THE SHORT SECOND LIFE OF BREE TANNER
THE NEWSPAPER HEADLINE GLARED AT ME FROM a little metal vending
machine: SEATTLE UNDER SIEGE—DEATH TOLL RISES
AGAIN. I hadn’t seen this one yet. Some paperboy must have
just restocked the machine. Lucky for him, he was nowhere
around now.
Great. Riley was going to blow a gasket. I would make sure
I wasn’t within reach when he saw this paper. Let him rip
somebody else’s arm off.
I stood in the shadow behind the corner of a shabby threestory
building, trying to be inconspicuous while I waited for
someone to make a decision. Not wanting to meet anyone’s
eyes, I stared at the wall beside me instead. The ground floor of
the building housed a record shop that had long since closed;
the windows, lost to weather or street violence, were filled in
with plywood. Over the top were apartments—empty, I guessed,
since the normal sounds of sleeping humans were absent. I
wasn’t surprised—the place looked like it would collapse in a
stiff wind. The buildings on the other side of the dark, narrow
street were just as wrecked.
The normal scene for a night out on the town.
I didn’t want to speak up and draw attention, but I wished
somebody would decide something. I was really thirsty, and I
didn’t care much whether we went right or left or over the roof. I
just wanted to find some unlucky people who wouldn’t even
have enough time to think wrong place, wrong time.
Unfortunately tonight Riley’d sent me out with two of the
most useless vampires in existence. Riley never seemed to
care who he sent out in hunting groups. Or particularly bugged
when sending out the wrong people together meant fewer
people coming home. Tonight I was stuck with Kevin and some
blond kid whose name I didn’t know. They both belonged to
Raoul’s gang, so it went without saying that they were stupid.
And dangerous. But right now, mostly stupid.
Instead of picking a direction for our hunt, suddenly they
were in the middle of an argument over whose favorite
superhero would be a better hunter. The nameless blond was
demonstrating his case for Spider-Man now, skittering up the
brick wall of the alley while humming the cartoon theme song. I
sighed in frustration. Were we ever going to hunt?
A little flicker of movement to my left caught my eye. It was
the other one Riley had sent out in this hunting group, Diego. I
didn’t know much about him, just that he was older than most of
the others. Riley’s right-hand man was the word. That didn’t
make me like him any more than the other morons.
Diego was looking at me. He must have heard the sigh. I
looked away.
Keep your head down and your mouth shut—that was the
way to stay alive in Riley’s crowd.
“Spider-Man is such a whiny loser,” Kevin called up to the
blond kid. “I’ll show you how a real superhero hunts.” He grinned
wide. His teeth flashed in the glare of a streetlight.
Kevin jumped into the middle of the street just as the lights
from a car swung around to illuminate the cracked pavement
with a blue-white gleam. He flexed his arms back, then pulled
them slowly together like a pro wrestler showing off. The car
came on, probably expecting him to get the hell out of the way
like a normal person would. Like he should.
“Hulk mad!” Kevin bellowed. “Hulk… SMASH!”
He leaped forward to meet the car before it could brake,
grabbed its front bumper, and flipped it over his head so that it
struck the pavement upside down with a squeal of bending
metal and shattering glass. Inside, a woman started screaming.
“Oh man,” Diego said, shaking his head. He was pretty, with
dark, dense, curly hair, big, wide eyes, and really full lips, but
then, who wasn’t pretty? Even Kevin and the rest of Raoul’s
morons were pretty. “Kevin, we’re supposed to be laying low.
Riley said—”
“Riley said!” Kevin mimicked in a harsh soprano. “Get a
spine, Diego. Riley’s not here.”
Kevin sprang over the upside-down Honda and punched out
the driver’s side window, which had somehow stayed intact up
to that point. He fished through the shattered glass and the
deflating air bag for the driver.
I turned my back and held my breath, trying my hardest to
hold on to the ability to think.
I couldn’t watch Kevin feed. I was too thirsty for that, and I
really didn’t want to pick a fight with him. I so did not need to be
on Raoul’s hit list.
The blond kid didn’t have the same issues. He pushed off
from the bricks overhead and landed lightly behind me. I heard
him and Kevin snarling at each other, and then a wet tearing
sound as the woman’s screams cut off. Probably them ripping
her in half.
I tried not to think about it. But I could feel the heat and hear
the dripping behind me, and it made my throat burn so bad
even though I wasn’t breathing.
“I’m outta here,” I heard Diego mutter.
He ducked into a crevice between the dark buildings, and I
followed right on his heels. If I didn’t get away from here fast, I’d
be squabbling with Raoul’s goons over a body that couldn’t
have had much blood left in it by now anyway. And then maybe
I’d be the one who didn’t come home.
