She’s dead.
But soon to be spectacularly undead, Veronica thinks.
She takes another step forward, her heels loud on the hardwood floor. “Daddy,” she says, a third time, like it might get through to him now. “Where’s Mom? You can stop this, now. Stop.”
“He can’t.”
The voice comes from all around, fills every spare inch of air around Veronica.
She squeezes her eyes shut. That’s not possible, she knows, but that’s how it seems. The words echo down and up and from behind. He can’t he can’t he can’t.
She knows that voice now, the sickening slickness of it. “Theodore!” Veronica throws her head back. “Show yourself, you coward.”
“You’re far too late.” Theodore’s voice echoes again, followed by a cruel laugh. “It’s over, Veronica. And to think—you could have been with me through all of this. You could have been part of this and lived the rest of your life as the powerful being you are, but you chose to fight me instead.”
Veronica’s turning in slow circles, trying to pinpoint where Theodore’s voice is really coming from, knowing this is just another trick—like the vanishing act on the road through the woods, and the mind control he’s clearly exerting on her father right now. “You turned my parents,” she yells. “You turned me. Without my consent! You have to ask permission first, you jerk!”
There’s a swirl of black in the corners of her eyes, and then Veronica sees him, watches as he steps out in front of the plate-glass floor-to-ceiling windows. There’s no moon, only the light of the night. “You chose weakness,” he says, his voice softer now, a slither through the air to Veronica’s ears. “So you have chosen, and so you have doomed yourself.” He dips his chin, handsome face turned ugly by his venom. “Farewell, Miss Lodge. We could have had such fun together.”
He flicks his hand in the direction of her father. “Hiram,” he calls. “Finish the job.” And then he cracks his fist against the window before him. It splinters, one crack turning to a dozen turning to a hundred, all racing across the glass before it shatters and crashes down around him, a rain of sharp pieces, and Theodore steps forward into the outside world.
“V!”
Veronica turns at Betty’s call and understands the panic in her best friend’s voice.
Her father is headed straight for her—straight for her friends. Now he’s focused; now he sees.
He’s going to kill them, she thinks, and looks after Theodore. But I have to kill him.
She only has a second to decide, she knows—if she doesn’t follow Theodore now, it’ll be too late. There’s no way she’ll be able to get to him after tonight, not when he has this many newly made moroi to operate at his will. But if she leaves her friends here with her father—
“Go!” It’s Dilton who says it, and he’s wielding one of his doctored stakes. “We’ll handle this.”
What does “handle this” mean? Kill?
Maybe, she knows. But isn’t this just like when she killed Reggie and Moose? She made a choice, and Dilton and her friends will make theirs, if they have to.
This is all because of you, Theodore.
She swallows her hesitation and runs at the now-empty window, leaping over the shards of destruction and landing gracefully, powerfully.
The air outside is chilly, but Veronica doesn’t feel it. She only feels adrenaline and the heft of the wood in her palm. She has left Betty and Dilton and Archie behind. Maybe left them to die.
Cheryl, she thinks. Where are you? Safe, hopefully, like they had planned.
“Planned?” A small laugh echoes in her mind. “How well has your plan gone tonight, Ronnie?”
It’s Reggie’s voice in her head as she spies Theodore, standing at the edge of the icy-blue pool. His stupid taunting grin is still on his face, and Veronica wants to smack it right off, claw the glee out of his eyes.
“What, Ronnie? Gonna kill him like you killed me?”
She shakes her head as she stands, chest rising and falling rapidly, staring at Theodore. That voice in her head is not real.
Powers of persuasion, she remembers. Mind tricks. “I know what you’re doing!”
“Me?” Theodore holds his hands out, oh so innocent. “Enlighten me.”
Veronica only steps toward him. “I’m going to kill you,” she says. “I’m going to undo everything you did to this town.”
Theodore tips his head to the side, red eyes wondering. “You really are very beautiful,” he says. “It’s a shame to waste that pretty face, but—”
It happens so fast Veronica can’t process it. One second he’s at the edge of the pool, and the next he’s an inch away from her. “What has to be done must be done,” he says, and now he’s holding a stake, and when Veronica looks down her hand is empty. “Truly, I am sorry.”
