Afterlife (23 page)

“Your mom might come around,” I said softly. “Given time.”

Lucas smiled grimly as he shook his head. “I’m nothing but a
monster to her now. Never will be anything else.” I touched his face. “You’re
not a monster.”

“Yes, I am. Got the fangs to prove it.”

“Then you’re not only a monster. You’re also a good man.” I
smiled, scattering a sof t glow around us in the stairwell. Hopefully that had
helped him, but I thought it would be a good idea to change the subject, too.
“So, what do you think of my plan
?
”

“I hate it.”

“You think it’s a bad idea
?
”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s a good idea. You’ve got to go up
against a wraith sometime, and I can’t think of a better candidate than that
creep. But it’s dangerous. I hate the fact that I can’t protect you.”

“I can protect myself.”

An unwilling smile spread across Lucas’s face. “I know that.
I trust you. And I’ve seen what you can do when you set your mind to it. But I
always wanted to be the one looking out for you, you know? I’ve gotta learn to
let you fight your own battles — at least the ones I can’t fight for you.”

Understanding, I said, “You just don’t have to like it.”

“Exactly
. ..”
His voice trailed
off as we heard footsteps on the stairs above us. Quickly I vanished, turning
into a fine cloud of mist that could easily hide in a corner. Lucas stood up,
adjusting his uniform sweater, and said to the unseen person, “Hey!”

His voice was a little too loud, an attempt at forced cheer,
and it must have scared somebody who thought she was alone. I heard a feminine
cry of surprise, and then a thudding on the stairs. Lucas ran up, taking t\vo
steps at a time, as I followed behind.

There, uniform kilt practically around her waist and books
scattered around, lay Skye. She scrambled into a sitting position when she saw
Lucas, tucking her kilt back into place as her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
“You scared me
!
I thought I was alone,” she said. “And
these stairs — they’re slippery
— ”

“You don’t have to apologize for falling down,” Lucas said.
“I startled you, and yeah, the steps suck. You okay, Skye?”

“Mostly just humiliated.”

“No need to be freaked out because of me. So You’re okay.”
He bent over, maybe to help her up or to pick up some of her books — and froze.

I saw it only a moment later. Skye had skinned her knee when
she felL Crisscrossing the pale skin of her knee were stripes of blood, beading
up thicker by the moment.

Lucas’s eyes narrowed, and I could see his entire body tense
as he breathed in the scent.

Skye saw it too and winced. “So, not just a bruise. Don’t
guess you happen to have any Band — Aids on you?”

“No,” Lucas said slowly. His gaze — his whole being — was
focused entirely on the blood. As his jaw worked, I realized his fangs were
threatening to emerge.

Lucas, no. Lucas, snap out of it. Did I dare to materialize?
It would scare the hell out of Skye, but if Lucas was about to bite
her .
. . but he wouldn’t. He couldn ‘t.

“Of course you don’t have a Band — Aid. Guys don’t carry
purses,” Skye said as if she were scolding herself. She bent the leg, bringing
the knee closer to her face — and his. “Maybe I’ve got a tissue in my backpack,
but I think I left my ftrst — aid stuff in the stables. Let me check.”

As she unzipped her backpack, her shining brown hair fell
across her face and obscured her view of Lucas. I could feel temptation
radiating from him like heat. He wanted blood — her blood — this second. He
wanted it worse than anything else, enough to forget that I was watching, maybe
enough to forget everything but his vampire hunger.

l
made up my mind to appear and was
gathering myself together to do it, when I heard someone else walk onto the
floor above. The click — clack 150 of footsteps made Skye look up, though Lucas
never took his eyes off the bleeding wound.

“Miss Tierney.” Mrs. Bethany’s rich voice echoed slightly in
the stairwell. I saw her appear first as a shadow in the darkness, as if she
were made out of nothing but night. “I see You’ve had an accident. And Mr. Ross
is helping you.”

Skye smiled unevenly. “Yeah, tripped and fell.”

As they spoke, Lucas finally pulled himself together with a
start. He didn’t seem to remember where he’d been or how he’d gotten here.
Hurriedly he held out his arm to help Skye to her feet.

Mrs. Bethany held out a lacy white handkerchief. “Bandage it
as best you can until you can get the first — aid kit.”

