I reach the bars, rattle them, feel their heft, their absolute impenetrability, and shriek, “Wyatt!”
He mumbles, shakes his head, then struggles to lift it.
“Nora?” His eyes are cloudy, his beautiful face as dirty as his smelly shirt. “Nora, get out of here. Run!” But it’s not an order, not a shout. It’s more like a . . . whimper.
His voice is listless, his arms just hanging there, not moving when he does.
The pits of his shirt are sweat-stained. I try to think how long it’s been since I’ve last seen him: over fifteen hours now. Has he been hanging here the entire time? Chained up while I was arguing with Abby to believe me and feeling sorry for myself in my comfortable dorm suite?
His arms quiver with tension, his wrists are bloody and bruised, his feet not quite flat on the unfinished wood floor of the cage. It looks so awkward, so painful. No wonder his voice is barely above a whisper, his chin wearing a groove in the stretched collar of his T-shirt.
I shush him gently and follow his arms from his sweaty pits to his biceps to his elbow to his forearm to his wrists, which are shackled to the bars of the cage midway up. Then I follow his legs from his slim waist to two more sets of shackles chaining his ankles. They’re rusty and as impenetrable as the thick steel bars of his twelve-by-twelve-foot cage.
I hear the vague rustle of Wyatt’s deep breaths against his sweaty T-shirt. He looks so different—so small and weak and helpless.
In school he is so strong and vibrant that girls watch him with avarice and guys watch him with jealously—even the ones who are prettier than him, because even their beauty can’t match his charm and that gorgeous crooked grin. His beautiful blue eyes are dull now, the grin gone, the biceps flaccid, the long legs dangling, and it’s all my fault.
Every minute of his pain, every ounce of energy and beauty Reece has stolen from Wyatt is because of me. All of it.
“Despite the grim circumstances,” Reece says, suddenly appearing by my side, “I assure you he’s quite comfortable. The drugs ensure he’s pain-free. Who knows, after our little . . . collaboration, he may not remember a thing. Probably better that way, for him anyway.”
I turn to him, blocking out the sight of Wyatt in my peripheral vision. “What do you want me to do?” There is no fight left in me. There is no deal to be made here, no negotiation to enter into, no fight to be won. This is not a scene in one of my books, a scene I can rewrite and twist to fit my needs—or, for that matter, Wyatt’s.
This is real life, and for better or worse, I can do merely what I’m told and hope for the best.
“I only ask that you do for me what you already do for a living, Nora. Write.”
“Why? What is all . . . this about?”
“What does it matter?” He grunts impatiently, stepping slightly away from the cage as if I should follow. “Why do you care what I want when it is in your power to give it to me, simply and painlessly? You see your predicament. How can you refuse?”
“Obviously I can’t,” I say through gritted teeth, taking one step closer to him—and away from my best friend. “You have me at your mercy. Great. Good for you. I give you that much. But I’d still like to know why you want me to do this.”
“All in good time,” he assures me without one trace of sincerity. With his hand on my sagging shoulder, he gently urges me away from Wyatt’s cage and ushers me across the dirty floor.
I follow him all the way to the desk, all the way into my seat.
When I look up and peer past the laptop, I see that he’s situated my office and Wyatt’s cage in perfect view of each other. In fact, you couldn’t have arranged them any more ideally unless you’d planned it that way, which he obviously has.
I manage to look at him (without spitting) and smirk. “Seriously?” I nod toward poor Wyatt.
“For inspiration,” he explains.
Indeed.
I clench my jaw, force a smile, look away from Wyatt, and peer into Reece’s shark eyes. “What’s this great idea for a story you have, anyway?”
He sits on a soft red cushion in a black rattan chair in one corner of the room and crosses his legs. He places his pale hands on the armrests as if he’s awaiting a cocktail at some country club and not surrounded by filth and decay.
“It’s very simple, you see. For four volumes you’ve had Scarlet Stain chasing Count Victus. For volume five, I simply want you to reverse the formula.”
