Vamplayers (23 page)

“Where does it lead, Grover?” I say, impatient.

“The chapel, but why would she go there?”

Chapter 33

B
ianca is praying, smoke still rising from her ripe young body, half her expensive, color-coordinated clothes torn from the searing heat, her skin underneath already puckered pink.

She’s already healing. In some places, she’s already healed.

I think of my finger pressed firm on the red send button of Dr. Haskins’ beeper and pray it went through, pray they’re on their way.

“Hey,” Grover whispers, apparently not wanting to disturb Bianca. “I thought you weren’t supposed to be in here. Aren’t you supposed to burst into flames or something?”

I roll my eyes despite the grim circumstances. “Don’t believe everything you read.”

Tristan stands at the door, and I can see his gaze darting down the hall to safety.

“Look,” I say, my voice low but not out of respect for Bianca’s silent prayers. “Run away or stay. I don’t care. But we could use your help, and it would be nice to count on you for once. Make up your mind, will you?”

“Okay, okay.” He groans, following us in reluctantly.

Bianca is kneeling at the altar, her head bowed. Even her hair is growing itself back out. From across the room, I can hear it: the sound thread makes scratching through fabric, follicles and long red strands extending through her scalp.

I watch the boys’ faces, but apparently they can’t hear it. Frankly, I wish I couldn’t.

I can see she’s weak but not down for the count, wounded but far from vanquished.

“What are you praying for?” I interrupt, walking forward boldly because this is the part where I finish her off.

She doesn’t look up. “Your soul, of course.”

“Where is he?” I ask, ignoring her repartee, trying to sound strong.

”Safe and sound.” She points behind me. Thin smoke, almost like a mist, rises in coiling tendrils from her fingers as her skin continues to regenerate.

I guess it’s true what I’ve always heard about Royals: they are badass!

In a wading pool behind me, Zander rests nearly up to his shoulders in holy water.

The liquid comes gurgling from a copper fountain shaped like a winged cherub pouring a wine jug into the pool at Zander’s feet.

Well, that doesn’t look very hazardous at all.

Zander’s not a vampire, so he’s not in any danger from the holy water, right? If this is her big, shocking finale, then she’s not very good at this because—

His posture looks awkward. I peer in. His hands are bound behind him, pushing his spine upward and his head slightly back.

His curly hair is wet in the back, his broad forehead waxy, his eyes glassy, his clothes soaked, his lips sputtering as water laps up and ebbs back, the fountain gushing, splattering him all around.

He looks dazed, like maybe she conked him on the head when she dumped him in there.

The pool is filling quickly, the water racing up his chest and, gently, to his shoulders. His ankles are tied up. He can’t move, and the pool is already three-quarters full.

“No worries.” Grover ambles over. “I’ll just snatch him out, and we’ll be on our way.”

Before I can move, before I can blink, Bianca rises from the altar, sails across the room, and grabs Grover by his hair.

There is a moment there, trapped in time, when she holds him so effortlessly, so lightly, it’s like she’s in some black market bazaar holding a shrunken head.

He squirms.

It’s all happening so fast.

He flashes me a panicked look.

I flash one back.

It’s like Bianca’s had enough. She flicks her wrist and tosses him against the chapel wall.

Hard.

He hits with a deep, wet smack and slides down the wall, wheezing. His head leaves a straight trail of blood, almost like it’s been applied by a paint roller.

The slap of his skull on marble still ringing, the holy water in Zander’s pool swashing, I’m momentarily paralyzed.

I gasp and sail to him.

I kneel, feeling for a pulse, knowing I’m vulnerable facing away from Bianca, aware that this is exactly what she wants.

Tristan has my back. I look over my shoulder to see him react quickly, holding the bottle of holy wine above his head to douse her in it.

But again she’s too quick.

Bianca grabs his arm unnaturally, like you’d grab a porcelain doll, the kind with cloth arms and no bones.

I hear something snap, watch Tristan’s face erupt in pain, and the bottle drops harmlessly to the floor.

Before it can soak her feet or scald her toes or sizzle through what’s left of her tattered clothing, she yanks Tristan by the hair into an alcove just a few feet above the holy water pool.

He’s over six feet tall, at least one hundred seventy pounds of straight-up, stone cold muscle, and she carries him like a plaything. She soars, and his legs dangle and swing.

He yelps but doesn’t scream. He struggles but only until she threatens him, one long, pointy claw at his throat.

She nestles him on her lap, like a mother nursing a babe.

The alcove is high and deep, cast in shadows from the moonlight pouring in through the tiny chapel’s stained glass ceiling.

I could reach it and save him if I had time, but already I hear Zander coughing and spluttering in the pool, the water reaching his throat.

I shake my head. All that training and I’m nothing against a Royal.

Scratch that.

Next to nothing.

All those Simulations, all those stupid stakes spitting out of idiotic walls, and they never said anything about having to save three humans all at once against a force so powerful it can repair itself—and kill your friends—right before your very eyes.

Grover breathes raggedly. His skin is pale and slick. His eyes flicker but never open.

I feel the pulse at his neck (I’m an expert in the jugular), and it feels like a hose that’s run out of water, growing slack beneath my fingers. There is a silence about him, a stillness, that I try to deny.

“Grover!” I shake him until at last he coughs himself to life.

He smiles and gasps and moves his lips, but he’s out of funny lines. The jokes have all run dry.

The water must be up to Zander’s chin by now.

Tristan whimpers in the alcove, where Bianca gloats.

Grover struggles to draw in one breath, then two.

Then no more.

There will not be a third.

The light goes out of his eyes.

