by Hannah Jayne
Will grinned, brushing his fingernails on his shirt proudly. “Haven’t lost one yet.”
“You had to put the ‘yet’ in there, didn’t you?”
“Um, guys? Can we just go find my aunt?” Vlad said from behind us.
We all filed into the living room, filling Will in on what we knew. When we got to the table, Alex unzipped his backpack and started handing out books.
“I thought these just dealt with the Vessel,” I said.
“All of these mention the fallen and all of them were stolen from Ophelia. Might give us some insight into where she took Nina.”
Vlad took the book Alex handed him and looked at the spine disdainfully. “I don’t think this is going to help. I’m sure I can sense her or track Ophelia by her scent.”
“You can track a scent through seven square miles?” Alex asked.
Vlad’s lip curled and he huffed into a chair, pulling open his book angrily.
I pushed away from the table and looked out the living-room window, staring into the slate grey of the sky as it edged into night. Everything was still outside; the world stood motionless. I blew out a sigh.
“Everything okay?” Alex asked, coming up on my left shoulder.
I wagged my head, feeling waterlogged and exhausted from the tears I’d already shed. “It’s going to take forever to get through all these books, and even then all that’s going to happen is that we’ll have an idea of where she may have taken Nina. We won’t have Nina.”
“We’re going to find her,” Alex said solemnly.
“I just feel like Ophelia is constantly one step ahead of us.”
“Well, right now she is. But”—Alex gestured back at the guys, Vlad snapping pages angrily, Will silently moving his lips as he read—“we’re gaining on her.”
I looked hopelessly on.
“We need to do more.” I tapped my index finger against my lips and paced. “I think I have an idea. I think I know a way to get one over on Ophelia.”
I took Alex by the hand and led him into the hallway. “You need to get the Vessel.”
Alex raised an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”
“If you have the Vessel of Souls—if you return it—then Ophelia won’t be after me anymore. She’ll release Nina and everything will be fine.”
Alex put his fists on his hips. “Everything will be fine? We don’t know that Ophelia would release Nina, and anyway, Lawson, you’ll be dead.”
“We all have to make sacrifices.”
Alex grabbed my shoulders and gave me a shake. “Do you hear what you’re saying? No. No, I’m not going to do it.”
“It’s the only way to get rid of Ophelia and keep Nina safe.”
“It is not.”
“Come on, Alex. If we go up against Ophelia, it’s likely I’m going to—”
“Don’t you dare say it,” Alex said between gritted teeth. “Don’t you dare.”
“Maybe this is why you found me.”
“I found you so I could protect you and I sure as hell am not going to let Ophelia win. We’ll figure out another way.”
“I’m beginning to believe there is no other way.”
“This isn’t worth your life.”
“Nina is.”
“We are going to find another way.”
I stepped back, put my hands on my hips. “Okay, so what else do you propose we do?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Alex followed me back into the dining room, where Will and Vlad were turning pages. Vlad groaned. “Can’t we just go to her house or something? Doesn’t anyone know where Ophelia lives?”
We all wagged our heads.
“So far she’s blown up my father’s house—”
Will knitted his brows. “Oh, I’m sorry about that, love.”
“Don’t be. It wasn’t actually his house. And anyway I think my dad is Satan. Oh, and Ophelia’s my sister.”
Will’s eyebrows shot up. “Now that wasn’t on your getting-to-know-you form. Hell of a family tree.”
“I just need to think,” I said, sitting down on one of the dining room chairs and holding my head in my hands. I tried to concentrate, ran my fingers through my hair. I heard the whisp of a name—Sophie—run through my mind. It’s you... . It’s always been you... . I closed my eyes and saw two pinpricks of light flicker behind closed lids. They came into focus and I recognized birthday candles, a fat chocolate cake, pink cheeks pushed out and ready to blow.... I saw myself on my fifth birthday, strawberry-red pigtails bouncing as I tore the wrapping off a Barbie Dream House.
It’s always been you, Ophelia’s breathy voice came again.
