Abby leans in close, right where I want her. “I’m worse, Nora. I’m much worse!”
“Yeah, sure. It’s just, I wanted you to see what I’ve written—”
Before she can turn to avoid the light, I flip open the laptop cover, filling my office space with its bright white glow, like a laser beam pointed straight at her face. She’s stuck in its twenty-one-inch glare, her eyes instantly shutting, her beautiful skin searing, her vocal cords shrieking as she ducks to avoid the light, then falls to the ground.
I quickly shut the laptop and put it back on the desk, feeling all kinds of guilty but just as relieved.
I know the secret now. I know Reece’s weakness.
Abby is mewling by the time Reece and Bianca rush to her aid, smoke rising from the floor where she lies, curled in a fetal position, clutching her steaming cheeks.
“What did you do?” Reece demands as he helps her up.
I see the fresh scars on her face, raw like hamburger meat.
“N-n-nothing,” I stammer, acting clueless. “I just wanted her to read my latest chapter. I mention her and thought she’d like it.”
“Print it, Nora!” Reece shouts without further explanation or, for that matter, suspicion. “Next time, print it for her . . . for any of us!”
He takes Abby into the next room, calming her with gentle words as Bianca follows reluctantly.
Behind them, I smile for the first time in days.
Chapter 21
I finish the book at noon, saving it all kinds of ways and backing it up on three separate flash drives Reece has brought me in a small Office Warehouse bag.
The vampires have entirely given up on the pretense of going to school by now, sleeping off their bloodlust in the darkest corner of the warehouse, well behind Wyatt’s cage, where the light from the ceiling’s broken windows never seems to reach.
I sit at my laptop, but I’m not using it. Instead, I’m keying the coded message—all two hundred words of it—into my cell phone as a draft.
But that’s not enough.
I know how lethal Reece is, how much of the predator’s blood roils beneath his dignified human skin.
He’ll find some way to steal my phone, smash it, destroy it. I’ll need backup for this to work, and plenty of it.
Abby’s backpack is near the front door where she dropped it after strolling in after school the other day.
Wyatt’s bag, dusty and untended, is on a wobbly wooden bar stool just outside his cage.
I hear the vampires dozing. Their closed eyes are dark under raised hoodies as they huddle together for warmth, like quivering, hairless beavers in a dam. Their breath is heavy and redolent of copper. How could Reece spend so much time polishing the field off his boots but not wipe the blood of the field mice off his lips? Gross.
I tiptoe to Abby’s bag first, avoiding every broken lightbulb and rat bone in my path.
Or, at the very least, trying to.
It takes forever, because each time I land on a rust flake, I have to stop and look up to see if one of the vampires has risen. They haven’t.
Not yet, anyway.
Abby’s backpack is full of her old life. Blue rewrite pages from her latest Zombie Diaries movie. Black-and-white head shots of human Abby looking young, scrubbed, and innocent. Endless tubes of her favorite lip gloss. Zombie Diaries buttons and bumper stickers to give to the freshmen. The fabric journal I gave her last Christmas, which she never wrote anything in but kept anyway. I find her pink cell phone in a zipper pocket, next to $138 in cash and a stack of her talent agent’s foil business cards (just in case).
I slip the phone into my back jeans pocket, looking up to find the vampires still snoozing.
Well, that was the easy part (if you could call taking forty-five minutes to walk twelve feet easy).
Now to stumble into the lions’ den.
Wyatt’s cage squats in the middle of the warehouse, equidistant between my lavish writing room and the squalid corner where the vampires slumber.
The light is bad. My eyes are blurry from overwriting for the last week straight. My head is pounding. My hips, back, and neck ache from sitting too long and now stumbling so slowly over every tiny obstacle that might possibly make noise.
I know I have enough cell phones. Two is plenty, but if I’ve learned one thing about vampires—well, fictional ones anyway—enough is never enough.
