Crossfire (Book Two of the Darkride Chronicles)

by Laura Bradley Rede

  To look at the pictures, you might think we were all on vacation. There are shots of Ander and D.J. running on the beach, Naomi letting Grimm take a cheeto from her lips, Emmie with her hair whipped to a cotton candy froth by the ocean breeze, Luke patiently cleaning the dust off the ancient Victrola he found in the shed by the barn. I try not to worry that in most of the pictures, Naomi has a hand on Ander. It’s an animal charming thing, right? She’s trying to help him cope with all the stress of dealing with D.J., and, to be honest, with me.

  And even if she is flirting, do I have any right to be jealous? I’m the one who made out with someone else.

  Suddenly, the urge to see Ander is overwhelming. I go to the mirror and pull off the sheet. As usual, the mirror is empty, but it won’t be for long. I lay the palm of my left hand against the cool glass. “Show me Ander!”

  The fog in the mirror churns. A figure emerges, slowly, but I can tell right away it isn’t him. It’s Luke, walking on the beach, his long black coat stark against the pale sand.

  The sight of him makes me feel embarrassed. Is my heart so confused I ask for Ander and get Luke? Is he really that much on my mind?

  But then I see him, behind Luke, trailing him down the beach. Ander. He’s in human form, but his eyes are all wolf, pale blue and cold.

  He has a stake in his hand.

  Icy panic spikes through me. Ander is hunting Luke! Why? Does he think Luke is our killer? Or maybe Ander has been planning to kill Luke all along, to keep him from fulfilling the prophecy and becoming the “vampire to lead them all.”

  Or maybe it’s much more personal than that. Maybe Ander knows Luke kissed me.

  The thought that Ander might be jealous fills me with a mix of horror and hope, but I shove the thought aside. It doesn’t matter why. What matters is that Ander is one of the few things left on this earth that could kill Luke, and he intends to do it.

  I am down the steep attic stairs in the time it would take a human heart to beat. I grab hold of the door.

  It doesn’t give. Emmie must have locked it for the night. I grab the doorknob and shake it. There’s no other way out, no way I can get to the boys in time. A horrible feeling of helplessness chokes me.

  And then I remember I’m a vampire.

  I grasp the doorknob, angle my shoulder to the door and ram it with all my might. There’s a loud crack as the warped wood gives way and the door splinters. I stumble into the kitchen.

  Well, so much for locking me in.

  In an instant, I’m through the living room and out the front door. I hesitate only a second in the shadows of the porch, to make sure there’s no sign of light, but the sun has truly set. I leap down and make a dash for the woods.

  It’s shocking how fast I can run if I try. The trees flash past me in a blur. Ignoring the branches that claw at my clothes, I let the darkness of the woods swallow me and spit me out again on the beach on the other side.

  Where are they? I push the hood of my sweatshirt off so my blue hair whips around me. Then I force myself to stand still and listen.

  At first, all I hear is the sound of the wind breathing through the trees. Then, somewhere far away, I hear a wolf yip.

  I spin towards the sound and shut my eyes. The scent comes to me on the wind: the sharp tang of vampire, the deep musk of werewolf. I tell myself the wolf is only Ander, but it doesn’t keep the hairs on my neck from prickling with fear.

  But I can’t hesitate.

  I run in the direction of the noise. Scents come to me in scraps: Luke’s cool and metallic, Ander’s warm and spicy like the potions he used to drink.

  Wait, I think, that’s not right. Why would Ander still smell like that? He doesn’t need the potions any more.

  But D.J. does.

  It dawns on me that I’ve been stupid. I had forgotten all about D.J.! Of course Ander would bring him along. Which means they have Luke outnumbered.

  It also means I can’t count on them to go easy on me. I trust Ander not to hurt me. He’s under control now, and I still believe somewhere deep down, he loves me.

  D.J., however, has no self-control. And even if he could choose to hold back, he wouldn’t. He’s too much of a hunter to let a vampire go free. Even with Ander as his alpha, I can’t count on D.J. to show any mercy. Not to me, and not to Luke.

