Evernight (19 page)

Balthazar shook his head. "No. The Black Cross operative was discovered
and fought his way out. The same thing happened tonight."
Black Cross. Vampire hunters. Lucas hadn't mentioned finding them in the books
Mrs. Bethany gave him; I realized he had kept them from me.
Lucas had come here to hunt down and kill creatures like me. He'd even coaxed
me into biting him again—and giving him the strength and power to truly fight
back. He'd used me to become a more efficient killer, and then he'd tried to
murder my parents, and he'd lied about everything, all along.
In the beginning, before Lucas knew I was a vampire, he kept trying to
protect me. I thought he was taking care of me because I was lonely, but it
wasn't that at all. He thought I was a human surrounded by vampires, and that's
why he kept looking out for me.
But ever since he found out what I really am, he's been using me to get
deeper inside Evernight. To gain our powers. To get whatever he wanted. He made
me feel guilty about lying to him when he was telling an even bigger lie.
What had seemed like love was betrayal.

I sat numbly on the bottom step of the staircase, listening
to the preparations taking place all around me.
Mrs. Bethany's team contained only five vampires: her, my parents, Balthazar,
and Professor Iwerebon. All of them wore heavy slickers and knives strapped to
their calves and forearms.
"We should have guns." That was Balthazar. "To deal with
situations like this."
"We have only been forced to confront 'situations like this' twice in more
than two hundred years." Mrs. Bethany, icier than ever. "Our
abilities are usually more than sufficient to deal with humans. Or do you not
feel up to the task, Mr. More?"
Lucas is a vampire hunter. Lucas came here to kill people like my parents.
He told me to distrust them; he probably thought they stole me as a baby. He
tried to drive a wedge between us. I thought he was just being rude, but maybe
he was really going to kill them after all.
"I can handle myself," Balthazar said. "But it's possible that
Lucas has armed himself as well. He's Black Cross. There's no way he came here
unprepared. Somewhere on campus, he's got a stash of supplies. You can bet that
includes weapons."
We went up the stairs of the north tower together, and he protested the
entire way. I thought it was because Lucas was scared of me, scared of
vampires, but that wasn't it at all. Even when we were making out on the floor,
he asked for us to be together again somewhere else.
"The room at the top of the north tower." My voice sounded so
strange, hardly like mine at all. "That's where it is."
Mrs. Bethany drew herself up. "You knew about this?"
"No. It's just a hunch."
"Let's check it out." Balthazar held out his hand to help me up.
"Come on."
The room didn't look any different to me than it had when Lucas and I were up
there together. Mrs. Bethany closed her eyes for a moment in dismay. "The
records room. If he's been up here, he's read almost all of our history. The
hiding places of so many of us—now, Black Cross knows."
"A lot of these records are decades out of date," Dad reasoned.
"The more recent years are in the computer."
"He broke into that, too, I think," I said, remembering the day I'd
found Lucas sneaking out of Mrs. Bethany's carriage house office.
Mrs. Bethany whirled on me, her temper clearly at the breaking point. "You
saw that Lucas Ross was breaking rules, yet you never warned anyone in
authority. You let a member of Black Cross run rampant at Evernight for months
on end, Miss Olivier. Don't think I'll forget this."
Whenever she spoke to me like that, I usually cringed. This time, I shot back,
"You're the one who admitted him in the first place!"
After that, nobody said anything for a second. I'd spoken only to defend
myself, but I realized that Mrs. Bethany had screwed up—really, seriously
screwed up—and her attempt to pin the blame on me had just failed.
Instead of strangling me, Mrs. Bethany stiffly turned back to searching the
room. "Open every box. Look in every closet and in the rafters. I want to
know everything Mr. Ross kept up here."
Memories of Lucas and I together nearly overwhelmed me, but I concentrated on
one moment in particular. When we'd first come into this room, Lucas had
immediately taken a seat atop the long trunk against the nearby wall. I'd
thought he just wanted to sit down, but maybe he'd done that for a different
reason: to keep me from opening it.
Balthazar followed my eyes. He didn't say anything out loud, but he raised one
eyebrow, questioning. I nodded, and he went to the trunk and opened its lid. I couldn't
see what was inside, but my mother gasped and Professor Iwerebon swore beneath
his breath. "What is it?" I asked.
Mrs. Bethany stepped closer and peered down into the trunk. Her face remained
imperiously cool as she bent her knees and picked up a skull.
I screamed, then immediately felt stupid for doing so. "That's got to be
really old. I mean, look at it."