“You want Count Victus to chase . . . Scarlet Stain?” I ask, already seeing the possibilities.
“I do think your readers would enjoy seeing this turn of events, don’t you? The hunter becoming the hunted?”
I nod.
“It has . . . potential,” I admit somewhat reluctantly, although already my mind is racing with the opening scene. “What else?”
“That’s it. That’s all I require of you.”
“Hold up—that’s your big master plan? That’s why you moved clear across the country, showed up at my book signing, registered at Nightshade Academy, turned Bianca, and kidnapped Wyatt? Because you’re tired of seeing Count Victus in the victim role?”
He cocks his head and smiles, though it doesn’t reach all the way to his eyes. “Well,” he says, putting his fingertips together under his chin, “not exactly. However, that is the deal.”
“Just write that story and you’ll let Wyatt go?”
“Of course.” He sighs. “What do I want with another male vampire?”
I look across the room, my eyes zeroing in on that bloodstain just beneath Wyatt’s collar.
My heart is racing with hope, but I purposefully avoid eye contact and as soberly as possible, like a kid on the playground not believing some other kid is going to trade his pudding cup for a cheese stick, ask, “So you haven’t . . . turned him yet?”
“Of course not.” He scoffs. “We vampires aren’t so bad. We can still keep our word. After all, a deal’s a deal.”
“But the blood,” I say, looking from Wyatt to Reece.
“Let’s just say your friend gave one heck of a fight.”
I shake my head. “And Bianca? If all you wanted was to lure me here, using Wyatt as bait, what do you need Bianca for?”
“Why do you care? I thought you two hated each other anyway.”
“She hated me, for whatever reason. I never said I hated her.”
“Either way,” he says curtly, “I can’t be all places at once. You have two best friends, do you not? Since even with my vast powers, I can be in only one place at a time. Consider Bianca . . . my second skin.”
I rise from the chair, but he pins me with a vicious glare. I sit back down.
“If you do anything to Abby . . .” My voice is full of tremors I can no longer hide. There is some threat there, at least the tone of a threat, but for the life of me, I can’t finish.
What?
What will I do?
Call his bluff and risk Wyatt’s safety?
“Relax, Nora. She’s perfectly safe. She won’t even know Bianca is shadowing her. I just have to make sure no one comes to your rescue. Hence, I need an ally. Once I got a good look at Bianca, well, I knew she’d be perfect for the job.”
I nod, open the laptop, and prepare to type. The sooner I get this over with, the better.
He smiles, watching me from across the room in anticipation.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you going to sit there, like that, the entire time?”
“I was planning on it, yes,” he says, somewhat surprised at my vehement reaction.
“Oh, no.” This is a real deal breaker, even when the deal is life or death. “I know you’re holding all the cards here, but I really must insist on you sitting somewhere, anywhere, else. You drooling in the corner over every fresh page is going to get real distracting, real quick.”
He sighs, stands, and approaches the desk. “I guess it was too much to ask to watch genius at work,” he says sarcastically.
An awkward silence follows, my hands poised ov
er the keyboard, his eyes lingering on my hands poised over the keyboard.
“Anything else?”
“Just this one slight detail,” he says, reaching down to open a desk drawer and pulling out a single sheet of paper. He hands it to me.
I take it. It looks like a dictionary page. A really cramped dictionary page.
There are four columns, side by side, filling the length of the page. Each column has fifty numbers—one through fifty in the first column all the way to the right of the page, fifty-one through one hundred next to that, and so on, up to two hundred.
Next to each number is a word, all seemingly unrelated: lake, elm, solstice, farm, equinox.
“What’s this now?”
“It’s very simple.” He lurks over my shoulder but, I notice, just out of the line of sight of the open laptop monitor. “Every number stands for a page, every word stands for a word I want you to use on that page.”
“What? That’s crazy. What for? That’s going to get really difficult come, say, word seventy-eight. Where does it go on the page?”
