Wombstone (The Vampireland Series) (5 page)

“J–Jefferson day camp” I stuttered. “You?”

Before he could answer, the whistle blew and seven bodies dove into the lake.
 

“Crap,” I muttered, standing up and executing one of the worst dives ever. I ended up in a half–dive, half–belly flop, and I could just imagine the peals of laughter above me in the bleachers. As I hit the water, the icy temperature knocked my breath from my lungs and time stood still while I floated, motionless, and tried to remember how to swim.
 

As my head broke the surface, I gasped in a breath and saw that most of the other swimmers were at least half a lap ahead of me already. I groaned inwardly and started swimming, mentally counting each lap in my head. Front crawl seemed to be the best way for me to avoid freezing to death and also offered the fastest path, meaning I could finish and get back to my French vanilla latte as soon as possible.

Pretty soon I stopped worrying about the cold, pushed on, and wondered when it had been that Jared Cohen had started looking less like an underdeveloped twelve–year–old and more like Ryan Kwanten. It was enough to make my cheeks burn, which was great, since the rest of me was dragging along like a brick of ice.

I got to the last few laps when a cramp started to squeeze at my lower left calf muscle. It was pretty minor at first.
Sixteen laps down, four to go.
Then, the cramp spread to my foot and I wanted to squeal. I did those last few laps messily, with terrible technique, and started to moan as I hoisted myself out of the pool and onto the slightly warmer pine decking. I ripped my goggles off and threw them to the side, frantically massaging my frozen muscles with my fingers.

“Cramp?”

I looked up from my spot on the ground to see Jared standing above me, his tanned chest covered in hundreds of drops of water that glistened in the morning sun.
 

I bit my lip and forced myself to look at his face. “Yeah,” I groaned.
Thanks for the distraction, though.
 

“Here,” he said, kneeling down beside me. He pushed my hands away and started massaging my clenched calf muscle with big, smooth hands. And of course, I didn’t tell him to stop. I snuck a glance at Evie, who was oblivious to the world and listening to her iPod in the bleachers. I kind of wished she would bring my coffee down to the pool deck.
 

“You’re not cold,” I remarked as Jared’s warm fingers worked their magic. “What’d you do, down a quart of scotch before you went in?”

He laughed, even though I thought my attempt at a joke was pretty pathetic and definitely not up to my usual smart–ass standards.

And his smile was amazing.
 

And I fell just a little bit in love with the kid who had stuck craft glue in my hair in first grade.
 

“I’m used to it,” he said. “Swim team and all. Evie and I swim outdoors almost every morning during swim season.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I replied.
From now on,
I thought
, I’m going to be coffee–bitch for the swim team every morning. And I’ll sit in the nice warm bleachers and sip my latte while I watch those abs of steel and that cute –
 

“All better?” he asked.

“Almost,” I lied. It didn’t hurt anymore. But he didn’t know that, did he?

He smiled again and kept his hands on my perfectly uncramped leg. “You know, Daniel Mansell’s having a party tonight. You should come.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I shrugged casually. “I’ll see what Evie’s doing.”

He stood and offered me his hand. “He’s got a pool. A heated one, don’t worry.”

He flashed those incredible teeth at me once more and wandered off to do his buoy dive on the other side of the pool.

I could barely wait until Evie had finished her laps and we were back at the bleachers to ask her about her swim team partner.

“Why didn’t you tell me hair–puller had turned into such a hottie?”

She smiled knowingly. “I told you to come along to swim practice, but you didn’t listen.”

“We’re going to that party tonight,” I said, grinning from ear to ear.

Where did you meet your first love? I met mine when I was five years old, on the playground, when he yanked on my hair. And when I was seventeen, I fell in love with him at a party on the first night of summer, and wondered why the universe had kept us apart for all those years.

The first time I kissed Jared Cohen, it was like little fireflies had landed all over my body, and butterflies swam in my belly. That night we didn’t do anything more than talk and land soft, gentle kisses on each other, and it was the most perfect night of my simple little life. If I had known what lay ahead, what we would become, what would happen to the world because of the virus that poisoned our love, would I still have let myself fall in love with him?

