The Vault (A Farm Novel) (4 page)

MEL

The last time I was here, I felt only rage and purpose. I had come to kill Roberto. I was focused and determined. I was in the grip of a vampire berserker frenzy. Here, in the middle of Roberto’s territory, I’d been unable to control my natural hatred for other vampires. It wasn’t aimed only at Roberto, but at Sebastian as well. It was a thing beyond mere anger. A thing beyond and apart from me.

It that state, I’d stabbed Sebastian. I’d rejoiced in doing it.

Now I need him alive. Will I be able to control my rage? Even for the cure? Even for my sister? Or will my new nature win out?

It had been less than twenty-four hours since I’d left El Corazon, but the time had taken its toll on the tiny village. El Corazon looked like a Victorian-era Texas county seat, with one massive building in the center of a town square and other businesses flanking the building on all four sides. Though, of course, it hadn’t been the county seat, since it wasn’t part of a county and wasn’t on any maps. It was quaint and lovely if you could overlook the fact that it had been owned and run by a monster. And now it is overrun by the Ticks who flooded the town when the fences came down. They swarmed and they devoured all of Roberto’s kine.

Here at El Corazon, the people who lived under the protection of Roberto and Jonathan Price had believed completely that they were safe from the Ticks. They had stood by—protected—while other towns were ravaged, while countless lives were lost, while the government fell and major cities had been blasted to dust. They had been safe and they had believed they always would be because my father promised them that.

When the fences around the city came down, when the Ticks swarmed in, the citizens of El Corazon had been slaughtered wholesale. By the hundreds.

I couldn’t help feeling like they’d deserved it.

But that didn’t make the carnage at El Corazon any more palatable.

Ticks—mindless pack animals that they are—are efficient killers, but inefficient eaters. It’s like their prefrontal cortex is just gone—or maybe cut off from the rest of the brain. They are incapable of logic or reasoning. They are driven only by the need to consume and the contradictory fear that they can’t consume it fast enough. They don’t drain the blood from a human the way a vampire does. They crack open the human’s chest. They drink right from the heart itself. Bones shatter. Viscera spew.

They are greedy and wasteful. They don’t eat. They gorge.

They leave the dead still twitching where they killed them. They move on to their next kill, eating until they can hardly move. When they’ve eaten their fill, they satisfy other needs. And then they sleep, huddled like dogs in whatever dark, warm place they can find.

Nature would never make a killer like this. And I know nature will not allow this killer to reign for long. A vampire could have lived indefinitely on a population this large. But the Ticks ate their way through it in less than a day. Far less, based on how badly the bodies are already decomposing.

This is the scene that awaits me when I return to El Corazon. I don’t want anything sneaking up on me, so I park a couple blocks away from the square and walk in. I hope to get a sense of where the Ticks are—something I would never be able to do from the moving car.

When I climb out of the car, Chuy hops out after me. I point back to the front seat. “Stay.”

He just looks at me.

“Whatever.” Maybe I would be able to make him obey, but I have bigger things to worry about. “I don’t like dogs,” I remind him. “And if you lag behind, I’ll leave you here.”

He must understand, because he falls in step beside me, close enough that his fur brushes against the backs of my fingers as I walk. It’s weirdly comforting, as I face the scene before me, the senseless death. The waste of precious resources. I don’t mourn the people. They were their own kind of monsters. But I’m disgusted nevertheless.

Beside me, Chuy stops, his fur bristling, in the same moment my own internal warning bells go off. We are not alone.

Sebastian is still alive. I can hear his buzz in the air. Faint, low. Weak. But still there.

And of course there are the Ticks, too. They have not traveled on, even though they are out of food. They are too sated to bother moving. I work my way through town, stopping every once in a while to triangulate their position. They’re in a house. Outside the square. Maybe more than one. It’s still day, so they are sleeping. I can’t get a sense of how many there are, which probably means there are too many for me to easily take on.

Which means I will try to deal with Sebastian first. The devil I know before the monsters I don’t.

