The Vault (A Farm Novel) (32 page)

CARTER

“So what do you think is going to happen?” Lily asked, whispering.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

We were back in the underground vault beneath Genexome. Sabrina lay on the bed sleeping fitfully, her hands and feet zip-tied as a precautionary measure. Lily and I had agreed to take the first watch. The sound of piano music drifted in from the other room, but I couldn’t tell if it was from the sound system or if it was Mel playing.

Outside the vault, things had settled down eventually. Sabrina’s people had scattered or been arrested. Some of the Mexican army had decamped, and the few troops they’d left behind were camping out in the parking lot. Sometime during the next few days, Sebastian would hand off the samples of the cure, along with the protocol for making it. We weren’t handing over Sabrina. Mel and I had convinced them to let us keep her. And maybe they didn’t want her anyway.

Not that we knew what we were going to do with her.

“If this were a movie,” Lily said, “when I shot her with the cure, there would have been some awesome special effect of her aging rapidly until she reached her real age and then crumbling to dust.” She paused to give me a chance to answer. “Do you think that’s what’s going to happen here?”

“Don’t know. Mel’s the only vampire who’s ever taken the cure. If she did the rapid age thing, it was only nine weeks in ten hours, not a hundred and fifty years.” I looked down at Sabrina’s form. It had been over six hours. Her physical appearance hadn’t altered at all. “It doesn’t look like she’s going to rapid-age. Maybe she’ll just be . . . you know, human.”

She looked at me. “And still a very powerful
abductura
.”

“Yeah. She’ll be someone we have to watch out for.” I knew how strong she was. How persuasive, even without her powers. Sabrina could be a very dangerous person. “Do you think we should have handed her over to the Mexican government?” I asked Lily.

“No,” Lily said simply. “She’s our problem. We’ll find our own way of solving it.”

On the bed, Sabrina’s legs twitched. She groaned and rolled over, her eyes flickering open. She blinked for a second before using her bound hands to push herself up. In the other room, the music stopped abruptly. A second later, the door opened and Mel stepped inside, Sebastian right behind her.

Sabrina’s eyes were wide, terrified. Her gaze darted away from Lily and me, as if we were of no interest at all. She barely glanced at Mel. It was Sebastian she couldn’t take her eyes off. I could see her waiting for the vampire berserker rage to kick in. I could feel her panic when it didn’t.

“What have you done?” she gasped at him. “What have you done?”

“The cure doesn’t work only on the Ticks, Brina,” he said, more gently than I’d have thought possible. “It works on us, too.”

“You—” She glanced around the room again, as if searching for confirmation. “You cured me?”

“We didn’t know what would happen,” Sebastian answered. “You had to be stopped, Sabrina. And this seemed better than killing you.”

“Better?” Her voice rose sharply and she waved her bound hands. “This seemed better to you? Bound like a criminal? Trapped here? This seemed better?”

“You’re not a criminal, Sabrina,” he said soothingly. “You won’t have to stay here. I don’t think we can let you go back to Smart Com, at least not right away, but—”

“Here in this
body
,” she hissed, interrupting him. “I’m trapped here in this puny human body.” She sneered the last few words, lashing out at us all with a burst of hatred. “You made me your
kine
.”

“No, Brina,” he said again. “I don’t have kine. I haven’t had kine in a hundred years, but I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.”

“I can’t do this,” she said desperately. “I can’t go back to being human.”

“You’ll adapt.”

For an instant, her gaze darted to Sebastian’s. “And you and I can be together again? I can be your
abductura
. I can—”

In two quick steps he crossed the room and sat on the bed beside her. He took her hands in his and leaned close, whispering something none of us could hear.

Her gaze met his and then jerked away. She blinked so rapidly I almost didn’t see the tears.

She took several deep breaths, sucking air in through her chapped lips in an audible hiss, like it took every ounce of her will to not fly apart. Then she said stiffly, “I can’t live like this.” And then, more panicked, twisting her bound wrists in front of her. “I can’t live like this. I can’t live like this.” She wrenched at her hands, frantic now to free them. Her arms contorted as she tried to break the zip ties. “I can’t live like this,” she said over and over.

“Calm her down,” Sebastian barked. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to Mel. Or even to both of us. “Use your powers to calm her down!”

I tried to order my own thoughts, but I couldn’t wade through her panic and fear to even get to them. Beside me, Mel dropped into a crouch, hands curled over her head, and let loose a low, sorrowful keening noise.

“Calm her down,” Sebastian ordered again.

I took a step forward, but before I could reach Sabrina, Lily dashed past me. Too late I saw the scissors in her hands. A massive pair of metal shears.

“I’ll take the ties off,” Lily said, rushing forward.

But Sabrina was still looking down at her hands, trying to break free. Then, at the last minute, she looked up. I saw the gleam in her eyes. Saw her intention, but somehow her will trapped mine. I couldn’t stop her even though I knew exactly what she was planning. I was simply frozen, unable to protect her from herself.

As soon as Lily had snipped the zip ties, Sabrina grabbed the scissors. And stabbed herself in her heart.