“It’s so pretty,” Skye protested, her fingers brushing over
the delicate lace. “I don’t want to bleed on it.”

“If you rinse the linen in cold water as soon as possible,
there will be little chance of any stain, “Mrs. Bethany said. “And a ruined
handkerchief would be infinitely preferable to a student bleeding profusely in
the hallways.”

Obviously Mrs. Bethany knew better than to tempt the undead
half of the student body.

Skye thanked Mrs. Bethany and Lucas as Lucas returned her
books to her backpack and handed it over. Just as she was leaving, she cast a
curious glance at Lucas, maybe realizing that he’d hardly spoken a word since
he’d seen her skinned knee. But she said nothing about it as she went limping
back up toward her dorm room.

When Mrs. Bethany and Lucas were again alone, except for me,
she gave him a hard stare. “You found that difncult, didn’t you?”

Lucas just nodded. He couldn
‘ t
meet her eyes. I knew that shame had to be consuming him from the inside out.
He hated himself for craving blood, and being tempted to attack a human — especially
a human who had always been kind to him — would be unbearable.

“Take heart, Mr. Ross.” Mrs. Bethany put that familiar hand
on his shoulder again. “There is a way beyond your present difficulty.”

“What, is there a way to stop vampires from wanting blood?”
he scoffed.

“
‘ Yes
.”

He stared at her in blank surprise, at least so far as I
could tell; I was too astonished to notice anything but my own shock.

Wanting blood — that was what made a vampire a vampire. Besides,
Evernight Academy was almost wholly made up of vampires who didn’t 151 attack
humans; wouldn’t they teach this kind of thing instead of driver’s ed!?

At Lucas’s stunned response, Mrs. Bethany smiled thinly. Her
fingers tightened on his shoulder. “A way to silence the bloodlust forever,”
she murmured. “It’s real. And it’s going to be mine. “

Lucas was utterly still, staring up at her raptly. “Teach
me,” he said.

“When you’re ready.” She turned to go, but said, as she
began to walk upstairs with her long skirts in her hands, “I think that will be
very soon.” When we were alone again, he whispered, “Is it real
?
Bianca, can she be telling the truth?”

“I don’t know.”

The rest of the day passed in a weird sort of blur for me.
My anxiety about Mrs. Bethany’s increasing hold on Lucas kept me from focusing
properly on anything, including the task at hand. But as night fell and Lucas
and my friends went to bed, I forced myself to get it together.

If I failed tonight, I would never have the courage to stand
up to the wraiths again. And that meant I might never be able to control my own
destiny.

I concentrated on an object that had been meaningful to me
during my life — a potential “subway stop” I could travel to at any time. This
would be tricky, though; this object hadn’t belonged to me. It was owned by
someone else. Someone who maybe never wanted to see me again — but she was
about to.

I filled my mind with the image, willing myself to see it,
to be one with it: a braided, tawny leather bracelet.

Evernight Academy vanished. Everything around me went dark.
As I looked around, I could see a few points of illumination — strips of lights
through Venetian blinds, revealing the garish neon of a cheap hotel’s sign and
blocky numerals on a digital alarm clock.

To my relief, this was a private room instead of a full
Black Cross lair. I’d suspected as much, but all the same, it was better to
know for sure. I decided the room needed another light source and turned up my
own glow, filling the room with soft blue light that outlined my spectral form.
Now I could see the hotel bed, and the two figures who slept there.

One of them shifted beneath the covers, then sat bolt
upright. She blinked once, then said, “Bianca?”

I smiled. “Hey, Raquel.”

RAQUEL STARED AT ME, HER SHORT BLACK HAIR rumpled and her
eyes wide. “Am I dreaming?” she whispered. “No,” I said.

She punched at the other person sleeping in the bed — her
girlfriend, Dana, who sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. “What is it, babe
?
”

I brightened a little more, daring to take firmer shape.
“Hey, Dana.”

Dana did a double take that, under other circumstances,
would’ve been funny.

“Are you here to haunt me
?
” Raquel
asked. She had scooted backward, against the headboard of the bed, like she
wanted to get away. One of her crazy — quilt montages had been pinned to the
wall, a collection of magazine snippets and found objects that Raquelliked to
turn into art. “I knew it.”