I reach Wyatt’s cage without crunching any bulbs or bottles or bones, peeling open his satchel slowly to find his life spelled out in empty gum wrappers and scraps of paper, on which are written scores of girls’ phone numbers, their loopy script filled with i’s dotted with hearts—some of them even extra-special hearts with eyes and a smile drawn inside—and names written in pink ink and spelling out tempting lady names like Amber and Audrina and Saffron and Sage.
Cad!
His phone is at the very bottom, natch (God forbid I found it before stumbling across all those scented scraps of paper), and I’m so relieved to see it, I reach for it instinctively, forgetting how the On button is on the side, a feature Wyatt was endlessly complaining about and I was endlessly telling him to go exchange it for.
I feel it vibrating in my hand and know the sound is coming, but there’s nothing I can do except toss it into Wyatt’s cage and hope Reece falls for the scam.
Wyatt stirs, eyes wide and fearful until he sees it’s me. “Nora,” he whispers, his voice hoarse, and at that very moment his phone springs to life with a telltale deedle-dwi-doo-doo-hummm tone as the screen begins to glow while coming to rest just at his feet. “What? What are you doing?” he hisses as the vampires rise.
“Just trust me, OK?”
Their feet rustle against the bare warehouse floor, crunching every bone and broken beer bottle in their path.
“Just . . . follow my lead.”
“Some lead!” he shouts, somehow finding the time—and the energy—to smile.
Chapter 22
They are on me in a hot second, all three of them cornering me in the shadow of Wyatt’s cage. I do a good job of cowering before their looming shadows and glistening fangs.
Their anger is a living thing, seething out of their mouths, burning in their eyes, oozing from their blood-soaked pores.
Even Abby looks outraged, and I wonder why, because certainly she can’t know about the code yet or the conclave or the thirty thousand poor residents of Lake Hammer, Texas.
Maybe it’s just me she hates, as if I’d blame her.
Reece reaches me first, hulking in front of me larger than life, his chest broader, his arms longer, his fangs already protruding. “Why aren’t you at your desk?” he shouts.
Bianca appears at my left side, hissing, crouched like an animal ready to pounce. She pokes me, and her hard, sharp nails scratch my soft, mortal skin.
Abby is on my right, circling, reaching out, hissing.
I hiss back, just to show her I know who she is and hate her for it, even as my heart breaks for her. “I’m done!” I stare down Reece. “Done with your stupid book. And your stupid code. I hope you’re happy!”
He smiles to hear the good news, then remembers why he’s here. “So what was that noise?”
I frown, pretending I don’t know the answer and doing it badly. “W-w-what noise?” I ask, flitting a glance toward Wyatt’s cage that they’re sure to catch.
They do.
“His phone,” Abby shouts, pointing to it proudly. “He must have had his phone in this bag, and she was trying to get it.”
“Thanks, Abby.” I sigh, trying to sound hurt.
“Thanks, Nora,” she hisses, leaning in. “Thanks for leaving me all alone, unprotected against these guys! What should I have done, Nora? Give up, or adapt? Weren’t you the one who told me to be strong? Who made me promise to be strong, just before you let me walk across the street from the café alone so you could write your precious book?”
Reece and Bianca ignore our little catfight as they struggle to retrieve the phon
e from Wyatt’s cage.
“My precious book? I was writing so fast only to help Wyatt. All I needed you to do was keep your mouth shut and stay out of trouble. I told you to play along. I warned you not to blab your big stinkin’ mouth about Bianca, let alone Reece. But oh, no, you couldn’t do that, could you? You just couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, sounding almost . . . human.
“He told me, Abby. Reece told me how you were going around school, blabbing to anyone who would listen about how Bianca was a vampire, about how—”
“Did not!” she shouts, shoving me so hard I literally fly back, landing on a pile of desiccated rats, which fortunately break my fall (albeit in the absolutely grossest possible way).
Reece shouts, “Abby, we need her here, where we can see her. Quit treating her like a play toy and drag her back.”
But I’m up now, scrambling in reverse as she advances, desperate to get to my room, my pillows, my desk.
