Three times a lady, p.25
Mere Mortals, page 25
Soon, we had a kind of miniature, makeshift fence reaching from either side of the tunnel opening but not quite meeting in the middle. It was a short fence, no higher than our shins, and there was no gate, but something about those little white stakes sticking out of the ground like fangs gave me the same shudder as when I’d first seen them surrounding the cottage, and I had a feeling in my gut that this just might work.
I was shoving my last stake into the ground when Poe and the twins ran up, panting and disheveled.
“You’re okay!” Sydney cried, dropping to her knees beside me and throwing her arms around my neck.
“What’s your uncle doing?” Poe asked.
At the other end of the tunnel opening, Sal was gripping each stake, one at a time, head bent low and muttering some kind of chant.
“I’ll catch you up later,” I said, standing. “Right now, I need your help. I need you to round everyone up—get them to come this way, back toward the gym.”
Poe gaped at me. “But we’ll be trapped. The gym doors—”
“Just do it!” I cried.
The twins moved in unison, racing back into the melee and dragging Poe along with them.
“And find Reg!” I hollered at their backs.
Sal wrapped his hands around the last two stakes, muttered his enchantment, and then sat back on his knees. “That’s it, then.”
And it really was it. Because either this was how we won, or this was the most colossal mistake I’d made yet. One way or another, the night was about to end.
“If this works, there are going to be a lot of pissed-off vampires,” Sal said.
“At least they won’t be dead vampires.”
“The girl I met just a couple of months ago would have said passing through my fence was a death sentence.”
I put my hands on my hips and looked out toward the field. A crowd was gathering under Sydney and Sophia’s command. I blew a stray hair out of my face. “That girl sounds kind of awful.”
He stood up, brushing the dirt of his hands. “Eh. She’s not so bad.”
“Don’t go soft now, old man. If this doesn’t work, we’ve just drawn targets on our backs.”
“Guess we’re about to find out,” he said.
The swarm of people was surging toward us, a single amorphous entity, backlit by the stadium lights. I had never been more impressed by the influence of the Carlone twins, the true queen bees of Hope High.
We stepped aside as the first tendrils of that swarm sprinted into the tunnel, racing toward the gym. As quick and as confidently as people were moving, I could only imagine Sydney and Sophia had told them the gym’s front doors were open. I hoped they would forgive the lie if this plan panned out.
And if it didn’t . . . well, I guess they wouldn’t remember anyway.
“Stay to the middle!” I shouted, pointing out the fence stakes, so people wouldn’t trip. “Get to the gym! It’ll be safe inside!”
Most folks ran through the gap Sal and I had left in the fence, while a few jumped right over the stakes. More than a dozen humans had passed by before the first vampire crossed the line. It was an Elder, vaguely familiar from the council gathering, and I held my breath as he sailed over the fence, just above the gap . . . and immediately crumpled to the ground.
Another vamp passed through and dropped next to the first.
Then another.
And another.
My human heart pounded as I watched them fall.
They writhed on the ground, clutching their chests and gasping for breath. A breeze rustled the grass around them, the force of Sal’s slayer magic. I remembered the power of that little personal tornado from the first night I’d stepped through the cottage gate.
“It’s working!” I cried actual tears of relief. “Sal, it’s working!”
Laughing through my ridiculous human tears, I slammed into Sal with a hug that nearly knocked him off his feet—as much from surprise as from the force of it.
One more vampire, on the heels of her human prey, hit the ground.
Two more.
Three more.
The humans flowed around the growing pile of vampires, few even stopping to register what was happening. I gasped as one desperate man climbed right over the top of an Elder, his boot leaving a muddy footprint on the chest of the Elder’s black shirt.
The crowd was more stretched out now, arriving at our fence in pairs or even individually. Soon, Poe was barreling toward us, and running next to him . . .
“Reg!” I grabbed my brother into a bear hug as he entered the tunnel. I had given out more hugs in the last hour than I had in the entire last century.
“Sydney and Sophia said to come back to the gym,” Reg said. “Did you get the other doors open?”
His gaze slid down to the tiny fence posts and around to the dozen or so vampires—former vampires—rolling on the grassy tunnel floor. Then his eyes widened in understanding.
“Here come Syd and Soph!” Poe shouted.
He waved down the twins as they approached, and we were all so happy to have our group back together again that we didn’t even notice Lina running up right behind them.
She was keeping pace with the twins, to cover their backs, so she wasn’t moving at immortal speed, but she was still fast, and by the time I looked up, it was too late. My scream of warning would not be enough to stop her.
She was just inches from the edge of the fence when an arm shot out in front of her.
A flannel-clad, rough-handed, stubborn old arm that caught her right around the waist, and flung her back toward the field.
Lina landed like a cat and skidded around in a crouched position, ready to strike. When she saw the arm that had cast her backward belonged to Sal, she looked downright murderous. But then her eyes drifted left and snagged on the fence posts. She looked back at Sal. Back at the fence posts.
Then she stood, charged right up to Sal, and planted a kiss on him.
I looked away, partly to give them privacy and partly because, whether human or vampire, grown-ups kissing was just universally yuck.
