Someone Should Save Her

by Robert J. Crane

  Mill crouched over me. Concern—no, fear—lit his eyes, and blood dripped from his fingers.

  “It’s all right,” he said, still more gently.

  I threw my arms around his neck, the tears coming hot and fresh. They spilled over my cheeks and onto his shoulder.

  “Cass …” he whispered.

  It took him a second or two, but he wrapped his arms around me too. It didn’t take long for the last vampire’s screams to die out. His collapsing body, reeking of rot and burnt tar, quenched the flames. When I looked up, all that was left of him was a black, scorched lump, and his helmet and stake baton, lying a few feet away.

  “They’re …” I mumbled, looking around wildly. “They’re gone?”

  “Yes,” Mill said, trying to steady me, his hands gripping my shoulders. “Yes, they’re gone.”

  Chapter 32

  Footsteps thudded against the parking lot, and I looked up to see Laura and Gregory running over to us, hand in hand.

  “That was crazy!” Gregory cried. “Cassie, are you okay?”

  I nodded. It was a glum nod, which was stupid—I should’ve been elated to have gotten out of this alive, to have saved Mill too. But no longer powered by adrenaline, I was tired—and I saw just how stupid I’d been in running out there.

  “If this gets any worse, we’re going to have to take you to the hospital in a matchbox,” Gregory said.

  Laura quivered at his side. Again, I got the feeling she was standing only because Gregory’s arm around her waist was supporting her.

  “Can we go?” she asked, looking around. “What if more come?”

  Mill seemed to have the same idea. “They won’t find anything when they get here. Other than the van and their gear. We’ll be long gone by then.”

  He refused to look at me as he stood and starting lumbering toward the car.

  My lips quirked into a frown. Was he mad at me?

  Since Mill’s help had now expired, it was Gregory who stooped to help me to my feet. I lurched along at his side. He didn’t proffer his arm, which was probably a good thing because it would have been rude not to accept it, but he stuck close.

  “What’s wrong?” Mill asked, looking over his shoulder at me from the front passenger seat when I climbed in and Laura worked the buckle for me.

  “I think I broke my finger,” I said.

  Mill heaved a sigh—an almost over-dramatic one which was totally more Kate’s fare, but alien coming from him. “Cassie, you aren’t a vampire. You can’t do the stuff you were out there doing. You’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “I know I’m not a vampire,” I snapped back. “But you would have died if I hadn’t intervened.”

  “Did it cross your mind that I was doing it to keep you safe?”

  “You dying would not have kept me safe. All it would have done was kill all of the rest of us.”

  “I had it under control,” Mill said, turning back around. He added, after another huff, “Don’t be such an idiot in future.”

  I suppressed a snarl.

  “I thought you were amazing,” Laura said. If she meant it, she didn’t sound it—more like she was testing the waters, trying to find amicable ground for us to meet at. “Both of you.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I would call what Cassie was doing as fighting,” Gregory said. “She was kind of just … flailing.”

  “Hey!” I rounded on Gregory, my broken finger pointed at his face. I groaned. Habit. “I meant to pour that holy water down his throat.”

  “That could have gone south, Cassie,” Mill said darkly.

  “Isn’t that what learning to fight is all about?” I asked.

  “Guys, can’t we just be thankful that we all survived?” Gregory asked hopefully. “I mean, it was crazy what happened, and also sort of awesome—” He recoiled slightly as Mill glared at him “—but we’re safe! And we got away! And now there’s no sweep team to, uh … sweep up the bad guys. Who are still out there.”

  “Yeah, let’s just be thankful for what we’ve accomplished,” Laura said.

  “No!” both Mill and I growled at the same time.

  Laura and Gregory looked back and forth between themselves. “They’re arguing like a couple,” Gregory whispered. Laura punched him in the shoulder.

