Creature Discomforts (Descendants) (8 page)

Willem. It was Willem.

Rachel spun to face the vampire and grimaced. She’d made out with
him
? Rachel nearly dropped her dagger in surprise. Willem stood at the front of four big vamps that looked related to Bitey No. 1. They flexed their fists and bared their fangs, but it was Willem who really turned Rachel’s stomach.

He smiled past ruby red lips—and holy hell, Rachel squinted and looked closer and could swear he was wearing lip liner. Even worse, his dark hair hung in limp hanks from a thinning center part and he wore a black velvet shirt unbuttoned nearly to his stomach. Rachel shivered and pulled a face.

“Yes,” Willem purred. “You should be terrified. You finally behold me in all my glory.” He held both arms out wide, and a silver thumb ring glinted in the diffused light. This guy totally had some silk leopard print sheets hiding somewhere around here in his cave linen closet.

“Yeah, no,” Rachel countered. “Glory isn’t the word I’d use for a guy wearing a thumb ring.”

Willem snapped his fangs and growled.

“Look,” Rachel said before she had to hear more from this
ren fair reject. “I’ve got some hangover rage going, and the only thing I want to murder right now is a plate of greasy fries. So we’re going to go, and you’re going to let us, or I’ll be happy to stake every one of you.”

Behind Willem, his four
vampcakes spread out, lips twitching in snarls. The first tendrils of fear bloomed inside Rachel and spread out through her limbs. Apparently she wasn’t going to talk herself out of this one. She backed up until her shoulder bumped Beth Ann’s cage. The girl scrambled forward and grabbed Rachel around the neck.

“Don’t leave me!” She screamed into Rachel’s ear. For being such a tiny girl, she had one hell of a grip. “Don’t leave me with them!”

“Beth Ann! Let. Go.”

“No,” Beth Ann screeched.

Eyes still on the vampires closing in, Rachel clamped her dagger between her teeth and pried Beth Ann away. She slid her eyes away from the vamps for one single moment to look at Beth Ann—who was now sobbing uncontrollably—and the demons attacked.

Rachel slashed and stabbed and kicked. But the minute she had one vampire pushed away with a new wound, another rushed her. Claws raked down her arms, and one of them grabbed a bundle of her hair and left her with a bloody scalp. Sweat dripped into her eyes and trailed down her back, but the beasts didn’t even seem to be breathing hard. They rushed and ebbed like some terrible tide, and Rachel found herself stumbling over the rocks, throwing her kicks wide. She got a good stab at the gross couch, but it didn’t die.

Finally, her aim was true and she staked one of the henchmen straight through the heart. The demon fell back with the force of the blow, and her little stake was wrenched from her hand. The demon hit the ground and burst in a flood of ichor, the stake lost in the mess of black blood.

Willem and his three remaining vampires circled and pushed Rachel back until her feet twisted in soft fabrics and she fell onto the pile of blood-crusted clothes. Willem loomed over her, his lips drawn across his fangs in a horrible smile. Rachel swallowed down the acid creeping up her throat and tried scrambling to her feet, but Willem pushed her back with a steel-toed boot. She landed hard on her elbows, and her fingers snagged on the pocket of a pair of discarded jeans. Something sharp jabbed the pad of her index finger, but the rest of her hand had closed around the contents of the pocket—around what was unmistakably a handful of sharpened pencils. Wooden pencils. Rachel sent up a silent thank you to the unfortunate girl who had tried in vain to defend herself and gripped the weapons.

“I know what you are,” Willem said, his voice quiet and menacing. “I can only imagine the power you’ll bestow upon me.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rachel lied. Things wouldn’t go easy for her if he knew she was a Descendant. There’d be no quick death.

“I can smell your fear,” Willem said, his nostrils flaring. “It’s tangy.”

Rachel rolled her eyes for affect and nodded at the vampire over Willem’s shoulder. “Maybe you’re smelling your buddy there.”

Willem stepped closer, a sneer playing on his face that made his black eyes shine. She could see it now, the otherness. He was old, this vampire, he was not as stupid as the others. His eyes were so black they had blotted out the whites until it looked like she was staring not into eyes but into pits. Rachel didn’t remember anything in the Corpus saying the whites would be swallowed as well. The strangeness of it all shook her. The blooming fear took root in her core and made her fingers tremble. Rachel clenched her left hand over the familiar hilt of her long, silver dagger and the right around the bunch of sharpened pencils. She needed to fight, not just these vampires but her own fear.

Willem blinked slowly, lazily. “You know,” he drawled. “It’s always the plainest girls so eager to believe my lies of their beauty. Despite who you are, you’re no different from the others. A little mouse
who wants to be a bird. You’re so easy to lure.”