He raises the stake and Veronica would scream if every inch of her wasn’t frozen.
Then she feels it.
Not the point to her chest, as she’s expecting, but a quick rush of air past her ear, accompanied by a harsh zzzzup.
“Hey, creep!” Cheryl’s voice rings out. “Get your nasty hands off my friend!”
VERONICA LOOKS UP, and there, on the roof of the ornamental greenhouse, is Cheryl. She’s bloodied and bruised, but she’s also holding a crossbow.
When Veronica looks back at Theodore he’s tripping backward, fingers grasping at the bolt protruding from his stomach. “Wha …”
“Now, V!”
Veronica glances over her shoulder to see Betty scrambling toward her, a crowd of vampires at her back. The barricade; it’s destroyed.
She whips into motion, snatching her monogrammed stake right back from Theodore, that second of disconcertion all she needs. “You know, you really are kind of hot,” she says, tossing the stake into her right hand. “It’s a shame to waste such a pretty face. Oh, wait—”
Veronica lunges, decisive and clean, and she arcs the stake through the air directly toward Theodore’s heart, and it lands perfectly. Slick and fast, right into his chest. “Just kidding,” she says as Theodore erupts into a howl. “Time for you to go! Bye-bye.”
She spins and kicks him, full force of her sharp stiletto right in his stomach, and it sends him teetering back, back, and crashing into the water.
The water that, if all went according to plan, Cheryl should have laced with plenty of holy water.
Veronica rushes to the edge, barely hearing Cheryl calling out to her. “Is he dead? Did it work?”
Stake through the heart, Veronica thinks. The laced pool water was just a precaution.
But—
At first she thinks it’s her stake, floating up to the surface. But when she leans closer, she can see: It’s bone.
Cheryl reaches her then, tossing her crossbow on the ground. “Is he—ew!”
More bones are floating to the surface, and as they watch together, Theodore’s flesh dissolves before them, steaming and fetid as it melts from his skeleton.
“It worked,” Veronica breathes. She twists to look at Cheryl. “It worked. He’s dead.” And then she holds her hands out, staring at her palms, the veins running up her wrists.
Theodore is dead.
But she feels no different.
It should be working, shouldn’t it? It should be happening now, she should be feeling something, some kind of change pushing her back toward her humanity—except nothing at all about this feels different.
“It worked,” Cheryl echoes, but there’s a lift to her words, turning it into a question. It worked? “So you—you should be changing back now, right?”
“I should be,” Veronica says, and she clenches her hands into fists. “But I’m not. So that must mean—”
She whips around and there they are, Riverdale’s best and brightest in raging vampire form, still coming after her friends, still coming straight for her.
If Theodore turned her father, and her father turned all these vampires, then they should be reverting. That’s how it
works: Kill the strigoi sire, and the bloodline turns back.
But they’re still vampires, Veronica thinks, and the meaning of that hits her like a punch to the face.
It’s not him. “Theodore wasn’t the sire,” Veronica says, and she springs to her feet.
This isn’t over.
“What?” Cheryl stares up at her. “Then who is? What do we do?”
Veronica’s about to say I don’t know but then suddenly she does. A feeling kicking deep in her gut, a memory.
A coffin and a symbol etched into it. The kind of coffin where a vampire might make their bed.
“I have to go,” she says to Cheryl, backing away. “Hold them off as long as you can. I think the real master’s back at my house—I have to go! I have to finish this.”
“Go!” Cheryl says, but Veronica’s already sprinting off, toward the parking lot, and she spots the perfect ride instantly.
She pulls the skirt of her dress up, gathering the silky fabric so she can tie it into a knot up and out of the way. Then she climbs on the inky-black motorcycle and kicks it into action, a loud engine rip through the noise behind her, and Veronica guns it. She rides off, leaving her friends behind and heading toward her own home.
Watch out, watch out, wherever you are, Veronica thinks as she speeds along the rain-slick roads. I’m going to find you.
