Afterlife (4 page)

But then I cried out in horror as Balthazar brandished a
stake and swung it, hard, so that it slammed deep into Lucas’s chest.

LUCAS COLLAPSED UPON THE FLOOR, A STAKE jutting out from his
heart.

I fell to my knees by his side. “Balthazar, no
!
What are you doing?” Just as I grasped the stake to pull
it out, Balthazar roughly towed me up to my feet, away from Lucas. I went
vapory again, slipping out of his arms easily. “You can’t stop me from taking
care of him.”

“Think,” Balthazar said. “We need him to remain quiet while
the police are here, and make sure he doesn’t go after Vic. I can’t come up
with any other way to make that happen. Can you?”

“There has to be some way better than staking him,” I
insisted.

“He is essentially unharmed,” Ranulf said, shaking off the
impact of Lucas’s last blows. “The stake through the heart only paralyzes; it
does not kill. When the stake is removed, Lucas will be as he was, except for a
scar.”

“I know — but
— ”
The sight of him
lying at my feet, crumpled and dead as he had been just a few hours ago, was
too raw for me to bear. Balthazar stepped closer. In the relative darkness of
the wine cellar, his shadowy form seemed more imposing than usual, which made
the contrast with his quiet voice especially striking. “Lucas staked me once to
save me. I’m returning the favor.”

“You probably enjoyed it.” I turned away from him then, but
already I’d realized we couldn’t unstake Lucas yet. As he was, he was
uncontrollable.

“Until we have fresh blood for him to drink, leaving him
unconscious is a kindness,” Balthazar said.
just
when
I might have softened toward him, he had to add, “When you calm down enough to
act like an adult, you’ll see that.”

“Please do not force me to listen to romantic bickering,”
Ranulf said.

Ranulf’s request was simple enough, but it was an
uncomfortable reminder of everything that had happened between Balthazar and me
— how much more he had wanted, and what I had been unable to give. Although I
didn’t think jealousy drove Balthazar’s actions, I wondered if it allowed him
to gain some satisfaction by staking Lucas.

Balthazar had insisted on going after Charity the day after
my death, and he had brought Lucas along, knowing that Lucas was too grief-stricken
to truly fight. Lucas, near suicidal, had plunged in unprepared. The aftermath
of Balthazar’s mistake would be on Lucas forever. That outweighed everything
that had happened between us before, good or bad.

This is what you get for hanging out with the wrong kind of
dead people, a sardonic voice said.

That would be Maxie, the house ghost. The others couldn’t
hear her. She’d been connected to Vic throughout his childhood but had never
appeared to him or any other living creature — except me. Anticipating my
transformation into a wraith, she’d begun appearing to me back when I was a
student at Evernight Academy: now that I’d died.
she
wanted me to abandon the mortal world and join her in other, more mystical
realms. The whole idea terrified me, and I’d never been less in the mood to
talk to her about it.

An awkward silence filled the room. A dead body on the floor
made casual conversation pretty much impossible. Balthazar studied the wine
racks for a few minutes, in what I thought was just a distraction, until he
pulled a bottle out. “Argentinean Malbec. Nice.”

“You’re going to sit here and drink wine?” I protested.

“We’ve got to sit here and do something.” Balthazar looked
around for a corkscrew, failed to find one, and then simply smashed the neck of
the bottle against the tiny sink. Spatters of red fell onto the floor. “It’s
not a particularly expensive bottle. We can replace it.”

“That’s not the problem,” I said.

“What is the problem, Bianca?” He, too, had become
frustrated. “Are you freaking out because I look underage? My face might be
nineteen, but I’m legal plus four hundred years or so.”

He knew that Wasn’t what I meant either. Before I could snap
at him, Ranulf groaned. “Still there is bickering.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Truce.” I was too tired for any of
this.

Although Balthazar looked like he might keep it up, he
finally let it go. From his pocket he withdrew my bracelet. “Picked this up off
the lawn,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said flatly. But I hastened to clasp it around
my wrist again. Since my death a couple of days ago, I’d learned that only a
handful of things I’d bonded to strongly in life had the ability to empower me
to be fully corporeal again — this coral bracelet, and a jet brooch in Lucas’s
pocket. Both of them were made out of material that had once been alive; it was
something we had in common. As the bracelet enhanced my power, I felt gravity
settle around me, and I no longer had to work at retaining a regular form.