CARTER

Sebastian and I buried Sabrina later that night, on a gentle rise, a few miles away from the Genexome headquarters. According to Sebastian, it wasn’t far from where she’d been born nearly two hundred years before.

Sebastian had his strength back, which made my being there to help pretty pointless, but I felt oddly compelled to stay. As though Sabrina were a stand-in for all the people I’d lost that I hadn’t been able to bury. McKenna. My parents. My friends from the schools I’d gone to. Lily’s mother, whom I’d never even met. Dawn and Darren, who we hadn’t heard from yet, though Lily still held out hope for them.

We didn’t have a ceremony. Sabrina’s death felt no more or less tragic and meaningless than any of the other things that had happened in the past year.

When we’d sifted the last shovelful of dirt onto her grave, Sebastian straightened and said, “You know this isn’t over, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are still vampire empires out there. A lot of them.”

“So?” I asked.

“Lily and Mel won’t be safe—not really—until all the vampires are dead.”

I looked at him, trying to gauge his mood. He’d been oddly quiet. I’d thought it was because he was burying one of the few friends he had, but maybe I’d been wrong.

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“You should kill me,” he said simply.

I let out a laugh then stopped. “Wait. You’re serious?”

“It’s the only way to protect them. As long as I’m alive, something could happen. I could infect one of them. I could lose control. It could be bad.”

“So you want to die? To make some sort of grand gesture?”

He blinked in surprise. Maybe at the scorn in my voice. “I want to protect them. I thought you would—”

“You thought I would kill you?” I asked. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I haven’t wanted to, but now that Mel’s in love with you, I figure you two are a package deal. There’s no way I’d kill you. The last thing I need is Lily pissed off at me forever because I killed the guy Mel loves.” Then a thought occurred to me. A pretty unpleasant one. “Unless you’ve decided you don’t love her. Now that she’s autistic again.”

And just like that, Sebastian had his hand around my throat. Slowly he pulled me right up to him until I was dangling a few inches from his face. “Do not be any more of a fool than you have to be.”

He thrust me away from him and I stumbled back several steps before catching myself. Well. I guess that was that.

Obviously, he still loved her. So much he was stupid with it. I knew the feeling. The world was a crazy, terrifying place. And the fear that you couldn’t protect the ones you loved could eat away at you.

“Look,” I said. “If you’re worried about protecting them, the best way to do that is for you to be here. In the fight.”

I added that last bit pointedly, because I’d seen the looks he’d been giving the supply of the cure that was stashed in the refrigerator. Like he was thinking of taking it himself.

“You are our best defense against other vampires. You know their empires. You know how they work. You’ll know if any of them come after us. And I figure they will come after us. Sabrina won’t be the only person threatened by the idea of a cure.”

He seemed to consider this for a moment before saying, “If I stay a vampire, I can’t be with Mel.”

“Because you’re worried about turning her?”

“Because the vampire/human thing just doesn’t work out. Ever.”

“Says who?”

“Says everyone.”

“Everyone is full of crap. I think you’ll just have to stay a vampire long enough to kill the others, then you can do whatever you want with that cure.”

After a moment, he nodded.

“By the way, I’ve been wondering what you said to Sabrina.” Sebastian threw me a look. “When she offered to be your
abductura
again. What was your answer?”

He looked away. “I believe that’s between me and her.”

“Which I would totally respect. Except you’re with Mel now. And the way I see it, I’m the closest thing she has to a brother. It’s my job to look out for her. She doesn’t need to be anyone’s second choice.”

He looked at me then, his gaze flat and expressionless and oddly deadly. For a second, I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. For a half second, I worried he might do worse.

Then he sighed and looked away. “Your generation has no boundaries, do you know that?”

“You gonna answer or not?”

“I reminded Sabrina that ten years ago, I went to her and offered her the cure. I offered to take it first, in case there were ill effects. I offered her the chance to be with me for the rest of our lives, however long that might be. For my insolence, she had me beaten and dumped at the edge of her territory. My forgiveness extended only so far as not doing the same to her.”

That would have been good enough for me. I turned to leave, but before I could, Sebastian said softly, “Mel isn’t my second choice. She’s my only choice.”

MEL

When I was a vampire, when I lived in a world of silence and blood and death and life like I’d never known, I used to wonder sometimes what I would have sounded like to the old Mel, to the Mel who heard music in everything.

Not just what I would sound like, but Sebastian, too. He had been silent to me when I first met him. When I was a vampire, when I knew him, would he have finally sung for me? Would we have resonated together? Those times he kissed me, what would the music be then?

I wondered if it would be Rachmaninoff, which is how Lily and Carter always sounded to me. My very favorite music—deep and lush and swooningly romantic.

I’ve heard people talk before, about blood singing. That’s how I felt. As though Sebastian made my blood sing, and it broke my heart that I would never hear it.

Now I do.

It isn’t Rachmaninoff. It’s something new. Like the sweeping swell of music at the end of a movie. It is indescribable and unique. It would fit nowhere, but it fits here. And it is all mine. All ours. And it is all the sweeter because we were both so silent before.