His massive chest droops into his even bigger belly.

I wait for him to gasp, to rise, to cough, to laugh.

That’s how this is supposed to end: we all get up, we all walk away, we all go home.

Not for Grover.

There is no gasp, no wink to say he’s faking it, no Hollywood ending, no zombie hand reaching up from his grave.

There is only stillness and softness and eternal, endless sadness.

I scream, cry, rage, hiss, and fly—fangs popping, claws pouncing—to the alcove above.

It is a soaring leap, like Michael Jordan in all those old-school YouTube videos from his glorious Air Jordan days. My chest is out, my legs bent slightly, my arms at my sides, my head back, the air playing with my long black hair.

I am blind to my vulnerability, blinder still to the danger. I see only my enemy, fangs bared, claws out, Tristan squirming in her lap as we prepare to clash.

It never gets that far.

She kicks me once in the ribs so hard I land all the way across the chapel before I know what’s happened. I’m in a pile of pews, sharp edges in my bones, tears in my skin. It takes everything I have not to fly up there and try it all over again.

Instead I stand.

I walk.

I run beneath the alcove, to the side of the wading pool.

“You didn’t have to kill him.” I hiss up at her. “He never did anything to you.”

She sneers, tousling Tristan’s long hair as if she hasn’t just taken a human life, as if she isn’t about to take another. “No, but
you
did. I told you I’d take something you cared about. Now you know how it feels.”

“I knew how it felt. You already took two things I cared about.”

She shrugs. “You should thank me.”

“Whatever for?”

“Now your choice is even easier.” Bianca settles against the alcove, as if the only thing missing from her big entertainment is a bag of popcorn and an ice-cold soda. “You can choose to save Zander, which of course will result in horrible pain, maybe even death, for you. Or you can choose to save Tristan here, which of course will cause you no pain at all.”

“I’m fine, Lily,” Tristan mutters.

She scratches his shoulder as a reward. I watch fresh blood poke out through the tear in his white linen shirt.

I judge the distance between where I’m standing and where Bianca is holding Tristan, then watch as the water licks Zander’s pursed lips.

The weight of the world is heavy on my shoulders, my dead heart wracked with sadness for poor Grover, who never got a second act or any last words, who died quickly and needlessly.

“Please,” I whimper, even though I know it’s exactly what she wants me to do. Even though I know it has zero chance of working. “Please don’t make me choose. Go. Leave here. I won’t tell anyone. I won’t even chase you to your next school. Just let these boys live. They’ve done nothing to you.”

“And I’ve done nothing to
you,
Lily.” She caresses Tristan’s head like Dr. Evil with his hairless cat in those Austin Powers movies. “And yet here you are, ruining my plans, upsetting my world. Look what you’ve done to my relationship. Why, Tristan here is afraid of me. Aren’t you, dear? And all because of you. Tell me, Lily, why should I show you a courtesy you’re unwilling to show me?”

I walk toward the wading pool. I have to.

“I’m … I’m sorry, Tristan,” I say even as I make my choice.

“It’s okay,” he shouts. “I understand. I know I’ve been a jerk. I know I ran out on you when you needed me most. W-w-why should you ch-choose me?”

“Ah.” Bianca bares her fangs. “Poor Tristan. Well, dear, I guess it’s you and me then. You know, being a vampire’s not so bad. Especially when a Royal turns you. Why, in no time at all you’ll be stronger than Lily here. I imagine that might come in quite handy as you seek revenge for the choice she’s made here today.”

I can’t hear her anymore. I’m in the wading pool reaching in to drag Zander out, the sound of my skin frying and the holy water bubbling. It’s like acid, if acid were on crack and crack were on speed and speed were full of double-sided razor blades attached to an electric toothbrush.

Every drop is a slice against my skin, shredding it like jerky. It’s searing when it touches and bubbles. It’s like sticking your finger in a fireplace, holding it until you can’t take it anymore, and then jumping in and taking a seat on the hottest log.

I don’t scream.

I can’t.

I’ve given her too much of my fear, my shame, already. I won’t give her any more. Royal or not, she’s gotten all she will from me.

With the last of my strength, I hoist Zander out of the water. I feel my own blood pour from my skin and see Tristan’s neck gouged and gory too. Drops splatter the alcove and drip down the walls of this once pristine and sacred chapel.

His hair hangs in his blanched face. His gaze is far away, which makes me feel better somehow.

Except that my skin is on fire and my fingers and toes are smoking. The pain wells up in me, burning from the outside in, boiling my organs, congealing my blood, fusing my cells, closing off my lungs. I’m panting. My skin is melting, dribbling down my arms, my legs.

I dump Zander onto the chapel floor and pull at the ties binding his hands, eager to free him, to tell him to run, but my fingertips are bony and sharp, the flesh all but eaten away. I nearly faint at the sight.

Instead I crumble next to him, lying in a heap of my own goo.

The stained glass ceiling of the chapel shatters into a thousand tiny pieces.

Eight figures sail to the floor, each dressed in red leather. With crossbows already pointed, they silence Bianca with simple precision. Eight razor-sharp arrows plunge into her heart like darts shoved into a bull’s-eye.

If only they’d been sixty seconds earlier.

Chapter 34

I
wake up in the Tank. I’ve never been in it before. The Tank is just that: a large, clear coffin filled with special healing waters, their exact properties known only to the Ancients. Heavy metal bolts fix the four sides and bottom to each other. Kind of like a fish tank (from hell), it has no lid.

It sits atop a steel platform from which tubes and dials and hoses and cords spill out willy-nilly, continually filling the container with healing jets of antibiotics and who knows what else.