Blood Run (12 page)

Breath hitched in her chest and her fingers touched the scrunchie. A childish part of her railed and wished everything would just magically go back to normal. There was no way of taking any of it back, though, and being here, in this room, made it harder to snuff that particular wish.

She sighed and felt that tidal wave of loneliness and depression, distant but ever threatening.

Peter watched Promise carefully, trying to gauge her level of distraction. He wanted to make sure she was listening and understood everything he told her. It was going to be dangerous, for her more than anyone. If a mistake was made, it might cost her her life, one way or another.

For his part, he wasn’t sure if it would work at all. Even if they were able to capture her brother alive, what then? How long could they hold him here? If he
was
fully changed, then he wouldn’t be able to exist on anything except blood, and if he didn’t get blood to fill
the need
, then he would die a slow, horrible death. Would Promise be able to watch her brother go through that? She was strong, he knew that already, but was anyone
that
strong?

Peter understood the need that drove Chance in his new incarnation as a vampire. He felt it stirring within himself. He hadn’t told anyone because he didn’t want to be an outcast, but still it was there, however muted. It came upon him more fully during times of high stress, like someone who has quit smoking will long for a cigarette when the pressure becomes too much. Sometimes the need expressed itself in bloody dreams, and on waking, he’d hold his head in both hands, feeling that something alien had taken him over as he slept. The dreams were so disturbingly vivid that at times it seemed he could almost taste the viscous saltiness filling his throat–except he’d never drunk blood. He vowed he never would.

“Promise, are you listening?” he asked gently.

She turned to him, and he was relieved to see that her eyes were clear and determined. She smiled and nodded. “I am,” she said.

“Okay, so, if we can get him in here, trapped in the laundry room, then the concern becomes the long haul. There are no windows, so light isn’t a problem. The walls themselves will be reinforced with plywood,” he said.

“We need to put something in the door…a small opening of some kind,” Promise said. “Like a small dog door!” she said, glancing at Lady, who’d nested herself on Lea’s coat in the corner.

“I don’t think there should be any openings. If he has anything to dig at or try to claw open, he’ll do it. Vampires are desperate, especially when they’re hungry,” Peter said. “Why do you want an opening?”

“So I can give him my blood,” she said and looked at him, head tilted as though she found the question silly. “He’ll die otherwise.”

“Promise, that’s gross!” Lea said from the doorway to the laundry room, and Peter felt two things at once–a flood of admiration for Promise but also agreement with Lea. He was glad Lea’d been the one to say it, though. If there was upset, he didn’t want to be the cause of it.

But Promise only laughed. “No, it’s not gross, or, well…maybe it is, a little,” she said and smiled at Lea. “But it has to be done. It’s no different than eating a venison burger, Lea, and you had one of those yesterday for lunch.”

Lea raised her eyebrows and said, “Whatever.” With a good-natured shrug, she turned back into the laundry room, where she and Mark were nailing plywood across the walls. “We need more boards in here, you guys.”

“Can you face the basement?” Peter asked Promise.

“Yeah, of course,” she said and turned to the door just off the kitchen.

Promise descended the stairs and went to the plywood leaning against one wall. Peter had cut the large sheets in half. The smell of fresh-cut wood permeated the basement, but under it, Peter could detect the smell of old books and molding board games. He saw that something had caught Promise’s eye, and he followed her gaze to the sight of a rusted pair of roller skates and a spill of little blue people who’d burst from a split in a damp shoebox–Smurfs.

She put her hand to her stomach, and then with visible effort, she turned her gaze away. She bent to grasp the other side of the boards Peter held and together, they carried them up the stairs.

~ ~ ~

“I’m getting hungry,” Mark said. They were all together in the family room, sitting on the floor, taking a break. The inside of the laundry room was finished and now resembled the inside of a wooden crate. Even the light in the ceiling had been taken out, and the ceiling boarded over with sheets of plywood. They were leaving nothing to chance, as it were.

It was early afternoon.

“I’ll go to the safe house and grab some food,” Promise said, starting to stand, but Lea beat her to it.

“I’ll go. You need to be here for the next part,” Lea said and stood to pull her coat out from under the little dog. “Want to take a run with me, Lady?”

