Wombstone (The Vampireland Series) (25 page)

“What people?” I asked. “I thought you said most people don’t even know about vampires?”

“There’s a bunch of people who keep tabs on supernaturals like us. Vampires, witches, shape shifters, werewolves, hunters.”

“Like a council?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ryan replied, draining his coffee mug. “A council of supernatural beings.”

“What’s it called?”
 
I asked.

He looked at me like I was stupid. “The ... council of supernatural beings.”

“Original,” I remarked.
 

I thought about that for awhile.

“So are we going to keep pretending your little visit with the witch didn’t happen?” Ryan asked casually, fixing his gaze onto me.

I just shrugged.

“That must have been hard. Seeing your little boyfriend? Your pal?”

“Who are you calling little?,” I shot back, raising my eyebrows and looking pointedly at the area below Ryan’s waistline.

Ryan laughed. “She has a sense of humor!” he cheered, raising his cup and clinking it with thin air. He stood and drained the last of his bloody espresso. “Well, she obviously didn’t convince you to leave.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Obviously. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”

Ryan shrugged. “Well, I’m off. Clair and I are going on a little
sojourn
.”

“Don’t eat her,” I said, trying to think and look as bored as possible.
Hurry up and leave!

“Jealous?” Ryan asked. “Don’t worry, I’ll take you somewhere special soon.”

“Oh goody,” I rolled my eyes. “I can’t wait.”
 

I spent the next half hour reading every article in the latest issue of
Vogue
without taking in a single word, while Ryan took his sweet time loading suitcases into his car and grabbing supplies from the fridge.

“You’re not taking all that, are you?” I gestured to the baggies of blood he was packing into a small blue cooler bag. If he took it all, I wouldn’t have any for the long drive back to New Jersey. And I really didn’t fancy trying to pick up a human meal and drinking their blood without killing them.

“I left three for you,” he said. “Ivy's picking up more tomorrow, so you’ll be fine until then.”

I watched as he opened the freezer door and started packing more frozen bags of blood in his cooler. There had to be at least fifty bags of the stuff, each containing a litre of blood. Fifty litres of blood. Where the hell was he going?

My heart sank as I put the pieces together. I stood and walked over so that I was in front of him.

“What are you doing?” I asked quietly.
 

Ryan looked away, unable to meet my eyes. “It’s not what you think,” he said.

“It is,” I insisted, grabbing at the handle of the cooler bag. “Tell me what’s going on!”

Ryan pulled the bag out of my reach and fixed his steely eyes onto mine. “Mind your own business,” he said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“You’re going to Turn her,” I accused. His eyes gave away what he wouldn’t say.

“Why?” I demanded. “She’s got her whole life ahead of her!” I sucked in a deep breath. “Why would you do that to her?”

“Get out of my way, Blake,” Ryan demanded when I blocked his exit from the kitchen. “I mean it. I don’t have time to screw around.”

“Ryan,” I said softly, pleadingly. I put both of my hands on his shoulders, as I asked for the third time. “You’ve only met the girl a few times. Why?”

Sorrow and pain competed against each other in those dark blue eyes of his.
 

“Because,” he answered finally, “she asked me to.”

I was about to argue that that wasn’t a good enough reason, when he pushed me to the side and stormed out to the garage. Seconds later, I heard his car peeling off down the driveway and the automatic door closing again with a dull thud.

I almost changed my mind. Frozen to the spot, I turned that information over and over in my mind.
He is going to make Clair a vampire. To do that, he has to kill her.

But he hadn’t lied to me. If he said she had asked, then it was what she wanted. It didn’t make any sense, but I supposed it really was none of my business, after all.

I headed back to my room for what I hoped would be the last time, opened the closet and grabbed the bag I’d packed during the early hours of the morning when sleep had deserted me. I went back to the kitchen, dropped the bag in front of the fridge, and loaded my three measly bags of blood into it. An overnight stop was probably out of the question then, if I only had this much blood.
 

My breath caught in my throat as I sensed someone else in the room. I turned around and let out a relieved breath. It wasn’t Ryan.
 