  Oh, he did not go there. Did he not realize how ridiculous that sounded? Like I would date Mill. He was probably a million years old or something. And that scowling face he always made—

  I was glad he was alive, for sure. But that didn’t mean I liked him or anything. Plenty of people ran out in the face of danger to rescue others, right? That’s what fire fighters did, and it wasn’t always because there were feelings involved.

  “So what do we do now?” Gregory asked.

  “Well, now the trail runs cold,” Mill said. “If Roxy and Ivan are smart, they’ll leave town.”

  “Why?” I asked, the anger in me deflating at the possibility of their escape. All this work, and we’d missed them?

  “They’ll have heard the rumors,” said Mill. “The vampire community in Tampa is not big. Word will travel fast. Now that the sweep team is out of the way? They’ll have the time to bail out.”

  “So this means we go back to HQ and make a nifty suspects board with push pins and string tying our clues together?” Gregory asked.

  Mill, Laura, and I stared at him blankly.

  “What? Have you guys never watched a detective show?”

  The theme song from Pretty Little Liars broke the awkward silence. My phone. Where was my phone?

  I discovered it wedged between the seats, but just missed the call. Xandra. And not just the one call either—over the course of the night, she’d called over a dozen times, and sent twice as many texts.

  “What the …?” Gregory asked, seeing the messages and missed calls over my shoulder.

  “Something’s not right …” I muttered, scrolling through her texts. They started out frantic, and escalated pretty quickly to sheer panic, and then … the same message, over and over again:

  Call. Or else.

  “Something is definitely wrong,” I said, going to call her back.

  “Wait,” Mill said. “It could be a trap.”

  But I had already hit the dial button.

  It rang once. Twice.

  Before the third ring, she answered.

  “Xandra, I’m so sorry. I am fine. I’m alive, it’s okay. You don’t have to worry. I’m fine.”

  The bottom of my stomach dropped when a voice answered that didn’t belong to Xandra.

  “Glad to hear it, new best friend.” Roxy. I yanked the phone from my ear and hit the speakerphone button. Tried, anyway—in my rising terror, I missed the first time.

  “—would have been crushed if something had happened to you,” Roxy was saying. “Because, you see … I have your little friend here. What did you call her? Xandra?”

  I heard a muffled scream of protest, and then a loud crash.

  “Shut her up, will you, Ivan?”

  I stared in horror—at Gregory, who was pale and wide-eyed too—but I saw nothing—only the image of my parents again, in the wine cellar at Byron’s place—only now it was Xandra, and she had two vampires looming over her, even wilder cards than Byron had been.

  “Where—” I stammered. “How did you—” Know about Xandra, I meant to finish. She hadn’t been involved in any of this—so how …?

  “It’s pretty simple,” Roxy replied. “She showed up at the airport to look for you. Apparently she got an urgent text from her bestie telling her she was on her way to Miami.” She laughed again. “Poor thing. She came all the way out here to help you only to be caught by the security crew … and then handed over to me.”

  My heart constricted, my throat tight.

  “You must think you’re so clever, Elizabeth,” Roxy sneered, “getting away from me. But that doesn’t matter. Not anymore. You can’t run forever, little girl. You’ve shown some real guts tonight by trying to be one
of us. Seriously. I almost believed you. Someone should give you an Oscar.”

  “What do you want, Roxy?” I asked.

  “Oh, come on, you haven’t figured it out yet? Okay, it’s getting close to sunup, so let me cut to the chase. I want to make a deal with you.” A pause. “See? I can be reasonable. Violence isn’t always the answer, you know.” I knew right then exactly what the deal was—knew it just as Mill did, his hands tightening on the seat, threatening to gouge the leather-covered seats.

  Mine tightened too, on my phone, my knuckles bone white.

  “You want to see your friend again, Elizabeth? Bring that pretty Laura girl and yourself, right now, and meet me. I know you’ve got her. Purple hair here told me you’re friends, that you’re helping her.” That prompted a loud round of mocking in the background, Roxy just cackling with amusement.

  Laura sucked in a sharp, panicked breath. Tears burned her eyes, utter terror written on her face.