The image warbled and I saw Nina’s face, drawn and bruised. Her eyes were red-rimmed and tears dribbled silently as her head lolled, chin on chest.
Sophie, Ophelia sang, won’t you come out to play?
“I think I know where she is,” I mumbled to myself.
“What was that?” Alex asked me.
“A shower. You know”—I shook myself—“this soot and dirt. I think better near water anyway.”
Alex followed me as I headed to my bedroom. I turned around at the threshold, heart pumping. “I’m just going to clean up. I’ll be right back.” I forced a smile. Alex and I had an unspoken agreement that his angelic mind-reading abilities were strictly off limits when it came to me. He let his fingers trail over my bare arm and I knew that his focus was not on my mind.
Alex brushed his lips over mine. He wrapped his arms around me, pushing me into my room, and kissed me hard. I pulled away, licking my lips.
“That doesn’t feel like the kiss of someone who’s expecting me to come back,” I told him. “I’m just getting in the tub.”
Alex pulled me toward him again and nibbled on my bottom lip, flicked his tongue over my ear. “No, that’s the kiss of someone who not only expects you to come back, but who intends to pick up where he left off this morning.”
I felt a delicious shiver in spite of my fear. When I pulled back I looked into Alex’s eyes. “Good to know.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I closed the door and rummaged through my underwear drawer, finding the gun Alex had given me a year ago. It was now nestled between a lacy thong with the tags still on and a pair of fuzzy socks with polar bears on them. The gun used to live in the freezer, but after an unfortunate accident with a Skinny Cow Mint Dipper, I decided to move it to a safer location. I pulled my bathrobe from the peg by the door, slipped it on, and tucked the gun in my pocket. I trudged out past the guys, head down, shoulders hunched under the guise of girlish modesty—and just as I suspected, they all did their best to look away.
The one benefit of undead men—they’ve got all that old-school chivalry.
I locked the bathroom door behind me and turned the tub on full bore. Then I slid out of my bathrobe, unrolled both of my pant legs, and yanked my discarded sneakers from their “I’m going to get rid of these tomorrow” spot on the floor. I threw my well-thawed .22 into my shoulder bag and added a couple bars of soap for good measure. I wedged the bathroom window open, sucked in my stomach, and launched myself through.
My apartment was on the second floor and my hefty rent gave me a priceless view of a well-tagged brick wall and a bank of Dumpsters—not so useful for romantic dinners on the fire escape, but excellent for a midnight sojourn with destiny. In my own Nadia Comaneci move I vaulted from the end of my fire escape to land in an inglorious belly flop on a pile of bagged garbage. I bit my lip to keep from screaming as I picked my way through splitting bags of God knows what, cursing my neighbors for buying cheap garbage bags and Cala Foods for selling them. I swamp-walked through the trash, willing myself not to breathe, reminding myself that all the slimy hands that I felt reaching out for me were either banana peels or burger wrappers.
When I mercifully reached the rusted metal side of the Dumpster I hauled myself out, landing with an impressive thud on the cement below. I dared a look up to my illuminated bathroom w
indow to check if Alex and the guys were on to me—nope. I took off running then, the sound of my sneakers slapping the pavement echoing through the dark alley.
Halfway to my destination I was heaving and certain my lungs were going to explode; I hailed a cab and paid the shameful $5.65 to go the next six blocks, then tore through the police-station parking lot, mashing my fingers against the elevator’s down button.
“Come on, come on,” I moaned to the molasses-slow machine as I danced from foot to foot. “Come on!” As I waited, I scanned the lineup of menacing-looking mug shots in the MOST WANTED photos and shivered. If Ophelia was just your basic, everyday homicidal maniac or computer hacker, I’d feel a lot better. At least then I’d have the whole police force behind me and she’d stay out of my head—and her mug could be plastered all over the streets of San Francisco, making everyone on high alert.