“GO!” CHERYL YELLS at Veronica, no time for explanations or planning now. It’s all action, only.
Cheryl’s still running on the adrenaline that first shot through her in the bathroom, as she was clawing at her transformed mother. For a moment she had thought that this was going to be the end for her: killed at the hands of her own mom, a monster now, and she’d let Veronica and the rest down by not fulfilling her part of the plan.
It was the thought of that, the thought of letting Veronica down, that gave Cheryl the burst of fire she needed to grab the stake out of the darkness and aim it at her mother. Not her heart—Cheryl was not sure she wanted to kill her mom, not just yet—but deep in her thigh, with an almighty crack.
The mechanism Dilton had rigged up exploded, sending wooden shards and holy water into her mom’s flesh. Enough to cause her mom to howl, and to distract her for long enough that Cheryl could escape.
By the time she made it out of the bathroom, she could sense she was way too late. Hear it—the baying of hundreds of people, desperate for fresh, hot, human blood.
The plan, she’d thought. Stick to the plan.
So she’d run outside, away from the noise, and found the stack of bottles of holy water that she’d stashed behind the outdoor bar earlier. She worked as fast as she could, ripping their caps off and emptying the contents into the pool, until her fingers were crisscrossed with tiny cuts but the cool blue water was sufficiently tainted.
Then she’d run back to rescue her crossbow from its hiding place, and as she’d cradled it in her arms, that’s when she’d heard the painful screeching of the plate-glass window shattering. She climbed up on the greenhouse roof and watched as first Theodore Finch came out, and then Veronica after him. She’d watched in horror as Theodore had grabbed Veronica, a stake in his hand and a fear in Veronica’s eyes that Cheryl could see even from this distance.
Cheryl knew she had only one shot at delaying him. She’d brought her crossbow up and aimed, steady, a lifetime of practice coming through, as she let the bolt fly; it thrummed through the air and landed true, piercing Theodore right in the stomach.
But now Veronica’s running away before Cheryl can even finish telling her to get out of there, and when Cheryl looks back she sees Betty running toward her. She can’t see Dilton or Archie, or Mr. Lodge, not in the fray following at Betty’s heels.
“Cheryl!” Betty calls out to her, her eyes wide and full of fear. “What do we do?”
A bone floats by, catching Cheryl’s eye, and she knows. “In here!” she yells to Betty. “It’s laced with holy water—they can’t follow us in!”
Without waiting to see if Betty understands, Cheryl twists to grab her crossbow before throwing herself and it into the water. She keeps her eyes open underwater, and there’s more of Theodore’s remains, and then a splash as another body falls through the water. It’s Betty; she opens her eyes under there, too, and holds Cheryl’s gaze.
They swim up and break the surface together, taking gasping breaths in unison. It’s then that Cheryl sees the boys, back-to-back, fighting their way through the tangle of people who used to be their neighbors, friends, authority figures. “Archie! Dilton!” Cheryl yells. “Get in here!”
Dilton hears her first and grabs Archie by the collar of his formerly pristine white button-down, now torn and stained. Dilton runs at them and slip-slides his way into the water, clumsily, and Archie throws himself into a kind of dive, cracking down on the surface.
Cheryl scrapes her wet hair out of her eyes. “Everybody okay?”
The boys come up for air, and Betty grabs on to Archie. “I think so,” she says, gulping oxygen. “What now?”
“Where’s Veronica?” Archie interrupts.
“They should have turned back,” Dilton says. He’s watching the vampires heading toward them. “Why didn’t they turn back? Unless—”
Cheryl treads water, some of it lapping up and over her chin, trying to keep herself afloat. She’s never been a big swimmer—more interested in lazing in the shallows showing off her vast bikini collection than the actual functional act of swimming—which is annoying now. And doubly so, because her gala dress is completely ruined.
Unless dry cleaners know how to remove chlorine and holy water and the rotting remains of a vampire corpse.