Ugh, but my throat burned! I clamped my teeth together to
keep from screaming in pain.
Diego darted through a trash-filled side alley, and then
—when he hit the dead end—up the wall. I dug my fingers into
the crevices between the bricks and hauled myself up after him.
On the rooftop, Diego took off, leaping lightly across the
other roofs toward the lights shimmering off the sound. I stayed
close. I was younger than he was, and therefore stronger—it
was a good thing we younger ones were strongest, or we
wouldn’t have lived through our first week in Riley’s house. I
could have passed him easy, but I wanted to see where he was
going, and I didn’t want to have him behind me.
Diego didn’t stop for miles; we were almost to the industrial
docks. I could hear him muttering under his breath.
“Idiots! Like Riley wouldn’t give us instructions for a good
reason. Self-preservation, for example. Is an ounce of common
sense so much to ask for?”
“Hey,” I called. “Are we going to hunt anytime soon? My
throat’s on fire here.”
Diego landed on the edge of a wide factory roof and spun
around. I jumped back a few yards, on my guard, but he didn’t
make an aggressive move toward me.
“Yeah,” he said. “I just wanted some distance between me
and the lunatics.”
He smiled, all friendly, and I stared at him.
This Diego guy wasn’t like the others. He was kind of…
calm, I guess was the word. Normal. Not normal now, but normal
before. His eyes were a darker red than mine. He must have
been around for a while, like I’d heard.
From the street below came the sounds of nighttime in a
slummier part of Seattle. A few cars, music with heavy bass, a
couple of people walking with nervous, fast steps, some drunk
bum singing off-key in the distance.
“You’re Bree, right?” Diego asked. “One of the newbies.”
I didn’t like that. Newbie. Whatever. “Yeah, I’m Bree. But I
didn’t come in with the last group. I’m almost three months old.”
“Pretty slick for a three-monther,” he said. “Not many would
have been able to leave the scene of the accident like that.” He
said it like a compliment, like he was really impressed.
“Didn’t want to mix it up with Raoul’s freaks.”
He nodded. “Amen, sister. Their kind ain’t nothing but bad
news.”
Weird. Diego was weird. How he sounded like a person
having a regular old conversation. No hostility, no suspicion.
Like he wasn’t thinking about how easy or hard it might be to kill
me right now. He was just talking to me.
“How long have you been with Riley?” I asked curiously.
“Going on eleven months now.”
“Wow! That’s older than Raoul.”
Diego rolled his eyes and spit venom over the edge of the
building. “Yeah, I remember when Riley brought that trash in.
Things just kept getting worse after that.”
I was quiet for a moment, wondering if he thought everyone
younger than himself was trash. Not that I cared. I didn’t care
what anybody thought anymore. Didn’t have to. Like Riley said, I
was a god now. Stronger, faster, better. Nobody else counted.
Then Diego whistled low under his breath.
“There we go. Just takes a little brains and patience.” He
pointed down and across the street.
Half-hidden around the edge of a purple-black alley, a man
was cussing at a woman and slapping her while another woman
watched silently. From their clothes, I guessed that it was a
pimp and two of his employees.
This was what Riley had told us to do. Hunt the dregs. Take
the humans that no one was going to miss, the ones who
weren’t headed home to a waiting family, the ones who wouldn’t
be reported missing.
It was the same way he chose us. Meals and gods, both
coming from the dregs.
Unlike some of the others, I still did what Riley told me to do.
Not because I liked him. That feeling was long gone. It was
because what he told us sounded right. How did it make sense
to call attention to the fact that a bunch of new vampires were
claiming Seattle as their hunting ground? How was that going to
help us?
I didn’t even believe in vampires before I was one. So if the
rest of the world didn’t believe in vampires, then the rest of the
vampires must be hunting smart, the way Riley said to do it.
They probably had a good reason.
And like Diego’d said, hunting smart just took a little brains
and patience.
Of course, we all slipped up a lot, and Riley would read the
papers and groan and yell at us and break stuff—like Raoul’s
favorite video-game system. Then Raoul would get mad and
take somebody else apart and burn him up. Then Riley would
be pissed off and he’d do another search to confiscate all the
lighters and matches. A few rounds of this, and then Riley would
bring home another handful of vampirized dregs kids to replace
the ones he’d lost. It was an endless cycle.
Diego inhaled through his nose—a big, long pull—and I
watched his body change. He crouched on the roof, one hand
gripping the edge. All that strange friendliness disappeared,
and he was a hunter.
That was something I recognized, something I was
comfortable with because I understood it.
I turned off my brain. It was time to hunt. I took a deep
breath, drawing in the scent of the blood inside the humans
below. They weren’t the only humans around, but they were the
closest. Who you were going to hunt was the kind of decision
you had to make before you scented your prey. It was too late
now to choose anything.
