Mei looked at me. “Vampires can die?” In her surprise, she hadn’t lowered her voice.
Kenzie heard and answered for me. “In a staking, they can.”
I sank low on the couch. Wow. The vampires must be pretty pissed if that was the message they were communicating to the masses.
“Who do they think did it?” someone asked.
I shivered. I knew who they thought did it. Alcántara had seemed suspicious of Carden from the moment I’d sprung him from that prison cell, making me wonder more than once how much the Spanish vampire had really intended to rescue him in the first place.
Carden was Vampire; I’d seen it firsthand. But I’d also seen something else in him—those flickers of concern for me, shreds of his old humanity that told me that, although he might be physically capable of the killings, Carden wouldn’t murder for sport.
“They don’t know,” Kenzie replied, sounding exasperated. “That’s the point. They’re escalating security island-wide. Until then, classes today and tomorrow are canceled. You’re in lockdown until further notice.”
The questions exploded again—“What lockdown? Can we eat? We can’t leave at all? What if I want to go to the gym?”—but Kenzie ignored all of them. “No more questions,” she said brusquely. Then she wove her way through us and left the room.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Emma and I plopped on my bed, and Mei-Ling on hers. I flopped backward, staring up at the ceiling. So much for my ill-fated investigation. How could I hunt for evidence if I wasn’t even allowed to leave my dorm? “I am so sick of these four walls.”
When we’d heard the news that we were basically being quarantined, my first thoughts had been, When will I see Carden? It was as if I’d already decided I’d feed from him again. It was pathetic.
Mei-Ling misunderstood the reasons for my misery and gave me a sympathetic look. “We could sit in the lounge.”
“Nonstarter,” I said. The common area was plagued with girls angling for a fight. “The lounge is crawling with people. This is our only option.”
Emma turned onto her side to face me. “Sorry we can’t hang in my room.”
“Does your roommate ever leave?” I asked. “I’m so sure she was transcribing our last conversation. It creeped me out.”
“She did seem suspicious,” Mei said.
“Oh, totally,” I agreed. “I think she probably assembles her notes into little reports for the vampires.” The girl was so into life on Eyja næturinnar, she’d changed her name from Audra to Frost, and spent all her free time studying Icelandic and brushing up on her Norse legends. I thought the new name made her sound like one of the X-Men.
“She’s just an eccentric, is all.” Ever-forgiving was our Emma.
“Eccentric?” I rolled my eyes. You’d have thought Frost’s study habits would make her prime friend material for me, but the slavering look she got in her eyes whenever she came near a vampire was enough to turn my stomach. “She’s Master Dagursson’s pet. ’Nuff said.”
I put my arm over my head, covering my eyes. Most normal teens got to spend their free time talking on the phone, texting, or downloading stuff to their iPods. Not us. For all we knew, a whole new iPod had been invented since we’d arrived. “Nope. We’re stuck here, and I’m dying of boredom.”
“We could play Gin Rummy,” Emma said.
With a moan, I rolled onto my stomach. I wriggled, trying to get comfortable around the permanent ache in my gut. “Not again. I’m sick of cards.” But then I laughed, hearing how ridiculous my tone of voice was. “Sorry, guys. I’m sounding like a brat. I’m just cranky.” Cranky and in pain.
Emma smiled. “You’re not the only one.”
She had no idea. She thought she did, but if she was cranky, then I was raging. It was only day two of lockdown, and my Carden detox was in full swing, worse now that we weren’t even having chance encounters. I felt like I was dying without him.
The vampires gave us supplements—lockdown didn’t mean starvation—but the refrigerated blood they served wasn’t the same. It was a weak substitute, like craving coffee and getting something old and watered down instead.
With a sharp inhale, I sat up. My friend was trying, and so would I. I would have a good attitude.
Emma sat up, too, and patted my back. “It’s totally understandable. We’re cooped up in here while there’s some crazy murderer out there.”