I could say no, but we would both know that it was a lie.

“Hey.”
 

I woke up from a heavy sleep, startled by the voice in the room.

“Oh,” I said, struggling to sit up as fresh pain shot up my dislocated arm. “It’s you. Here to break the other one?”

Ryan smiled coldly. “I’m hungry. Thought I’d hit you up for a pint.”

Well, I didn’t know what to say to that.

He laughed. “Your face!” He slapped his thigh and laughed some more while I glared at him. “Well, be afraid. Someone is going to be eating you, little girl. But not me.”

I put on my best blank face and stared at the wall opposite me. I was tired of games, and my shoulder was hurting too much for me to maintain much of a conversation anyway.

“Here.” He crouched down in front of me and pointed at my arm. “I’ve come to fix that.”

I didn’t move.

“Come on,” he said, and gestured for me to scoot forward. I did, reluctantly, and braced myself for a lot of pain as my bones were seconds away from more grating on each other. Ryan put one hand on the front of my shoulder, and the other on my back. I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut.

“Okay, on the count of three. Ready?”

I nodded mutely.
 

“One –” A white-hot poker stabbed into my shoulder as he reset it.

“
JESUS!
” I screamed. I looked at him, shaking my head. “What happened to three?!”

“It’s like a Band–Aid. You shouldn’t hesitate.”

I had been dreaming about Jared before he came in, but before that I’d been wondering something.

“Can I ask you a question?” I enquired through gritted teeth.

Ryan shrugged, offering me a hand up. “You’re so goddamn curious, why not?”

 
I accepted his hand, and he hauled me up to my shaky feet. I stared at his flat brown eyes and his ridiculous smirk and shuddered inwardly.

“She wanted to die,” I said, pointing at the body in the corner that had finally stopped bleeding. “But she kept saying no, no, no. What did he really say to her to scare her before he killed her? Did he do something else to her? Why today?”

Ryan raised his eyebrows petulantly. “You just asked three questions. Do you want to know why he killed her, why today was a good day to kill her, or what else we did to her?”

“We?”

“Well, I do have to eat,” he replied, grinning wickedly.

“You’re disgusting” I said, rolling my eyes. “She was a kid, for God’s sake.”

“I’ve had younger.”

“You’re a fucking pervert, you know that?”

He furrowed his brows, as if he was not only genuinely hurt by my remark, but utterly confused by it. “It’s nothing sexual,” he replied defensively. “I have to feed, or I die. Do you think about Daisy the cow before you chow down on a piece of fillet steak?”

“Do I LOOK like Daisy the cow to you?!” I shot back, my voice steadily rising.

“No,” he replied flicking his gaze from my face down to my feet and back again. “With you, it would most certainly be sexual.”

Well. I didn’t know what to say to that. I just shook my head incredulously and felt my cheeks burn with equal parts anger and embarrassment.

“Forget about that,” he said abruptly. “Caleb’s going to call for you in the next few hours. I want you to be prepared so ... well, so
that
doesn’t happen to you.” We both continued to stare at the dead girl who had ceased to frighten me, and who was now just a part of the room.

“Why?” I asked. “You’re such an asshole to me, I think you’d like it if I died.”

“I’m serious,” he snapped, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me for good measure.

“My shoulder!” I moaned.
 

“Sorry.” He let go of me and appeared to try and calm himself. “Listen, please. Don’t upset him, or he
will
kill you. There is another way. If you’re good, and you do what he says, then he’ll spare you and you can be free one day.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What’s the catch?”

He glanced at Kate’s body, then at me. “Does it matter?”
 

“Yes!” I insisted.
 

“Just do what I told you,” he said. “Unless you want to end up dead like
this
.” He bent down and picked Kate up, throwing her over his shoulder like she was a sack of potatoes.

I narrowed my eyes at him as he left the room.
Yeah, fucking right
, I thought bitterly.
Either way, I’m not walking out of here.