“She’s going home,” Cheryl says, legs kicking frantically beneath the surface. “She said Theodore wasn’t the sire. There’s another one out there and she thinks—”
Dilton’s eyes light up. “The coffin,” he says. “Of course!”
“Coffin?” Betty says.
“So what do we do?” Archie interrupts again.
It’s quiet.
It happens suddenly, one moment the night filled with sound, and the next so still that her own breathing sounds like a hurricane.
A chill jackknifes up her spine, and Cheryl looks up.
The vampires have stopped dead. Some look at the bones drifting around, some look at their prey in the pool, but all of them are still and staring. They can look all they want, Cheryl thinks. But they can’t touch.
She’s beginning to shiver, but it’s not from the pool, heated to the perfect last-gasp-of-summer temperature. “Where are we with weapons?” Cheryl says through gritted teeth.
“I have stakes,” Archie says.
Betty moves back, toward the center of the pool, the farthest spot from the watching vampires. “I have one knife and a stake and some silver.”
“Dilton?”
He looks ashamed. “I lost them,” he says. “I don’t have anything.”
Cheryl nods. “Well, we have some stuff, at least,” she says. “And I have this.” She shifts her crossbow, slow through the water. Maybe if she weren’t holding it she’d have an easier time staying afloat, but she feels more comfortable with it in her hands. Letting them know that she’s not completely vulnerable. “They can’t get in here. So, if Veronica’s right, we just have to trust that she can kill the true sire.”
“And until then?” Archie says.
Suddenly Cheryl can feel someone watching her, the intensity of a gaze drilling into her. She looks up and there’s her mother. Her fur stole hangs off one shoulder, and her chandelier earrings glimmer, just like the crystals stitched into the straps of her diaphanous green gown. And there’s a long streak of blood on one thigh where Cheryl had staked her, the wound itself now healed.
Her mother’s red eyes are locked on her. I see you, they seem to say. You can’t escape me.
Cheryl swallows her fear. “Until then,” she says, “we wait.”
VERONICA DITCHES THE stolen motorcycle outside her house and marc
hes up to the front door.
She pauses, hand on the doorknob, and checks herself. One stake still wrapped around her thigh, and another on her ankle? Check. Fangs out? Check. Fists ready to punch the stupid strigoi in the face for, one, turning her town into a vampire haven and, two, making her sweat in this perfect dress? Oh, check and check.
If there’s another strigoi, they must be in that coffin, Veronica thinks. Must have been hiding out here all along. So all I have to do now is get down there and kill them.
Easy.
She takes a deep breath and pushes the door open. It creaks, so loud in the silence of the dark and empty house that Veronica winces. She can’t let the strigoi know she’s here, can’t give any sign at all that she’s figured out their true plan.
Veronica slips inside and shuts the door behind her.
It’s only been a few days since she was here last, but this house doesn’t feel like her home anymore. No; now it’s the place where her parents turned from flawed humans to broken monsters. The place where she thought she was going to die at the hands of Theodore.
But Theodore’s dead now, she thinks, a sheen of pride on the words. I did that. I killed him, and okay, it might not have had the exact outcome I was planning, but I still did it. He can’t touch me again, and now you—whoever you are and wherever you’re hiding—you’re next.
She only takes two steps into the foyer when something appears on the stairs, as if out of nowhere: a monstrous, gargantuan spider.
The horrified noise Veronica makes is involuntary, and she slaps a hand over her mouth to keep it inside, shaking as the creature—twice as tall as Veronica, thick hairy legs skittering and huge, multifaceted eyes searching—rears over her. It’s no normal spider. (Well, no normal supersized spider, she thinks.) No, this one’s eyes are just as red as Veronica’s, its grossly enlarged mouth flashing fangs like Veronica’s.
“Giant vampire spider?” she says aloud, her nerves still on edge. “Oh, come on—”
Its head lowers so fast Veronica only has time to drop to the ground, just beyond the grasp of its teeth snapping shut on air. She rolls to one side and hits something; when she puts her hand out, she feels sharp bristles and gags as she realizes it’s one of this monster’s many, too many, legs.
Interview with the Vixen Page 18