“Why did you do that?” Lina asked Sal.
He rolled his shoulders, face beet red.
“It just oughta be your choice,” he said. “And if you think—”
But whatever he was going to say next was smothered by another kiss from Lina.
A new group of humans hit the tunnel, but this time, the vampires chasing them pulled up short. They looked at us, recognizing Adelina the Ancient, Salvador the Slayer, and me and Reg, the two former immortals who were supposed to be the planners of this party. I watched the questions surface on their faces as they noticed the former vampires behind us, now sitting up with slow, clumsy movements, their chests heaving with deep human breaths.
The immortals hovering just outside the tunnel began to slowly back up, even as another vampire sped our way, a blur of movement I could barely make out until he froze, instantly, as if suspended in midair.
Adante.
His feet were still on the grass, but his body was half arched over the fence posts, eyes locked on them in suspicion. Inch by inch, he pulled back, as realization dawned. The other vampires had halted their retreat with Adante’s arrival, and they watched the scene now with a mix of curiosity and fear. But Adante’s face was pure murder. He raked his gaze from the stakes to Sal to Lina and, finally, to me.
“You betrayed us,” he snarled.
“I believe it was you who put us on this side of the fence.” I lifted my chin, even though my heart was hammering.
“As punishment for a crime!” Adante was spitting, fangs bared. “What you’ve done to your kin is—”
“You want them?” I stepped to the side, offering him a clear path to the pile of former vampires. “Come and get them.”
He did not even spare them a glance. “How dare you?!”
But the rage he felt was clearly not for them. It was for himself—at having been outplayed. He hissed, tongue darting through his fangs, and for a moment, it looked like he might risk crossing the fence just to rip out my throat.
But then he carefully reorganized his features, dabbed away the blood at the corners of his mouth and tugged on the ends of his sleeves. With effort, he turned his stare away from me to address Lina.
“Adelina,” he said, voice strained. “At your convenience, the Elder Seat requests a word.”
She nodded once in response, and I saw Sal’s shoulders tense.
Composed now, Adante gestured to the vampires behind him, waving for them to leave. With grateful faces, they turned and ran. Adante followed, and soon, all the remaining vampires were doing the same.
One by one, they disappeared into the shadows of the night, until only mortals remained under the sun-bright glare of the Hope High stadium lights.
Thirty-Eight
Déjà Vampire
It took only a few minutes for word of the vampires’ departure to spread, and Nowhere shifted quickly into a new mode. Incredibly, very few people ran away. Instead, they worked together to smash open the barricaded gym doors and to locate fallen friends and family.
The people of Nowhere were heroes, no more, no less, and as I watched them help one another, I knew I had made the right choice. Still, in the quiet aftermath of the attack, I felt the stinging sensation of loss. We had one chance to reclaim our immortal lives, and we had thrown it to the wind for this tiny town. Charlotte Drake, House of Drake, Clan of Bone, thought Charlie Smith of Nowhere, Iowa, was a fool.
Reg and I wound our way through the gym and field, letting everyone know that the coma victims would wake when the vampire venom wore off. Out in front of the school, we found the people who had not made it inside the gym. Their prone forms were scattered on the lawn and in the street, surrounded by overturned chairs and abandoned food carts, as a dozen or so pug puppies scampered this way and that.
We helped Poe load his sleeping parents into a car while Sydney and Sophia searched for their own mom and dad. The people of Nowhere seemed as unrattled in the aftermath as they had been in battle. I knew the town had ancient history, but it was clear now that it had more recent history as well.
Back in the open-air tunnel, we found Sal and Lina tending to the group of new mortals.
One of the former vamps raised a shaky finger to point at me and hiss, “You chose the wrong side.”
But in the end, I hadn’t chosen a side at all. I’d managed to protect the village and stop immortal lives from going up in smoke. For once, the only side I didn’t choose was my own.
“Better human than dead,” I said.
He sneered. “Debatable.”
As Reg and I circled the group, another new human—formerly an Elder—kept touching his fingers to his wrist, then to his throat, and back again, feeling the pulse of his own blood flowing for the first time in centuries. His eyes were wide with wonder.
I winked down at him. “You get used to it.”
Reg surveyed the lot.
“Do you think they’re all coming back to the cottage, then?” he asked.
“Ugh, I hope not.” I pointed to a skinny former vampire who looked close to our age. Pimples were already sprouting on his face, and his hair was taking on a greasy sheen. “I am so not sharing a bathroom with that guy.”
Hours later, Reg and I dragged our tired human bodies home, down the dark, tree-lined streets of Nowhere, through the fields yawning open under a starry sky, and back to the cottage, where Sal was waiting for us.
He was furiously scribbling in a notepad and barely glanced up.
“You two get your friends off all right? They all find their parents?”
“Everyone’s accounted for,” Reg confirmed.
“Where’s Lina?” I asked.
Sal’s pen paused. “Still with the council.”
“Did we get her in trouble?”
“Not any trouble she didn’t dive into willingly. I wouldn’t worry.” His mouth twitched. “That woman can handle herself.”
We collapsed into the closest kitchen chairs, and I might have fallen asleep right there at the table, if I hadn’t been curious about Sal’s scribbles. “What are you doing?”
