Two other vampires leapt into the space between us, snarling.

  I didn’t have time to react. Carried through ash-filled air by momentum, I hurtled toward their clawed embrace, dragging my stakes up and hoping desperately that I could plunge them home—

  Then something solid grappled me from behind. I was pulled backward. My hair whipped out in front of me—

  “Lockwood!” I shouted.

  He was carrying me underneath my arms and my knees like a sleeping child, and we were hurtling away through the trees, through the woods behind the house, the vampires, the roaring fire and the destroyed house disappearing quickly behind us.

  “Nice aim, Miss Cassandra,” he said, smiling at me, his green eyes bright in the dark. “That little stunt surprised everyone. Even me.”

  “Where are Mill and Iona?” I asked.

  “Distracting them,” Lockwood said. “The other vampires were entirely too focused on what was happening between you and the Butcher. Lost interest in us rather quickly. Mill took your holy water trick as a chance to attack from the back. Iona followed. They should be here …”

  And as he said it, Mill and Iona appeared as blurs beside us.

  “I’ll take Cassie,” Mill said, and Lockwood passed me to him as we ran. “Iona will help you, Lockwood. Let’s run.”

  The trees rushed passed at a blur, the wind making my eyes water. But it was better than the sting of smoke from my burning house. So, too, was the cool air, filled with the scent of damp wood.

  Mill’s arms were tight around me, more comforting than he would ever know.

  I closed my eyes. The trees barreling toward me were too much.

  “Where should we go?” Mill asked. “Where is a place we could lay low that’s close?”

  “Gen’s house,” I said, pointing through the trees to the east. “Just on the other side of the road.”

  He turned on a dime and dashed off.

  I glanced over his shoulder. Bright, golden flames fanned out, lighting the night, consuming my past with unstoppable power.

  I closed my eyes again. I couldn’t bear to look at it for another second.

  Chapter 33

  We reached Genesee’s family’s property a few minutes later. It was downhill from my house, and as we stood out on their back porch, I could just see the smoke from the fire as it burned in the distance.

  It still didn’t seem real. I wasn’t sure if it ever really would.

  I knocked on the door, and to my immense relief, Genesee answered.

  “What in the world are you doing here?” she asked in a whisper, slipping out onto the porch, closing the door behind her. “And why are you all such a mess?”

  I pointed over my shoulder up at the house. Black, oily smoke was billowing up into the sky, visible against the twilight by the orange inferno lighting it from beneath.

  Her eyes nearly popped out of her skull.

  “Get in,” she said. “Go up to my room. Go quietly.”

  I waved the others behind me as I stepped over the threshold.

  Genesee’s house had been more comforting than my own some days. Any time my parents and I were arguing, really. It smelled like burning wood from their stove—no longer quite the welcome scent it had once been—but it also smelled of warm spices; cinnamon and nutmeg.

  Where my house was orderly and modern, Gen’s house was colors and fabrics, a happy hodge-podge of all sorts of furniture. Handmade tables, knitted blankets, couches covered in slipcovers, and lamps straight out of the eighties.

  I snuck Iona, Mill, and Lockwood through the kitchen to the stairs at the back of the house. The television was on in the living room; whoever was watching it was enjoying a baseball game. The cheers from the crowd carried through the house.

  We made our way up the carpeted stairs to the room at the end of the hall.

  Gen had the best room. Her large four-poster bed, covered in a green quilt her mother had made, stood against the back wall. Her window overlooked her front yard, which gradually sloped upward into the forest where my house lay.

  Fire danced behind the trees through the glass. I looked away.

  Lockwood closed the door behind us. His phone was pressed to his ear.

  “Hello, fire department?” he asked. “Yes. I would like to report a fire on Forestview Avenue. Yes. I was driving by and saw the smoke. I think it’s a house fire. Yes. Thank you very much.”

  I blinked at him. I hadn’t even thought about that …

  “That will keep the vampires away for a while …” he said, replacing his phone in his pocket. He located Gen’s desk chair and sat down in it, and I realized with concern that he was looking rather pale. “Plus, it will help give you the chance of possibly salvaging … something.”

  I sank onto Gen’s bed, head in my hands. “My parents are literally going to kill me now.”

  Consequences, I realized. I was finally seeing the consequences to all of my actions. Everything was coming full circle. I messed up, people got hurt.

  A vast, echoing emptiness filled my mind. The house wasn’t the worst of my problems.

  Mill and Iona hovered beside the window, gazing out into the darkening night. The moon hung near the horizon, just visible as a sliver through the trees. Stars were probably out. Outshone by the fire, though, I couldn’t see any of those twinkling specks.

  “Some place she has here,” Iona said, looking around at all of the knick knacks and collectibles. She lingered on a porcelain doll in traditional Native American garb.

  I couldn’t tell if she was being nasty, pensive, or it was her form of a compliment.

  Gen’s door opened, and my stomach lurched painfully until I saw Gen squeeze inside, closing it behind her.

  “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever had this many people in my room all at once,” she said, looking around at us all.

  “Are both of your parents home?” I asked. “I’m so sorry to just show up like this, but—” I pointed at the window again.