  I push myself, racing up the beach, but there’s no real trail. The soft sand swallows any footprints they might have left and the briny smell of the ocean overwhelms their fragile scent. I stand helpless on the rocks, turning like a weathervane in the wind, trying to catch their scent, but everything is confused. I shut my eyes, take a deep breath…

  A scent strikes me. Vampire, definitely, but not Luke. My eyes fly open.

  Five is rushing towards me down the beach. For the first time ever, she looks worried. The wind has whipped her bleach blond spikes so they look like whitecap waves. “Cicely!” She beckons to me. “This way!”

  “What are you doing here?” The wind snatches my words. “Have you seen Ander?”

  “I saw them in a vision! We have to hurry!” She turns and starts off down the beach back the way she came.

  I hesitate. That’s not the way I thought the trail was headed. Could Five be leading me astray? But the worry on Five’s face was real, and there’s no time to lose. She turns to me, “Come on!”

  I run behind her, her pale hair like a torch in the growing dark. I can’t smell a trail, but Five certainly seems to know where she’s going. She moves silently, and so quickly we are far down the beach in no time, to a section of the shoreline I haven’t explored. A house materializes out of the darkness, big and gray as the rocks around it. It must be someone’s summer home, because the windows on the ground floor are boarded for the season.

  “They’re in here.” Five bounds up the front steps.

  “Are you sure?” I don’t hear any signs of a struggle, and I can’t smell the werewolves at all, but I follow Five onto the wide porch.

  At the door, I stop, panicked. “We won’t be able to get in! How will we get to them?”

  “Oh, we don’t need an invitation.” The door clicks open at Five’s touch and she steps over the threshold without any resistance. I follow her, stepping from the deep gray of the night to the blacker darkness within.

  The second I do, I know I’ve made a mistake. Inside, the air is charged with the electric smell of vampire. Vampire, and something else.

  Death.

  I spin, fangs bared, and lunge for the door, just as it clicks shut.

  “Not gonna happen,” Five says, and a huge form steps between me and the door.Someone switches on the light.

  A man the size of a pro football player is looming over me. His skin is sickly gray, his face is as round and meaty as a clenched fist. One eyelid hangs at an odd angle, like a broken window shade.

  But it’s the much smaller figure standing beside him that has my attention. There’s no mistaking that chestnut hair, that pretty, heart shaped face. It’s a face I’ve seen almost every day of my school career. The face of someone who hates me.

  “Lyla?” I stare. “Lyla Jansen?”

  “Cicely.” She smiles. It’s the same smile she wore in her student council campaign posters.

  Except now that smile has fangs.

  The whole world seems to spin. Lyla disappeared just a few days before I died. If she is a vampire, she was made one by the vampire Queen Constanza.

  The queen I helped to kill.

  Which means these are the enluzantes who survived the collapse of the St. Paul caves. The ones who want to avenge their queen.

  And Five has delivered me right to them.

  Chapter 18: Cicely

  I spin to face Five. “You lied to me!”

  She shrugs. “Had to. How else would I get you here to meet the gang?” She sweeps her arm like a ringmaster introducing an act. “Cicely, allow me to present the last of Constanza’s undead—or the ones we’ve found so far, at least. They call themselves the Remnant.
”

  I hear a stirring from the next room. Two enluzantes, a young man with hair the red of a dead leaf and a girl who doesn’t look much older than eight or nine, are watching me from the doorway, their eyes unblinking. That makes four of them, plus Five. I am very out numbered.

  So this is it, I think. This is the way it ends. I lived through being buried alive and even survived my own death, only to be taken out by Lyla Jansen, the high school mean girl who used to make my life hell.

  Well, somewhere Luke and Ander could be fighting to the death, and I still have to reach them. I turn and make a grab for the door.

  “Restrain her.” Five’s voice is calmly commanding. The big undead grasps me effortlessly, spinning me around to pin my hands behind my back. I thrash against his grip, but it’s no use. His hands feel like they’re made of steel. “We named him Cole,” Five says. “Who knows what his name used to be. He’s not much of a talker—he lost his tongue somewhere along the line—but he’ll think to you.”

