I could hear the exasperation in her voice. “Vampires aren’t cannibals, okay? They don’t eat people. They drink their blood. And they often find people who they keep as pets, or servants. Not all of them actually want to kill people. Those are usually their fledglings – new converts, you know.”
Xandra spoke as if she was discussing her favorite store at the mall. The fact that she was apparently an authority on this did not make me feel calmer on the whole, since I was locked in here with her, and she was gushing about vampires while psycho-boy was trying to scare the beejeezus out of us.
“They’re irresistible to humans as a way to lure us in. They look young—”
“You are talking about this as if you actually believe in vampires.”
“Are you telling me you don’t believe in supernatural stuff?” Xandra replied. “Not even, like, ghosts?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I countered, “Does that mean you believe in werewolves and faeries as well?”
“Why not?” Xandra answered. “This is a strange world. If vampires exist, why not these other things?”
“Okay,” I said, and got to my feet. I brushed off the back of my legs and decided it was best for my sanity, and my safety, to move to the other side of the room, away from Miss Crazy Pants.
“What?” Xandra got up too, and followed me through some of the shelves, peering at me between the gaps. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Like staring at me through shelves was totes normal.
I whipped around to face her, raking my hand through my hair to get it out of my face. “Yeah. I do.”
“Well, do you have a better explanation?”
I froze, running through everything, anything that might make more sense.
“Didn’t think so,” Xandra said defiantly, before turning to walk back through the shelves.
I sighed, the sound echoing in the old chamber like a rush of air, and followed after her. She might be crazy, but she wasn’t the one trying to pound her way into the building we were hiding out in.
I sat down on the cold tile floor beside her again.
“So,” Xandra said rather coolly in an obvious attempt to change the subject, “how did a Yankee like you end up in Tampa?”
She meant Yankee as an insult, but I couldn’t care less.
“Mom and Dad relocated down here,” I answered, just as coolly. Also, lying.
“Jobs?”
“Mom’s a lawyer, Dad’s a doctor.”
“Florida is Heaven’s waiting room.” Xandra shrugged her shoulders.
“Yeah,” I said. “Lots of need for doctors and wills.” That was true, if breathtakingly lacking in details about the real reasons we’d left New York.
Yeah, “jobs” was a good enough answer. Better than telling the truth.
“I’ve lived here for my whole life,” Xandra said, staring off into the shadows on the far side of the room. “Remember that ramen shop I was telling you about?”
“Yeah?”
“My mom owns it.”
I felt a twinge of jealousy. If my mom ran a restaurant, that would be the very last place I would ever want to go. But Xandra said it was the best in town.
She was proud of her parents.
I wondered what that was like.
I’d fallen into thinking about what kind of family Xandra belonged to when the sound of something slamming against the steel door rang through the air again, startling us both.
Hesitantly, we got to our feet and walked closer to the door. Everything in my brain told me to run the opposite direction, away from the ear-splitting crashing. But the sick human curiosity in me urged me forward. My heart thumped against my ribs as if it were trying to get out too.
The slamming got louder and louder as we could see the outline of the door frame from the dim light from the high windows.
Xandra’s hand tugged on the elbow of my sweatshirt, trying to stop me from moving toward it.
There was a bright red light beside the keypad beside the door, indicating it was still locked, but it was a small relief when Byron was slamming who knew what against the door itself.
Just as I was three or four steps away, something in the thrashing changed to more of a crunch, and then fell silent. My knees started to buckle, but I couldn’t move, so it didn’t really matter.
“What … what happened?” Xandra whispered behind me, her voice choked.
I swallowed hard, and took another hesitant step to the door. I reached my hand out, and ran it over the icy, smooth steel.
At least, it used to be; the steel beneath my fingers was now bent, like a piece of paper folded with a sharp crease. It was imperfect, jagged, and terrifying. The dents all converged upon a single, rounded shape.
A shape the size of a fist.
“My God …”
“What?” Xandra whispered.
I took a few steps back.
The silence was eerie, and even scarier than when Byron had been pounding on the door. Everything seemed frozen, but I heard every creak of the floor, every scrape of the gravel beneath my shoes.
“I think …”
I couldn’t say it, I couldn’t. It was crazy, all of it.
Xandra grabbed my arm, and shook it, her fingernails digging into the soft flesh of my underarm.
“It … he tried … to punch through the door.”
She hurried back across the space to where I stood and looked into my face. The little light where we stood reflected in her eyes like small lamps.
“Do you believe me now?”
“About what?” Another lie, a stalling one. I knew exactly what she meant.
She focused in on me, eyes glittering in triumph in the dark. “What in the world aside from a creature with super strength could do that?”
I shook my head, over and over. It couldn’t be—
“Come on, explain this. Please. Come up with something reasonable. Rational. Something that doesn’t sound like the batshit-crazy ravings of a teenager trapped in a basement.” Xandra stared me down, and I stood there in silence, unable to come up with anything. “Please. I want to be wrong. Especially since, if I’m right, he could tear us limb from limb like paper dolls.”
I took a long, shuddering breath. “Would you quit it?”