I stepped inside the elevator and watched the doors close on the safety of the police station vestibule. “I have to do this,” I told myself out loud. Suddenly, the thundering beat of my heart was all I could hear. My mouth went dry and my palms were wet; my stomach seemed to drop with every floor. I dipped my hand into my shoulder bag, fingering the comforting coolness of my gun.
“Everything is going to be okay,” I whispered.
When the elevator’s big steel doors opened, the UDA waiting room was dim, the empty furniture and deserted kiosks bathed in an eerie yellow glow from the room’s flickering emergency lights. The UDA was technically closed, but since the standard lock-and-key method did little to deter the undead who wanted in, the company was locked up tight with a magical charm, courtesy of the higher-ups at Underworld corporate. The supernatural padlock method was ingenious for keeping out curious breathers and impatient demons, but it had one weak spot—me. My magical immunity wasn’t just a fun parlor trick; it occasionally came in handy, too. I breathed deeply and tried to convince myself of my confidence.
Ophelia may have the supernatural powers of the otherworld behind her, but I had a gun, a handbag full of soap, and a team of mythical defenders who thought I was taking a bubble bath.
I gulped.
“Ophelia?” I called out.
I heard her giggle—this time it was out in the open and not in my head.
And then I heard a scream.
I tore down the hall, screaming for Nina and kicking open doors. When I got to the last one—the room the UDA used for storage—I paused, until I heard Ophelia’s laugh again. I yanked open the door.
I lost my breath when I saw the storeroom. Just like the rest of the UDA, the lights were off, the only illumination coming from the sickly yellow glow of the emergency lights. The storeroom furniture had been pushed back and heaped up against the walls, so towers of used office chairs and obsolete phones were stacked in precarious mountains all around me—everything except for one wooden desk and one chair. The desk had been pushed to the front of the room and Ophelia was stretched out on her stomach on top of it. Her fingers were knitted and her chin rested in her hands. Her long, bare legs were kicked up and she would occasionally kick her bare foot like a child watching fireflies. She was dressed in a red cotton sundress with crisp white piping—inappropriate both for the situation and for San Francisco weather—and her long blond hair looked flawless, held back by a thick white headband. Her curls trailed over her bare shoulders and spilled down to her elbows. There was a jaunty straw purse sitting on the desk next to her. If her arms and shoulders hadn’t been streaked in blood, she would have looked like a teenage girl lounging on a summer day.
“Sophie!” Ophelia squealed gleefully when she saw me. “So glad you could make it!” She waggled her bare feet and grinned at me, a shiny prom-queen grin that morphed into a pouty frown. “I don’t think Nina wants to play with me anymore.”
Ophelia stretched one arm, her talonlike nail pointing to where Nina was tied against one wall.
My stomach sank and I had to bite down hard on my lower lip to stop myself from crying.
“Nina?” I breathed.
My best friend was sitting on the missing desk chair, bare ankles double-roped against the legs of the chair, her arms tied behind her. She was wearing the slip dress I had last seen her in, except now it hung listlessly on her and her once-glossy hair was snarled in a series of rats-nest knots. There were large tears in the silky fabric of her dress and the elegant lace that edged the bodice was torn and hung around Nina’s neck like a noose; one strap hung ineffectually around her upper arm, right next to it a series of oblong purple bruises. Her exposed skin—usually marblesque and perfect—was pockmarked with angry red gashes, burn marks, and cuts. Splatters of blood marched across her chest and arms, and long, bloody rivers dripped down each leg.
“Oh,” I whimpered, feeling the sting of tears that wanted to fall, feeling the tension in my spine as it crawled up the back of my neck.
Nina’s head lolled to the side and I saw that her lips were puckered and had a handful of tiny cut marks on them. There was blood caked at the corner of her mouth and under her nose and one eye—usually decked out in a luxe MAC eye shadow palette—was nearly swollen shut. Half-empty blood bags were torn open and leaking all around Nina. I cringed.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, swallowing hard against the lump in my throat.
“You know what’s neat?” Ophelia said, hopping from her spot on the desk like an excited school child. “I can hurt vampires! And if I feed them just enough to get their system going—but not enough to gain their strength—I can make them bleed.” Ophelia was downright giddy and she clapped her hands, her straw purse bobbing jauntily as she wound it around her arm. “Isn’t that fun?”