“You’re leaving?” Sam asked, gesturing to my bag.

I debated whether or not to lie. “You can’t stop me,” I said finally.

“Who said anything about stopping you?” Sam replied. “I’m surprised you stayed this long.”
 

“Don’t tell the others,” I said. “Please?”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll figure it out, though. Ryan is a very good tracker. He can find anyone.”

I sighed. “I know,” I said. “I’m just hoping that once I’m home, he won’t try to make me come back.”

“So when are we leaving?” Sam asked.

I raised my eyebrows. “We? There is no we.”

Sam crossed his arms and leaned against the bench. “I notice you have my keys,” he said casually.
 

I looked down at the keys in my hand. “It’s the only other car here,” I said, a note of desperation entering my voice. “I can’t take my car. It’s too obvious.”

“I’m coming with you,” Sam announced. Before I could argue, he uncrossed his arms, plucked the set of keys out of my hand and casually made his way down the hall. “Five minutes,” he called. “I’ll just pack a few things.”

I stood on nervous feet, hopping from side to side, trying to decide what to do. To trust that Sam, a vampire I’d only known for a short time, would deliver me home safely and without an agenda of his own? Strangely, I found myself looking forward to the idea of being alone with him on a cross–country road trip.

Don’t get carried away
, I thought to myself.
You’re never going to see him again.

And for some silly reason, the thought of never seeing him again hurt. More than I could have imagined. I could kind of see why. Whereas Ryan was the source of all my troubles, and Ivy was cold and aloof, if it hadn’t been for Sam’s gentle guidance and ability to listen to me freak the fuck out on a regular basis, I would have gone insane the first night I landed in that house. I suddenly understood why the thought of losing him hurt so much. It was because, in my new life, he was the only real friend that I had.

 
You’re going home. You need to forget about him.

Somehow that didn’t seem so easy.

I stormed out to the car, irritated that my plan had been sprung before I’d even left the house. I was so terribly bad at anything that required stealth or cunning. I threw my bag in the backseat of Sam’s SUV, a sleek black BMW with leather seats and chrome wheels. It looked like a car that Ivy would choose, not Sam. I imagined if he had the choice, he would pick something as ordinary as a second–hand pickup.
 

“Nice car,” I murmured as he entered the garage carrying a duffel bag and a small ice cooler. He must have seen my eyes light up, because he nodded and handed the box to me. “You didn’t think three little bags would get you there, did you?”

I shrugged. “I would have had more if Ryan hadn’t sniped it all.”

Sam’s face fell. “That’s where it all went?” he asked.
 

“Well, yeah,” I said. “He took a big cooler full of blood bags with him. He’s going to Turn Clair in Barbados.”

I placed the cooler on the floor behind the passenger seat and closed the door. “I don’t know why he has to go all the way to Barbados to do that. It’s hardly a time to be getting a tan when she’ll be all albino girl.”

“Barbados is a hospital,” Sam said as he shut the tailgate. “It’s in Malibu. It looks like a regular hospital, but it treats anything that falls out of the human category.”

“Clair is still human, though,” I said. “And how come you’re not surprised? Did you know he was going to Turn her?”
 

I really hoped he didn’t know.
 

“Nothing he does surprises me, Mia. He’s done far, far worse than that.”

“Oh.” I swallowed uncomfortably and hopped into the car, throwing my handbag at my feet. A wave of nausea hit me and I clamped my mouth shut and counted to ten in my head.

You don’t need blood yet. You just had some.

“Are you alright?” I opened my eyes to find Sam in the driver’s seat, peering at me with concerned eyes. “You’re as white as a ghost.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said quietly. I reached down and grabbed a bottle of water from my bag, cracked it open and drank the whole thing in one go.
 

Stop thinking about feeling sick and you’ll stop feeling sick. It’s all in your head.