  Gregory squeezed her hand.

  I closed my eyes tightly, willing the entire thing, the entire night, to have been nothing more than a bad dream left over from all of my Byron PTSD.

  Xandra, my best and only real friend, was in danger because of me. Why hadn’t I thought about her? Why had I been so senseless as to think that she wouldn’t be in danger?

  What was I going to do if I was too late? What if …

  “We’re outside Lord Draven’s, by the way.”

  There was a mutual shudder of fear inside the car.

  “Let me make your decision easier,” Roxy said when I didn’t respond. “Either you bring yourself and that Laura girl here with you, or I give Xandra over to Lord Draven, and let him do what he wants with her. Sound fair?”

  She snickered, and I heard Ivan laugh out loud in the background.

  Xandra’s voice cried out again in anguish and was quickly stifled.

  I was going to be sick.

  “I’ll see you soon,” Roxy said in a sickly sweet voice. “Best Friend.”

  Chapter 33

  “Damn her!” I lashed out. I punched the door three times in quick succession, and immediately regretted it. Hand throbbing, I whimpered and let my head fall back onto the seat.

  “Lockwood?” Mill asked quietly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s go back to my place.”

  “No!” I grabbed the back of Mill’s seat and shook it. “No.”

  My mouth was dry. My head spun. “I just … need a minute to think.”

  Lockwood turned down a side street and put the car in park.

  The slow, repetitive clicking of the turning signal grated on my nerves, making it even harder to think clearly.

  Think, Cassie.

  “Cassie …” Mill started.

  We had lost. For one second, one blissful, perfect second, I thought we had a chance. I had survived a fight with vampires again. Mill had made it out. We had Laura, who was safe and sound. And Gregory, who had gotten himself involved when he really shouldn’t have.

  But Xandra. Snarky, sarcastic, loyal Xandra. What were you thinking, girl? Why in the world did you try to take it into your own hands to try to rescue me?

  Gee, I wonder whose example she was following, trying to do some rescuing?

  “It’s not your fault,” Laura murmured, putting her hand in mine.

  “If I hadn’t told her where I was, she’d still be safe at home …”

  “If it wasn’t Xandra, Roxy would have found something else to hurt you with,” Mill said. “You know that.”

  “But they don’t know who I am,” I protested. “They don’t even know my real name.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Mill said. “Even if it wasn’t tonight, she would have found you eventually. If she’s threatening to go to Draven … he’s got resources. Contacts. He’d track you down as soon as she told him you’re human.” He forced a weak smile. “But she hasn’t—yet.”

  “Because she wants me to show up,” I said.

  “Yeah, what’s up with that?” Gregory asked.

  All three of us—four if you counted Lockwood and his green eyes—stared at him. Was he really that dense?

  “Didn’t you hear?” Laura asked. “She called Cassie ‘best friend.’ She wants to turn her.” Laura looked at me. “She wants to turn both of us.”

  “But that’d mean she wants you as part of her gang,” Gregory said, just rambling along, “which we already know is kind of like a harem—”

  “Stop talking,” I said, souring on him instantly. Laura looked at me out of the corner of her eye; I did not look back. There was no part of this that appealed to me. No offense, Laura.

  “Roxy’s feeling reckless, if she wants to do this outside Draven’s place,” Mill said. “She’s arrogant, and therefore she’ll be easier to beat.”

  Easy for him to say. He was a vampire. Even if he was bleeding all over the front seat, he had a better chance of winning in a fight against Roxy.

  “For what it’s worth, Cassie,” Laura said quietly, “I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” I said, voice hoarse, “except make things worse. For all of us.”

  Xandra’s cries echoed in my mind, and I squeezed my eyes shut against it.

  “I have to go …” I said softly. “I can’t just leave Xandra there to—to die.” The words caught in my throat.

  I hadn’t even wanted to get involved in all of this. When Gregory first came to me, I had laughed in his face. Who would want to get involved with vampires again?