“Hey,” Beth Ann snapped suddenly from her cage. “I’m not a mouse, you shithead.”

Willem shrugged and nodded at Beth Ann. “True. You were convenient. That boy will come after you, then I’ll have two of their kind”—and he hitched a thumb toward Rachel, forgotten for the moment in the pile of discarded mouse clothes—“to add to my collection.”

His what now?

“Your collection?” Rachel couldn’t help but ask.

“The power I’ll draw from you feeds a greater evil,” he said. “A beast of old you can’t comprehend.”

“And the other girls? Were they added to your collection as well?” Keep him talking, that’s what Rachel needed to do. She needed to buy time to figure a way out of this mess.

Willem smiled again, and his black eyes shone in the twilit cave. “Oh no, those were just for fun.
And food, of course. My new little nest needs to grow strong, after all.”

Rachel clutched the pencils so hard the edges bit into her palm. “Why girls then? Vampires feed on men, too. If you recognize what I am, then surely you’re aware of how much I know about your kind.”

“It’s the game,” Willem said. “The chase is nearly as fun as the kill.” He waved his hand as if to wipe away the memory of it all. “But enough of that. Now I have you two.” Willem strolled to Beth Ann’s cage and left his three vampires to guard Rachel as he opened the door and dragged Beth Ann out. She squirmed in his grasp, but it only made him smile wider. Willem turned to face Rachel, Beth Ann pinned to his side. “Your deaths will be slow and painful, and I think I’ll start with your friend here.”

Rachel snorted. “Go for it. She’s a pain in my ass.”

Beth Ann’s mouth dropped open, and Willem frowned then shrugged. But at that moment, Rachel sprang. She lunged straight for the closest vampire and jammed the whole bundle of pencils into his heart at the same second an earth-trembling roar rolled down the tunnel from the cave entrance.

The cave exploded into chaos. Willem dropped Beth Ann to round on the new sound, and Rachel snatched her away and pushed the girl behind her. Willem screeched at his two remaining vampires, something about taking care of someone already. The vampires stared at each other, stumbling over excuses until they both loudly started blaming the dead guys.

And then Sid burst into the cavern, a troll right behind him. Beth Ann screamed and took off, and even in the shouts and fighting her shrieks echoed all the way down the entrance tunnel. Rachel whipped back toward the action only to catch Willem darting away down the darker tunnel. Coward. Sid dispatched one of the vampires with a quick stake through the heart. The troll—all ten feet of him—swatted the head off the final vampire like an apple falling off the end of a stick.

It was all over in a matter of seconds, and Rachel was left facing a grinning Sid and a troll baring every one of his fist-sized teeth in what she assumed was a smile. Trolls were classed as a threat in the Corpus, but this one didn’t seem too threatening, at least not to her. The beast’s head appeared to have been plopped directly onto its shoulders without any need for a neck, and its skin was the color and texture of a plucked goose. It wore rough, hand-sewn pants and a patchwork tunic of hides.

Rachel looked past the troll to Sid. “The leader got away,” she said, pointing down the dark passageway. “We should track him.”

It wasn’t Sid who answered, but the troll. It lifted one beefy hand in hello. “I’ll take care of it,” the troll said. Its low voice rumbled through Rachel’s bones. “Name’s Bernard, by the way.”

“Your name’s Bernard?” Rachel asked. Of all the absurdity she’d witnessed in the past hour, that seemed the strangest.

“Yeah,” Sid confirmed. “And this was Bernie’s home until those vampires kicked him out.”

Rachel peered around the cavern and pushed at the creaking, rusty cages. “This is your home? Are these your cages?”

Bernard shrugged. “Antiques. It’s been generations since my family has eaten humans. I’m on a full deer diet.”

“Dear, tender college girls?”

Bernard rolled his mossy green eyes and spread his hands behind his ears. “The kind with antlers. Anyway, thanks for the help. I inherit the place and lose it to vampires within fifty years. My dad, rest his soul, would not be proud.”

“Right,” Rachel said. Really, what does one say to a troll? “Um, happy we could help.”

Bernard waved a plate-sized hand her way. “Happy to finally meet Daphne’s daughter. I’ve heard a lot about you over the years.”

Rachel squirmed at that. She’d never heard Daphne talk about a troll, let alone a troll named Bernard. It was Sid who spoke up. “Well, Bernie, we should get back. We’ve got one freaked out girl out there.”

Rachel raised her eyebrows. “One in here too.”

*

Rachel had been right about the cave entrance being right around a bend in the tunnel. It was a narrow exit, and short enough that Bernard had to stoop to get out. Rachel blinked in the sunlight after so long in the dark and held up a hand to shade her eyes as she followed Bernard down a narrow, steep path winding through a gray-rocked gorge. The ground was crumbly and soft underfoot, and Rachel’s head pounded with each stumbling step.