The stench of day-old blood churns my gut. I would retch, but my stomach is empty. I haven’t eaten since I killed the girl outside the Farm. Soon the air is thick with flies, and their buzzing drowns out the hum of the Ticks where they sleep. A block from the square and the buzz is like a roar in the air, overpowering even Sebastian’s sounds.

I can only hope he is where I left him, pinned to the ground on the green by the gazebo. If he has managed to free himself and crawl away, I don’t know how I’ll find him.

I keep waiting for my vampire berserker rage to kick in. For the fury that dances along my nerves and lights my blood. I keep waiting for it to guide me to him, but it doesn’t.

What if it’s gone? What if he’s gone?

I can’t hear him anymore over the buzz of the flies. I can’t feel his presence. No pulsing anger driving me to ferret him out. To stab him through the heart and rip him limb from limb. Not even a tingle of annoyance.

Is he dead?

In the time it’s taken me to walk through El Corazon, has he died?

Something like grief hits me. How is that possible? How can I grieve for someone that I barely knew? How can I mourn him when I haven’t even mourned the life I had before him?

My pace quickens. I run the last block, which is better anyway, because then I don’t have to see the carnage and waste. I round a corner, nearly stumble on a body, but catch myself before I can fall and then I’m leaping over the patches of ground where the bodies are too thick to walk through. Did anyone in town make it? Anyone at all?

I slow down as I reach the center square, dread pulling at my feet. There on the green, beneath the sprawling live oak, I can see the two bodies. Roberto’s petite and headless body is sprawled out. In life, he was as fragile and as lovely as an angel. Or maybe one of Tolkien’s elves. Now he is headless and lifeless. I can’t make myself look at him, knowing that when I die—someday in the distant future—this is how I will go.

It’s Sebastian’s body I’ve come to see or save if I can.

He is still there, as I somehow knew he would be, the stake I thrust through his heart pinning him to the ground. His eyes are closed, his always pale skin paler than pale, as white as the ghost I feel like I’m seeing.

This—apparently—is the limit of Chuy’s friendliness. He stops maybe fifteen feet away, letting out a low, tense growl. “Stay,” I tell him, and this time he listens. He lies down, submissive, but not relaxed, wiggling backward without taking his eyes from Sebastian’s form.

Instinctively, I take a cue from Chuy, and move forward slowly, crouching down by his body, my eyes searching for that final proof that he is truly dead. I hear no music from him at all. No annoying buzz. He seems as lifeless as Roberto’s headless corpse. And yet I can’t believe that’s true. How could Sebastian be dead?

I lay a palm on his motionless chest. It doesn’t rise and fall with breath, but when I rock back onto my heels, his eyes are open. The gleam of life in them is dulled by pain and blood loss, but somehow he still lives.

Relief surges through me.

I didn’t kill him. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t. Somehow, through some miracle—if vampires can be granted miracles—he has survived.

I keep my hands on his chest and lean over to study him. It’s almost as if I’m seeing him for the first time, not with the eyes of the autistic girl or the angry fledgling vampire, but with eyes made new. His pale skin is smeared with grime and blood and too hot to touch. The spark of his eyes is faded. And despite all that, the sight of him fills me up with something unfamiliar and so big it is almost uncomfortable, like it is squeezing out all the soft tissue of my body, making me both harder and more vulnerable.

“You’re still here,” I say softly. “You haven’t taken out the stake.”

He draws in a deep breath and I can almost hear the wheezing in his chest. “I was just getting around to it,” he says. “But you see, it’s ever so comfortable.”

His gaze stays on mine long enough that I start to feel shaky. I don’t know what to say. How to excuse what I’ve done. I don’t know if he’s glad to see me or angry at me and simply too weak to kick my ass. With his normal strength, he could easily dominate me. I would never have been able to stab him at all if he hadn’t been distracted and drained by his fight with Roberto.

Not sure what to do, I lean closer and say the only thing that comes to mind. “I don’t want to kill you.”

His lips twist in that familiar sardonic smile. “Then you probably shouldn’t have stabbed me through the heart.”

I frown as it takes me a second to get his point. “No,” I say. “I mean I don’t want to kill you now.”

“I know. I was”—he pauses and sucks in a pain-laced breath—“just teasing you, Melly.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because you’re fun to tease.”