  “No, just Dad. And he won’t come up here. I told him that it wasn’t anyone.”

  “Lying to them is easy like this, isn’t it?” I said with a tight smile, mirthless.

  Gen didn’t reply immediately, but she cringed a little. “It’s not lying to them that’s the problem. It’s—”

  “When it’s all you do,” I cut in for her. “When it consumes you. When you don’t even need to tell a lie to cover up for another lie, you just do it because … it’s habit. Yeah, I know. Compulsive, remember?” I pointed to myself.

  Gen came to sit beside me on the bed, concern coloring her cheeks.

  “What happened, Cassie?” she asked. She looked down at the bottoms of my pants. “Your legs … you’re been burned.”

  “Boy, have I.” The lies. The consequences. Oh, and literally.

  She frowned. “We need to get something on those. Hold on, I’ll go get the first aid kit.”

  Just as quickly as she left, she was back with her arms full of bottles and a red tin box.

  She knelt down in front of me.

  “Listen, Gen, you don’t have to do this. I’m fine. I can—”

  “When are you going to stop refusing help from people, hmm?” she asked. She took a pair of scissors and started to trim away my jeans just below my knees.

  I winced as she worked; now that I was out of imminent danger, the pain from the burns was becoming worse with every movement, every brush against something.

  “So what happened?” she asked, slowly peeling away the denim. It had stuck to some of the blistering burns that were oozing—and damn, did it hurt as it got unstuck. I bit back a gasp of breath, clenching my fingers, nails dug into Gen’s bedcovers. “Sorry,” she said. “This should help.” She dabbed cool water on my skin to aid the separation. “Did those vampires do this?”

  “Yes,” Mill said.

  “And Gen …” I said. “They got Jacquelyn.”

  She froze in her cleaning and looked up at me. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s a vampire now,” I said quietly. “… They turned her.”

  She sat back on her heels and stared at a loose stitch on her quilt that spilled over the side of the bed. She didn’t say anything for a few moments, a bloody gauze pad in one hand.

  “Is there anything that we can do to save her?” she asked quietly.

  I shook my head.

  “No way to change her back?”

  “I’m sorry …” Mill said. “But no.”

  Gen stared, lost in thought again for a long time. Then, at last, she creaked back into motion. Sighing a long exhalation, she leaned forward again and resumed cleaning my wounds.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my eyes stinging. But no tears came. I didn’t think I could cry anymore, even if I wanted to.

  Gen shook her head. “Don’t be. It isn’t your fault.”

  “But it is.”

  “Cassie …” Mill said gently. “Now is not the time for a pity party.”

  Lockwood moaned, and as we turned, Mill basically teleported across the room to catch him just before he fell out of the desk chair.

  “Here,” Gen said, getting to her feet and pulling back the covers on the other side of her bed. “Lay him down there. He looks exhausted …”

  “Is it his injury?” I asked as Mill laid him down.

  My heart ached; Lockwood looked so frail, so vulnerable. Silvery blood had seeped to the surface of his bandage.

  “That and his exertion to get you away from the fight …” Mill said.

  Guilt upon guilt.

  “He used strength that he obviously didn’t have,” Iona said. “I’ll re-dress his wounds.”

  Gen spared him another quick glance before kneeling back down on the floor beside my legs. She opened a small, glass jar and began to rub a soft, velvety sort of lotion all over. It smelled tropical, like a beach. The first touch caused pain to flare—but then the gel soothed, stifling the pain like a fire under a blanket.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Coconut oil,” Gen replied, going back for some more. “Mom swears by it. And I’m mixing in some antibiotic cream, too. Gotta have something stronger for burns like these…”

  I waited in subdued quiet, watching Iona fussing over Lockwood with an unsurprising lack of bedside manner. Though out cold, he did not look at peace for it: his features were taut, grim, and set into a line.

  “I’m both amazed and glad that your burns aren’t any worse,” Gen said as she wrapped a bandage around my shins. “Because any sort of mess that I couldn’t explain would make my parents mad.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face. “Ugh … why does everything always go so badly?”

  Iona snorted. “Because you decided to fight vampire hunters that Draven sent to your town. Which part of that did you think would be easy?”

  I turned around as far as I could and glared flaming arrows at her. “What the hell is your problem?”

  “You,” she said. “You are my problem. The whole entirety of it. I tried to help you once, and now—what is this? I’m in rural New York, I was gutted a day or so ago, I keep having to go to sleep in the same room as this weirdo—” She pointed at Mill.

  “Um, standing right here?” Mill said.

  “You are my problem, Cassie,” Iona said, ignoring him. “I thought I could just help you with Byron, but after that, and there was your Roxy problem … and your Miami vampire Lord war problem … and now this house-burning-down-best-friend-turned-to-vampire-and-Butcher-after-us-problem …”

  “That’s a lot of problems,” Gen whispered.

  “I’m starting to think,” Iona said, “you’re the problem.”

  Well, at least we found some common ground to agree on. Not that I’d give her the satisfaction of knowing that right now.

  “Because Byron was a totally normal guy who never stalked and killed anyone?” I asked.