"When we die, our bodies decompose rather rapidly, Miss Olivier."
Mrs. Bethany kept turning the skull that way and this. "To be precise,
they decompose to the stage they should have reached since the time of human
death. Though the flesh is gone, a few scraps of skin remain—which suggests
this skull belonged to a vampire who died decades ago, perhaps even a
century."
"Erich," Balthazar said suddenly. "He said once that he died in
World War I. Lucas and Erich always had it in for each other. If Lucas lured
him up here, and Erich had no idea that he was dealing with a Black Cross
hunter, then it would've been no contest."
"Not if Lucas had one of these." My father had opened another box
nearby, from which he lifted a huge knife—no, a machete. "This thing could
make quick work of any of us."
Balthazar gave a low whistle as he looked at the blade. "Those two used to
fight, but Erich always got the better of Lucas. Either Lucas threw the fights
on purpose, or he knew if he showed what he could really do, we might have
caught on."
I protested, "I thought Erich ran away." Surely that had to be the
truth. Lucas and Erich had fought, but Lucas couldn't have
killed
him.
"We all thought that, but we were all wrong." Mrs. Bethany let
Erich's skull drop unceremoniously back into the trunk. "Keep
searching."
The others did as she said. Trembling, I stepped closer to the trunk to look
inside. There lay a jumble of bones, a dusty Evernight uniform, and, in the
corner, a tan hoop. With a jolt I realized it was Raquel's leather bracelet,
the one that had been missing. Lucas wouldn't have stolen it. No, Erich had
taken it, and he'd had it on him when he died.
When Lucas killed him.
"Bianca? Honey?" My mother came to my side. She wore jeans and boots;
normally she refused to dress in what she still thought of as men's clothes,
but to catch Lucas, she'd made an exception. "You should go to our
apartment. You don't need to see any more of this."
"Go to the apartment and do what? Read a nice book? Listen to records? I don't
think so."
"We should be able to track him despite the rain. You will never tell
anyone else at this school what transpires here tonight." Mrs. Bethany
glared at me over Iwerebon's shoulder.
Slowly I shut the lid of the trunk. "I'm coming, too."
"Bianca?" Mom shook her head. "You don't have to do this."
"Yes, I do."
"Don't." Balthazar stepped closer to me. "You've never done
anything like this, and Black Cross—they're good. Deadly. Lucas might be young,
but he knows what he's doing. That much is obvious."
"What Balthazar is too polite to say is that it's dangerous." Dad
looked furious. His nose was red and swollen—probably broken. Even vampire
injuries take a while to heal. "Lucas Ross could hurt you, even kill
you."
I shivered, but I stood my ground. "He could kill any of you. You're still
going."
"We're going to take care of everything," Balthazar insisted.
"The worst part of all of this is what he did to you, Bianca. Your parents
won't let Lucas get away with it, and neither will I."
Mrs. Bethany raised one eyebrow. Obviously she didn't consider my broken heart
the "worst part of all this," and I expected her to shoot me down as
usual. Instead she said, "She may join us."
My mother stared at her. "She's only a child!"
"She was old enough to bite a human. Old enough to give him powers. That
makes her old enough to face the consequences." Her gaze bored into me.
"Will you require a weapon, Miss Olivier?"
"No." I couldn't imagine plunging a knife into Lucas's body.
Mrs. Bethany misunderstood me—on purpose, maybe. "You might as well
complete your transformation tonight, I suppose."
"Tonight?" My parents said as one.
"All children must grow up eventually."
She wants me to bite Lucas again. This time, she wants me to kill him.
They'd set fire to the body before he could rise again as a vampire. Lucas
would be gone forever.
Mrs. Bethany went to the door and pushed it open. Balthazar draped one of the
slickers across my shoulders, and I struggled to slip my arms into the overlong
sleeves. "Let's go."
We began our trip downstairs into the dark.

* * *

My parents had told me they were vampires as soon as I was
old enough to understand about keeping secrets, so that was as ordinary to me
as the fact that Mom's hair was the color of caramel or that Dad liked to snap
his fingers to jazz from the 1950s. They drank blood at the dinner table
instead of eating food, and they liked to reminisce about sailing ships and
spinning wheels and, in Dad's case, the time he saw William Shakespeare acting
in one of his own plays. But those were little things, more funny and endearing
than frightening. I'd never thought of them as unnatural.
As soon as we began our pursuit, I realized how little I truly knew them.