“What? No.” Then I realized why Raquellooked so scared and
guilty; she thought I remained angry about her having turned me in to Black
Cross.

Which I was, a little bit. I hadn’t quite realized that
until I saw her again, without any horde of Black Cross fighters to get in the
way. Dana interrupted, “How’s Lucas doing? In Riverton, he didn’t look good.”

“He’s having a hard time.” That was totally inadequate for
what Lucas was going through, but I didn’t know what else to say.

Dana slumped, as if crushed. She and Lucas had grown up
together — and she also had been indoctrinated by Black Cross, to the point
where she would consider vampirism the worst possible fate. Maybe she was the
only person who could fully comprehend the depth of Lucas’s self — loathing
now. Then her eyes fixed on mine, flashing with anger. “How come you didn’t
behead him?”

As horrible as that was to contemplate, I’d considered it
difficult enough to know my answer: “Because I’d been a vampire myself. I knew
it wasn’t always the worst thing. I thought maybe he could handle it, and maybe
he can.”

“You were never anything but a vampire,” Dana shot back.
Raquel watched us argue with wide eyes, as if afraid to remind either of us she
was there. “How do you know what’s the worst thing? I know for damn sure that
if I got changed, I’d want somebody to make sure I never woke up undead. It’s
the most sacred promise we make to ourselves. Lucas and I promised each other
that a thousand times.” She was breathing hard, her 153 outrage growing. “If
you loved him, you’d have done that for him.”

It was a slap in the face, even though I knew Lucas had
forgiven me for it. “It’s easy to make promises. But if you had been there — if
you’d seen Lucas lying there dead, and knew that you could either lose him
forever or talk to him again in just a couple of hours — it’s not that easy
anymore.” Once again, I wished it was possible for wraiths to cry; it hurt to
carry such a sad memory and have no way to vent my grief. “As difficult as this
is for him, he has his friends. He has me. Is that honestly worse than never
having anything else, ever again?”

Dana sat in silence for a few seconds. “I don’t know,” she
finally admitted. “But what I say goes, okay, babe
?
”
Her eyes met Raquel’s. “If I get changed into a vampire, you make sure I never,
ever see the sunrise.”

“I promise.” Raquel’s voice was so quiet, so sure, that her
love for Dana filled the room. If Lucas and I had ever talked about this — if I
had made him that promise — could I have been strong enough to let him go? As
strong
as Raquel? I wasn’t sure.

For a few long moments, Raquel and Dana looked only at each
other, and Raquel held Dana’s hand tight. But then Dana turned back to me. “Is
that what you came to talk about? Lucas
?
’ Her tone
softened slightly. “Does he need to speak to me
?
Because .
..
if
you need me to
sneak into that crazy vampire school for him, I’ll do it.”

Raquel blurted out
, ;;
What are you
guys doing back at Evernight Academy? Are you nuts?” Then she shrank back
again, still afraid of me.

“It’s working out, sort of. Mrs. Bethany wasn’t even angry.
It’s like she hates Black Cross so much that — she enjoys having taken Lucas
from them.” I hadn’t realized that until now, but I didn’t doubt that was part
of her reaction. “Anyway, I wouldn’t suggest showing up there as a Black Cross
hunter. But there’s another Riverton trip coming up fairly soon.
Unless …
would Black Cross come after him again, if he
leaves campus?”

“Next time Mrs. Bethany’s going to have people there waiting
for them,” Dana said, shaking her head. “Black Cross knows that. If they ever
run 154 into Lucas again, they’ll turn on him in an instant, but they wouldn’t
target Riverton after failing there the first time.”

“Then that works. Maybe you could come to Riverton again,
Dana. Lucas —
!
think he thinks you wouldn’t want to
see him.”

“That boy never did have any sense.” Dana’s scowl told me
that she loved Lucas as much as ever. ;’Name the day. We’ll get there.”

I took in our surroundings for the first time — a cheap but
comfortable hotel room, with enough clutter around to show that they’d been
here for a while. Saving up money for private accommodations was impossible in
Black Cross, where any money was supposed to belong to the group rather than
the individual. “So, you guys really did it. You left Black Cross for good.”