A Night Without Stars (15 page)

Dad touched my arm. “Lola, we should go.”

I shook my head, refusing to believe Travis wasn’t inside. That he wasn’t alive. “No. Not yet. Maybe if I ring it one more—”

The door opened suddenly. I stumbled back a step, Dad right beside me, his grip tightening until I winced and yanked my arm free.   

“Hey Lola! Hey Mr. Sanchez. Good to see you again.”

My jaw dropped. “
Travis
?”

“Uh, yeah. Were you expecting someone else? A giant bicep bulging vampire, perhaps?”

“You… You know about the vampires?” I said stupidly.

Travis tapped his chin. “Well, let’s see... What gave it away? Could it be all the dead people, or the fact that the hulk tried to sink his fangs into my neck?”

“It
is
you!” I launched myself at him. Our bodies collided hard enough to have us bouncing off the doorframe, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything other than the fact that my best friend was alive. He was
alive
and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry so I did both and when I felt him shudder my hold around his neck only tightened. “I’m sorry,” I whispered in his ear. “I’m so sorry, Trav. I tried to save you, but—”

“The big bad vampire scared you off?” he finished for me. “Don’t worry about it.”

I rocked back on my heels, but kept my hands firmly on his shoulders. I could feel the bones pushing through his wrinkled shirt. It made him seem frail, even though I knew he was the furthest thing from it. You didn’t survive a night with a vampire by being weak. “You look exhausted,” I said, noting the dark purple smudges under his eyes.

“Didn’t get much sleep.”

I wanted to ask if he’d been bitten, but that would mean revealing
I
had been bitten and that still wasn’t something I was ready to do, at least not yet. So instead I pretended like everything was fine and there was nothing strange at all about Travis spending the night with a vampire and living to talk about it the next day. Smiling, I entwined my fingers with his and tugged him down the steps past the scary garden gnomes. “Come on. We have a car and supplies and we’re heading for the mountains until this whole thing blows over.”

And that’s it. If you want to know my biggest regret in all of this, if you want to know what I would change, there you have it. I would ask Travis how he did it. How he survived. Such a simple question. By not asking it I damned us all.

We just didn’t know it yet.

“Glad to see you’re not dead, Mr. Sanchez,” Travis said, shifting his attention.

 Dad tried to smile. It came off more as a grimace. He’d never understood Travis’ sense of humor. “Same to you.”

We made room for Travis between the duffel bags in the backseat. He squeezed in, his long legs and lanky arms stretching from window to window. I bumped my seat up so he wouldn’t have to sit with his knees under his chin and gave my dad a withering look as we pulled away from the curb.

“Good call on stealing the smallest car ever.”

“It’s fast,” he said defensively. “And I didn’t steal it. We’re borrowing it.”

I snorted under my breath. Yeah, right. 

“I like the car, Mr. Sanchez.”

Dad met Travis’ gaze in the rearview mirror and they exchanged one of those guy-to-guy knowing looks. “Zero to eighty in six point five.”

“Sweet.”

I twisted around in my seat and hit his leg. “You don’t even know what that means.”

“Do too.” Suddenly his expression grew serious, his voice strained. “Mr. Sanchez, I hate to ask this but…” He trailed off and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

This time Dad didn’t look in the rearview mirror. He kept his eyes trained on the road and only I could see how hard he was gripping the steering wheel. “I’m sorry Travis, but I can’t. It’s too dangerous.”

“I understand,” Travis said, looking close to tears.

I remained silent. I knew what Travis was asking for and I knew why Dad had to say no. I perched my elbow on the edge of the window and stared blindly out at the passing houses, trying hard not to think about Travis’ parents. If I was in his position would I be able to leave my dad behind, not knowing for certain if he was dead or alive? The question pulled at my already stretched out nerves and I kicked to a faraway corner of my mind. I knew the answer, but I didn’t like what it said about me… or my best friend. 

The houses faded away as we got closer to the interstate. Now there were only trees blurred together in one long line of green. I glanced at the speedometer, noted the little needle was hovering at eighty, but didn’t say anything. Who was going to pull us over, the police?