Balthazar sighed heavily, grabbed two glasses from the rack
beside the sink, and poured for himself and Ranulf. After a moment, he said,
“Can you drink wine anymore? Drink anything?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t seem to need food or
water.” The mere thought of chewing was faintly disgusting to me now, I
realized — one more difference between me and the living world.

There are better things than eating and drinking, Maxie
said. Increasingly her presence could be felt, a sort of cool spot right next
to me, but Balthazar and Ranulf remained oblivious. Aren’t you curious about
what they are
?

I ignored her. I had eyes only for Lucas, so pale and broken
upon the floor. A thin circle of bloodstains ringed the stake, no more:
evidence that his heart had stopped beating forever. The strong features that
had always captivated me — his firm jaw, his high cheekbones — were more
sculpted now, his handsomeness as compelling as it was unnatural.

The makeshift apartment in the wine cellar was where we had
lived for the final weeks of our lives, virtually the only time we’d ever had
to just be together without rules to keep us apart. We’d tried to make
spaghetti on the hot plate, watched old movies on the DVD player, and slept
together in the bed. Sometimes our situation had seemed so desperate, but I
realized now that it was the greatest joy we ‘d ever shared. Maybe the greatest
we ever would share.

We’re together, I reminded myself. You have to believe that
as long as that’s true, we can make it. That belief had never been more
important, but it had never felt so fragile.

I heard car doors slamming; Vic had apparently managed to get
rid of the police. Ranulf and Balthazar lifted glasses to each other, or to
Vic. Within a few seconds, there was a rapping on the door, and Balthazar
opened it to let Vic in.

“Those guys did not want to believe my home invasion story,”
he said. Vic remained on the doorstop instead of coming in. “Apparently my
neighbors called them even before I did and said it was a wild party, though
how that looked like a party, I don’t know. They made me take a Breathalyzer — oh,
man.” Vic saw Lucas on the floor. “What did you guys do
?
”

“The staking will not harm him,” Ranulf explained. “When it
is removed, Lucas will revive. Do you require some wine?”

Vic shook his head. He just stood there in his T-shirt and
jeans, awkward and miserable, staring down at Lucas. “He
won’t
.
. . he can’t …”

“He won’t attack you,” Balthazar said. “For the time being,
Lucas can’t move. And we won’t unstake him until we can get him fed.”

Vic crammed his hands in his pockets, and although he had to
know Balthazar was telling the truth, he couldn’t bring himself to walk any
closer.

I realized that, no matter how upsetting this was for me, it
had to be a hundred times worse for Vic. He was the only human in the room, and
despite growing up in a haunted house and attending Evernight Academy, Vic’s
experience of the supernatural was fairly limited — or it had been, before
tonight, when one of his best friends had tried to kill him.

Maxie cocked an eyebrow, her saucy sense of humor already
returning. “I already told you. Vampires and wraiths? Not a good mix. A really,
really bad mix. We’re poison to them, and they’re no friends to us.”

“I love Lucas. Our deaths don’t change that.”

“Death changes everything. Haven’t you learned that much by
now?”

“It didn’t change you haranguing me nonstop,” I snapped.

Maxie ducked her head, her dark blond hair tumbling around
her face. If she’d had blood flow, I thought.
she
might have blushed. “Sorry. You’ve had a rough couple of days. I don’t mean to —
I’m just trying to tell you how things are.”

A rough couple of days. I’d died, found out I was a ghost,
seen Lucas get cut down and turned into a vampire, and fought off a Black Cross
attack. Yeah, that counted as a rough couple of days.

“You used to play with Vic in this room, when he was a
little kid.” I glanced at the place he’d shown me, where he used to sit and
read his storybooks to her. “You didn’t separate yourself from the world after
you died.”

“But I did. For the better part of a century, I
just .
. . I was stuck between here and there, and I didn’t
quite know what was going on. Sometimes I’d stab into people’s dreams and turn
them to nightmares, just to do it. Just to prove that I could affect the world
around me.” I’d heard of wraiths doing worse things, maybe for similar reasons.