The next step was to cut a space in the ceiling that Promise could be pulled through after getting Chance to follow her into the laundry room. Then they’d drop a weighted board over the hole, sealing him in. It wasn’t the best plan, Mark thought, there was something too slapstick about it, too possibly comical and therefore potentially disastrous. But Promise said that the true beauty in the plan was that no one was going to be placed in danger beside her. And that’s what she wanted.

“Take Ash. He’ll get you there quicker,” Promise said.

Lea seemed to consider and then shook her head. Mark knew she’d only ridden the big horse a handful of times and only when Promise had been nearby. “No, Lady and I’ll just jog over. No problem, see?” She kicked up one puffy-sneakered foot in a mock-cheerleader jump pose, and Promise laughed.

“I’ll walk you out,” Mark said. While they’d worked together in the laundry room, Lea had let slip some of her past with her foster father. To Mark, who’d had a nice family, it sounded like a quiet kind of nightmare, but she mentioned it without judgment. It reinforced the feeling he’d been getting over the last day that there was more to her than he’d ever imagined.

“Listen, be careful,” he said as they stood together in the driveway. Lady danced joyfully at their feet, jumping up to tap on their knees with her little paws. Mark noted that Lea was still wearing the flannel he had given her the other night, and he wondered if that had any significance. He reached out to pull her coat closed, snapping the snaps and pulling the collar up to protect her ears.

She became still under his hands, and the world melted away. She tried to tell herself this was standard kindness that people bandied about on a daily basis, but she couldn’t quite convince herself of it. She tilted her head back so she could see into his eyes, and his hand went to her forehead and pushed a blonde tendril of hair up under her knitted hat. He leaned forward (an errant thought–
seventeen and never been kissed
–flew through her mind), and he kissed her on the lips. It left her breathless. Almost faint with emotion.

He pulled back, his face a study in caution. Then he smiled. “So, anyway. Be careful, okay?” He reached down to pet Lady, and seemed relieved to break eye contact. “You take good care of her, girl, okay?”

“We shouldn’t be longer than twenty minutes,” Lea said, and her voice was slight and breathy. She turned and trotted across the yard in the direction Promise had gone earlier, Lady leaping and running at her side. She thought about turning to wave to Mark, but if he’d gone inside, leaving her only the empty and uncaring façade of the house, she wouldn’t have been able to bear it. So she trotted on without glancing back.

She felt lifted up, light and buoyant with good feeling. She ran her fingers over the snaps he’d snapped, smiled even wider, and broke into a happy, skipping run down the sidewalk. “Come on, Lady!” she cried with abandon. She and the dog ran several blocks in excited joy, Lady leaping and dancing as Lea laughed.

Deidre stepped onto the sidewalk from behind a U-Haul. “What’s up, Lea? Where you going?”

Lea stopped dead in her tracks, and Lady barked sharply.

“Hi, Deidre. What…what are you d-doing out here?” Lea said, fumbling the words. She glanced behind the U-haul and saw the ten-speed Deidre must have ridden to Willow’s End.

Deidre smiled and reached forward to grip Lea’s arm. “I just wanted to see what you kids were up to. Make sure everything was okay. You all left in such a rush this morning.”

“Oh, nothing, really, just…I’m going to get some stuff from the safe house, and…” Lea trailed off, glancing over her shoulder. She knew she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what they were doing. But Deidre was such a grown-up.

Deidre squeezed her arm, and her smile became concerned, sympathetic. Lea couldn’t see the deceit that was there, too, in the harder core of Deidre’s eyes.

“Lea, honey, you can tell me anything. You know how much I
care
about you,” Deidre said and squeezed Lea’s arm again.

Lea felt almost hypnotized. She’d been overwhelmed with her feelings for Mark, and now, here was pretty, popular Deidre telling her that she cared about her. It was so topsy-turvy. She’d never had so much concern given to her before. In her confusion, she neglected to ask herself why Deidre had never shown her any concern until now.

Lea was like a little plant too long starved of nutrients; now she soaked them up greedily.

