The Vampire Book of the Month Club (18 page)

Reece only smiles and turns to Wyatt. “Relax, my friend. You're one of us now.”

“Never!” Wyatt lurches forward, claws and fangs out.

“Oh, no?” Reece arches his neck, poking out his fangs and coming within centimeters of my naked, defenseless throat. “Unless you want her to join you in eternity, young Wyatt, I suggest you—”

I knee him in the groin, shove him off me, and rush to Wyatt through the wide, jagged hole in the wall. We huddle in the bathroom as Reece rises from the cheap carpet in the bedroom.

I aim for the two stakes tied to Wyatt's chest, grab one with each hand, and step through the door.

Reece shoves me back into the bathroom, his arms still so powerful that if I hadn't slammed headfirst into Wyatt, I would have surely gone into the next room. Or, at least, parts of me would have.

As it is, I land against Wyatt's stony flesh, my neck pushing one way, my body pulling another. I'm sore and bruised everywhere and shaking with violence and fear and pain.

Wyatt grabs me, frantically, and turns his back to Reece.

I am trapped between my vampire kind-of boyfriend and the bathroom wall, nowhere to go as Reece claws at Wyatt's back, tearing at bare skin. Blood pools on the bathroom floor.

“Wyatt!” I shout as Reece pulls him slowly back, back toward the hole in the door.

“Nora!” he shouts, fear bringing his fangs forward to full point, nearly four inches of hungry, trembling fangs mere centimeters from my face.

I see my future in those long, sharp teeth: I see Reece tearing at him, eventually yanking him away and finding me—and then turning me. There is no avoiding it. There is no way out but this. This isn't one of the scenes in my stupid books, and I'm no Scarlet Stain. I can't break his arm with a karate chop or rig the shower curtain into a parachute and fly away from this one.

This is real life, strange as it all may be, and here is where this life—my life—must end.

Reece is too strong. Even with a face full of laptop glass and UV rays, even wounded and weakened, he is tearing Wyatt to bits.

The only way to stop it is to sacrifice myself.

To release my bond to humanity, to become . . . immortal.

I grab Wyatt, embracing him, once again bringing his head to my neck, like that day in the commons at school.

It seems so long ago, yet I know it wasn't.

But it was a simpler, more innocent time. He was human then, warm and soft and tender to the touch, his lips so warm and fang-free, his tongue so eager, his hands so firm and self-assured as they pulled me toward him like he'd done it a thousand times before—like he was a pro, taking control, calling the shots.

But now it's my turn to take control, to call the shots, to pull him close, ever closer, to me. Not as a ruse to fool Bianca this time, but for the real deal.

“Nora!” he shouts, too weak from blood loss to resist.

Before Reece can yank him away, before I can chicken out, I jam his fangs into my throat like a can opener, plunging them deeper, deeper, into the skin, past the skin, until I can literally feel the connection between us, between his teeth and my jugular, the biggest, fattest, most powerful vein in the human body.

It breaks like a sewer main, spewing blood into those fangs like that gum with the soft, squishy, squirty middle, his vampire venom mixing with mine.

The sensation is immediate, the power immense, the rush incredible.

I can feel our DNA fusing, my humanity drifting, my blood pumping, nearly boiling with the power, the fear, of immortality.

And I'm so glad, no matter what happens next, that it's Wyatt who turns me and not Reece.

Or Bianca.

Or even Abby.

I don't pass out so much as slump.

Down the dirty tiles of the bathroom wall, down onto the wet floor, which vaguely sizzles against my bare ankles in a not entirely unpleasant way.

Wyatt still stands, wiping the blood—my blood—from his lips.

As if he's embarrassed, as if he's ashamed, of what he's done. Scratch that—of what I've done.

Reece immediately stops his assault on Wyatt's back and squeezes through the hole in the crumbling drywall to see for himself if I've really done what he thinks I've done. I don't disappoint.

Standing calmly next to Wyatt—as if 2.7 seconds earlier he wasn't trying to claw his way to his spinal cord—Reece looks down almost wistfully. “It's a shame, really. I was looking forward to tasting her myself.”

