The Vault (A Farm Novel) (29 page)

MEL

It’s dark when I wake up, but I don’t know if it’s because it’s night or because the lights are off. I’m in a bed that’s unfamiliar but that smells divine. My mind feels spongy and dense. Like my thoughts keep burrowing for warmth instead of traveling a straight path through my brain. And, somewhere off in the distance, from far away, I can hear music playing. Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” which has always been one of my favorite songs.

I breathe the music in, loving the sleepy, dreamy, perfect way it makes me feel, and the air is scented with a smell that’s both comforting and exciting and new and familiar all at the same time.

Instantly I know where I am. I’m at Sebastian’s.

And I know why I’m here and what I’ve done. My thoughts are now rabbit quick, moving through the burrows of my mind. Scurrying away before I can catch them. I am not Melly anymore. I am not Sebastian’s Kit. I’m not Mel yet, either, but someone in between. A half vampire and half-autistic girl. I don’t want to lose either. I want to be both.

But that’s not possible. This isn’t a destination, it’s a hub. I haven’t arrived, I’m merely changing planes. Though while I’m here, I intend to see more than the terminal.

I force my eyes open, push myself up on a shaking elbow, and look around the room. Sebastian is by my side, vampire fast.

“How do you feel?”

Like my soul has been ripped out. Again.

“Fine,” I say. I reach for his hand before I think too much about it. “Carter and Lily?”

“They’re okay. They’re resting in the other room.” He tries to pull his hand away, but I hold on to it with strength that surprises even me.

“Sit with me?” I ask. He hesitates. “Please.”

There’s a chair by the bed and he sits on it, knees right against the bed frame, elbows on the mattress. There is a tension in his body that I don’t understand. It’s not bright enough in the room for me to really see him like I want to. I know he won’t look any different when I’m Mel again, but these are the eyes that fell in love with him and I want to hold these memories like Lily told me to.

“Turn on the light?”

He blinks, clearly surprised, but gets up and does it anyway. When he comes back to the chair, he sits with his elbows propped on his knees and his expression perfectly blank. Too blank.

“I don’t understand.” Maybe the cure is messing with my head, muddling my thoughts already, but I can’t make sense of the tension radiating from him. “You’re mad at me?”

He pushes up from the chair by my side and stalks to the other side of the room, not moving vampire quick, but taut with vampire anger. “Yes, damn it. I’m mad at you. I’m furious because you risked your life taking a cure that hadn’t been tested enough. We had no idea for sure what it would do.”

“Of course it wasn’t properly tested. It’s not like there are enough vampires around to run FDA-sanctioned tests.”

“You could have been killed.” He whirls around and practically growls the words at me.

“But I wasn’t. And neither was Lily. If it was safe enough for her, then it was safe enough for me.”

“Yes,” he says, his voice suddenly cold. “But do you honestly think I care whether one more mewling human lives or dies?”

“No. I don’t think you care.” His words are like a scalpel carving out parts of my soul. Because that’s what I am now to him. Just another mewling human. Yet another worthless creature he can never care about. “But I do.”

“Oh, yes. I know that. You
care
so desperately for them.” He sneers.

Them? Does he mean Carter and Lily or does he mean all of humanity?

Before I can ask him, he continues. “Don’t you get it? You are worth more than them. You could have been the best of us.”

Just when I thought his words couldn’t possibly hurt me more, the scalpel digs deeper. This time, it’s not the scorn that hurts, it’s the hint of admiration. It’s his love of all the darkest parts of my soul. All the parts I want to hide or forget. “I could have been the best?” I ask, with a hint of scorn. “The best murderer? The most brutal? The most vicious? Because of my ‘killer instinct’?” I throw his own words back at him.

And just like that, his anger is gone. His eyes close and regret passes across his face, leaving grief in its wake like the debris from a flash flood. And then he’s back in the chair by my side, his head cradled in his palms. “No, Kit,” he murmurs. “Because you could have been the
best
of us. The strongest. The wisest. The most benevolent.” Then he takes my hand in his. “For far too long, this world has been ruled by vampires who were selfish and cruel. Who were interested only in accruing power. You could have been different. Instead you sacrificed yourself. And for what? Lily and Carter?”

“And for you,” I say softly.

He laughs, a sound so bitter it makes me ache. “Right. So I can kill Sabrina and save the world.”

“I know that’s not what you want.” The words hurt, but I push them out.

“I could have done that without taking the stake out.”

“Maybe,” I admit. “But you wouldn’t have lived. We both know how strong she is. You may have been able to kill her, but the damage she would have done to you . . .” I shake my head, unable to talk, unable to pretend that he could have walked away from that battle. “You have to survive this.”

“Melly—”

“No! Promise me,” I demand fiercely. “Promise me that you won’t go into this fight expecting to die.”

