“There’ll be time for stories later—we need to get on the road,” Dren said.
She kept staring at me, but picked up a radio at her waist. “Containment unit, we’re loading up.”
Dren gestured into the belly of the truck that Vish had just dropped from. “The boxes are in there. Hers is the central one.”
“Thanks.”
Despite being a daytimer, I couldn’t leap up into the back of a truck while holding Anna gracefully. Gemellus did it first, and then reached down to help me.
There were three boxes end-to-end. They looked like human-sized oil drums, made out of sturdy metal with overlapping seals—and I could see that they locked from the inside.
I set Anna down inside hers carefully, arranging her as I had Lars not that long ago. And, like number sixty-four, she looked like a sleeping fairy-tale princess, if you ignored the blood. Had she really known what she was doing all along? I hoped one of us had.
I closed the lid, and found Gemellus frowning. He looked horrified at the idea of going back into any sort of confinement. “Where will you sleep?”
“Not in one of those things. On the ground here is fine.”
“I should warn you it won’t be safe.” Dren mounted up in the back. “If we get run off the road and crash, you could be exposed to light.”
Gemellus nodded. “Better that than to sleep in a cell again.”
“Try to at least fight a few of them off before you fry.” Dren walked over and ratcheted the lid on Anna’s box down with ties. She’d be secure but not trapped—once she woke up, she’d be able to break through canvas ties with no problem.
“You think we’ll be attacked?”
“The greatest killer of our kind is helplessly dead for three days until she becomes reborn. You tell me.” He hopped into the foremost box and started to lie down. I reached for the lid before he could close it.
“Will we at least have a head start?”
He looked to the woman whom I assumed was his daytimer, and she shrugged. “Depends. Were there any survivors? Did anyone escape? Did they have cell phones?”
“I’m not sure. I was a little busy.” I didn’t know what had happened to Jackson—if he’d been killed by someone else, or gotten free. And Natasha—and the Shadows—shit. “What did you all do with bystanders?”
“We did our best to minimalize casualties,” Dren said, growing irritated with me. I wouldn’t let go of his lid, so Vish stepped in.
“This block is industrialized. Mostly we just kept homeless people from sleeping in their stoops—and we’ll blow the building before anyone else can get in in the morning. I’m going to get on that.” She turned and strode toward the back of the truck.
“Wait!” I ran after her.
“For what? You have someone else you need to kill?” she asked, sounding peeved.
“No—just wait. Please.” Anna hadn’t come all this way for Dren to let me die now. I hopped off the truck and went back to the Catacombs’s doors. The building was dark now, the power down.
“Shadows!” They’d said they were fast—and if everything inside was truly dark—“Shadows! We’re leaving! Get up here now!”
I crouched, listening, one hand out into the darkness on the floor. Feeling nothing, I started snapping my fingers. Despite the fact that they would have gladly left me behind—and some of them had, taking their chances with Celine—I’d made a promise.
“Hurry it up, Shadows!” I shouted, hearing the words echo, and feeling the weight of all the wounded building above me as it creaked. I didn’t dare run back downstairs for them now.
“We’re hurrying!”
A chill took my hand, as if I were shaking hands with Death, and then the Shadows forced their way inside to hide against my palm. “We’re here!” they said, muffled. “When she stopped being dead we tried to kill her too. We think we only made her mad.”
“Who?” Then I heard a sound like a raging bull from the depths of the hall.
“Oh, no—” I spun and ran out of the building like it was already on fire.
* * *
I leapt into the back of the truck where Dren’s box lid was already closed, and I beat on it like a drum. Gemellus lay down in the corner like a life-sized statue, closing his eyes. “Dren—there’s one vampire left—”
“Old, or new?” he asked without opening up.
“New—but she’s important. We have to kill her—”
“She’ll go when the building does—” Vish said.
“She’s smarter than that.” What was it Jackson had told me about earthquakes? The vampires would survive and just crawl through the rubble until they extracted themselves? Even if her lab wasn’t intact anymore, if she was—
“We’re running out of time—” Vish pulled me away as Dren opened his own lid.
“We can kill her later,” he said. “That’s the nice thing about vampires, we keep coming back.”