  “Because you’re not a normal girl who could just let it go and be grateful she got out with her life once everything was over. Because you have some kind of defect where you have to keep throwing yourself into this—”

  “I did not want to throw myself into anything—” I said.

  “You could have left this alone. Draven’s guys would’ve sniffed around for a while and when they found nothing, boom, you would have been fine. You could have lived a normal life. But that’s not what you chose.”

  Gen’s gaze darted anxiously back and forth. Clean-up forgotten, her face was pale.

  “I couldn’t leave it alone because people are getting hurt,” I said.

  “That’s not your problem,” Iona said, her body tense and taut.

  “But it’s my fault,” I said. “So it is my problem.”

  “That’s not normal!” Iona said, voice rising. “This is not what normal people do, looking for ways to get involved in vampire feuds when they could hide until they go away.”

  “Everything okay up there?”

  It was Gen’s dad; his voice carried up the stairs.

  We all froze, even Iona.

  “Oh, I, uh …” Gen said, scrambling to her feet and yanking the door open. “Sorry! I had the Netflix on my phone turned up too loud!”

  Her dad must have been satisfied, because he didn’t say anything else or attempt to come upstairs.

  Gen’s face was murderous when she closed the door behind her. “Quiet the riot, will you?”

  Iona and I were both seething, staring at each other as if we would like nothing better than to resume arguing, regardless of who would discover us. Iona, shaking with rage, growled low in her chest, and walked over to Gen’s closet, shutting herself inside.

  “That’s … not a walk-in,” Gen said.

  “You know …” Mill said, “I don’t think she cares at this point.”

  I turned away from Iona and her drama in the closet, facing out the window. Dark now, little sign of flames. Things were improving out there—the firefighters, probably. It was far too late to salvage the house … but, I assumed, it had not totally been reduced to ash. And that was … well, something, I guessed. Against the darkness, my reflection stared back at me.

  My hair was a mess, sticking up at odd angles. My shirt was torn at the shoulder and there was soot all across my cheeks. Long trails of dried tears gave me a ghostly appearance. My cheeks were red, eyes puffy.

  Mill stood behind me on the other side of the bed, checking Lockwood’s wound. He kept snatching glimpses of me, worry contorting his features. A painful lump stuck in my throat. Everywhere I turned, something that I cherished was in jeopardy. Or destroyed. It was as if I was this cancerous disease. Everything I touched became tainted. Ruined. Dead.

  Everything I did made things so much worse.

  Maybe Iona was right.

  Maybe it was time for me to just butt out … forever.

  Chapter 34

  The only problem with choosing to duck out of this vampire war now was that there was something tying me here.

  The Butcher knew that I was a human. That would have probably been the first thing that Jacquelyn would have told him.

  The thought of her telling him everything about me as revenge for the pain I had caused her? It cut me like a dagger.

  The bed sagged, and I looked over to see Mill had come to sit beside me.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked. “You’ve got this distant sort of look in your eyes.”

  I looked away.

  “The Butcher is going to tell Draven that I’m human …” I said. “If he hasn’t told him already.”

  Mill’s expression was not encouraging.

  I marshaled my thoughts. “These vamps … The Butcher and the others … they aren’t just going to leave the town alone. They burned my house down. They’re not going to stop there.”

  “They might,” he said.

  “Jacquelyn was just full of hate …” I went on. “She told me that fighting me was a way for her to get back at me for everything I had done to her.”

  Mill shook his head. “The Butcher probably poisoned her. Honed that sadness that she was feeling about you. Twisted it.”

  “No, it was already there,” I said sadly. “Before we even came up here. Before I had seen her in town. She’s hated me … since before I left.”

  Something about that felt even more final than pronouncing her dead, and a vampire.

  I paused, mulling it over, letting myself slip further into the black, melancholy waters of my regret.

  “I just wish she hadn’t been at the wrong place at the wrong time. If I’d had more sense, I wouldn’t have approached her. When I did that, I painted a fat target right on her back. I should know that Draven will go to any length to get what he wants. He isn’t above hurting humans. We’re nothing but food to him, after all.”

  I sighed.

  “And everything is my fault. If I hadn’t fallen for Draven’s trap and come up here, my house would still be standing. Jackie wouldn’t be …”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.

  “Cassie … you know Iona didn’t mean those things—”

  “Sure she did,” I said. “And she was right.”

  Mill shook his head. “Just because she wouldn’t have done what you did doesn’t mean you were wrong.”

  I paused for a second, mulling. “Do you think I should have jumped in head first? Flown up here at the first sign of trouble?”

  Mill hesitated.

  I let out a groan. “See? If all that was going to happen was my uncle getting hurt, then I should have been able to live with that. But out of fear of something worse happening, I came up here. And then it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Worse has happened. So much worse.”

  “You are being too hard on yourself,” Mill said. “If we hadn’t come here that first night … Those vamps were going to finish off your uncle, remember?”

  “I remember,” I said. “They still could, because now they know he’s my uncle. Before, he was just an inconvenient witness. But since Jackie …” I shook my head. “They know who I am. She knows my family. All of them. This is … it’s so much worse now, Mill.” I buried my face in my hands. “I don’t even know what to do. Where to start.”

 

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