I felt a tug on my braid and turned to see Travis leaning forward, one hand gripping my armrest. There was dirt under his fingernails and his knuckles were skinned. “What happened?” he asked quietly. “How did you make it?”

“I met a guy. Maximus. He knew a lot about what was going on. We hid out in one of the old storage units by the baseball field. He gave me this.” I reached down under my seat and pulled out Maximus’ gun.

“Be careful.” Dad looked at me and frowned. “You shouldn’t have that out while we’re driving, Lola. Put it away, please.”

Get my dad away from his beer and he becomes parent of the year. I rolled my eyes at Travis who managed a tiny smile. “You can hold it when we get to the mountains.” I slid the gun back under my seat. “Maybe we can practice shooting it or something.”

“Maybe,” Travis said hollowly.

I wanted to say something to make him feel better, but what? Sorry your parents were most likely torn apart by vampires? Sorry your dad is dead and mine’s alive? Sorry everyone we knew was gruesomely murdered? Yeah. That would make a great Hallmark card. “Travis, maybe when we—”

It happened so fast I didn’t have time to react. One second the car was barreling down the road and the next the wheels were squealing and Dad was yelling and I caught only a fleeting glance of the crater in the middle of the earth where the road used to be.

I was thrown to the side as the car spun. My head cracked hard against the window. Dad’s airbag deployed with a whoosh of air. Travis shouted something unintelligible. I felt a sharp pull on my braid, but I couldn’t turn around. I was too busy scrambling to secure the seatbelt I’d forgotten to buckle. My fingers slid clumsily over the metal clip, numbed by fear and desperation.

The car swung to the left, the tires spitting out gravel as it veered towards the ditch. Everything was a blur of color and sound. I heard someone screaming and only distantly recognized the voice as my own.

We hurtled off the side of the road, a sleek silver bullet headed straight for its target: an old oak tree, more dangerous than any gun when you were flying towards it at eighty miles an hour. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dad trying to spin the wheel. His mouth was agape, his eyes rolling wildly. Spit flew from between his lips and made a long, wet line across the dashboard.

Gross. 

The car hit a dip in the grass and bucked, hard enough to send us air born. What were really only milliseconds felt like minutes as we sailed through the air. The force of our landing pushed me up and out of my seat. My head slammed against the felt ceiling and I felt something give in my neck with a sharp
crack
.

“BRACE YOURSELVES!” Dad cried.

The collision with the tree launched me forward. Without my seatbelt I didn’t have a chance in hell, but as I headed towards the windshield I was filled with the oddest sense of calm.

All things considered, dying in a car accident wasn’t the worst way to go.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Decision Time

Dying really pissed me off.

It wasn’t the whole being dead thing that annoyed me – even
I
knew you couldn’t get thrown through a windshield and survive – but I had really expected a little bit more than
this
. A bright twinkling light would have been nice. Maybe some angels with harps or at the very least fluffy white kittens. Was that too much to ask after everything I’d been through? It must have been, because all I got was darkness.

It was impenetrable, as though I’d fallen into a deep, dark void of nothingness. I could feel I was lying down, but when I tried to sit up my body wouldn’t cooperate. My limbs felt heavy. My head weighed a thousand pounds. The only body part I could move were my lips and when I smacked them together I tasted metal.

The voices came then, so indistinct and fuzzy I thought I was imagining them at first. But like a bad radio slowly being tuned in they became sharper and clearer until I was able to make out every third or fourth word.

“…out of nowhere. Couldn’t…time.”

“Is…dead? Oh God, all…blood.”

“…move her? Is it okay if we move her?”

“I…know. I DON’T KNOW!”

“Stop yelling.” The words came out sluggishly, like I was trying to speak around a mouthful of cotton balls.  I heard a sharp intake of breath, followed by a muffled sob. “Travis?” My eyebrows pulled together.

Another sob, this one louder than the last.

Definitely Travis.

“Lola, you’re a-alive!” he blubbered.

I was? That couldn’t be right. For the second time I tried to sit up, but nothing was working like it should have been. There was a prickling at the base of my skull and under my hands, like someone was poking me with tiny needles. “No, I’m pretty sure I’m dead. You probably are too,” I said kindly, wanting to break the news as gently as possible. “You just don’t realize it yet.”