That wasn’t my problem, but I nodded just the same. She had no idea what I was going through, but this was one misunderstanding I was happy to embrace. Anything to get my mind off Carden.
Mei stood and pulled down the window shades, looking creeped out, as if the killer might be standing just outside. “It is disturbing.”
I caught her eye and gave her a nod. “Disturbing is exactly the word for it.” The vampires employed a few humans to do menial tasks and there was Ronan who actually had family on the island, but otherwise everyone kept to themselves. “A regular human person, drained of blood? It’s an aberration.”
“Drained and then just left there.” Emma shuddered.
Her words were a revelation. The fact that the bodies were left behind was in some ways the most shocking thing of all. “This breaks every rule they’ve got,” I said, feeling good to be engaged in something other than my own problems. “Any normal vampire would make the dead body disappear. For the killer to leave the bodies in the open to rot…it’s like he’s bragging.”
“Or she’s,” Mei amended.
“It’s gotta be a guy.” I ticked the reasons off on my fingers. “A vampire did this. Vampires are guys. Ergo the killer is a guy.”
“The vampire could’ve had help from a woman,” Mei said, defending her point.
“True enough.” I thought of Masha and her preoccupation with Alcántara. It wasn’t hard to imagine her or many of the other girls doing anything to earn vampire brownie points. But did she want vampire attention badly enough that she’d help kill her friend to get it?
Emma shrugged. “It could be a Draug.” She knew Draugs as well as I did, having fought one with me.
“We can’t rule it out,” I said, though I had a hard time believing it was anything but a thinking, scheming vampire.
“From what you learned on your mission,” Emma began carefully, “it seems like…” She looked from me to Mei and back again. “There might be other stuff, on other islands, that we still don’t understand.” She gave me a pointed do-you-understand-my-hint look.
She was hedging around one of my least favorite topics: Lilac. Subtle, Em.
Mei shifted to the edge of her seat. “Would you like me to leave?”
“No,” Emma and I said at the same time.
“No,” I repeated, rubbing my temples. Thoughts of Lilac did nothing to help my killer headache. “You can hear this.” I needed to trust my new roommate. What would my life be if I never trusted anyone ever again? Besides, I had a good feeling about Mei-Ling, and one of us had to take the leap. Who knew? Maybe if I confided in her, she’d open up a little more to me. “Look, this isn’t for public consumption, but…”
I proceeded to give her the full download. Lilac, the crazy pyromaniac roommate. How I’d supposedly killed her in the Directorate Challenge. The weird tension between me and Alcántara on our mission together. The mysterious sighting of someone who looked exactly like her.
“Wait.” Mei stopped me, confused. And of course she was—I was confused, and this was my story. “Didn’t you see Lilac’s body? How could she be alive?”
I remembered back to that day. By the time our fight was over, I was covered in bruises, slashes, and third-degree burns. Not a lot else registered. “I thought she was dead.”
Emma spoke for me. “They took away the injured girls. They always do. We don’t know what happens to them.”
“Maybe it wasn’t her you saw,” Mei said.
“I thought I was hallucinating, but then I mentioned it to Alcántara and he wigged out.”
She
looked alarmed. “Wigged how?”
“Nothing crazy. You know, he got all…focused. Distant.”
“Strange,” she said, frowning.
All I could do was nod at that, the understatement of the year. How or why Lilac could be alive and living with a bunch of crazy Germanic vampire monks was a mystery. And rather than put it behind me, it loomed out there like something that might come and bite me in the butt while I slept.
We were all quiet then, considering what it could mean, when Kenzie startled us out of it. She was walking down the hall, banging on doors as she went. “Lights out.”
Mei-Ling glared at the door. “She’s like the warden in a prison movie.”
I felt Emma’s hand on my shoulder. She whispered, “You going to be okay?”
I considered her question. I had a new roommate, and not only was she not a psycho, she might end up being a friend. I gave Emma a true smile. “Yeah, I think I just might.”