Diego dropped from the roof edge, out of sight. The sound
of his landing was too low to catch the attention of the crying
prostitute, the zoned-out prostitute, or the angry pimp.
A low growl ripped from between my teeth. Mine. The blood
was mine. The fire in my throat flared and I couldn’t think of
anything else.
I flipped myself off the roof, spinning across the street so
that I landed right next to the crying blonde. I could feel Diego
close behind me, so I growled a warning at him while I caught
the surprised girl by the hair. I yanked her to the alley wall,
putting my back against it. Defensive, just in case.
Then I forgot all about Diego, because I could feel the heat
under her skin, hear the sound of her pulse thudding close to the
surface.
She opened her mouth to scream, but my teeth crushed her
windpipe before a sound could come out. There was just the
gurgle of air and blood in her lungs, and the low moans I could
not control.
The blood was warm and sweet. It quenched the fire in my
throat, calmed the nagging, itching emptiness in my stomach. I
sucked and gulped, only vaguely aware of anything else.
I heard the same noise from Diego—he had the man. The
other woman was unconscious on the ground. Neither had
made any noise. Diego was good.
The problem with humans was that they just never had
enough blood in them. It seemed like only seconds later the girl
ran dry. I rattled her limp body in frustration. Already my throat
was beginning to burn again.
I threw the spent body to the ground and crouched against
the wall, wondering if I could grab the unconscious girl and
make off with her before Diego could catch up to me.
Diego was already finished with the man. He looked at me
with an expression that I could only describe as… sympathetic.
But I could have been dead wrong. I couldn’t remember anyone
ever giving me sympathy before, so I wasn’t positive what it
looked like.
“Go for it,” he told me, nodding to the limp girl on the ground.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Naw, I’m good for now. We’ve got time to hunt some more
tonight.”
Watching him carefully for some sign of a trick, I darted
forward and snagged the girl. Diego made no move to stop me.
He turned away slightly and looked up at the black sky.
I sank my teeth into her neck, keeping my eyes on him. This
one was even better than the last. Her blood was entirely clean.
The blonde girl’s blood had the bitter aftertaste that came with
drugs—I was so used to that, I’d barely noticed. It was rare for
me to get really clean blood, because I followed the dregs rule.
Diego seemed to follow the rules, too. He must have smelled
what he was giving up.
Why had he done it?
When the second body was empty, my throat felt better.
There was a lot of blood in my system. I probably wouldn’t really
burn for a few days.
Diego was still waiting, whistling quietly through his teeth.
When I let the body fall to the ground with a thud, he turned back
to me and smiled.
“Um, thanks,” I said.
He nodded. “You looked like you needed it more than me. I
remember how hard it is in the beginning.”
“Does it get easier?”
He shrugged. “In some ways.”
We looked at each other for a second.
“Why don’t we dump these bodies in the sound?” he
suggested.
I bent down, grabbed the dead blonde, and slung her limp
body over my shoulder. I was about to get the other one, but
Diego was there before me, the pimp already on his back.
“I got it,” he said.
I followed him up the alley wall, and then we swung across
the girders under the freeway. The lights from the cars below
didn’t touch us. I thought how stupid people were, how oblivious,
and I was glad I wasn’t one of the clueless.
Hidden in the darkness, we made our way to an empty
dock, closed for the night. Diego didn’t hesitate at the end of
the concrete, he just jumped right over the edge with his bulky
burden and disappeared into the water. I slid in after him.
He swam as sleek and quick as a shark, shooting deeper
and farther out into the black sound. He stopped suddenly when
he found what he was looking for—a huge, slime-covered
boulder on the ocean floor, sea stars and garbage clinging to its
sides. We had to be more than a hundred feet deep—to a
human, it would have seemed pitch-black here. Diego let go of
his bodies. They swayed slowly in the current beside him while
he shoved his hand into the mucky sand at the base of the rock.
After a second he found a hold and ripped the boulder up from
its resting spot. The weight of it drove him waist-deep into the
dark seafloor.
He looked up and nodded to me.
I swam down to him, hooking his bodies with one hand on
my way. I shoved the blonde into the black hole under the rock,
then pushed the second girl and the pimp in after her. I kicked
them lightly to make sure they were in, and then got out of the
way. Diego let the boulder fall. It wobbled a little, adjusting to the
newly uneven foundation. He kicked his way out of the muck,
swam to the top of the boulder, and then pushed it down,
grinding the obstructions flat underneath.
He swam back a few yards to view his work.
Perfect, I mouthed. These three bodies would never
resurface. Riley would never hear a story about them on the
news.
He grinned and held up his hand.