  Curse my conscience. The guilt ate away at me, and eventually made me give in. I didn’t want someone else to go through what I went through. The perilous, overwhelming isolation, and the lack of support. Having to lie at every turn, knowing that no one would believe me.

  All of it had been to save my own skin.

  Enter Laura, and suddenly, I turned into the hero.

  More like anti-hero. Reluctant, angry, a failure.

  Byron had taken my parents. I hadn’t hesitated to rescue them.

  Roxy had taken my best friend. And here I was, paralyzed with fear, with four sets of eyes boring into me.

  I’d never be able to live with myself if anything happened to Xandra, especially when it was in my power to help her. Her death would be on my hands. It would be my fault.

  “You don’t think that Roxy would hurt Xandra, do you?” I asked. “While we’re waiting, I mean?”

  Mill hesitated, and my stomach dropped. “I don’t think she would,” he said, after an eternity of a few seconds. “She’s angry, yes. But she knows the only way that you’ll play her little game is if you see Xandra alive, at when we go to meet them.”

  Xandra may have been an accidental friend, but she’d believed me when Byron was stalking me. She’d been there when I needed her. We’d come together after that, bonded, as though this vampire business had welded us together. And tonight, she had demonstrated the depth of her friendship by sneaking out in the middle of the night to go to the airport to try and find me.

  Throat stinging, eyes burning, I took a shaky breath.

  “You’d think this would get easier,” I said. “Fighting vampires, I mean.”

  Laura watched me pensively. She’d have worry lines on her forehead for life after tonight.

  “I know how scary all of this is,” I said to her, my hand tightening in hers. “I’ve never been so scared in my life, and I know you understand. The only thing that even comes close was when my parents caught me in a really nasty lie back when I was living in New York. It wasn’t pretty. And I totally deserved their wrath.”

  “I totally understand,” Laura said, tears leaving streaks down her pale face.

  “I wish that was all I had to be afraid of right now …” I said, scrubbing my eyes with the heel of my palms.

  “You’re crazy for going through with this,” Gregory said. The streetlights outside were glinting off his glasses. “But … I kinda get it now.”


  Mill made a sound like a growl deep in his throat.

  “I understand that you want to help your friend, Cassie—” And the tone in his voice told me that I didn’t want to hear what he was going to say. “But you should get out of this while you can.” Uproar from the backseat—from all of us, Laura included, albeit in quieter, politer protestations.

  “Do you seriously not care about this? About Xandra?” Gregory shouted. “It’s because she’s human, isn’t it? She’s just another casualty to you.”

  “You cannot honestly expect me to just—to walk out now!” I said. “She’s my friend!”

  “And Ivan is a destroyer,” Mill answered, gesturing to his stomach. “Roxy has no mercy. She lost a lover tonight, remember?”

  I opened my mouth—but Mill continued.

  “I know your friend is in danger,” he said, “but even if you win this—it’s going to be on Draven’s doorstep.” He hung his head. “And honestly … I don’t know that we can win.” He was holding himself, pained. “That sweep team … they took a lot out of me. I’ll be going into a fight with Ivan, and I’m not exactly a hundred percent here.”

  “I … I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t care whether you’re going. I am not leaving my friend in the hands of these monsters.”

  Decision made. Again.

  I was going to go, and I was going to fight.

  Dawn was coming, and Roxy wanted to end it. My stake had fallen into the footwell. I knelt over, picked it up gingerly, and then deftly slid it into my hair where it belonged.

  “Let’s end this,” I said. Mill did not look happy, and for a long moment he watched me, imploring me with his eyes to reconsider.

  I did not. And so, finally, he turned to Lockwood, and said flatly, “Drive.”

  Lockwood drove.

  Chapter 34

  I recognized the building before we even stopped in front of it. This building had been the place where my life had changed forever. Here was where I went from being a terrified human girl to a vampire slayer pretending to be undead. I’d played my part so well that Lord Draven himself had believed my story.