  Hello, says a deep, growling voice in my head.

  Five smiles. “And I think you remember Lyla.”

  Lyla takes something from the pocket of her jacket—a weapon, I’m guessing, although her fangs alone look like enough to get the job done. She takes a step towards me and I brace myself for the blow.

  But it doesn’t come. Instead, she holds out her hand.

  It isn’t a weapon she’s holding. It’s a necklace. My necklace, the one my mother gave me, the one that once belonged to my ancestress a century ago. I thought it was gone forever—torn from me as carelessly as my life, and just as unlikely to come back.

  “Here.” Lyla holds the necklace out to me. The tear-shaped stone looks black in the shadow of her palm.

  For a second, I’m so surprised, I forget to be afraid. “I lost that in the caves the day I died.”

  “We thought you might want it back.”

  It’s Lyla’s voice, just as I remember it, but she doesn’t speak. I hear her words in my head, even though her lips never move.

  “Um…” I say. “Thank you.”

  A smile spreads across Lyla’s face as she sinks to her knees before me.

  This time, she speaks out loud. “It’s the least we can do, my queen.”

  I stare at her. “Your… your what?” She has to be joking, but, as I look around at the faces of the enluzantes, no one is laughing. They are just looking at me, attentive, like dogs waiting for a command. Then, one by one, they sink down to their knees.

  Only Five is still standing, leaning against a book case, a lazy smile on her face. “Forgive me if I don’t stop, drop, and grovel, your majesty, but you’re their queen, not mine.”

  “I’m not anybody’s queen!” I suppose I should just be grateful the enluzantes aren’t trying to kill me, but I actually find the sight of them kneeling almost as alarming.

  Okay, that’s not entirely true. I admit there’s a part of me that loves to see bitchy, popular Lyla on her knees. I can’t help flashing back to the last time I saw her, that day at the Mall of America when she stole my clothes and threw my boot away. I know that, with all that has happened since, that day shouldn’t matter at all, but seeing Lyla again makes the memory sting like a fresh slap.

  One of the enluzantes, the red-haired young man, looks up at me. He’s handsome in spite of the cuts that mar his pale face. He’s wearing ordinary jeans and a t-shirt, but the jacket he wears over them is something from another time—Victorian, I think. The tunnel-dust has turned it the warm sepia of an old photograph. “Please,” he says. His voice is softened by the ghost of a British accent. It’s somehow very familiar. “Please, don’t hold that day at the dress shop against her. Lyla regrets it, I’m sure.”

  “You can read my mind?” It shouldn’t surprise me. I heard Lyla’s thoughts just a moment ago, and I know we must have shared a psychic link when we were all connected to the Queen who made us. For me, it lasted only few minutes before Luke killed Queen Constanza, but if this guy is anywhere near as old as his jacket, he could have been in touch with other enluzantes for years.

  He bows his head again. “Beg pardon, your majesty. We tried to respect your boundaries, to give you time to recover, but I’m afraid we weren’t entirely successful.”

  Suddenly I realize why his voice sounds familiar. “I heard you in my dreams, didn’t I… Ian?” The name pops into my head without me trying. Then the reality of what this means dawns on me. “You’re why I recognized the body on the beach!” I look wildly about at the enluzantes. “You were the ones who killed them. I was dreaming your thoughts!”

  Ian and Lyla keep their eyes on the floor, but the little girl—her name is Rose, I’m pretty sure—simply shrugs. “We were hungry.”

  “They’re a little hard to control, with no queen to lead them,” Five says. “They’re used to following orders, and with no one in charge they tend to get a little… impulsive. Lyla’s a newbie—”

  “It wasn’t Lyla’s fault,” Ian cuts in swiftly. “We were all indiscreet.”

  Five wags a finger at Lyla like she’s scolding a puppy. “I tried to get them to keep their mess off the beaches, and their thoughts out of your brain…”

  “And the people who own this house? Did you kill them, too?” I feel ill. My mind keeps going back to the boy, face down on the beach. Somewhere, someone is waiting for him to come home.