It took me a minute to understand that he was looking for a
high five. Hesitantly, I swam forward, tapped my palm to his,
then kicked away, putting some distance between us.
Diego got a weird expression on his face, and then he shot
to the surface like a bullet.
I darted up after him, confused. When I broke through to the
air, he was almost choking on his laughter.
“What?”
He couldn’t answer me for a minute. Finally he blurted out,
“Worst high five ever.”
I sniffed, irritated. “Couldn’t be sure you weren’t just going to
rip my arm off or something.”
Diego snorted. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Anyone else would,” I countered.
“True, that,” he agreed, suddenly not as amused. “You up for
a little more hunting?”
“Do you have to ask?”
We came out of the water under a bridge and lucked right
into two homeless guys sleeping in ancient, filthy sleeping bags
on top of a shared mattress of old newspapers. Neither one of
them woke up. Their blood was soured by alcohol, but still
better than nothing. We buried them in the sound, too, under a
different rock.
“Well, I’m good for a few weeks,” Diego said when we were
out of the water again, dripping on the end of another empty
dock.
I sighed. “I guess that’s the easier part, right? I’ll be burning
again in a couple of days. And then Riley will probably send me
out with more of Raoul’s mutants again.”
“I can come with you, if you want. Riley pretty much lets me
do what I want.”
I thought about the offer, suspicious for a second. But Diego
really didn’t seem like any of the others. I felt different with him.
Like I didn’t need to watch my back so much.
“I’d like that,” I admitted. It felt off to say this. Too vulnerable
or something.
But Diego just said “cool” and smiled at me.
“So how come Riley gives you such a long leash?” I asked,
wondering about the relationship there. The more time I spent
with Diego, the less I could picture him being in tight with Riley.
Diego was so… friendly. Nothing like Riley. But maybe it was an
opposites-attract thing.
“Riley knows he can trust me to clean up my messes.
Speaking of which, do you mind running a quick errand?”
I was starting to be entertained by this strange boy. Curious
about him. I wanted to see what he would do.
“Sure,” I said.
He bounded across the dock toward the road that ran along
the waterfront. I followed after. I caught the scent of a few
humans, but I knew it was too dark and we were too fast for
them to see us.
He chose to travel across rooftops again. After a few jumps,
I recognized both our scents. He was retracing our earlier path.
And then we were back to that first alley, where Kevin and
the other guy had gotten stupid with the car.
“Unbelievable,” Diego growled.
Kevin and Co. had just left, it appeared. Two other cars
were stacked on top of the first, and a handful of bystanders
had been added to the body count. The cops weren’t here yet
—because anyone who might have reported the mayhem was
already dead.
“Help me sort this out?” Diego asked.
“Okay.”
We dropped down, and Diego quickly threw the cars into a
new arrangement, so that it sort of looked like they’d hit each
other rather than been piled up by a giant tantrum-throwing
baby. I grabbed the two dry, lifeless bodies abandoned on the
pavement and stuffed them under the apparent site of impact.
“Bad accident,” I commented.
Diego grinned. He took a lighter out of a ziplock from his
pocket and started igniting the clothes of the victims. I grabbed
my own lighter—Riley reissued these when we went hunting;
Kevin should have used his—and got to work on the upholstery.
The bodies, dried out and laced with flammable venom, blazed
up quickly.
“Get back,” Diego warned, and I saw that he had the first
car’s gas hatch open and the lid screwed off the tank. I jumped
up the closest wall, perching a story above to watch. He took a
few steps back and lit a match. With perfect aim, he tossed it
into the small hole. In the same second, he leaped up beside
me.
The boom of the explosion shook the whole street. Lights
started going on around the corner.
“Well done,” I said.
“Thanks for your help. Back to Riley’s?”
I frowned. Riley’s house was the last place I wanted to
spend the rest of my night. I didn’t want to see Raoul’s stupid
face or listen to the constant shrieking and fighting. I didn’t want
to have to grit my teeth and hide out behind Freaky Fred so that
people would leave me alone. And I was out of books.
“We’ve got some time,” Diego said, reading my expression.
“We don’t have to go right away.”
“I could use some reading material.”
“And I could use some new music.” He grinned. “Let’s go
shopping.”
We moved quickly through town—over rooftops again and
then darting through shadowy streets when the buildings got
farther apart—to a friendlier neighborhood. It didn’t take long to
find a strip mall with one of the big chain bookstores. I snapped
the lock on the roof access hatch and let us in. The store was
empty, the only alarms on the windows and doors. I went
straight to the H’s, while Diego headed to the music section in
the back. I’d just finished with Hale. I took the next dozen books
in line; that would keep me a couple of days.
I looked around for Diego and found him sitting at one of the
café tables, studying the backs of his new CDs. I paused, then
joined him.