“Cover stories for our newly human friends. I’ve called in some favors to put them up for a few nights, but that won’t last, and I don’t have room for them here. I need to get them acclimated, ID’d, and on their way pretty quick.”
I grimaced. “Sorry about that.”
Sal’s head snapped up, and he jabbed his pen in my direction. “Don’t you ever say sorry for what you did tonight.”
A firework of pride exploded in my chest, but I only nodded.
“Sal,” Reg leaned forward, weary. “The town, the people . . . so many of them tonight were . . .”
“Unfazed?” Sal offered.
“Alarmingly so.”
Sal pushed his pen and pad to the side.
“I’ve been wondering about that too.”
“A boy from the AV club called tonight ‘another’ vampire attack,” I said. “And Lina told Dex’s dad he’s done this before.”
“He likely has,” Sal said. “Bunch of ’em have. But what I can’t figure is how they almost seem to remember things.”
“Remember what things?!”
“The Elders have been meddling in the matters of this town for centuries.” Sal waved a hand as if this should be no surprise. “I told you how they own most of it. You think they managed that without interacting with the humans?”
“Dexter’s family farm,” I said. “Dex said his dad almost sold it a couple of times but couldn’t do it. When he finally sold to Morgana, it was a big shock.”
Sal pointed a finger. “Bingo. My guess is those first deals fell through with the help of a little mind manipulation. Who knows how many encounters your boyfriend’s dad has had with the Elders and their brain poison?”
I hated the idea of vampire venom coursing through the veins of my friends and their families, of ideas being planted into their minds. It was what we’d fought against tonight. And for what? Only to learn it was already happening anyway?
“‘It’s for the best, and we should all be grateful,’” I said.
“Excuse me?” Sal knit his thick brows together.
“It’s something Dex’s dad says a lot. About selling the farm. I wonder if those aren’t his words.”
“Probably not. How do you think they keep this place small? Chasing away developers and whispering in people’s ears that their ideas are too grand and they should just give up. One vamp who came through here was fit to be tied about his mortal punishment, and he spilled his guts about all kinds of things. Told me the Elders regularly attend town chamber meetings with their fangs out, poisoning everyone with their venom and wiping out deals. He said one time they even crashed a groundbreaking event to stop a strip mall from being built. Maybe your AV friend was there. Or maybe at some other event that got attacked and erased from everyone’s minds.”
“The movie theater,” I said. “Downtown. There was a fire on opening night. And now the council owns it. Do you think they started it?”
“Hell,” Sal snapped his fingers. “Maybe there wasn’t even a fire at all, and they just planted that thought in everyone’s head.”
I gasped. “You think?”
“Who knows? I knew they were interfering, but I didn’t really guess the extent of it until I saw how many people tonight seemed to be having déjà vu.”
“That’s not how the fade is supposed to be used,” Reg said in disapproval. “It is always to be for the benefit of the recipient—to protect them from the trauma of memory—not for our personal gain.”
“What about Dex?” I asked. “And Poe? They were unfazed too.” I swung my gaze over to Reg. “Or ‘unflummoxed,’ Poe said.”
Reg gave a soft, sad smile in response. “Sounds like him.”
Sal shrugged. “Probably a case of wrong place, wrong time. Maybe saw something they shouldn’t have. But the real question,” he repeated, “is why do they seem to remember?”
Lina burst through the front door just then, a scatter of fall leaves around her feet, chased into the cottage by the wind she created with her speed.
“That is exactly what the Elder Seat wants to know.”
“How did you get past the gate?” Sal asked.
“What gate?”
“Oh yeah.”
They smiled at each other, and he pulled out a chair for her. I noticed that he also pulled it a little closer to him. I’d had a hard time before, picturing Lina living in this place, but the way she flung her scarf over a hook on the wall, helped herself to a cup of coffee, and sank into the seat next to Sal . . . she was right at home.
“I’ve been conferring with the Elders. Those who are left.”
“Are they mad?” I asked.
I knew it was a childish question, and the answer was so obviously yes, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking it.
“You may have inadvertently done them a favor, actually,” Lina said.
Reg and I exchanged quizzical looks.
“The council is disturbed by the number of humans who took tonight’s events in stride. They’re worried a migration will fail if the necessary memory work involved does not hold. It could present a serious risk of exposure for our kind.” She sipped her coffee and smiled. “I may have helped them to this wise conclusion.”
“No migration?” I asked, my heart lifting. “They won’t try again?”
“Not until they figure out why the fade isn’t working as it should here.”
“I’ll tell you why.” Sal dropped a fist onto the table with a thump. “Too much monkeying with their minds! Over and over again. At some point, the system breaks down. Like a screw stripped of its grooves, the brain zaps just aren’t holding anymore.”
“Interesting hypothesis,” Reg said. “Perhaps the people of Nowhere are building up an immunity to vampire venom.”
No, that wasn’t quite it. I doubted Dex and Poe or even all the adults had endured multiple memory fades. A few, maybe, but not all.
Lina set her mug down and spoke almost as if to herself, alone. “It could be their lineage.”