They clambered over a boulder blocking the entrance to the gorge, and Rachel shuddered with relief to see Kendra waiting for them in the middle of a bright clearing, a loaded crossbow in her hands and the old pick-up at her back. Her friend squealed and immediately dropped the crossbow, setting it off with a click and a thrum. An arrow shot toward them, ricocheted off the rock right near Bernard’s head, and careened off into the thick pines.

“Sorry!” Kendra squeaked.

Kendra picked the crossbow up and held it at arms’ length. Behind her, Beth Ann sat like a stone statue in the passenger seat with a pageant smile frozen on her face. Rachel frowned at that and turned back to Bernard and Sid.

“Bernard,” Rachel said. “Have you noticed anything strange lately?” She recalled Willem’s eyes, and the way he spoke of a greater evil.

Bernard shuffled his feet. “Your mom and I just talked about this. There have been more vampires in the area, and that mess with the wendigos.”

“Have you heard the term ‘greater evil’?”

Bernard cocked his head to the side, thinking. Next to him, Sid mirrored the motions. “No,” they both admitted. Rachel’s shoulders drooped a bit. It felt important somehow. She just didn’t know how.

They said their goodbyes with a promise to be in touch if they heard anything new. Bernard even pulled out a cell phone and punched in Sid’s number with a sharpened stick acting as a stylus.

Then aching and tired and still horrendously hungover, Rachel crawled into the truck next to Sid and leaned her forehead against the cool glass. Beth Ann didn’t say a word, though she still had that desperate smile pulling at her lips.

Sid patted Rachel’s knee, but they were all jammed so close in the truck she had nowhere to pull away. “You have a wooden face,” he said. When Rachel didn’t agree he repeated it in French: “
Vous avez une gueule de bois
,” he said. “It means you look hungover.”

“Wow,” Rachel groaned. “Thanks.”

Sid slipped Rachel a silver flask engraved with the letters S L M, and she took a tiny, burning sip of whiskey. It actually helped a bit as they bumped and jostled down the long-forgotten roads out of the mountains and back to Saint Etienne, but she still wanted those fries.

Heat crawled up Rachel’s neck and spread across her cheeks. She pressed the back of her hand to her face, but it did little to cool her skin. All around, heads bent over test booklets and the rasp of pencils on paper scratched at Rachel’s ears, yet her No. 2 remained still. She stared at the test question and read it back to herself for what felt like the hundredth time, but the words meant nothing.

It was Willem. She couldn’t get the whole encounter with him out of her mind. It was a horrible combination of humiliation and confusion. It had been nearly a week since the peculiar vampire had escaped into the tunnels, yet the questions around him lingered: What was this greater evil, this beast of old? And what did it have to do with Willem’s collection?

Even worse, every time she and Sid had tried to make any sense of it all, Sid had very carefully not breathed a word of
how
Rachel had come to be locked in the cage of a tacky vampire with a love of velvet. That was even worse than him teasing. To think that he was so embarrassed for Rachel made her skin crawl and her stomach churn.

Rachel closed her eyes and silently listed every capital of Western Europe. Then she refocused on her biological anthropology final exam and started writing.

An hour later, she found Sid and Kendra laying in the shade of an old oak at the edge of a courtyard. Rachel dropped her bag and collapsed to the grass, throwing an arm over her head. She was done. Her first year of college was done. Her insides coiled with both relief and trepidation.

“Finals went well?” Sid asked, all sweetness and light.

Rachel peered at him from under her arm. She wished he’d start teasing again. This new softhearted Sid had her on edge.

Next to Sid, Kendra looked up from a musty old book open on her lap and toed at Rachel’s elbow. “Heard from Daphne yet?”

Rachel had called her mom as soon as they got back to Saint Etienne and told her of the encounter with Willem—glossing over the whole “your daughter got crazy drunk and made out with a vampire” thing—and Daphne had rushed off the phone after learning of the greater evil and beast of old Willem had gone on about.

The thing was, so far they’d found nothing in any texts detailing a specific demon using those terms. Demons, the most dangerous ones anyway, weren’t exactly modest. None proclaimed themselves middling or passable. It was always “most terrifying” this and “supreme demon” that.

“Not a word from Mom yet,” Rachel said. “Anything in that histoire?”

Kendra shut the book, dropped it next to the Corpus, and stretched out on the grass between Rachel and Sid. “Well, I found an account of a water gremlin who called itself the great
est
evil, but it was bagged by an eight year old girl in 1872.”

Rachel rolled over in the grass and picked absently at a blade. Her brain felt a bit like an empty teacup with just the dregs left clinging to the bottom. “So freshman year,” she said, her eyes still focused on the verdant lawn rolling out under her and across the yard to a fountain. A group of girls sat around the edge with their feet in the water.