This felt strange because it was familiar in a haunting,
uncomfortable way. I had sat like this before—across a table
from someone. I’d chatted casually with that person, thinking
about things that were not life and death or thirst and blood. But
that had been in a different, blurry lifetime.
The last time I’d sat at a table with someone, that someone
had been Riley. It was hard to remember that night for a lot of
reasons.
“So how come I never notice you around the house?” Diego
asked abruptly. “Where do you hide?”
I laughed and grimaced at the same time. “I usually kick it
behind wherever Freaky Fred is hanging out.”
His nose wrinkled. “Seriously? How do you stand that?”
“You get used to it. It’s not so bad behind him as it is in front.
Anyway, it’s the best hiding place I’ve found. Nobody gets close
to Fred.”
Diego nodded, still looking kind of grossed out. “That’s true.
It’s a way to stay alive.”
I shrugged.
“Did you know that Fred is one of Riley’s favorites?” Diego
asked.
“Really? How?” No one could stand Freaky Fred. I was the
only one who tried, and that was solely out of self-preservation.
Diego leaned toward me conspiratorially. I was already so
used to his strange way that I didn’t even flinch.
“I heard him on the phone with her.”
I shuddered.
“I know,” he said, sounding sympathetic again. Of course, it
wasn’t weird that we could sympathize with each other when it
came to her. “This was a few months back. Anyway, Riley was
talking about Fred, all excited. From what they were saying, I
guess that some vampires can do things. More than what
normal vampires can do, I mean. And that’s good—something
she’s looking for. Vampires with skillzzz.”
He pulled the Z sound out, so I could hear how he was
spelling it in his head.
“What kinds of skills?”
“All kinds of stuff, it sounds like. Mind reading and tracking
and even seeing the future.”
“Get out.”
“I’m not kidding. I guess Fred can sort of repel people on
purpose. It’s all in our heads, though. He makes us repulsed at
the thought of being near him.”
I frowned. “How is that a good thing?”
“Keeps him alive, doesn’t it? Guess it keeps you alive, too.”
I nodded. “Guess so. Did he say anything about anyone
else?” I tried to think of anything strange I’d seen or felt, but
Fred was one of a kind. The clowns in the alley tonight
pretending to be superheroes hadn’t been doing anything the
rest of us couldn’t do.
“He talked about Raoul,” Diego said, the corner of his
mouth twisting down.
“What skill does Raoul have? Super-stupidity?”
Diego snorted. “Definitely that. But Riley thinks he’s got
some kind of magnetism—people are drawn to him, they follow
him.”
“Only the mentally challenged.”
“Yeah, Riley mentioned that. Didn’t seem to be effective on
the”—he broke out a decent impression of Riley’s voice—“
‘tamer kids.’”
“Tame?”
“I inferred that he meant people like us, who are able to
think occasionally.”
I didn’t like being called tame. It didn’t sound like a good
thing when you put it that way. Diego’s way sounded better.
“It was like there was a reason Riley needed Raoul to lead
—something’s coming, I think.”
A weird tingle spasmed along my spine when he said that,
and I sat up straighter. “Like what?”
“Do you ever think about why Riley is always after us to
keep a low profile?”
I hesitated for half a second before answering. This wasn’t
the line of inquiry I would have expected from Riley’s right-hand
man. Almost like he was questioning what Riley had told us.
Unless Diego was asking this for Riley, like a spy. Finding out
what the “kids” thought of him. But it didn’t feel like that. Diego’s
dark red eyes were open and confiding. And why would Riley
care? Maybe the way the others talked about Diego wasn’t
based on anything real. Just gossip.
I answered him truthfully. “Yeah, actually I was just thinking
about that.”
“We aren’t the only vampires in the world,” Diego said
solemnly.
“I know. Riley says stuff sometimes. But there can’t be too
many. I mean, wouldn’t we have noticed, before?”
Diego nodded. “That’s what I think, too. Which is why it’s
pretty weird that she keeps making more of us, don’t you think?
”
I frowned. “Huh. Because it’s not like Riley actually likes us
or anything….” I paused again, waiting to see if he would
contradict me. He didn’t. He just waited, nodding slightly in
agreement, so I continued. “And she hasn’t even introduced
herself. You’re right. I hadn’t looked at it that way. Well, I hadn’t
really thought about it at all. But then, what do they want us for?”
Diego raised one eyebrow. “Wanna hear what I think?”
I nodded warily. But my anxiety had nothing to do with him
now.
“Like I said, something is coming. I think she wants
protection, and she put Riley in charge of creating the front line.”
I thought this through, my spine prickling again. “Why
wouldn’t they tell us? Shouldn’t we be, like, on the lookout or
something?”
“That would make sense,” he agreed.