He slaps Wyatt on his torn back. “Ah well, young man, to the victor go the spoils, eh?”

“Now what?” Wyatt pulls a dry towel from a rack on the dirty yellow wall and wraps his snacks in it. He's bathed in a halo of red light as my human sight gives way to creepy vampire vision.

“Now we leave this place and destroy the evidence,” Reece says.

“What evidence?” Wyatt looks down at Abby's steaming body.

“That,” Reece says, and the way he says it lets me know I'll always hate him, until the day I die—again.

Or he does.

Whichever comes first.

“H
old on,
hold
on, hold
on
,” I snap from my inglorious seat on the wet bathroom floor. I stand and shove them both away from Abby's body with a strength I never knew I could possess. “This isn't evidence; this is my friend. This is my
best
friend.”

Wyatt says, “Nora, she's tried to kill you, by my count, like six times today alone. And she literally just tried to break me in half. What do you think she's going to do tomorrow? And the next day?”

I stand over her, nonplussed. “That was when I was human, Wyatt. And if you'd turned a little earlier, you probably would have done the same thing.”

He shakes his head, his unsightly red skin already healing from the holy water bathtub trip.

I look at Abby lying on the floor, her face a mass of boils, her hair choppy and short where half of it has burned away (oh, she's gonna kill me—if she lives, that is), her shoulder a red, ghastly thing, her clothes tattered, the skin underneath covered in welts.

“The only reason she's lying here in the first place is because
you
pulled her out of that tub, Wyatt. Remember that? You've already saved her once today. Now you want to get rid of her like some piece of trash all of a sudden? What's gotten
into
you?”

He rubs his head, shakes it, like he can't believe what I'm suggesting. His eyes are full of wonder, then pain, then shame, then anger, then . . . confusion. (Hey, I know the feeling!)

“I can't believe you, Wyatt. This was your girlfriend once upon a time! You two were intimate. Remember? Think about it—is this really someone you want to do away with? Forever?”

He clings to the shredded bathroom wall, grout and concrete dust turning to mud on his long fingers. He seems unable, maybe even unwilling, to look at Abby.

Reece says nothing, merely watches our sad little drama unfold as I kneel on the floor to touch Abby's cheek.

It is hot, no doubt, but alive.

And as I watch, I can see the skin starting to heal, to grow less pink, the boils no longer pulsing now.

I put my finger beneath her bent nose. She's still breathing. I snap my finger next to her ear, and she flinches, just the tiniest bit—just enough to let me know she's still in there somewhere.

“We can't let her die like this,” I insist. “Isn't there anything we can do?”

Reece looks at me curiously. Just then sirens wail, and his panicked face takes on an almost feral look. “It's too late now anyway.” He seems almost disappointed we won't be disposing of anybody anymore. “Grab her, Wyatt, and both of you follow me. Quickly now. I'm tired of fighting and don't wish to take on the entire Beverly Hills police force if I can avoid it.”

As Wyatt reluctantly picks up Abby and slings her over his shoulder like a big, red, steaming duffel bag, I reach for one of the water pistols in my pocket.

Reece leads us out of the room, down the stairs, and straight to his car. Even with a trio of half-vampires straggling behind him and sirens blaring just down the street, Reece has the presence of mind to turn to me and slap the gun out of my hand with one effortless, perfectly aimed swipe. “Where we're going,” he says ominously over his shoulder, “you'll want me around. Trust me. I know you don't believe it now, but you will once we get there.”

“Where are we
going
anyway?” I ask fifteen minutes later, once the coast is clear and we're barreling down the 101 heading west.

I'm riding shotgun, strapped into the seat so tightly I couldn't go anywhere even if I wanted to.

My body feels leaden, each muscle sore.

Wyatt is directly behind me, enduring his own hellish transformation, with Abby just behind Reece, beyond pain, beyond consciousness—partway between human and what she is—what we all are—destined to become.

The sleek sports car with the black-tinted windows roars down the freeway, deserted at this time of night, speeds reaching ninety, sometimes one hundred miles per hour as we race toward parts unknown.