She leaned in, not letting me look away as she fixed me with her stare. “Why are you so determined to ignore reality here?”
“I’m not ignoring reality,” I whispered. “I’m very much in tune with what is going on right now.”
“You are believing what your eyes and ears are telling you. What we are seeing here defies reasonable explanation. These myths and legends we’ve heard about all our lives … how do you know they aren’t true?”
I don’t know what surprised me more: that I was actually still listening to her talk about this nonsense, or that I had, for a fraction of a second, considered that what she’d said could actually be true.
We didn’t talk very much after that. We lapsed into silence, a mutual, unspoken agreement that retreating into the back of the room, out of sight of the windows, was the best idea. We didn’t look at each other, didn’t speak, just moved, staying out of each other’s way. I found myself picking through the shelves and boxes, combing through the space for something to defend ourselves with. I came up with nothing better than a stray hammer and a glass coffee pot. There was no phone line, no means of communication to the outside world. And we were trapped, like prisoners, with no way out except through the front door.
The sounds disappeared for an hour or so, and finally Xandra broke the long silence.
“If he’s a vampire,” she said, voice cracking, “then he’ll be outside until the sun comes up.”
I didn’t have the strength, or the confidence, to argue.
Sleep felt like a luxury I wasn’t ever sure I could trust myself to experience again. I wasn’t tired, but my body ached from the constant surge of adrenaline. Everything felt like jelly, even my neck, and it was all I could do
to lean against one of the shelves and focus on breathing.
It felt like days had passed when Xandra shoved my arm, maybe a little harder than she needed to, and then pointed up at the windows.
“It’s morning,” I said.
She and I both stood and crossed the room, nearer to the door. Our footsteps echoed crisply in the empty space, and for some reason they made the bile rise in the back of my throat. I was ravenous, my mouth parched with thirst, dry like I’d taken a big old gulp of salty seawater.
When we got closer to the door, we heard a strange, snarling sort of sound, like an out-of-control dog.
Xandra looked at me, pointed at the dented metal, and her eyebrows knitted together.
I nodded. We were thinking the same thing: it’s still him.
The door looked even scarier in the daylight. With the sun shining in through the windows, the folded mark in the steel did indeed look like a fist. And it made my stomach clench even tighter.
Another blow rang out as Byron threw himself against the door again. “Come out!” he shouted, voice muffled but clear through the metal.
I took an involuntary step back at the sudden, jarring noise, and Xandra matched my movement. I looked at her face, stricken with worry and doubt. The sun was coming through, making me wonder if all that speculation about him being a vampire was just the two of us pinning an extraordinary explanation on something very ordinary—that my stalker outside was a crazy person, that he was on drugs, that he was doing ordinary things like standing on a post or something we’d missed to look in the windows. Or that he’d hit the door with something heavy and blunt, like a sledgehammer. Not a fist.
There had to be a simple explanation. Simple was always better, when it came to lies, and when it came to explaining who Byron was and how he was doing what he was doing.
“I will find you again!” Byron’s voice rang out through the door, cool malice through the warped steel. “Both of you.” He let out a guttural, inhuman screech. It faded into the distance, the source of the sound becoming more and more faint.
“Do … ” Xandra shifted uneasily on her feet. “Do you think he’s gone?”
My breath came out shakily. I wanted, more than I had wanted anything in my life, for that to be true.
“I don’t know …” I said. “Why would he give up now, when he was trying to get in here literally all night?”
Xandra looked at me, a look of withering scorn on her face.
“Vampire,” I said, before she could.
Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, or the lack of anything to eat since noon yesterday … but part of me was starting to see her point.
We waited … and waited, until the sun was peeking through and between the buildings. Had to be past six a.m. now, easy.
“We can’t stay here forever,” Xandra said. “People hardly ever come down here. Maybe once a month, tops.”
Okay, I thought. In that case, I had some important questions. How long could you survive without water? Without food? I’d heard somewhere you could last a month without eating, but only if you had enough to drink.
Here we had neither.
“We won’t starve for a while,” I said, and even as the words left my mouth, I realized they were crazy.
“Come on, we have to look,” Xandra said.
I protested, and even tried to pull her hand away from the keypad, but she slapped my arm away.
So I guess this was how I was going to die.
I let Xandra peer out first, since she was the crazy one who wanted to look to begin with.
She looked back and forth, and again, and then hesitantly took a step into the alleyway. She stood there, drenched in sunlight, for a long minute, and I waited for something horrific to happen to her. I imagined her screaming, trying to lunge back inside as I shut the door on her, locking myself in my own tomb.
“I don’t hear anything,” Xandra said, not sparing me a glance. Which was good, because I feared she could see what I was thinking.
“Then we need to hurry,” I replied.
“Yeah. He could come back.”
“Or he never left at all,” I whispered.
She stared at me, and her face hardened.
“What?” I asked.
“I just … never mind.” She looked around. “I’m leaving.”
And without another word, she turned down the alley at a jog and dashed around the corner, out of sight.