We looked at each other in silence for a few long-seeming
seconds. I had nothing more, and it didn’t look like he did,
either.
Finally I grimaced and said, “I don’t know if I buy it—the part
about Raoul being good for anything, that is.”
Diego laughed. “Hard to argue that one.” Then he glanced
out the windows at the dark early morning. “Out of time. Better
head back before we turn into crispies.”
“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” I sang under my breath as I
got to my feet and collected my pile.
Diego chuckled.
We made one more quick stop on our way—hit the empty
Target next door for big ziplocks and two backpacks. I doublebagged
all my books. Water-damaged pages annoyed me.
Then we mostly roof-topped it back to the water. The sky
was just faintly starting to gray up in the east. We slipped into
the sound right under the noses of two oblivious night watchmen
by the big ferry—good thing for them I was full or they would
have been too close for my self-control—and then raced
through the murky water back toward Riley’s place.
At first I didn’t know it was a race. I was just swimming fast
because the sky was getting lighter. I didn’t usually push the
time like this. If I were being honest with myself, I’d pretty much
turned into a huge vampire nerd. I followed the rules, I didn’t
cause trouble, I hung out with the most unpopular kid in the
group, and I always got home early.
But then Diego really kicked it into gear. He got a few
lengths ahead of me, turned back with a smile that said, what,
can’t you keep up? and then started booking it again.
Well, I wasn’t taking that. I couldn’t really remember if I’d
been the competitive type before—it all seemed so far away
and unimportant—but maybe I was, because I responded right
away to the challenge. Diego was a good swimmer, but I was
way stronger, especially after just feeding.
See ya, I mouthed as I passed him, but I wasn’t sure he
saw.
I lost him back in the dark water, and I didn’t waste time
looking to see by how much I was winning. I just jetted through
the sound till I hit the edge of the island where the most recent of
our homes was located. The last one had been a big cabin in
the middle of Snowville-Nowhere on the side of some mountain
in the Cascades. Like the last one, this house was remote, had
a big basement, and had recently deceased owners.
I raced up onto the shallow stony beach and then dug my
fingers into the sandstone bluff and flew up. I heard Diego come
out of the water just as I gripped the trunk of an overhanging
pine and flipped myself over the cliff edge.
Two things caught my attention as I landed gently on the
balls of my feet. One: it was really light out. Two: the house was
gone.Well, not entirely gone. Some of it was still visible, but the
space the house had once occupied was empty. The roof had
collapsed into ragged, angular wooden lace, charred black,
sagging lower than the front door had been.
The sun was rising fast. The black pine trees were showing
hints of evergreen. Soon the paler tips would stand out against
the dark, and at about that point I would be dead.
Or really dead, or whatever. This second thirsty, superhero
life would go up in a sudden burst of flames. And I could only
imagine that the burst would be very, very painful.
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen our house destroyed—with
all the fights and fires in the basements, most of them lasted
only a few weeks—but it was the first time I’d come across the
scene of destruction with the first faint rays of sunlight
threatening.
I sucked in a gasp of shock as Diego landed beside me.
“Maybe burrow under the roof?” I whispered. “Would that be
safe enough or—?”
“Don’t freak out, Bree,” Diego said, sounding too calm. “I
know a place. C’mon.”
He did a very graceful backflip off the bluff edge.
I didn’t think the water would be enough of a filter to block
the sun. But maybe we couldn’t burn if we were submerged? It
seemed like a really poor plan to me.
However, instead of tunneling under the burned-out hull of
the wrecked house, I dove off the cliff behind him. I wasn’t sure
of my reasoning, which was a strange feeling. Usually I did what
I always did—followed the routine, did what made sense.
I caught up to Diego in the water. He was racing again, but
with no nonsense this time. Racing the sun.
He whipped around a point on the little island and then dove
deep. I was surprised he didn’t hit the rocky floor of the sound,
and more surprised when I could feel the blast of warmer
current flowing from what I had thought was no more than an
outcropping of rock.
Smart of Diego to have a place like this. Sure, it wasn’t
going to be fun to sit in an underwater cavern all day—not
breathing started to irritate after a few hours—but it was better
than exploding into ashes. I should have been thinking like
Diego was. Thinking about something other than blood, that is. I
should have been prepared for the unexpected.
Diego kept going through a narrow crevice in the rocks. It
was black as ink in here. Safe. I couldn’t swim anymore—the
space was too tight—so I scrambled through like Diego,
climbing through the twisting space. I kept waiting for him to
stop, but he didn’t. Suddenly I realized that we really were going
up. And then I heard Diego hit the surface.
I was out a half second after he was.