“No one is dead, honey.”

“Dad?” I tried to turn my head in the direction of his voice, and this time my muscles cooperated. Someone squeezed my hand and excitement shot through me when I was able to move my fingers, followed closely by fear. I had to be dead. If I wasn’t… If I wasn’t, then why couldn’t I see? Why couldn’t I move more than a few inches? Was I paralyzed? Oh, God. I was. I was paralyzed.

“I’m right here,” Dad said. “I’m right next to you.”

“I can’t… I can’t see you.” Panic pitched my voice up an octave. “Am I blind?”

Travis snorted. I jerked my head to the side. The movement was a little easier this time, but it still didn’t feel right. It was jerky instead of smooth. Hard instead of effortless.

If you want to know what it felt like to lay on the ground not knowing if I was irreparably damaged or not, move your left pinky finger. It’s easy, right? You barely have to think and it twitches. But what if you’re giving the command and nothing is happening? What if you are thinking about moving that damn finger as hard as you possibly can and
it doesn’t work
? What then?

“Do you think that’s funny?” I demanded, hoping I was the only one who would notice the fear creeping into my voice. “Is having a blind best friend
amusing
to you?”

“Lola, you’re not blind.”

“Really? Then why can’t I—”

“Your eyes are closed.”

Oh.

Gritting my teeth from the force of concentration it required, I managed to peel my eyelids apart. The resulting rush of color after so much darkness was overwhelming. I cringed away from it all; away from the smoking crap of metal that vaguely resembled a car, away from the glass that seemed to cover everything, away from the blood that covered the glass. Instead I looked at myself, lifting my head with a soft grunt of effort to examine the cuts that sliced through my flesh, making it appear as though I’d been wrapped in thin red ribbon.

My turtle t-shirt was torn to shreds, exposing my abdomen. A shard of glass stuck out of my side, wedged between two ribs. There was a burn mark on my right knee. A bloody gash on my left.

No wonder Dad and Travis had thought I was dead.

Feeling was beginning to return to my body in fits and starts. After two tries I managed to lift an arm and touch my face. I didn’t need to look at my fingertips to know they would come away bloody. I could feel the blood running down my cheekbones, sliding into the corners of my mouth, dripping off my chin. It explained the taste of metal. It didn’t explain why I wasn’t writhing in agony, although I had a vague idea.

I remembered how my other injuries had healed overnight. The cut on my knee. The scratch on my face. The bite marks on my hand. And I knew that somehow, someway, Angelique was responsible for how I was healing now.

The crash should have killed me. Instead, with every moment that passed, I felt more and more aware. My skin was tingling all over. I felt a vague
pop
in my back, and my stomach did a queasy flip as I realized my spine had just realigned itself. Thanks to a vampire my body was literally healing from the inside out and I didn’t feel one ounce of pain, just a numbness that was gradually fading.

Way to go, Angelique. 

“Help me up.” I lifted my hand towards Travis, who backed up a step and frowned. There was blood on his forehead from a cut right below his hairline, but otherwise he seemed fine. Dad did too. He hovered at the edge of my peripheral vision, twisting his hands and shifting his weight from foot to foot. 

“Lola, are you sure you should move?” he asked nervously. “Your injuries look very severe. ”

Don’t worry, thanks to the vampire who bit me I’m fine. Oh, I didn’t tell you about that? Yeah, this crazy bitch sank her teeth into my hand and now I can’t get hurt. Pretty cool, huh? Except she can sense me, which means I’m putting both of your lives in danger.

“It’s superficial,” I said, hating myself for lying, but unable to force the truth past my lips. It darkened the tip of my tongue, a festering sore I couldn’t spit out.

Travis took my hand and helped me gingerly to my feet. Grass prickled between my toes. I looked down and saw I’d lost a shoe. We’d ended up nearly a hundred yards from the road. The tree was off to the left, the car still wrapped around it. Our supplies were scattered across the ground. Spying a tiny battery I picked it up and tucked it into the front pocket of my shorts. “You should go stand over by my dad. You know blood makes you queasy.”