After Emma left, Mei flicked off the lights as I got into bed. I chuckled in the darkness. “Talk about overwhelming you with information on your first week, huh?”
But her response was somber. “We could investigate.”
I edged up onto my elbows. “My thought exactly.” I weighed my words. How much could I trust her? I decided it was all or nothing. “I’ve already tried a little. Investigating, I mean.”
“What’d you find out?” Eager excitement tinged her voice. I’d been right—despite our age difference, Mei was total good friend material.
“Nothing really. Trinity fought her attacker and ended up on the rocks near the cove. We already knew all that.”
“Well,” she began, “next we could…”
“Next we could…what?” I’d hit a dead end. “Anyway, we’re locked in.”
“We could investigate without leaving the dorm. I’m sure we could find out more about the latest killing if we asked around. Gossiping is all anyone has been doing since lockdown.” She was showing me a whole new side. Apparently her stoic act masked total unflinching guts. “It’s possible.”
I gave her idea real consideration. I was beginning to dig my new roomie, and it could only mean trouble. As it was, I had a sinking feeling the day was coming when the powers-that-be would drop Emma and me into some vampire coliseum and force us to go gladiator on each other. No, I had to protect her. “Possible, but too dangerous.”
“If there were three of us, it’d be safer.”
“Emma, you mean? Even if we convinced her, she and Yas are inseparable, and I don’t know if she’d do it without him.” I loved Yasuo, but until I understood what was really going on with those Trainees, I wasn’t ready to have one hundred percent trust in him.
“Then it’ll be just you and me.”
I laughed outright at that. “You and me?” I gave it a moment’s thought. But then I dismissed the notion—I needed someone who’d watch my back, which I doubted Mei had the skills to do. “I don’t even know what your weapon is.”
“I don’t have a weapon.”
“What do you mean?” I sat up in bed—there’d be no sleeping anytime soon—and the rapid movement amplified the pounding in my head. “We all have weapons. Everyone’s assigned one on the first day.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Didn’t they have something waiting for you in your drawer?”
“All I had was this.” She stood and rifled through her dresser, pulling something out.
I hopped out of bed and pulled aside a corner of the shades to let in the watery moonlight. She held something long and thin, and I snatched it from her to make sure there wasn’t a blade concealed in there somewhere. I hefted it in my hands and peered down the length of it. “They gave you a flute?”
“It’s not a flute.”
“Masha is gunning for us. There’s a killer on the loose. You’re jonesing to go play Nancy Drew. And all you’ve got to protect yourself is a flute.” I crawled back into bed, suddenly overwhelmed. No wonder the vampires needed me to look out for her—they’d given the girl a flute as her only protection.
“It’s a D’Tzu,” she said, sounding amused.
“Okay, fine. It’s a…that. But trust me, call it what you like, but it won’t kill any Draugs. It’s not even metal.”
“It’s bamboo.” She held it to her mouth. “Shall I play it for you? It’ll relax you.” The way she’d said it—all calm and sure—sounded so culty.
“You’re scaring me, Mei.”
“The infamous Acari Drew is afraid?”
Laughing, I punched my pillow into shape and flopped my head down. “You don’t scare me, Ho. Go for it. Play your little flute.”
I heard her suck in a breath, then immediately winced at the sharp, high-pitched sound her instrument made. It reminded me of a cheesy kung fu movie soundtrack—like something that might play as an old wise man emerged from the mist.
I lay in the dark, patiently waiting for her to finish, wondering which would happen first, glass breaking or Kenzie knocking on the door, telling us to shut up.
But then something changed.
The music triggered something in my brain. There was a shift. A wave of calm. My headache subsided. I began to register a song where before there’d been only shrill, atonal notes.
The music became hypnotic. It surrounded me, filled me, enveloped me. As that high pitch hummed through my skull, memories swamped me. Mental snapshots of my mother, simple and random.
She unloaded groceries from the car, hitching a bag on her hip.
She put on lipstick and caught my eyes in the mirror.