The cave was no more than a small hole, a burrow about the
size of a Volkswagen Beetle, though not as tall as that. A
second crawl space led out the back, and I could taste the fresh
air coming from that direction. I could see the shape of Diego’s
fingers repeated again and again in the texture of the limestone
walls.
“Nice place,” I said.
Diego smiled. “Better than Freaky Fred’s backside.”
“I can’t argue with that. Um. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
We looked at each other in the dark for a minute. His face
was smooth and calm. With anyone else, Kevin or Kristie or any
of the others, this would have been terrifying—the constricted
space, the forced closeness. The way I could smell his scent on
every side of me. That could have meant a quick and painful
death at any second. But Diego was so composed. Not like
anyone else.
“How old are you?” he asked abruptly.
“Three months. I told you that.”
“That’s not what I meant. Um, how old were you? I guess
that’s the right way to ask.”
I leaned away, uncomfortable, when I realized he was talking
about human stuff. Nobody talked about that. Nobody wanted
to think about it. But I didn’t want to end the conversation, either.
Just having a conversation at all was something new and
different. I hesitated, and he waited with a curious expression.
“I was, um, I guess fifteen. Almost sixteen. I can’t remember
the day… was I past my birthday?” I tried to think about it, but
those last hungry weeks were a big blur, and it hurt my head in a
weird way to try to clear them up. I shook my head, let it go.
“How about you?”
“I was just past my eighteenth,” Diego said. “So close.”
“Close to what?”
“Getting out,” he said, but he didn’t continue. There was an
awkward silence for a minute, and then he changed the subject.
“You’ve done really well since you got here,” he said, his
eyes sweeping across my crossed arms, my folded legs.
“You’ve survived—avoided the wrong kind of attention, kept
intact.”
I shrugged and then yanked my left t-shirt sleeve up to my
shoulder so he could see the thin, ragged line that circled my
arm.
“Got this ripped off once,” I admitted. “Got it back before
Jen could toast it. Riley showed me how to put it back on.”
Diego smiled wryly and touched his right knee with one
finger. His dark jeans covered the scar that must have been
there. “It happens to everybody.”
“Ouch,” I said.
He nodded. “Seriously. But like I was saying before, you’re
a pretty decent vampire.”
“Am I supposed to say thanks?”
“I’m just thinking out loud, trying to make sense of things.”
“What things?”
He frowned a little. “What’s really going on. What Riley’s up
to. Why he keeps bringing the most random kids to her. Why it
doesn’t seem to matter to Riley if it’s someone like you or if it’s
someone like that idiot Kevin.”
It sounded like he didn’t know Riley any better than I did.
“What do you mean, someone like me?” I asked.
“You’re the kind that Riley should be looking for—the smart
ones—not just these stupid gang-bangers that Raoul keeps
bringing in. I bet you weren’t some junkie ho when you were
human.”
I shifted uneasily at the last word. Diego kept waiting for my
answer, like he hadn’t said anything weird. I took a deep breath
and thought back.
“I was close enough,” I admitted after a few seconds of his
patient watching. “Not there yet, but in a few more weeks…” I
shrugged. “You know, I don’t remember much, but I do
remember thinking there was nothing more powerful on this
planet than just plain old hunger. Turns out, thirst is worst.”
He laughed. “Sing it, sister.”
“What about you? You weren’t a troubled teen runaway like
the rest of us?”
“Oh, I was troubled, all right.” He stopped talking.
But I could sit around and wait for the answers to
inappropriate questions, too. I just stared at him.
He sighed. The scent of his breath was nice. Everybody
smelled sweet, but Diego had a little something extra—some
spice like cinnamon or cloves.
“I tried to stay away from all that junk. Studied hard. I was
gonna get out of the ghetto, you know. Go to college. Make
something of myself. But there was a guy—not much different
than Raoul. Join or die, that was his motto. I wasn’t having any,
so I stayed away from his group. I was careful. Stayed alive.” He
stopped, closing his eyes.
I wasn’t done being pushy. “And?”
“My kid brother wasn’t as careful.”
I was about to ask if his brother had joined or died, but the
expression on his face made asking unnecessary. I looked
away, not sure how to respond. I couldn’t really understand his
loss, the pain it still clearly caused him to feel. I hadn’t left
anything behind that I still missed. Was that the difference? Was
that why he dwelled on memories that the rest of us shunned?
I still didn’t see how Riley came into this. Riley and the
cheeseburger of pain. I wanted that part of the story, but now I
felt bad for pushing him to answer.
Lucky for my curiosity, Diego kept going after a minute.
“I kind of lost it. Stole a gun from a friend and went hunting.”
He chuckled darkly. “Wasn’t as good at it then. But I got the guy
that got my brother before they got me. The rest of his crew had
me cornered in an alley. Then, suddenly, Riley was there,
between me and them. I remember thinking he was the whitest
guy I’d ever seen. He didn’t even look at the others when they
shot him. Like the bullets were flies. You know what he said to
me? He said, ‘Want a new life, kid?’”