“I’ve been alive two thousand years. Death isn’t such a bad deal. Frankly, these past few days have just been borrowed time.” I must look confused because he explains. “I went after Roberto. I always knew that was probably a battle I wouldn’t come back from.”

“Don’t say things like that.” I clutch his hand, desperate now. “I didn’t do this only to save Carter and Lily. Or even to save all of humanity. I also did it to save you. To save your life.”

“Melly, don’t—”

“I know you think you’re not worth saving, but you are. And if you want there to be a vampire in the world who is strong and wise and benevolent, then that vampire should be you. That vampire already
is
you.”

He tries to pull his hand away, but I don’t let him.

“If you love her and you don’t want to kill her—”

His head snaps up. “You think I’m still in love with Sabrina?”

“It’s okay,” I say softly. “I understand that you loved her and then had to give her up once she turned. I understand that that’s why you didn’t want to turn me. But she can’t be trusted and she has to be stopped. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I understand that. I’m not an idiot, Melly. Despite all evidence to the contrary.” He brings my hand up to his lips and presses a gentle kiss to my knuckles. “You were never in love with Carter, were you?”

The moment for lying or pretending just so I can protect myself has passed. “I will always care for him because he loves Lily, but I’ve never loved him. Not like that. He’s a great guy, but he’s no vampire.”

He presses my hand to his cheek and then leans forward and kisses me. This kiss is not fueled with vampire passion or vampire rage. It is simple and sweet and kind. It is as delicate as the way his eyelashes flutter when he closes his eyes to kiss me.

Later, when he sits back down, I say, “For a man who’s two thousand years old, you are very stupid.”

His smile makes my heart sing—which sounds so trite, but really isn’t. Not when I hear music in everything.

“Yes,” he says. “I suppose I am.”

He leans over to kiss my hand and winces as he straightens.

That’s when I realize he’s changed his shirt. And probably his bandage, too. That’s when I notice that his skin has lost that sickly green tinge it had on the drive here.

“You took the stake out.”

“Carter said it was what you wanted.”

I nod. “So you can fight Sabrina. I know you’ll be stronger than her. Here on your own territory. She can’t possibly win.” I squeeze his hand more tightly, until he looks up at me. My mind feels foggy with sleep and with the serum that’s pulsing through my blood. Suddenly I can’t remember if I said this before, so I add, “You can’t go into this fight expecting to lose. Do you understand me?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he tells me.

And I want to believe him so badly that I decide to. I choose that belief. That he will be okay. That he will choose to win.

After a moment, I ask, “So now that the stake is out, do you still want to kill me?”

He smiles—another rare smile! “Melly, when I thought you were dead, I wanted to kill everyone.”

For a moment, he merely looks at me, his expression unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Then he closes his eyes and presses his forehead to our joined hands. I feel him suck in a deep breath, feel the way it shakes his whole chest, like maybe he’s crying, and my heart feels so full that I can’t breathe. I believe that he loves me. Right now, just like this. I know it can’t last. That the vampire girl he loves will be gone soon. I know this because I can feel the old Mel sneaking back in, and I can hear it in the way his breath hisses out like a sonnet. In the way his dark silence fills up all my empty spaces. Soon, Melly Kit will be gone forever and with her, his love. I can make peace with that.

If I save Lily and Carter. If I save Sebastian. If I do all that and still get to have this one moment of happiness, then that’s what I will take even if it’s all I will ever have.

CARTER

I waited until Mel fell back asleep and Sebastian came out to feed again before I gave him the bad news. In fact, I waited until he’d drained most of the bag and was feeling pretty relaxed before I even walked into the same room as him.

He just gave me a droll look. “You might as well tell me how it is. I can feel you stressing out from half a building away.”

“Okay. I’ve been watching the security feed. As far as I can tell, the building is completely surrounded.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess by Sabrina’s people.”

“Give me specifics.”

“I’ve counted fourteen armored vehicles. And twenty more cars.”

“And these armored vehicles . . .”

“Are basically transporting an army. She’s pretty much set up an RV park at our front door.”

“Are you sure it’s her?” Sebastian asked.

“She’s not trying to hide. She’s right out there in the open. She wants us to see her.”

“You said she’d lost a lot of kine,” Sebastian pointed out.

“You said she was well stocked when you were there just a few days before I was, why did you assume I was right and you weren’t?”

Sebastian clenched his hand into a fist, like he wanted to slap me upside the head. “Because you’re the
abductura
, you idiot. I will almost always believe you. So please be more careful with your fact-finding in the future.”

“Yeah. When we get out of this mess, I’ll make that my top priority.”

“If she has an army, why didn’t you see it?”

“Off the top of my head, I’d say because she didn’t want me to.” Feeling frustrated, I started to pace. “She knew we were coming. She had her guys pick us up in town. She had plenty of buildings to keep all of her people under wraps while we were there. I had no way of knowing how many people she actually had, and frankly, I was there to talk to her and get the cure. I wasn’t there for recon.”