“We’re going to save Promise’s little brother,” she said in a rush. Now that she had decided to tell, she felt as though she needed to get it all out at once. “She’s going to keep him trapped until the Guard brings a cure.”

“A cure? A cure for being a vampire?” Deidre’s face drew up in lines of derision, and her hand dropped from Lea’s arm as she fisted her hands on her hips. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Lea’s heart seemed to twist painfully in her chest. She didn’t like Deidre’s tone; she didn’t like being yelled at. She felt suddenly as though she had betrayed her friends, and she was all at once sick to her stomach.

“Deidre, you won’t tell, will you? Please don’t tell anyone! I wasn’t supposed to say anything. But we’re doing it out here so no one is in danger. That’s why we came to Willow’s End, so it will be totally, totally safe. It’s not hurting anything…nobody even has to know! Don’t tell anyone, okay?” Tears were tightening her throat. She reached a shaking hand to Deidre.

Deidre glanced down at Lea’s hand as though Lea had offered her something nasty.

“What’s this cure all about? Does Mr. West know about it? Does it have something to do with that half-and-half?”

Lea smiled shakily. “Yes, Mr. West knows. The Guard told him, when they brought Peter…the, uh, half-and-half…when they brought him here. They’re working on a cure, a vaccine, in New Jersey at the base there. That’s where Peter came from. He knows all about it!”

“In New Jersey? Ha! That’s a laugh,” Deidre said, but she said it to herself. She seemed lost in thought. Then she looked up. “I’ll do you a deal, okay?” Her smile was sarcastic-sweet. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Me? What would I tell?”

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me or told me about Promise’s brother, okay? And I won’t tell anyone you told me about it. You get it now?”

“Oh! Yeah, sure, Deidre. I won’t say anything.” Relief washed through her, loosening her nerves. This was better, the no-telling pact. It made it like it never happened. She could just forget about it.

When she got back to Promise’s old house, Mark asked what had taken her so long. She blushed and reached hurriedly into the backpack, but when she met Mark’s eyes, she saw his concern was with her, not the food.

“Did anything go wrong?” he asked, brushing aside the bag of chips she offered him seemingly in place of an answer. “You were gone a long time.”

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. She smiled and shrugged.

He frowned, but his voice was all soft concern. “You’d tell me, right? You can, you know.”

She nodded and smiled. “Now I do,” she said and offered him the bag again. “Eat your chips.”

Mark relented. He showed Lea the hole they’d made in the ceiling of the laundry room. Promise and Peter were trying to decide if rope were the best thing to pull her out with or some sort of heavy-duty straps.

“Why don’t you just drop something down? It would be quicker,” Lea said.

“Drop something down? What do you mean?” Promise asked.

“Make a wider, thinner hole, the width of the narrow part of the room–what is it? about five feet wide, if that?–and drop a board or some kind of screen down, like a kennel door, you know how I mean? Between the inside and the outside?”

Peter looked up at the ceiling and then back down to Lea. “You’re a genius,” he said. “That’s the best idea yet.”

“No joke, Lea,” Promise said. “You probably just saved my life with that. We can do the same thing with the opening. I was just going to pull the laundry room door closed with a rope or something, but a falling door at either end, trapping Chance right in between…that’s way better!”

Mark’s hand went to the small of Lea’s back, claiming and protective, both at once. Lea smiled, basking in their admiration, and struggled to put Deidre out of her mind.

They worked about an hour more and then decided to call it quits for the day. Mark said they’d made good progress. They could finish up the room and the trap system tomorrow and then see about readying the space above, since they’d have to spend at least one night there.

At the safe house that night, Promise slept again in the family room, this time with two horses for company instead of just one. She was tired but unable to sleep as she watched Ash and Snow leaning against each other in the dark. It had been hard, being back at her house today, but it was good, too. Good to move forward with some hope for a future with Chance in it. Her parents would be so happy if they could see how hard she was trying. She wished again that they weren’t dead. She wanted them so badly and missed them so much.

She wondered if she were doing the right thing; if planning on keeping Chance caged like some sort of hamster was the best idea…but it was the only idea she had. She tried to put the questions of right and wrong behind her. She was doing it for the right
reasons
…that would have to be enough.