I nearly smile at that and can’t help wondering when the last time was that I did smile. Certainly not since I’ve turned. And only rarely before. Music made me smile, back when I was Mel, but since then? Nothing until now.

“No,” I say gently. “I should want to kill you, shouldn’t I?”

He quirks an eyebrow. “Because I lied to you about Roberto?”

“Because of the vampire berserker rage. I wanted to kill Roberto. I wanted to kill you before. Why don’t I want to kill you now?”

His shoulder twitches, almost like he’s thinking about shrugging, but it must send a bolt of pain through his body, because he writhes with it. After sucking in several deep breaths, he says, “Well, off the top of my head, I’d say it might be because I’m an inch from death.”

I lean a little closer. “Does it work that way?”

“I don’t know. First time I’ve been staked.” His lips twist again, but it looks more like a grimace than a smirk. “Let’s take the stake out and we’ll see, shall we?”

I look then at his hands. His fingertips are scratched and bloody from trying to get the stake out. I realize now that the stake did not just go through his heart, it went deep into the ground. How much force must I have used when I did that? How much hatred had fueled that single action? How much anger?

I have many reasons to free Sebastian now. He’s the only one who can get us into the underground storage where the cure is stockpiled. He is the only living expert on the Tick virus. He may have been the one to engineer humanity’s downfall, but he is also the one who could save it. He has it in his power to save Lily. To keep her from turning into a monster even more horrible than I.

Yet despite all those very good reasons, I fear the real reason I want to save him is more personal. In the end, it doesn’t matter why I save him. All that matters is that I do. That I succeed.

But first, we have to get out of here. Fast. I’ll worry about his wound later. For now, I need to get him off the ground. I can’t bandage him here, not when there are Ticks sleeping nearby.

I crouch back down beside him. “I’m going to try to move you.”

He meets my gaze, but his eyes are foggy. “You know, it would be much easier, my dear, if you would just finish the job you started and kill me. I understand Roberto had quite the weapons collection. I’m sure he won’t mind now if you borrow a nice katana.”

“Shut up,” I mutter, trying to think of options.

“Do it quickly,” he murmurs, his voice almost seductive. “This can all be over soon.”

“Too bad. I need you alive. To help me get the cure for the Tick virus.”

He almost smiles. “Ah, it’s good to be wanted.”

I lean over him again and wrap my hands around the head of the stake. I hadn’t looked at it before, but I do now. It has a rounded top and intricate carvings on the sides that bite sharply into my hand when I grasp it. I remember the anger. The blunt-edged fury that drove me to it. More importantly, I remember the reasons.

Sebastian carefully molded me into the perfect assassin. He trained me to kill. He fed my need to seek revenge. He convinced me that I was the only one—the only person in the world—who could kill Roberto.

And I had bought it all. I had believed completely that killing Roberto was my destiny. That it was my gift.

However, when I’d arrived at El Corazon, nothing had been as I’d expected. By the time Sebastian had showed up to stage his own assassination, I’d realized the depths of his betrayal.

I know the truth now. I had only been a decoy. A distraction. There’s nothing unique about me. I have no special destiny.

There’s another truth I know. Sebastian will do anything to get what he wants. He will tell any lie. He will trick any fool.

I have no interest in being his fool again and I don’t know which of his lies to believe. I can’t trust him, but I need him. Alive and conscious.

I grab the stake and give a sharp tug, wrenching it free from his chest and from the blood-soaked ground beneath him.

He lets out a sound that starts as a gasp and ends as a scream. A sound that makes the hairs on the back of my neck spike with fear and makes Chuy whimper in distress. It’s the sound of death and agony. It’s the sound of torture. His whole body bucks off the ground.

His scream fades into echoes, yet there I stand, leaning over him, watching him draw in shuddering painful breaths. Watching what’s left of his blood pulse out of his body.

I reach out a hand and he takes it in his own. His hand barely has the strength to grasp mine. His skin is so cold he might as well be a corpse. He’s visibly shaking as he struggles to stand and I feel a burst of regret. He’s wounded and now that I’ve pulled out the stake, he’s dying more quickly. And I’m about to stab him in the back. Literally.