“It’s simple, really. For the numbers up through ten, it will be the number of words. So, here, number five, will be the fifth word on the page: travel. Do you see? I can see where that goes right now. You could say something like Scarlet Stain loved to travel. One, two, three, four, five: very simple. Later, when the numbers get to double digits, the pattern shifts again, so that—here—word thirty-five is our, meaning in the third line down on the page, in the fifth word over, you will use our in a sentence. Not too terribly difficult, is it?”
“Not too difficult?” I squirm, eyes wide with disbelief. (I knew it seemed too easy!) “Are you serious? Do you know how hard it is to find a particular place for some of the words on this list? Solstice? Equinox? These aren’t words I use every day, let alone in a Better off Bled novel! How in the world am I supposed to use a word like restructuring in a story a teenage girl is going to relate to? I mean, seriously, this is really going to test the limits of creativity,” I finish, whining, knowing I’m whining but powerless to stop.
He moves away and points to the cage in the middle of the empty warehouse. “Like I said, for inspiration.”
Chapter 16
Abby is scared, and rightfully so.
We sit in the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop, knees up against the table across from each other, neglected chai teas steaming in front of us, uneaten macadamia biscotti still in their plastic wrappers.
I wanted to do this alone, somewhere private, like the dorm suite, but the risk of Reece or Bianca interrupting us, violently, maybe even permanently, forced me to relocate to the twenty-four-hour coffee shop.
I figured the bright lights, the hissing cappuccino machine, the gossipy teenage cashiers, the other frustrated writers, and the public setting would put us both at ease. I figured wrong.
It’s late, and I know Abby is tired, her face still slightly pink from scrubbing off her zombie makeup in her trailer after another long night on the set.
“Well, what can we do, Nora? We have to do something! I mean, this is Wyatt we’re talking about. What if he’s torturing him right now, for God’s sake? How can we sit here discussing it like this when our friend is in danger?”
“You think I don’t want to rush over there right now and save him?” I lean in so my voice won’t travel quite so far. “But you should see this cage. I don’t know about you, but my skills for breaking friends out of three-inch-thick metal bars are a little rusty, you know?”
“This is LA.” She leans in just as close. “You can find anything here. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap and all that.”
“Look around. This is Beverly Hills. I don’t see any safecrackers lurking around at pricey cafés in the middle of the night, you know, and I don’t think they advertise in the yellow pages.”
“So, what, that’s it? We just give up, drink our chai tea, and hope for the best?”
“All we can do is what he wants. It’s the easiest way.”
“What kind of crazy guy is this dude? He comes all the way here, from Manhattan, to force you to write some stupid vampire book?” She is instantly chagrined at the slip of tongue, but it’s OK. Fang fiction isn’t for everybody, although a seventeen-year-old who dresses up like a rotting corpse every night of the week has very little room to talk. I mean, at least you have to have half a brain to read my books. You don’t even need to be able to read to watch her stupid zombie movies!
“I gotcha, Abby,” I say, “but I’m not interested in his reasons anymore. I just want Wyatt out of that cage and back with us.”
“I mean, can’t we call the cops?” she whines, her face looking less pretty and more desperate by the second. “The feds? Somebody, somewhere? You write about this stuff. I mean, aren’t there real vampire hunters out there in the world?”
I snort, glad no one is around at this hour to hear us, save for the lone clerk who’s busy jamming out to the music vibrating his earphones while he cleans out the cappuccino machine.
“Abby, until yesterday, I didn’t even realize vampires existed. What do I know about vampire hunters? And even if there are any, where do we find them? The task is easy. Write his stupid book, use his stupid words, and he’ll set Wyatt free.”
“Do you trust him to do that?” she asks, hands in the air.
“Of course not, but what else can we do? I know this much: If I write the book, I can also delete the book. I can destroy the flash drives, dump it in the recycle bin on my laptop, something. Heck, I can make sure the book sucks so no one publishes it. Know what I mean? I’m not entirely at his mercy, but I have to play the game until I figure out some type of plan.”