“But—” What if Natasha went underground with what she knew? And built her own army up?
“The sun for her will be just like the sun for us. We have bigger things to worry about—unless she can hurt us in the next three days, we need to go.” Dren closed the lid of his box again with a resounding thud.
“The containment unit’s packed and ready to roll,” said a voice over the radio on Vish’s hip.
“Is she alive?” asked a familiar voice on the radio.
“Asher?”
Vish jerked her chin up at me. “Do you want to stay back here all day or not?”
“No.” I wanted to see the sun. I didn’t want to be in the dark ever again in my life.
“Then go get in the containment unit’s cabin. He’s waiting for you there.”
I went to run out, then thought better of it and reached for Gemellus. He’d tucked the silver knife into his belt. I didn’t want to use it, but I put it into one of the pockets of my pants and ran for the back of the truck bed, my hand still clenched around the Shadows.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Dren was right: The sun was on its way. A second truck was idling right behind ours now, the cab so high I couldn’t see in. Vish closed the back of the first truck up behind me with herself inside. I wondered what Gemellus would think of being guarded by a woman come dusk.
I jumped for the door of the second truck, found it locked, and beat at it with my free hand. “Let me in!”
The cabin door didn’t open—but one behind it, to the trailer, did. Four daytimers I didn’t know stood inside, all armed to the teeth.
“Gonna light it up, let’s go let’s go let’s go—” came Vish’s voice on the radio from all of their shoulders—and a familiar arm reached out of the pack and grabbed me.
“Edie.” Asher pulled me inside as the door slammed shut and the truck we were in was rolling. He squeezed all the air out of me, and there were no words between us, just the physicality of making sure that someone else you loved and thought lost was not a ghost.
“I’m just going to assume all that blood is someone else’s,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Mostly.” I pulled back, breathing hard. I’d only left him a week ago but I could read the passage of that time around his eyes. My exploits were aging my shapeshifter.
“I know you can survive anything you put your mind to, but—” he pulled me to him again and kissed my forehead and stroked his fingers through my hair, catching on all the tangles and scabs.
There was the sound of a very large explosion from behind us. It rattled the truck and I could hear crashing glass—and then came a second softer sound, that of the Catacombs collapsing, tons of concrete and lumber falling into the caverns beneath.
All that mattered to me was that it was behind us, and that I was here, safe with Asher again. “I made it.” I wasn’t okay, but I was here. It counted for now.
“So you killed that other girl for nothing, eh?” one of the daytimers I didn’t know asked Asher. I felt him stiffen under my arms. Old Edie didn’t generally approve of killing people, and Asher knew that. New Edie couldn’t throw any stones.
“She was wearing your necklace,” Asher explained, pulling my chain out of his pocket. Celine.
“When you were supposed to be holding the line,” the other daytimer pressed.
“The line was fine.” Asher held me roughly. “I needed to know. I saw her racing by with your necklace on and I thought the worst—”
“It’s all right.” I didn’t need to hear the blow-by-blow. No one would be crying for Celine, least of all me.
The female daytimer leaned in to give me a smile. “I wish I had a man that willing to throw down for me. It was stupid—but sort of sexy, in a murderous way.”
“Thanks, I think,” I said. She put her hand out.
“Lilah,” she said.
I couldn’t shake her hand because I was still holding a thimbleful of Shadows. I inhaled to explain this, when they decided to speak.
“Did you kill them too?” Their voices were high and small.
Asher frowned, and the other daytimers stared.
“Shadows,” I explained. “Long story. Some of them were with Celine, the necklace-lady. The rest stayed with me.”
“Not that I know of,” Asher told my hand.
The Shadows didn’t respond again. The door between the RV-like living quarters we were crowding and the driver’s cabin was open. We were headed west, away from the sun, but it was almost light everywhere now.
“Holy fuck,” said the driver. I recognized him, Mr. Galeman. He’d once been a patient of mine.
“What?” Lilah started forward, gun in hand.
He pointed at his sideview mirror. She ducked in, and I could see her disbelieving expression reflected in the windshield. “What the hell is that thing?”
I had a feeling I knew who it was.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Kill it,” Lilah commanded.
