Throat (46 page)

“I’m telling you the truth. It was an accident.”

He stood again and touched the side of my head with the tip of his finger, drawing the finger down the line of my hair to my ear. I jerked away.

“We know that you have … family … somewhere nearby,” Wirtz said. “A sister. Whom I would very much like to … kiss.”

I cursed him a third time.

“It’s all right,” the vampire said. “I understand these things so well,
Mädchen
. You have a few moments where you still have thoughts, awareness. Right now your mind has never been more … open. That is all there is now, inside you, this openness. I think when someone … dies … there is so much to be learned in the last moments. When there is no reason anymore to think wasteful thoughts, everything is so clear.”

I glanced at Sagan.

“So. Are you going to tell me?” Wirtz said.

I don’t have any secrets
, I thought.
I only have hate. That’s all you’re leaving me with, so I want to be dead. I have to be dead. Go on and finish it
.

“Let him go,” I said, nodding at Sagan. “Let him go and I’ll tell you anything you want.”

Sagan struggled fiercely, trying to say something.

Wirtz smiled. “You are worried about your pet
Vollmensch
?
Why do I want to give up something I already have? Every part of his life has always been mine. You know a little about the
Feld
, I think? His whole life has been spent in bringing himself here. Making of himself a gift … to me.”

I wrenched at the arms holding me. “Do what you want with me! But let him go. Leave him alone!”

Wirtz looked up. “The
Vollmensch
—he is more important … than your own life?”

“Yes,” I said, choking. “Yes, he is.”

“Then tell me what I want to know. How is it you can go out in the daylight and eat the humans’
Nahrung
?”

“I told you. I don’t know. I don’t! But I think maybe it was because of my … epilepsy.”

Sagan tried to say something. The stocky
Verloren
, Bastien, tightened his hold on him, making him wince.

Wirtz looked at Lilli. “Epilepsy?”

“
Ergreifungen,
” she said.

“Ah!” Wirtz said. “And so that’s what it was. When I was … drinking … the bright lights, nothingness?
Ja?
You suffered a … seiz-ure … and because our
Felds
were … 
verbunden
 … joined—the seizure came to me as well. Is this right?”

“I guess so. I don’t … I don’t remember things during a seizure. I think it scrambled us somehow. Scrambled my transformation. It’s not something I can just do. It was an accident. It can’t … it can’t help you.”

“Oh. You believe I want to be helped?”

“Don’t you?”

Wirtz walked up to me again. “You are still … 
unerfahren
. Young … inexperienced. There are things you come to realize in time,
Mädchen
. There is no help coming. There is nothing … 
good … out there that hears you when you pray. Once you realize that … what is one to do with this
Leben
 … this life? I tell you this. The years go by. Until nothing is left but … curiosity.”

“You’re crazy.”

Wirtz sighed deeply. “Oh. You have just now come to that conclusion? Let me tell you something. Who is sane? When we are born here …” He extended his arms and walked in a slow circle. “We are crazy. This … 
Leben
 … is the nightmare. All of us are sleeping and we can never wake up. Nothing matters. There is only each night and the night after it. You follow them or you die. But this is not something you can do for yourself. There is no dignity in a death like that. Someone else finds the courage for you. I have found it for you.”

The vampire turned and sprang across the conference table, where the woman Lilli and the stocky man Bastien were holding Sagan. Wirtz pushed Lilli aside, grasped Sagan by his hair, and twisted his head back, exposing his pale neck.

“Let him go!” I yelled. “I told you what you wanted to hear! There’s nothing else you need him for!”

“Oh, you are so wrong to say that,” Wirtz said.

“What do you want!”

“It is something you owe me, not him. And so I will take this thing that you owe me. And this is how I will take it. I want you to watch while I do … this.”

He sank his teeth deep into Sagan’s neck.

Sagan grunted in pain and arched his back sharply; a look came over his face that I had never seen before. The realization that this was it, everything was finished. It felt as if my insides were collapsing.

Wirtz remained attached to his neck, drinking deeply.

Lilli licked her lips as she watched, probably waiting her turn along with the others. They were going to drain him. They were going to drain him right down into death. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I fought with all my strength against the three vampires holding me.