“She needs expert help if she's to heal properly,” he explains as if we're a nuisance and he'd rather just keep driving. “The kind of help only the Council of Ancients can provide.”

“I know I'm a little out of it,” I croak, barely finding the strength to speak, “but did you just say . . . Council of
Ancients
? You mean, they really
do
exist?”

“Of course they do,” he snaps impatiently (I realize this is his default setting, not sure how I ever missed that before), changing lanes to fly past an eighteen-wheeler going too slow in the right-hand lane—at eighty-seven miles per hour. “You didn't get entirely
everything
wrong in those silly books of yours.”

“But why are you taking us there?” I ask, ignoring his blatant cut down. (Trust me, I've heard worse.)

He sighs, hand steady on the wheel as my eyes flutter open and shut intermittently, completely out of my control.

It's like I've been awake for seventy-two hours straight and am starting to zone out without rhyme or reason. Then I realize it must be the vampire in me, short-circuiting everything I've ever known.

“Believe it or not, Nora,” Reece says, not without some obvious discomfort, “you are not the
only
one at fault in this whole mess. I too have sinned: sinned against my tribe, my kind, and the laws set down by the Ancients themselves.”

“You?” Wyatt says from the backseat, a wary look on his face. “The great and mighty Reece Rothchild screwed up? How so?”

“You, actually,” he says to Wyatt, giving him a vicious case of side-eye in the rearview mirror. “It has been forbidden since the great Overabundance Act of 1990 to turn any new males into vampires. There are simply too many of us as it is. By turning you, I too have sinned. I too must face the wrath of the Ancients.”

“You
too
?” I sputter. I am fading fast but still managing to grasp the logic of what he's laying down. “Who
else
sinned?”

“Why, you, Nora, of course,” he says, as if it gives him great comfort to deliver the news that I've been a very bad girl. “
You
broke the code,
you
threatened to publish it to the world, and what's worse,
you
killed one of your own.”

“Killed? Who'd I kill?” I'm an author, for Pete's sake; I've never hurt another living soul, let alone killed a person, in my entire life.

“Have you already forgotten about poor Bianca and that desk leg you shoved through her heart back in the warehouse?”

“That was
before
! I was human then. I was a mortal who could die, and she
knew
that. Plus, your beloved girlfriend was trying to kill
me
! Have you already forgotten that darling little detail? Poor Bianca, my left foot!”

Reece gives me that famous smile. “That's not the way I'll be telling it to the Ancients.”

“You
creep
!” Wyatt shouts from the backseat, weakly kicking the polished leather Reece is sitting on. “I saw the whole thing. Bianca was trying to kill Nora; Nora was human then, and she was just trying to defend herself.”

“You?” Reece sneers, as if he has something unpleasant on his shoe he can't get off. “You're hardly what I'd call a reliable witness, dear boy. You were barely conscious at the time, you blithering fool. It's bad enough I have to suffer for my sin. I'm not going to suffer alone. The harder they punish Nora, the less likely they'll be to punish me.”

Wyatt fusses a little longer, I'll give him that, but by this point I've all but given up.

I don't care what happens to Reece; I can't believe I ever did.

Heck, right about now I don't even care what happens to
me
.

I feel . . . not good.

It's like an instant flu bug, gone straight to my head, my throat . . . my heart.

Something is happening inside me—something uncontrollable, wild, and angry.

One second I'm short of breath, gasping for air; the next I'm relaxed and euphoric, absolutely high; then it's right back to some kind of panic attack for my lungs.

I feel nauseated, sore, lightheaded, and . . . amazing?

I'm smiling even as tears roll down my face, flinching as elation floods my body, quivering from head to toe as I bliss out in the buttery leather of the seat beneath me.

It's the purest definition of bittersweet, this leaving my old me behind and embracing the new.

“I never
did
like you,” I murmur, succumbing to the agony, the ecstasy, the pain, and the delight as they consume me all at once.

“The feeling's more than mutual, Nora, but say no more. We have several hours to travel before we arrive at the Council of Ancients. That should be just enough time for you to turn completely and accept—”