Fine. Didn’t want to hang with you anymore anyway. Not after all that you’re-such-a-weirdo, you-don’t-talk-to-anyone, like-seriously-who-even-does-that stuff.
Glancing over my shoulder at the door, I pulled it closed. From this side, I could see four individual dents in the point of the impact on the steel.
Knuckles.
I shuddered, and ran in the same direction as Xandra had, hurrying home before anything worse could happen.
Chapter 5
“Mom, it’s not a big deal.”
“Not a big deal?” I wasn’t sure her eyebrows could get any closer to her hair line. And that was the least of it. “You’re joking, right?”
I rolled my eyes, but I had to hold onto the barstool in front of me for support.
“I already told you. I went home with one of my new friends.” Lie number one. “My phone died before I could even read your text—” another lie “—and we fell asleep on her floor working on math problems.” Three in one breath. I was on a roll.
The old saying if looks could kill was not nearly strong enough for the expression on my mother’s face. She would have much rather ripped every hair out of my head, tied my hands and feet together, and tossed me off of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into Tampa Bay, where a shark would eat me.
“And you didn’t even think to call me? Or your father?”
I shrugged, unable to meet her eye. I stared at a dark, smoky spot on the quartz countertop. “I left my phone charger in your car, remember? You asked me for it yesterday morning.” The best lies were seasoned with a truth. Like flour to keep a soufflé from collapsing on itself.
Mom’s jaw clenched, and she lay both her hands flat on the counter. “Don’t you dare to try to blame any of your idiotic decisions on me.”
I flinched. She’d never used the word “idiotic” on me before. She must have been angrier than I thought.
It wasn’t like I was going to waltz through the door, sobbing and trembling, and tell them I’d been chased by a vampire through the city streets last night. Talk about a kid who’d cried wolf too many times.
No, instead I tried to sneak into the house and pretend like I had just woken up for school. My hair was even nicely messed up as if I had been sleeping on it.
Oh, sleep. What I wouldn’t give to sleep.
Of course, there was no doubt it would have been filled with nightmares.
I’d been all ready, my book bag on the stool in the kitchen where it always was before school, a bowl of hastily poured cereal in my hands. The spoon was clamped tightly between my teeth when my mother found me.
I hadn’t guessed she would stay up until three in the morning waiting for me to get home, counting the hours until they thought they should file a missing person’s report. I guess Dad had twelve hours in the pool, but Mom was holding out for twenty-four, sure this was all just another Cassie-being-irresponsible scheme.
Way to go, Mom and Dad. Both kinda nailed it, in their own ways.
I was told, in great detail, every worry and every terrible thought that had gone through my mother and father’s heads the night before. First, I’d been yelled at, then cried at, and then yelled at again. It was almost thirty minutes before I could even get a word in.
“You can forget about making any plans with this new friend of yours,” Mom said, running a hand through her long, auburn hair. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see it turn into flames, fed purely by her anger.
No skin off my back. Xandra wasn’t the happiest crayon in the box. Not to mention I wasn’t sure I wanted to thi
nk about what had happened the night before. Ever again. Ever.
“Fine.” I had probably said it a dozen times. I deserved their wrath, and I took it with as much grace as I could. At least I was there to receive the punishment, not lying dead in a dark alley. I kept telling myself to be thankful for it, even if my parents would never know, or ever believe me, about why I had been out all night. Mom continued to glare at me. Dad had left twenty minutes prior, having to get to his first shift of the day at Tampa General Hospital, but even though he was so angry with me he could barely speak, he still gave me a kiss on the cheek on his way out.
“I still love you, even when you don’t treat us like you love us,” he had said.
That hurt more than he would probably ever know.
Mom sighed heavily, and I wondered if we were moving to round three of the tears for the morning. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Go upstairs and get ready.”
I blinked. “Ready for what?”
She opened her eyes again, but her fingers remained in place. “School.”
I looked over at the clock on the stove. I had to be at school in fifteen minutes if I didn’t want to be late for homeroom.
“But I’m exhausted. Can’t I just use one of my sick days?”
She laughed, but I could hear the condescension in her tone. “And why would we reward you with a day off?”
I guess I totally deserved that.
“I’ll be watching the security camera feed from my office. And if I don’t see you home when I know you should be after riding the bus—”
“Mom, not the bus—”
She held up her hand. “You will be here. And you can bet your ass that I will be watching for you.”
Thankfully, Mom wasn’t one to lie. It made her predictable.
She waved her hand toward the stairs. “Go. You better hurry.”
There was no way she joking, so I dragged myself over to the stairs.
“And don’t think that this is over!” Mom shouted after me as I climbed.
I closed myself in my room and collapsed against the back of the door.
The familiar smell of perfume, fabric softener, and my favorite lavender and vanilla candle greeted me, and I felt safer than I had since I’d left school the night before. My bed, unmade, was pressed against the far wall, the four pillows I slept with were scattered, two on the floor. A pile of unfolded clothes sat in my laundry basket beside my closet. The shirts I chose not to wear were hung over the door. The dresser was cluttered with makeup, perfume bottles, and my jewelry case.
No One Will Believe You Page 3