Wirtz pulled back from Sagan’s throat and looked at me, smiling broadly. His face was slick with Sagan’s blood. There was even a little bit on the tip of his long nose.

“
Sie werden wie ein Schwein sterben,
” he said. And sank his teeth in again.

Then I saw it: Sagan gave up. Stopped fighting. Went so completely limp that I think the vampire could have finished the job without anyone even holding him.

“Sagan!” I screamed.

I managed to break free for just a moment, digging my fingers into the face of one of the dark-skinned brothers and smashing the other in the jaw with my forearm. But the huge third
Verloren
clung to me stubbornly, wrapping his giant arms around my chest before I could even touch the conference table.

Sagan’s hand started to twitch. It was the only part of him that was still moving. As if his hand had a separate little mind that realized it was dying too.

I couldn’t believe how quickly it was all happening.… Sagan was so alive, so fresh in my memory—and now he was becoming a thing in a dream that I didn’t even know anymore. His flailing arm stretched out farther and farther, as if it were losing its muscular ability to even hold itself taut.

I closed my eyes.

What was it Lena had said? About the Call?

That it wasn’t something you did out loud, it was something you did down deep in your throat.

Help us
, I said, feeling the vibration as I spoke the words on the inside. The giant vampire smiled at me stupidly. The noise I was making must have sounded like a groan.

Please, Lena. Please come to me and help us. We need you. Lena. Donne. Anton. Please come help us or we will die!

I opened my eyes.

It was still true. Sagan was on the table, dying.

Please please please!

Something Sagan had once said when I was barely listening now flared in my mind:

Stars … some of them are already dead when we get to see them
.

My eyes clouded up again. I blinked furiously to clear them.…
Stars. See them
.

“Sagan!” I yelled. “Sagan, can you hear me? Please, Sagan!”

His hand stopped flopping for a moment, then the fingers straightened, went still. Wirtz lifted his head from the wound in Sagan’s neck and smiled sweetly at me. Enjoying this so much.

“Josey Wales!” I screamed the name as loudly as I could. “Remember … remember Josey Wales, Sagan! What did he say? Remember! What did he say! Josey Wales! You gonna pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?”

Sagan snarled deep in his throat and lunged. Wirtz had temporarily been thrown off guard by all my shouting. Sagan got his hand on it, the computer mouse. Clicked the button. I closed my eyes.

The room exploded with light.

I could see it, hideously intense, even behind my closed
eyelids: the huge, enormous, gigantic, blazing 3-D ball of the sun.
Sonnen
.

The same image Sagan had shown me that very first time, only this time it was blaring full force in real color. A smothering, double-barreled volcanic assault of blinding illumination.

The vampires in the room screamed, a sound so monstrously anguished, it was almost alien to my ears. I felt the hands grasping me fall away as the young
Verloren
sank to the floor, crying out in pain as digitized sunlight blasted over them. The light was so intense, I was afraid to open my own eyes but had to stumble sightlessly forward to the conference table, where I threw myself on my stomach and slid across, hoping I was aiming in the right direction.

I slammed into something that felt almost inert and I realized at once it was the slumped body of the stocky vampire with the scar across his nose. The one Wirtz had called Bastien. I heaved him out of the way and dared open my eyes a slit; sunlight lanced my brain, forcing me to clamp my eyelids shut again. But I had seen enough: Wirtz was crawling away from the table, in obvious pain. Only the female seemed to be groping with some sense of purpose, reaching where she thought Sagan would be.

But I got to him first. I tugged hard and his long body slid away from her clutching fingers. Lilli shrieked with rage. I started to sling Sagan over my shoulder but he said, “No, I can see. Let me lead.”

I peeked again and, bracing my hands against the table, lifted off the ground and gave the female vampire a brutal kick in the neck that sent her sprawling against some computer monitors. Sagan caught my hand and guided me past the chaos of writhing
Verloren
bodies and out into the hall, where I could open my eyes again.

He staggered on the long run up the hall and I caught him.
Blood was running down his neck, leeching into the top of his shirt, a little red starburst blossoming on his collar.

