs for him, downstairs for her. This one,” a nod toward Sofie. “Grigori may want to keep.”
The vampires begin to pull Jenny and Will out of the room again. Jenny cries “hey, wait,” and tries again to pull away, glancing at Sofie in panic. Will has a sudden flash of memory, the image of Lily with a sword in her hand stepping into the room where he was held captive, relief and love naked on her face. He has to get them out of here. He has to save them. That much, at least, being a vampire should make him good for.
“If you know who they are then you know who I am, too,” Sofie is saying, a note of businesslike negotiation taking over from her earlier elation. “And you know you can’t kill us. Liam Foley will pay whatever Grigori wants in apology. He’ll vouch for us.”
“I’ll offer Mr. Foley my personal condolences for the death of his estranged daughter,” Cora says, cool voice turning icy and her smile becoming even thinner and less pleasant. “And I’m sure Mr. Grigori will pay him, as you say, whatever he wants in apology. You see, the little girls were his,” Cora leans in near to Sofie, her words a cruel whisper. “But the teenagers were mine. The three of you will pay for stealing from me.”
“No, you can’t—” Sofie says, genuine panic creeping into her tone now, but Will doesn’t hear Cora’s response. The vampire dragging him away is too strong, and he has no choice but to stagger after her as she pulls him to a pair of stainless-steel elevator doors concealed behind one of the lush wall hangings.
The elevator mechanism is almost silent as it takes them up, and when the doors open again the vampire shoves Will out onto the bare asphalt hard enough to make him stumble. The doors are closed again before he even gets a chance to turn to look at her.
He’s on the rooftop, inside the greenhouse. Only it isn’t a greenhouse at all; Will can see that now. There are plants, certainly, a thin border of them along the edges of the space, against the glass. From ground level, they give the illusion of a full and lush garden up above. The rest of the space is empty. Through the glass panes of the roof, Will can see the dark of the night sky above him.
He knows what the result will be, but he tests the glass walls anyway. They’re shatterproof, made of something thick and diamond-hard and, Will’s willing to bet, soundproof. They aren’t flat, as they first looked, but subtly curved. Lenses.
He’s inside a giant magnifying glass, and the sun’s going to come up soon.
Will gives up his pride and hatred, because pride and hatred aren’t worth dying for, and shoves his mental self as hard as he can in the direction of Chicago. There’s no time for intricate explanations, not with the distance and effort involved in this desperate plan. Will just pushes the image of Cora’s face as hard as he can, coupled with the ideas of ‘danger’ and the need for rescue and help.
Then, exhausted and afraid, Will waits. He thinks of Lily, and how much he hopes that he’ll see her again. He’s run enough. He’s found his answer, and it’s back where he began.
Will doesn’t know if they’ll be able to make it work, if the light between them is strong enough to survive the darkness pressing in all around. But he wants to try. He really, really wants to try.
The sun comes up, and he begins to burn.
LILY
Rose and Tommy are having a marathon of all the Christopher Lee Dracula movies, and Lily thinks it’s probably in poor taste for her to enjoy the movies so much, but she does all the same. And, in addition to the weird silly horror onscreen, she enjoys the company, and the sense that there’s still somewhere she fits in the world.
She wrote her first new lyrics in a long time when she woke up this evening. Just a couple of lines: What makes us stronger, kills us. What kills us, makes us stronger. She doesn’t have music for it, though, because all her music came from Will and so there’s none left now.
She’s jolted out of lonely daydreaming by a prickle all over her skin, raising goosebumps and making her shiver. She’s got that walked-over-her-grave feeling, the crawly sense that something just beyond her senses has occurred. For some reason, she thinks of tanned
legs and long caramel-colored hair, and danger.
It’s a difficult feeling to shake off. Disquiet is tenacious, and it’s never been that hard to make Lily feel bad.
Rose gives her a look of worry. Lily does her best to smile.
WILL
The sun burns down and the brightness and the agony are a single sensation, overwhelming Will completely for an eternity before everything fades, white flaring to red flaring to black flaring to nothing.
“This smells revolting.”
The words jolt Will awake, too-loud against the fragility of his eardrums. He’d thought the pain had been too intense for any other feeling to get through, that it had blocked the world out, but no. The danger has sharpened his senses laser-fine—it was just that, until the voice spoke, there was nothing for him to sense except the pain and the light, and so those things had filled the world.
He hears the shuffles and swears of someone moving around. Will wants to look up, just for a second, but knows that his eyes will burn and he feels like any pain even a fraction beyond what he feels now will be too much and he’ll die completely.
And he realizes, with a vague feeling of surprise, that he desperately doesn’t want to die.
The soles of sneakers squeak against the ground, and then there’s the shredding tear-sound of a Velcro fastener being opened.
Then there’s dark.
The light, sturdy fabric thrown over him is a new and awful pain against Will’s wounded skin, but the dark. The dark. Will will never hate the dark again, never. He chokes out a sob of relief.
“It’s okay, I’ve got you, you’re okay,” Sofie says, tone just as hard and breezy as ever. “You are the crappiest vigilante on earth, but you’re okay. I think you might want to pass out from the pain before we get you out of here, though. Can you do that?”
Will obliges.
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