“You would do that?” she asks, as if we’ve just met. “You would purposely write a bad book just to save Wyatt?”
“What? What kind of a jerk do you think I am? I would write ten dozen bad books, each one worse than the last, to save Wyatt.”
She shakes her head, her hands buried in her dark-pink-on-lighter-pink turtleneck sweater, her luxuriant chestnut brown hair swept back in a simple ponytail, all the better to see her deep green eyes. Right now those eyes are scared, almost . . . haunted.
“I dunno,” she says, chin on one knee. “I just feel so helpless, sitting here knowing Wyatt’s in some cage being guarded by some maniac vampire!”
“I know. I know, but you have to keep it together. You have to be strong, Abby, remember that! I’ll write as fast as I can, four thousand, maybe even five thousand words a day if possible.”
“But how? When?”
“I’ve already e-mailed Principal Chalmers and my guidance counselor, explaining my publisher’s deadline. They’ve given me the rest of the week off, plus the weekend. I can do it. I can do it by then, but you have to be my eyes and ears at school. I hate to leave you defenseless, but you’ll be alone with Bianca and Reece for those few periods every day. Are you up to it?”
“I want Wyatt freed as much as you do,” she says, planting her feet on the floor, defiantly taking her first sip of chai tea—and promptly making a displeased face, no doubt at the old bathwater temperature. “What, you don’t think I’m up to it? You think I’ll crack or something?”
I shake my head, reaching for my own cup of lukewarm tea. The sweet, spicy liquid revives my lips, my tongue, my throat, my very soul.
“Abby, I trust you completely. I just know how Bianca gets your goat, is all. You can’t taunt her. You can’t even let on that you know what she is. Look how easily Reece got to her. I don’t want him—or her—doing the same to you.”
She stares at me over the lid of her cup, her eyes blank and cold. “I’m not helpless, you know.” She slams the cup down.
“I know you’re not.” I sigh, leaning back, the sugary tea racing through my body, lifting my spirits.
So why isn’t it doing the same for Abby?
“Is something . . . wrong?” I ask, watching her stare at a broken thumbnail for so long I’m surprised it’s not fully he
aled by the time she finally looks up and answers me.
“You mean, something other than my ex-boyfriend being strung up in a cage and my ex-best friend having to write under the gun to save his life? You mean, something more than I have to watch my back against not one but two killer vampires who will be sitting less than three feet away from me for four out of seven periods all week? Not much, why?”
“Ex-best friend? What does that mean?”
“It means I’m mad at you. It means I know, and you’re not forgiven!”
“Know what?” I ask, although I already suspect the answer, my face growing hot with the mounting suspense.
“Know this.” She tosses her cell phone across the table at me.
I manage to catch it before it knocks over my cup. I hit the on button, and the screen flickers to life.
It’s a text from Wyatt. Before I read the message, I check the time stamp—7:22 p.m. on the day he disappeared.
He must have written her on the way to the photo shoot, just after—I’m talking seconds after—leaving the coffee shop.
The message is brief and intimate and stings with betrayal:
Abs, it finally hapnd. Just like u said it wld. Nora & I kssd. There wer firewks but . . . not bazooka blasts. You ok wit dat? Will c where it goz. Don’t B angry. It had 2 happen sometime. W
“What? Why? When?” My stomach somewhere on the floor, my eyes blurry, my butt half in, half out of my seat.
“The day it happened.” She sighs, looking at me with new eyes that no longer smile. “So . . . why didn’t you tell me? That night? When we had our big talk?”
“I wanted to. Really, I did. I just . . . What would you have rather heard? That I’d kissed Wyatt or that Bianca was a vampire?”
“How about both, Nora? I can take it, you know. I’m a big girl, remember?”
“It would have been nice if he’d told you why I kissed him,” I say, avoiding eye contact. I always thought Abby would be okay if Wyatt and I ended up together. Like he said, it had to happen sometime. Did Abby not understand that? Or did she still have such strong feelings for him that it could cost us our very friendship?
The Vampire Book of the Month Club Page 9