  “We didn’t mean to kill anyone,” Lyla says, “but once things start—”

  “—your mind is like a hall of mirrors.” Rose shuts her eyes. “It’s like an echo chamber, when there’s no other mind to take the lead. Everyone else’s desires magnify your own.”

  “We wanted to leave you out of it, to give you time to recover,” Ian says, “but it was hard to keep our thoughts to ourselves once Five told us where you were…”

  “Once Five told you where I was, huh?” I shoot Five a glare.

  The others shrink away a step as if I am a ray of sunlight, but Five only shrugs. “What, you think I’m on this little road trip for my health? You think I tagged along because I like riding shotgun to werewolves and listening to you whine? I’m here because I’ve seen the visions and I know you are meant to be queen.”

  “But I can’t be.” I should maybe shut up and let them believe I am, just so they don’t kill me, but in some ways the thought of being queen is even scarier than death. “I never said I was.”

  “You didn’t have to say it. The prophecy does.”

  “The prophecy says ‘the human falls,’ and I did! I died. You all saw it.”

  “Sure,” Five says. “The prophecy also says ‘the vampire to lead them all must rise.’”

  “So?”

  “So it never says those two people aren’t one and the same.”

  I stand there, blinking at her. The idea is so ridiculous, I don’t even know where to start. Does Five really believe that? It’s impossible to tell. The dead can’t blush. We have no pulse to race. Without the little tells of humanity, how can I know if she’s lying? “The vampire to lead them all is Luke. He’s the prince from the ancient family line. That’s why the Hunters were trying to kill him in the first place! That’s why Ander is probably trying to kill him right now! You have to let me go to them!”

  I go for the door, but the enluzantes are on it in a second, their movements perfectly coordinated without them ever having to speak. My way is blocked before I can take a step.

  “What?” Five says. “And let you jump in the middle of a fight?” She laughs. “It’s dangerous out there, princess, and you’re a little too valuable to lose. That’s why I brought you here, for safe-keeping. Now, sure, the Hunters believe Luke is the vampire in the prophecy. Go ahead and let them think it! It’s just like an old boys club to assume the guy has to be in charge. But you and I both know the vampires need a queen to lead them.”

  Of course I knew that, but I always assumed some relative of Luke’s would take on the role. “Queens have to be born vampires. They have to be immo
rtal members of some powerful vampire family. That’s the way it has always been.”

  “True,” Five says calmly, “but I’m not all that concerned about the past. I think you’ll find we psychics tend to focus on the future.”

  I narrow my eyes at her. “Tell me. What have you seen? Is Ander killing Luke?”

  “I promise you,” Five says, “Ander isn’t killing Luke.”

  The way she emphasizes “Ander” says it all.

  “D.J.?” My voice sounds very shrill. “Did he turn? Is he out of control?” I don’t wait for Five’s answer. I turn to the Remnant and muster up my most commanding tone. “If you really believe I’m your queen, then I order you to let me go!”

  The enluzantes stay right where they are.

  Five laughs. “Nice one, princess. I really felt it. But I’m afraid you’ll need to start claiming your role as queen before they’re going to take any orders from you.”

  I glare at her. “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  “Step one is re-establishing the psychic link.”

  “And step two?”

  Five smiles. “We’ll get to that later.”

  I’m sick of her games. “But the psychic link is already there! I can hear them in my head!”

  “A tiny portion of the link remains,” Ian says, “but it’s nothing compared to what it was.”

  “We want it back completely,” Rose says.

  “And if I bring it back, you’ll follow me?” If I’m going to stop D.J. from killing Luke, I’m going to need all the help I can get.

  “Yes.” It’s Ian who speaks, but I can tell he speaks for all of them. “We’ll follow you.”

  I hesitate. Having the Remnant as back-up is so tempting, but the thought of being joined to them at the mind scares me. The fact that they have already leaked into my dreams is enough to make me feel blurred around the edges. How would I feel if I were in touch with them all the time? I’ve already lost myself in so many ways. What if establishing the psychic link only made me lose myself more?