She ignores him, angry now, stomping, reaching me quickly, fangs protruding, eyes yellow, face a mask of hurt and shame. “I never said a word, Nora. I knew how much was on the line, how much danger we were in. I showed up to that school every day, sat near those two . . . two . . . monsters every day, trembling for fifty minutes each time, and never said a word. She came and broke into our dorm. Bianca bit me without warning, for no reason, just because she could. And you know who sent her? Reece did. I never blabbed. To anybody. Ever.”
Her fangs tremble, face freshly healed from my little computer screen experiment the other day. She’s closing in, licking her lips, hungry for my blood, my pulsing veins.
“Then I’m sorry, Abby.”
That stops her short. “For what?”
“For this!” I say, yanking open the laptop and shoving it in her face.
Chapter 23
Abby is still screaming, lying in a pile of gore and smoke beneath my desk, curled up like an infant, clawing at the skin that sizzles and boils above her neck.
Bianca screeches like a wild thing, racing across the room toward me, but I’m ready, the laptop yanked free from its power cord, charged up, and wired to last 4.5 whole hours of vampire-sizzling good times (if I can last that long, that is).
I hold the laptop like a shield, its white-hot glow reaching out inches in front of me in the gloomy warehouse light: the biggest, fattest, UV-spitting spotlight I can find.
Bianca stops too soon to get the full sizzle effect that Abby got but not short enough to emerge unscathed. Her chin catches fire as I shove the laptop toward her, but she’s strong enough—older and wiser and meaner than Abby by two whole vampire days (which is probably like two whole weeks in human time)—and knocks the laptop free from my hands.
It lands in a pile of pillows, unbroken but facedown, and it won’t do me any good from all the way over there. I scramble after it, but she’s too fast, too strong, and pins me with a hard sneaker on my soft elbow.
Here’s the thing they never tell you in books or show you in movies: pain hurts. It really does; I’m not gonna lie. Her shoe on my little wimpy arm is like a hot poker in my eye. It stings and grinds and threatens to break me at any minute.
What’s more, she knows it, and she likes it. Bianca grinds her foot into the soft flesh of my arm.
Already I’m thinking, Don’t let her break my typing fingers!
I squirm on all fours, scrambling forward until she puts the other foot on my butt and shoves me down. And that hurts too. Everything she does hurts, and she knows it, and that’s why she’s doing it. I feel the breath get knocked out of me, feel the bruises start to swell on my arm, feel the catch of a pillow zipper against my chest, and that hurts too!
I flip over, panicking, anything to avoid the pain, kicking at her groin, her thighs, backing her away from me, if only momentarily.
Somehow, it’s enough.
I grab Abby’s phone from my back pocket as Bianca turns to sink her fangs into my belly. The bright glow from Abby’s touch screen pierces Bianca’s hide like a cattle brand. Not content to watch her stumble away, I clutch her throat where the first sizzle burns and shove the lighted touch screen against her skin. It sears her all over, as if it’s a hot iron in some medieval torture chamber. Her skin is falling off in big, square clumps by the end, like a cheap Halloween mask coming apart after a long night of trick-or-treating. I see bone in places, sinew in others—her face, neck, chest, arms like a patchwork blanket of herself.
She quivers on the floor, whimpering in a heap, and I’m not done yet.
I’ve watched this scene in too many movies to walk away from a wounded vampire and think nothing will come of it. Bianca is wounded, yes, but still breathing, and I just can’t let that ride.
I look around for a weapon, for anything, and see the thing that’s gotten me in all this trouble in the first place: my desk. Big, solid, with four sturdy legs.
I kick it to the floor with a great smashing thunder, then stomp one of the legs until it breaks off.
Bianca snuffles, whimpers, but doesn’t move. It’s like she knows what’s coming but is powerless to stop it.
There is no time to whittle the broken desk leg down into a sharper point, but the jagged edge looks just spikey enough. It’ll have to do.