My jaw tightened and my stomach went leaden. “Great. You can hurt a vampire when she has a quarter of her powers. You’re real tough.”
Ophelia’s eyes narrowed and she went on, ignoring me. “I wanted to tell you—I tried to get in your mind to show you all the fun stuff that Nina and I had discovered but your mind was closed completely. It was clogged by all the others around you.” She frowned a pouty little girl’s frown. “It made me sad. Where were you—the mall?”
“Broadway.” My voice was barely audible to myself and I didn’t want to raise it. I thought of us wandering aimlessly through town, and Alex and I rolling around in bed, all the while, Ophelia was learning—and hurting Nina.
“Don’t cry!” Ophelia said. “There’s plenty left for you, too!”
I backed up, slipped my hand into my shoulder bag. Ophelia’s eyes followed the line of my arm.
“You know what else is different?” Ophelia asked. “I can’t read your mind in here.” She held her arms open, blue eyes grazing the ceiling. “Must be something about the Underworld—protects their own or something? No, that can’t be it because you don’t belong here.” She grinned. “You don’t belong anywhere.”
I gritted my teeth. “Are you through?”
“No. Like I said, I couldn’t read your mind—it was frustrating. Imagine how I felt, having to cart around that bag of bones”—she inclined her blond head toward Nina—“on the off chance that you’d be where I wanted you to be.”
I licked my lips. “So you took a chance?”
“No, silly.” Ophelia paused then, her eyes wide and dripping spurious innocence. “I couldn’t read your thoughts, so I read Alex’s.”
Ophelia smiled serenely, stepping back toward Nina. She gingerly slipped her fingers under the strap of Nina’s dress and lifted it back up to her shoulder, smoothing it carefully. Then she trailed her fingers slowly through Nina’s hair, playing with the few strands that weren’t snarled and blood caked.
“You get away from her,” I spat.
Ophelia just smiled and sweetly patted Nina’s unmoving head. “That’s okay. I’m done playing with her. Now I’m ready to play with you.”
Nina’s body lurched forward in the chair and Ophelia slapped her back. I sucked in a breath, praying that my best friend wasn’t dead. I kept my eyes fixed on Op
helia, but gingerly kicked one of the blood bags closer to Nina.
Ophelia kept up her lament.
“You know, Sophie, I should be really, really jealous of you. Alex loves you in a way that he never even considered me.” The soft lilt of Ophelia’s voice took on a hard edge. “He thinks about you so often, he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.”
Ophelia walked slowly, closing the distance between us. “He’s been so worried that I’m going to hurt you. He thinks about it constantly. He’s even thinking about it now as he drives to your grandmother’s old house.”
“What?”
“Alex was right when he said it was easy to hijack your mind—the maggots, Daddy.” Ophelia pressed her manicured fingers to her lips and giggled. “But it wasn’t too hard to put a few suggestions into his mind. Especially since they seemed to be the same thoughts that your ragtag bunch of supernatural friends were having. And because I wrote your grandmother’s address in the margins of all my books. I would have included a Google map, but I thought that would be just a little too obvious.”
I nudged closer to Nina, trying to eye her through my peripheral, to see if she was alive.
“But that Alex—” Ophelia clasped her hands and batted her eyelashes innocently. “Try as I might, I just can’t get over him. I guess it’s a girl thing—or maybe it’s those sweet baby blues of his.” She licked her lips as if the memory was a delicious one and winked at me. “You know how mesmerizing those eyes are. I still love him, Sophie; a part of me still wants him back. I just can’t do anything to hurt him. So, you don’t have to worry. I’m not going to hurt you.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and Ophelia smiled.
“I’m just going to kill you.”
Ophelia’s face fell when mine did. “Oh, honey! Don’t take it personally. I mean, we are sisters after all, and I’ve always wanted a kid sister. But you know what I want more? Complete control.”