“You’ve handled it well, Rachel,” Sid said. He looked over Kendra to Rachel and smiled. Not a smirk or a grin but a smile. “My first year at uni I failed a class after I missed the final exam chasing a shapeshifter through London. I could have used someone like you to help me juggle it all.”

Rachel dropped the blade of grass and pushed herself up to sit and stare at Sid. “Okay, that’s it. Why are you being so nice? Is it because of Willem? Because I was stupid enough to get caught by the world’s lamest vampire?”

Sid scrunched up his face. “Do you want me to be
mean
to you?”

Rachel threw her hands up. “I want you to be you! You should be giving me a hard time about it! I could have gotten us all killed, including that girlfriend of yours. But you’re just being so … so nice.”

“She’s not my girlfriend anymore,” Sid said quietly.

Rachel’s heart kicked over in her chest. She peered at Sid, but his eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses, and his face was very calm. Was he broken up about it? Relieved? And even worse, what had changed to make Rachel care so much? She
shrugged, hoping neither Sid nor Kendra noticed the spots of color burning in her cheeks.

“Either way,” she said. “People could have been hurt, and it’s my fault.”

Sid sighed loudly. “That’s the job. We put others in danger, but we save a lot of people too.”

Rachel laughed darkly. “Yeah, except for those six girls who disappeared from the very college we attend.”

Sid looked away over the courtyard, but Kendra rolled onto her side and grabbed Rachel’s hand. “You saved me,” she said. “You didn’t think twice before going after me when those sirens had me cornered last October. And you saved Beth Ann. You can’t keep a running tally of all the people you hurt or help or you’ll go nuts.”

Rachel slumped back down to the grass, suddenly exhausted. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Beside her, the grass rustled as Kendra and Sid stretched out under the dappled shade of the giant oak. “I’ve been overwhelmed trying to keep everything straight. I think I’ve been a bit of a shit to both of you these last couple months.”

Kendra’s hand covered her own and squeezed. “It’s okay,” her friend said. “At least you’re not Beth Ann.”

“Speaking of,” Sid muttered.

A shadow fell over them accompanied by an annoyed “mh-hm.” All three pushed to their elbows to face Beth Ann. Her face was tight, her shoulders straight, and Rachel was pretty sure she was glaring behind her giant sunglasses.

“We were just talking about you!” Kendra chirped with a big smile.

“I’m sure,” Beth Ann said. She crossed her arms over her pale pink button down and nodded toward the Corpus near Kendra’s hand. “Conspiring about drugging another good girl?”

Sid sighed like a man who had the weight of the world on his shoulders. “What are you talking about, Beth Ann?”

“That horrible book!” Beth Ann was losing her careful poise, and she started tapping one cotton candy nail against her arm. “You think I haven’t noticed you three bent over that thing? It’s probably a manual for drugs or something.”

“Yes, Beth Ann,” Rachel said. “That’s it. You’ve got us. We’re meth dealers.”

“Don’t mock me, Rachel Chase. You had to have drugged me. There’s no other explanation for all those … those
horrible
things I saw.”

Rachel balled her hands up in the grass, ripping blades from the soft ground. “I saved your ungrateful ass.”

Beth Ann’s nail was tapping faster now. She pursed her strawberry lips together in a way that drew her face inward and made her look quite mousy. Then everything relaxed. Her features settled into their normal prettiness, and she smoothed her hands down her sleek hair and crisp shirt.

“My mother always told me to meet bad manners with a smile,” Beth Ann said before smiling sweetly at the three of them. Her smile dropped as quickly as it’d appeared. “She also told me not to have anything to do with bad people, and you three are bad people. I’m going to pretend I never met any of you.”

“So why are you still talking to us?” Sid snapped. Rachel nearly cheered for him.

Beth Ann’s mouth compressed to a slit and her face drained of color. She puffed up like a marshmallow ready to explode for one horrifying second, then turned on her heel and stalked off.

Beth Ann disappeared down a walkway, and Sid collapsed to his back. “I’m so happy that’s over,” he sighed. “She was way more work than expected. Are all American girls so difficult?”

Kendra reached over Rachel to poke him in the ribs. “Hello?” She pointed to herself then Rachel before poking Sid again, who yelped and scooted out of the way. “Obviously not.”

She lunged for him, ready to strike again, when Sid’s phone beeped and he scrambled to his feet, laughing and jumping away from Kendra. He flicked a finger across the screen, and Rachel watched as his smile fell and his forehead contracted into worry. He dropped to his heels in front of Rachel and held his phone out for her to see.

The screen showed two words from Bernard: “Willem. Help.”