I grab the other end in both hands, stand over Bianca like a ditch digger with his shovel, and without hesitation—without a second thought—without guilt or remorse, I plunge the stake straight down into her chest. It cracks a few ribs and jabs into her heart on the first try. She erupts like a fireball, like a giant M-80 going off in the world’s biggest toilet. The huge ash plume explodes around me, covering the entire office in bone and flames and charcoal briquettes that look suspiciously like fingers and toes.
With ashes flying around me, a great black dust cloud of once-human flesh and bone, I turn triumphantly to face Reece, only to find him standing inside Wyatt’s cage. Not outside—inside.
Wyatt is free now, his shackles loosened, his phone in pieces under Reece’s imported leather soles, but he is far from liberated.
Reece has him shoved up against the rusty metal bars, the surface rubbing harshly against his smooth cheeks, his nose bent and ready to break at the slightest application of pressure from behind. Reece holds him by the shoulders, his face alight with glee, his gaze transfixed on the smoking remains of his latest acolytes.
“Well done, my dear. To think, a mortal—a measly mortal—has bested two of my own flesh. I am truly impressed.”
“Me too,” I say, inching forward, my hand on the preloaded cell phone in my pocket.
“Careful,” he says as I pull it free but aim the glow at myself. He wraps his free hand tighter around the back of Wyatt’s neck, just in case.
“Forget him,” Wyatt says, fully awake now. “Run, Nora. Get out of here!”
I ignore Wyatt, though it pains me to do so, and stare at Reece. “I’m impressed with the simplicity of your code.”
He doesn’t even blink. “What code?”
I look at the text message draft I keyed in earlier, queued up and ready to send to every media contact in my address book—and trust me, after four New York Times best sellers, they’re all in there.
GNN.
RSNBC.
Satellite Network News.
The tabloids.
DMZ.com.
Even Teen Talk.
One push of the Send button, and the whole world knows where the next conclave will be.
“This one,” I say, reading the first few lines aloud from my glowing phone screen: “At hour seventeen on the seventh day of the winter solstice in the year of our Lord 2017 shall we meet on the banks of Lake Hammer in west Texas.”
I stop reading, scan his face, and see the waves of rage wash over him. He is speechless, but I know it won’t last.
“So what does it mean, Reece? Why this elaborate code? Who reads it, if you guys can’t even answer a cell phone, can’t even glance at a computer monitor?�
��
“That’s just it.” He smiles, loosening his grip on Wyatt the slightest bit. “We can’t use your cell phones, can’t read your computer monitors, can’t even watch TV. Not that we’re missing much, from what I can tell. It’s the UV rays, of course. They’re as bad as the sun. Worse, in some cases. So we must rely, alas, on the printed page.”
I mull it over, see the possibilities.
“You mean, this is an . . . invitation?”
He nods.
“To . . . conclave?”
“Very good,” he says, and I still can’t tell if he’s mocking—or praising—me. “Very good.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Not really.” He sighs, opening his free hand to reveal the flash drives I carefully hid around my work space. “But now that the book is done, the code is in place, the printers stand at the ready, and you won’t survive the day—why not? You see, Nora dear, every ten years the remaining twenty-five thousand or so vampires on this planet gather at something known as a conclave.
“It’s a gathering, traced back to ancient times when we numbered but a few. The code you so deftly deciphered is, in fact, an invitation. Every vampire on the planet will converge on this tiny Texas town, where we’ll meet for four days, conducting business, passing judgment, enacting laws, dealing punishment, and then we’ll feast on the good people of Lake Hammer. It’s a delicious plan, also passed down through the ages. We don’t just eliminate the witnesses; we feed on them. Two birds, as they say, I believe?”
“So let me get this straight. You read my books, liked them—”
“Heavens no.” The truth I long suspected finally comes out. “They’re complete rubbish. However, they are popular and have now been translated into thirty-four languages, precisely the ones we’ll need to reach our international brethren. So, please, don’t flatter yourself.”
“Of course not.” I groan. “The point being, you came here, stalked me, tricked me into writing your book and implanting this code, and now . . . what? All the vampires will know to read it? How do you let them know if you can’t communicate via e-mail or phone or computer?”
The Vampire Book of the Month Club Page 12