Maxie sat on the windowsill, her long white nightgown
seeming to glow as the moonlight filtered through the billowing sleeves. “As
you can probably imagine, people usually didn’t stay in this house long. It was
like a game for me, seeing how fast I could scare them out. But then the
Woodsons took the place, and Vic was so tiny, just a couple of years old. When
I showed myself to him, he Wasn’t scared. That was the first time in so long
that I remembered what it was like to — to be accepted. To care about someone.”

“So you understand,” I said. “You see why I can’t give up on
the world.”

“Vic’s human. He’s alive. He anchors me to life and lets me
experience it through him, just a bit. Lucas can’t do that for you, not
anymore.”

“He does. He can. I know it.” But I didn’t know any such
thing. There was so much about being a wraith that I didn’t understand yet.

“You need to talk to Christopher,” she said encouragingly.
“He’ll make you understand.”

I remembered Christopher. He had appeared to me, a
mysterious and foreboding figure, at Evernight; he had attacked me there with
intent to kill, so that my transformation into a wraith would be guaranteed.
Yet when he had appeared to me and Lucas this summer, he had rescued us from
Charity.

Was he benevolent or evil? Did the actions of wraiths even
fit into any kind of morality I understood? The only thing I knew for sure was
that Christopher had power and influence among the wraiths. Now that I had
become one, our paths were certain to cross again.

Thinking about this made me nervous. I managed to ask, “He’s
sort of
the …
wraith in charge, right?”

“Nobody’s ‘in charge.’ But plenty of us listen to
Christopher. He has a lot of power, a lot of wisdom.”

Maxie cocked an eyebrow, her saucy sense of humor already
returning. “I already told you. Vampires and wraiths? Not a good mix. A really,
really bad mix. We’re poison to them, and they’re no friends to us.”

“I love Lucas. Our deaths don’t change that.”

“Death changes everything. Haven’t you learned that much by
now?”

“It didn’t change you haranguing me nonstop,” I snapped.

Maxie ducked her head, her dark blond hair tumbling around
her face. If she’d had blood flow, I thought, she might have blushed. “Sorry. You’ve
had a rough couple of days. I don’t mean to — I’m just trying to tell you how
things are.”

A rough couple of days. I’d died, found out I was a ghost,
seen Lucas get cut down and turned into a vampire, and fought off a Black Cross
attack. Yeah, that counted as a rough couple of days.

“You used to play with Vic in this room, when he was a
little kid.” I glanced at the place he’d shown me, where he used to sit and
read his storybooks to her. “You didn’t separate yourself from the world after
you died.”

“But I did. For the better part of a century, I
just .
.. I was stuck between here and there, and I didn’t
quite know what was going on. Sometimes I’d stab into people’s dreams and turn
them to nightmares, just to do it.
just
to prove that
I could affect the world around me.” I’d heard of wraiths doing worse things,
maybe for similar reasons.

Maxie sat on the windowsill, her long white nightgown
seeming to glow as the moonlight filtered through the billowing sleeves. “As
you can probably imagine, people usually didn’t stay in this house long. It was
like a game for me, seeing how fast I could scare them out. But then the
Woodsons took the place.
and
Vic was so tiny, just a
couple of years old. When I showed myself to him, he Wasn’t scared. That was
the first time in so long that I remembered what it was like to — to be
accepted. To care about someone.”

“So you understand,” I said. “You see why I can’t give up on
the world.”

“Vic’s human. He’s alive. He anchors me to life and lets me
experience it through him, just a bit. Lucas can’t do that for you, not
anymore.”

“He does. He can. I know it.” But I didn’t know any such
thing. There was so much about being a wraith that I didn’t understand yet.

“You need to talk to Christopher,” she said encouragingly.
“He’ll make you understand.”

I remembered Christopher. He had appeared to me, a
mysterious and foreboding figure, at Evernight; he had attacked me there with
intent to kill, so that my transformation into a wraith would be guaranteed.
Yet when he had appeared to me and Lucas this summer, he had rescued us from
Charity.