They moved faster than I could, faster than most humans could. Lucas and I had
thought we were stretching our powers when we'd run across these grounds a few
weeks ago, but that was nothing compared to this. Mom, Dad, Balthazar, every one
of them—they were sure-footed despite the mud and able to see their way in the
dark. I had to rely on the flashes of lightning and their voices to guide me.
"Here!" Professor Iwerebon's Nigerian accent was thicker when he was
agitated. "The boy came this way."
How could they know that?
I realized that Iwerebon's hand rested upon
the branches of a bush. When I touched it as well, I could feel the soft buds
of new leaves fuzzy against my chilled palms. One of the branches was broken.
Lucas had snapped it when he'd run by.
He's running for his life. He must be so scared.
He said he loved me.
Lightning flashed once more, making it bright as day for a split second. I could
see Mrs. Bethany's profile against the dark forest, and I recognized the
landscape enough to know that we were very near the river. It was the first
time in a while I'd had any idea where we were, because the rain clouds
shrouded the stars. "This isn't one of the usual paths the students
take," Mrs. Bethany said. "Black Cross would've trained him well
enough to have an escape plan. That means he'd marked this route in
advance."
Thunder rolled over us, blotting out whatever Professor Iwerebon said in
response. Wearily I pulled my feet out of the mud they were sinking into;
Balthazar took my elbow, balancing me as I got to more solid ground.
All this time I thought Lucas was protecting me, but instead he put me in
danger. How can that be true?
Then Balthazar's fingers tightened upon my arm. "This way. Over
here."
When lightning forked through the sky again, I saw what Balthazar had glimpsed:
mucky, foot-sized holes in the mud, leading toward the river. Lucas had been
forced to pull his feet out just like me. Despite the new powers we shared, he
wasn't as quick or as unearthly graceful as the older vampires all around me.
Lucas was just a guy, running as fast as he could through a terrible storm and
knowing that, if he was captured, he might die.
It was raining too hard for footprints like that to last long without being
washed away. We'd already nearly caught up to him.
He lied to me from the beginning. From the very first day. All those fears I
had about keeping secrets from him, and Lucas was playing me for a fool every
single time we kissed.
"Hurry!" Mrs. Bethany urged us forward. Despite her long skirts, she
could move faster than anyone else. I straggled behind, breathing hard and cold
to the bone, but I was able to keep close enough to hear the rain pattering
against their coats. "He will have crossed the river. We'll lose time there."
The river.
All my life, my parents had joked about how terrible running water was. When we
took road trips, they would always try to arrange it so that we never crossed
any rivers on our way. If we had to, they could do it, but usually it took a
while—Dad pulling the car over once we were in sight of the bridge, Mom biting
her fingernails anxiously, me laughing at them for the entire half hour or so
it took them to get up the nerve. They both described their shipboard voyage to
the New World as the absolute worst experience they'd ever endured.
Vampires have trouble crossing running water.
Some of the human students
had wondered why the teacher chaperones traveled into Riverton ahead of us, but
I'd always known it was because they wanted to cross the bridge in their own
time, without revealing how badly the experience unsettled them. Now I realized
that Lucas had understood, too, and he was counting on that fact to keep
himself alive.
We kept going, until the others stopped in front of me. I didn't need the
lightning to show me the path anymore. Breathing hard, I caught up and kept
walking past Professor Iwerebon, past Balthazar, past my parents, and finally
up to Mrs. Bethany, who stood only a few feet from the bridge.
"Wait here for us," she commanded. "We will proceed
shortly." She pressed her lips together, perhaps willing herself to
conquer her one weakness.
"He'll get away." I walked past her.
"Miss Olivier! Stop this instant!"
My feet touched the bridge. Old wooden planks, waterlogged with rain, were
easier to cross than thick mud.
"Bianca!" That was my dad. "Bianca, wait for us. You can't do
this alone."
"Yes, I can." I started to run, drops of water pelting my face, my
side aching from exertion and the raincoat heavy across my shoulders. All I wanted
to do was fall down upon the bridge and cry. My body didn't have the strength
for this.
And yet I ran. I ran even though my legs were as heavy as lead, and my throat
was tight with unshed tears, and my parents and my teachers and my friend were
all shouting for me to come back. I ran anyway, and with every step I went
faster.
Ever since I'd come to Evernight—no, really, throughout my whole life—I'd
counted on other people to take care of my problems. Nobody could take care of
this for me. I had to face it myself, alone.
I didn't know if I was chasing Lucas or running with him. I only knew I had to
run.