***

For as long as I can remember, the sight of blood and the thought of any kind of unnecessary pain has grossed me out. So as soon as I was frogmarched back into Caleb’s den/office/torture chamber, I wanted to throw up. The leather couches and coffee table had been pushed into the corner of the room, and in front of the huge bay window was a metal hospital gurney that I was awkwardly pushed onto by Ryan. There were leather straps for my wrists and ankles and I realized I was about to be strapped down. Panicking, I drew my fist back and hit Ryan as hard as I could in the jaw. I was surprised when his head snapped back from the force of my blow. Clearly, I was getting better at trying to fight my way out.
 

Two other guys who’d followed us into the room sprang into action, holding my arms as I kicked and screamed, jerking around like a slippery eel. I felt a sharp prick in my forearm and groaned as my head spun and my limbs went heavy and loose.
 

“You guys never play fair,” I mumbled, slumping back on the cold metal, trying to remember how to move my mouth to form words. Whatever they’d just given me hadn’t affected my thinking at all, but physically I felt like I weighed a hundred tons. Even moving my fingers felt impossible.

Things were happening very efficiently around me. I struggled in vain as one of them wrapped a makeshift tourniquet – a gray scarf – around my right arm and started tapping for a vein.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “
What
are you
doing to me
?!”

Nobody answered. I cried out as one of the nameless guys (I looked closer and realized it was Ford, who’d gotten a towel and wiped my vomit off Ryan’s shoes) stuck me in the arm with an IV line, missed the vein, and did it again.
Butcher,
I thought angrily. My veins were bright blue and purple and right on the surface of my goddamn arms – a nurse’s dream, I’d been told before. This guy was a hack.

My heart must have been hammering along at a million miles an hour. As soon as Ford got the needle in my arm, bright red blood sprayed out of the plastic tubing on the end, splattering me, him and the floor. I stared at the red stuff, horrified. Was it like dangling a piece of meat in front of a hungry dog? Or four hungry dogs, in my case? I thought about Daisy the cow and shuddered.
 

I looked to Ryan for – what? Familiarity? I knew I wasn’t going to get any help from him, but somehow his presence made things less scary. Which was completely fucking insane thinking on my part. The guy had almost killed me, like, five times now.

But he was gone, and in his place was Caleb with those freaky white eyes again. I felt my eyes grow wide as he came closer. I tore my gaze from him and turned my attention back to my blood, and how it was spraying everywhere.
 

“You’re being wasteful!” Caleb’s voice boomed.

Ford hurriedly released the scarf that was wrapped around my bicep, and my blood stopped spraying across the room.
Thank god for small miracles.
 

 
The other guy – whose name I hadn’t caught yet – wheeled a stainless steel IV stand over to my butchered arm and connected a length of clear plastic tubing to the straw that jutted out of the inside of my elbow. The line began to fill instantly, my blood curling its way like a calisthenic ribbon to its new home. I followed its path with desperate eyes and gagged when I saw its final destination. Sitting atop an old wine barrel was a line of wine bottles, each sculpted from clear glass and labeled only with my name and the letters RC.
 

RC? Ryan’s initials, maybe?

I didn’t really care about the writing, only that the first bottle (which looked as if it could hold nearly a liter) was almost full already. When it reached the top, the unnamed guy pinched the plastic tubing, stopping the flow of my blood.

My head spun. I watched in horror as Caleb stepped forward with an enormous red wine goblet in one hand. With the other hand he picked up the bottle and poured
my blood
into his glass, swirling it around the edges and watching it stick to the sides.
 

“Look at that!” he marvelled, drinking half the glass down in one, open–throated gulp. “In France they call them tears.” He motioned to the oily streaks of blood that clung to the inside of the glass, and I guessed that he was talking in wine terms.

A wave of dizziness hit me, and I looked back to the wine bottles to see a second one was being filled with my blood. Two bottles would equal one–and–a–half–liters – any more than that and I suspected I might die. My mouth went dry and I started to shake. I was going into shock.
 

“Too much,” I mouthed, staring at the blood–filled tube with a mixture of revulsion and wonder. “You’re taking too much.”