“Let me carry you!” I threw an arm around his waist, lifted him up. We were moving much faster now.

“How long do you think it will last?” I said as we rushed through the air lock.

“Not long,” Sagan said. “Not … the same stuff at all. Not natural light.”

I shoved him in the passenger seat of his Jeep.

“No, let me, you don’t even—” he started.

I ignored him and jumped in the driver’s seat.

“Keys!”

My heart plunged into my stomach as I watched the front door of the observatory while Sagan fumbled in his jeans.
Come on, come on!
Nothing yet. I grabbed the keys and slammed the Jeep into gear, turning off the driveway and smashing into the woods.

“What?” Sagan said.

“Lights! Where’s the lights?”

I ran my hand frantically over the dashboard. I didn’t need the lights to see, but to be seen. I wanted the
Verloren
to see.

“Here.” Sagan took my hand and guided me.

The lights flamed on, but now the forest was too bright; I had to throw my arm partly across my eyes to cut the glare. We bounced and rocked on the uneven ground, the cones of the lights bouncing too, little saplings disappearing under the beams.

As we raced toward the secret meadow and the tower, Sagan coughed and his cough sounded liquid. I wondered with fresh horror if he was bleeding deep inside.… Had his jugular been severed?
Oh God
.

I pulled at his shirt, trying to see, but it didn’t look like the bloody flower at the top of his collar had spread much farther.

“Hey, get your hand on that,” I said, trying not to panic. “Compress it.”

I pushed his hand to his neck and drove on. I came to the edge of the forbidden meadow with the buried munitions and skirted around it, driving as fast as I dared, branches whisking by on either side.

“Hang on.”

We jounced crazily on the long downslope to the bunker and I jammed the brakes, fishtailing on the gravel at the bottom. I leapt out and hauled Sagan inside.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” he kept saying. “They’ll figure out where we went.… They’ll be coming soon.”

“I know, I know.”

Sagan undid the hidden padlock at the back of the bunker and I hurried to haul open the steel mesh. He got to his feet and lurched toward me but not fast enough to satisfy my vampire reflexes. I took hold of him and shot through the small opening, dragging him behind me. Then I started scrabbling in the boxes we had stowed there, swearing.

“I can’t believe we didn’t put the first aid kit on top!”

I tore his shirt open. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but a clear fluid was leaking from the wound. I swiped it away with cotton balls and splashed the cuts with hydrogen peroxide.

“Ouch! Hey!”

“Sit still.”

Sagan grimaced as the bite marks foamed. Then I swathed his throat with gauze, going round and round his neck.

“You were so brave,” I said, tying the gauze and trying not to cry. “I couldn’t believe how brave you were. Were you thinking about that the whole time? The STEREO image?”

“Not at first. I remembered it when I saw the red light glowing
on the bottom of the mouse.… That’s the only way I could find it. But I knew if I tried to grab it, he would be too fast for me. I thought if I let my body go limp, played dead, I could bluff him into letting me go. Then you gave me the perfect chance when you started yelling.” He swore and touched his neck.

I kissed him on the forehead. “Are you okay? Please tell me you are okay.”

He took a deep breath. “Yeah. I was mostly faking it, I told you. But they’re coming,” he said weakly.

“We’re ready for this, remember?” I said. “They’re not. It ends right now. You got your radio thingy?” I pulled my own headset out and put it on.

Sagan patted his pocket. “Yeah. Emma, I don’t know.…”

“I don’t know either. I trust your plan. I trust you.”

He looked a little better now, not so pale. I got him some water, but he pushed it away after only a couple of swigs and scrounged through a box, pulling out long red highway flares and a set of night vision goggles.

“No flashlight?” I said.

“Too risky.” Sagan pulled on the goggles. “These have infrared illumination. Even if I have to go where there is no ambient light, like deeper into the cave, I’ll still be able to see.”

He fired up his laptop.

“What kind of battery life do you have?” I said.

“Max of about four hours with heavy video use.” As soon as the computer booted up, the five Webcams appeared on the screen as individual greenish squares. “Okay, we’re good to go.” He looked at me, squeezing my hand. “Be careful.”