She snapped her clutch shut with a laugh.
She widened her eyes, chugging soda as her Coke bottle fizzed over.
She hugged me, enveloping me in her lemony scent.
The images faded, but the scent lingered as I became aware of my bed again. Mei-Ling had finished playing. My pillow was damp. I touched my face—I was crying.
Mei had managed to reach deep into those parts of myself that I’d buried and forgotten. It was the most cathartic experience of my life. And it was the most terrifying.
That was Mei’s secret. And her weapon.
And her talents would only be enhanced over time as she consumed more of the blood. I lay there, unable to speak. The possibilities were endless. Could she hypnotize people? Trigger reactions in entire crowds? Would she be powerful enough to influence even the vampires?
If vampires could harness her gift—gaining the ability to hypnotize with music, influence emotion, manipulate memory and thought, to control those around them—it would be a powerful weapon indeed.
“Would you like to sleep now?”
I felt a jolt of alarm. “Can that thing put me to sleep?” I had no doubts it’d work in the euthanizing sense of the word.
She sat at the edge of the bed, seeming calmed. When I saw her smile in the moonlight, I realized she hadn’t given me many true smiles. I liked the sight. “Relax, Acari Drew. You’ll wake up again. I promise.”
“Mei, it’s just Drew. You gotta call me Drew.”
She began to play again, quietly this time. For the first time since the bond, the gnawing in my gut subsided. In the moment before I drifted off, I hoped I’d get to feel my mother’s embrace one more time. But the black void of sleep was all that waited for me. Cold sleep and dreams of vampires.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I was climbing.
All I knew was the rock in front of my eyes and my own breath reverberating in my head. My fingers found handholds without effort. My legs pushed me up—just as Carden had said they would.
Suddenly my perspective telescoped outward. A moment of vertigo as my head adjusted. I was climbing the Needle.
I saw the rock and heard my breath, and now I was aware of the sunlight, too, warm on my shoulders. It almost soothed the permanent throbbing along my neck and in my skull—almost.
The sun was warm, but the wind was cold, whipping against my legs. I realized they were bare. I wore my
favorite old pair of cargo shorts.
A dream, then.
Smiling, I climbed faster. I couldn’t fall—this was a dream.
Carden was waiting for me, seated on the plateau near the top. I wondered for an instant why he was there if we were supposed to remain apart, but then I laughed, understanding. “Anything can happen. I’m just dreaming.”
He smiled down at me, reached out his hand, and pulled me up and over to join him. “Anything can happen.”
I sat and dangled my legs. They were so small in comparison to his muscular thighs, thick like tree trunks swathed in plaid wool.
“Wait, is that…is that a kilt?” The wind was cold on my smiling cheeks. “You didn’t wear that when you climbed. The wind…I would’ve noticed.”
He leaned down, speaking close to my ear. “You’re saying you would’ve peeked up my plaid?”
The way he’d nudged his shoulder to mine set my heart pounding. I nodded to the preposterous scale of our legs, side by side. “I look so tiny, compared to you.”
“You’re just right, compared to me.” His broad hand covered my thigh, squeezed, warm on my chilled skin.
My body crackled to life. Thirst clawed me, and I rubbed my belly. Desire robbed my words. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came. I wasn’t good at this—not even in dreams.
“Do you know what your problem is, little flower?”
My problem? I pulled back to meet his eyes. “This is supposed to be my dream.”
“Your problem is that you underestimate yourself.”
“Oh, that.” I sighed. “Some people think I overestimate myself.”
“Those people are fools.”
“You don’t mean it. This is just a dream.”
He leaned closer until his face filled my vision. His eyes—they’d reminded me of honey, and in the daylight they looked golden. “Then we shouldn’t waste it talking.” He fully cupped my chin and tilted up my face. He brought his mouth a whisper away from mine. “I’ve wanted to taste you again. If this were my dream, I’d not waste it talking.”
I sank into the warmth of those eyes.
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