“Hah!” I laughed. “That’s way better than mine. All I got was,
‘Want a burger, kid?’”
I still remembered how Riley’d looked that night, though the
image was all blurry because my eyes’d sucked back then. He
was the hottest boy I’d ever seen, tall and blond and perfect,
every feature. I knew his eyes must be just as beautiful behind
the dark sunglasses he never took off. And his voice was so
gentle, so kind. I figured I knew what he would want in exchange
for the meal, and I would have given it to him, too. Not because
he was so pretty to look at, but because I hadn’t eaten anything
but trash for two weeks. It turned out he wanted something else,
though.
Diego laughed at the burger line. “You must have been
pretty hungry.”
“Damn straight.”
“So why were you so hungry?”
“Because I was stupid and ran away before I had a driver’s
license. I couldn’t get a real job, and I was a bad thief.”
“What were you running from?”
I hesitated. The memories were a little more clear as I
focused on them, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that.
“Oh, c’mon,” he coaxed. “I told you mine.”
“Yeah, you did. Okay. I was running from my dad. He used to
knock me around a lot. Probably did the same to my mom
before she took off. I was pretty little then—I didn’t know much. It
got worse. I figured if I waited too long I’d end up dead. He told
me if I ever ran away I’d starve. He was right about that—only
thing he was ever right about as far as I’m concerned. I don’t
think about it much.”
Diego nodded in agreement. “Hard to remember that stuff,
isn’t it? Everything’s so fuzzy and dark.”
“Like trying to see with mud in your eyes.”
“Good way to put it,” he complimented me. He squinted at
me like he was trying to see, and rubbed his eyes.
We laughed together again. Weird.
“I don’t think I’ve laughed with anybody since I met Riley,” he
said, echoing my thoughts. “This is nice. You’re nice. Not like
the others. You ever try to have a conversation with one of
them?”
“Nope, I haven’t.”
“You’re not missing anything. Which is my point. Wouldn’t
Riley’s standard of living be a little higher if he surrounded
himself with decent vampires? If we’re supposed to protect her,
shouldn’t he be looking for the smart ones?”
“So Riley doesn’t need brains,” I reasoned. “He needs
numbers.”
Diego pursed his lips, considering. “Like chess. He’s not
making knights and bishops.”
“We’re just pawns,” I realized.
We stared at each other again for a long minute.
“I don’t want to think that,” Diego said.
“So what do we do?” I asked, using the plural automatically.
Like we were already a team.
He thought about my question for a second, seeming
uneasy, and I regretted the “we.” But then he said, “What can we
do when we don’t know what’s happening?”
So he didn’t mind the team thing, which made me feel really
good in a way I didn’t remember ever feeling before. “I guess
we keep our eyes open, pay attention, try to figure it out.”
He nodded. “We need to think about everything Riley’s told
us, everything he’s done.” He paused thoughtfully. “You know, I
tried to hash some of this out with Riley once, but he couldn’t
have cared less. Told me to keep my mind on more important
things—like thirst. Which was all I could think about then, of
course. He sent me out hunting, and I stopped worrying….”
I watched him thinking about Riley, his eyes unfocused as
he relived the memory, and I wondered. Diego was my first
friend in this life, but I wasn’t his.
Suddenly his focus snapped back to me. “So what have we
learned from Riley?”
I concentrated, running through the last three months in my
head. “He really doesn’t tell us much, you know. Just the
vampire basics.”
“We’ll have to listen more carefully.”
We sat in silence, pondering this. I mostly thought about
how much I didn’t know. And why hadn’t I worried about
everything I didn’t know before now? It was like talking to Diego
had cleared my head. For the first time in three months, blood
was not the main thing in there.
The silence lasted for a while. The black hole I’d felt
funneling fresh air into the cave wasn’t black anymore. It was
dark gray now and getting infinitesimally lighter with each
second. Diego noticed me eyeing it nervously.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Some dim light gets in here on
sunny days. It doesn’t hurt.” He shrugged.
I scooted closer to the hole in the floor, where the water was
disappearing as the tide went out.
“Seriously, Bree. I’ve been down here before during the day.
I told Riley about this cave—and how it was mostly filled with
water, and he said it was cool when I needed to get out of the
madhouse. Anyway, do I look like I got singed?”
I hesitated, thinking about how different his relationship with
Riley was than mine. His eyebrows rose, waiting for an answer.
“No,” I finally said. “But…”
“Look,” he said impatiently. He crawled swiftly to the tunnel
and stuck his arm in up to the shoulder. “Nothing.”
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