I felt bile rush up my throat and I bolted from the car, barely making it to the garden bed on the side of the driveway before the entire contents of my stomach projectiled out of my mouth and onto a pretty rose bush. Thank goodness the garage door had been open or I would have chundered all over the car bonnet. I felt a warm hand on my back and my cheeks started to burn.
Great, he just saw me throw up. Classy.

“Here.” A fresh water bottle was placed in my grasp. I opened it and took a small sip, swirled the water around my mouth and spat it out.
 

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head and taking a deep breath. “Let’s get out of here.”

It was small talk for the first few hours. Small talk and me napping. I was so tired, I felt like I could sleep for days. I was tired right down to my weary bones. I awoke just as we were crossing the border from LA into Arizona, in a town called Needles. If I had stayed asleep five minutes longer, I would have missed Needles completely.

“Can we stop?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
 

Sam frowned. “It’s only been three hours.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I need to pee.”

Sam shrugged in agreement and turned into a gas station. As soon as I got out of the car I regretted it. The temperature had to be at least a hundred and five, and the sun burned my skin the moment I was outside.
 

***

Ten minutes later, I was scratching my reddened skin as we left California and drove into Arizona. The Mojave desert stretched ahead of us, shimmering with mirages of things that did not exist.
 

“That sucks,” Sam said, reaching over and pressing two cool fingers to the pink flesh at my wrist. The skin stayed white for several moments, indicating a nasty burn.

“I remember that,” Sam said. “It took months before I could go out in the sun without getting fried.”

They called Sam the Ripper.
Ryan’s words came back to me like a knife to the heart.

“What was it like for you?” I asked carefully. “In the beginning.”

He didn’t answer, and after several minutes had passed I guessed that he wasn’t going to.

***

“Have you ever wanted to kill someone? To feel their life force fade away? To take everything from them?”

I thought of Caleb. Of Ryan.
 

“No,” I replied honestly.
 

He tore his eyes from the road and stared straight at me. The anguish in his gaze was unmistakable and raw.
 

“I did. I feasted on the suffering of others. The more they hurt, the better I felt. Their blood was like a never–ending river of pain.”

“You … hurt people?”

“I killed people, Mia. I killed a lot of people. And worse.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. His eyes were glossy, and I wondered if he was going to cry. I’ve never seen a guy cry before.

“There are things worse than killing someone. I’ve done most of them.”

I swallowed thickly and cracked the window, staring straight ahead. The landscape was barren and desolate, but it looked positively radiant compared to sitting in the car listening to Sam talk about murdering people. I was suddenly all too aware of the fact that nobody knew where I was. Or who I was with. The one person I had trusted in the midst of chaos, and he was telling me this?

Hot, stale air flooded the car, and I closed my window again. I slumped down in my seat and looked limply at Sam, concentrating on the road ahead. I could tell by his expression that he felt me staring, but he didn’t turn to look at me. He was clearly locked inside his own struggle.
 

“Would you do that now?” I asked. “Would you hurt someone again? Would you hurt me?”

He cleared his throat. “Of course not.”

“Did you hurt anyone before you were a vampire?”

Now he looked at me. “I know what you’re doing.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re trying to pass the blame. Like it wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I replied forcefully. “Unless you decided to let someone Turn you, to make you a vampire, then none of it is your fault.”

“But what about you?” Sam repeated. “What happened to you that you’re so different? You don’t even
like
blood.”

I blushed, stared at the floor.

“Oh, come on, Mia. A few minor cravings is nothing compared to what I’ve just described.
Trust me
.”

The funny thing was, I did trust him. Even after what he’d told me. I glanced at his hands and couldn’t imagine them being used to inflict misery upon somebody.

“I tried to bite Ryan,” I said sheepishly. I didn’t need to tell him the rest.
 

Sam laughed! I felt my face turn even redder.

“Sorry,” he said. “I would love it if you bit him. A scar would be even better. God knows he deserves much worse.”

I frowned. “You don’t like him very much,” I said, “do you?”

“Do you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. And I really didn’t. The pull I felt towards him was incredibly intense. If I thought about moving further away from him, it hurt, a dull thud between my temples and a sharp spike in my chest.