Two of the other daytimers started pulling a panel off the ceiling of the cabin. Asher started pulling me back into the rest of the trailer. It was half living quarters for daytimers during the day; two boxes with unknown occupants were strapped down in back.
“This isn’t your fight anymore, Edie.”
“No—I need to see.” I had to know. The second the ladders were pulled down and the daytimers mounted them, I smashed the Shadows to my chest and felt them dive underneath my left breast, chill against my heart. Then I squeezed in beside the daytimers, grabbing hold of the roof to pull myself up.
Racing up the street behind us was something utterly unreal.
“What is it?”
I grabbed someone else’s binoculars to look. “It’s Natasha.”
She was five times the size she’d been when I saw her last—she must have dosed herself hard, hoping to wake up in time to help Raven fight, but instead the vampire cells had made a monster out of her. She looked like a mutant, bigger in all directions, bubbled with tumors and dotted with spots of ash from where the fabric she’d found to cover herself with hadn’t done a good enough job and light had seeped in. I’d seen vampires manage to be awake during the day. They just didn’t function as well—but Natasha didn’t need to be functioning to kill us, charging down the street at us like a pissed-off water buffalo.
I turned toward the daytimer nearest me. “You have to kill her. And make sure she’s dead. All the way.”
“With pleasure,” he said, setting a sniper rifle into a mount on the roof. It locked into place and he aimed as carefully as he could and shot at her. It looked like he hit her head, but she didn’t stop.
“More,” I encouraged him.
“It’s daylight,” he muttered, re-aiming. I knew what he meant—the vampires weren’t up to divert attention from us. If anyone saw us out on a highway doing this, we’d be pulled over by cops and the coffins would be broken into for sure.
He shot again. This time, it looked like it hit her chest. Still nothing. She was gaining.
“Use silver!” I shouted.
He spared a dark look at me. We were in a caravan of vampires. Of course no silver weapons were allowed—except for the one in my pocket.
With a giant leap forward, Natasha grabbed hold of the back of the truck, making the entire trailer shake. Asher pulled me down as the frequency of the gun reports increased.
“I’m not losing you again—and I’m not letting you go anywhere unarmed.” He pressed a gun at me. I had never shot a gun before—but I could see myself doing it as I felt Natasha come closer, hearing her weight thunk against the trailer’s ceiling as she came for us. The daytimer didn’t care about being seen anymore, it was life or death—gunshots echoed through the cabin and hot casings flew out and ricocheted down. Asher pushed me behind him, toward the cabin, to where we could both sight out the window.
A ballooned hand swatted the gun away, tearing it free from its mounting, as the daytimer dropped inside, barely missing decapitation. “Shoot, shoot!”
Guns rang out in the small space and the hand yanked back.
“Did we get it?” Lilah asked.
“Do you want to go up and find out?” another daytimer asked.
“Natasha!” I shouted up. “Natasha, you felt him die, didn’t you?”
There was no sound except the whistling of the air as the truck picked up speed. I could only pray that the trailer was high enough that no one else could see Natasha clinging to the top of it.
“I was there! He thought you’d died—he was distraught—he told me to tell you something!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “I’ll tell you what it is. Just let me come up.”
The noises on the top of the trailer ceased, and all the daytimers looked at me.
“Edie, no,” Asher said.
I looked back at him. We weren’t the only ones who knew what being in love was like.
I hauled myself up before he could stop me.
Natasha was crouched there, panting with the effort of staying awake. Her face wasn’t her own; it was too small for her head, hiding behind a curtain of bangs. She looked like she’d had too many steroids and then been hit with radiation like the Hulk. Half of her skin was sloughing away, blisters forming and breaking open with tiny puffs of ash. I realized she’d doped herself so hard that she was healing almost as fast as she burned. Her cells had, for a brief moment in time, actually made her immortal. She’d become the cancer that she once feared.
My hand was over my pocket with the silver knife, like I was a gunslinger—but I had something I wanted to tell her first.
“He said if I ever saw you alive again to tell you that he loved you. And he wished everything had gone differently. You were the only thing that ever mattered to him, and all he wanted in this world was to protect you.”