Before I knew it, Sebastian and I were standing nose to nose, glaring each other down.

“This isn’t helpful,” Lily said from the other side of the room.

We both backed down.

“I know. I’m sorry.” I dropped to the sofa and put my head in my hands, trying to think. “I need to be better about this shit. I need to—”

“Stop being so dramatic,” Sebastian drawled. “You’re young. Practically a child. Given recent research about the development of the frontal cortex, it’s a miracle you can function at all.”

Lily glared at him. “Given the enormous stick up your ass, it’s amazing you can function, too.”

Sebastian just arched an eyebrow, looking almost amused. “Oh, and that is helpful? Thank goodness you came along to put us on the right track.”

“Look,” I said. “The point is, we’ve got to find a way out of here that doesn’t involve trying to fight our way past a hundred armed soldiers.”

“Nonsense. We won’t need to fight our way past them. We just have to give them what they want. Which is you, my dear boy.”

“Excuse me?” Lily asked. “That’s your plan? Hand Carter over to them?”

“Obviously Sabrina needs an
abductura
rather more desperately than we thought. She will most likely be willing to trade our freedom for him.”

“Again,” Lily asked, “that’s your big plan?”

“No, of course, that’s not my
big
plan. That’s my petite plan.” Lily nearly launched herself at Sebastian then. I stood up and grabbed her by the arm. Sebastian clucked disapprovingly. “The petite plan involves offering him up in order to get us safe passage so I can talk to Sabrina. Then I kill her. That second part is the big plan, in case you missed it.”

All the fight went out of Lily and she sagged against me. “I do like that plan better. But it’s still dangerous.”

“Yes, well, no plan is perfect.”

“So when do we do this?” I asked.

Sebastian glanced back toward the bedroom where Mel was still asleep. “Soon. Certainly before Mel wakes up and starts getting her powers back, because she’ll undoubtedly try to go instead of you.”

*  *

It didn’t take us long to get ready to go out there. We each selected a gun and a blade, both small enough that we could conceal them in our clothing. Neither of us thought we’d get close enough to Sabrina without being searched to actually use the weapons, but they made us feel better.

Sebastian’s selection of weapons was far greater than just the ones he had displayed on the wall. He had a whole closet full of them. Everything from shotguns to crossbows to samurai swords. I left the crossbow out where Lily would see it when she came out. She was sitting with Mel now. She had refused to say good-bye to me, saying instead that she’d see me in a few.

Sebastian noticed my placement of the crossbow. “Good idea,” he said. “She won’t need it, though.”

“She better not.”

Sebastian talked to me the whole time. He was in full-on professor mode, like he could teach me to be this super
abductura
in ten minutes or less.

“You need to stay focused.”

“Got it.”

“And stay calm.”

“Okay.”

He slid a dagger into the holster by his boot. “You should try to visualize yourself somewhere you feel at peace. Like a clear green meadow.”

“How long have you lived in Texas?”

“Three hundred years. Why?”

“You live in the desert, man. How many clear green meadows do you get out here?”

He almost smiled then. “I’ve seen pictures.”

“Okay,” I said, tucking the pistol into the back of my pants. “Focus. Check. Calm. Check. Scenes from
Bambi
. Check.”

“Unless you want to create chaos,” he added. “Which might be useful at some point. In that case, you should visualize yourself doing something disruptive. Like being in a fight.”

“Actually, I’m doing that right now,” I told him with a fierce grin.

“Yes. I can tell.”

We paused by the door. It killed me, leaving Lily and Mel in there by themselves.

“If we don’t come back—” I couldn’t even finish the thought.

Sebastian, the bastard, just shrugged. “If we don’t come back, they’ll just wait until this is over and sneak out the back way.”

“Wait. There’s a back way?”

“Of course. Every fortress has a back way out.”

And it was at moments like these that I really did wish I was strong enough to kick Sebastian’s ass. “If there’s a back way out, then why are we marching out the front door to face the army of hundreds?”

“Because if we didn’t eventually walk out the front door, Sabrina would be suspicious. Besides. She’s here to pick a fight. If we let her, she won’t bother looking for Lily and Mel.”

“Where does this back way out lead?”

“There’s an underground tunnel leading to one of the other buildings.”

“So you told Lily about this back door?”

“No. But Mel will figure it out. She did at Roberto’s. Once she wakes up, she’ll realize it pretty quickly.”

“Not too quickly, I hope,” I said. “I don’t want Lily trying to do something brave.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell her.”

“Okay. Let’s do this.”

“Yes. Let’s.” He stopped me at the very last minute. “By the way, if I do happen to die horribly out there, try to slice out my eyeballs, will you?”

You’d think after a full year of the Tick-pocalypse, nothing would gross me out. But that did. “Is that some weird vampire ritual?”

“No. It will keep Sabrina’s people from breaking into the vault.” He pulled a face. “My goodness, what kind of monsters do you think we are?”