Blood Awakening (21 page)

“Only Kayla?” His voice was softer now, less frantic. He walked toward me, closing the space between us. Fear crawled over me with each step he took. Fear that he would ask me to stay a vampire and be with him forever…and fear that he wouldn’t. He stopped a few feet away and just stared at me. Streams of sun slicing through the trees lit shards of his face and eyes, making him appear ethereal and more angel-like than walking-dead-like. “You love him, don’t you?”

“I—I…” I couldn’t answer him. I didn’t know the answer. Did I love Erik? Erik himself had said I did. But was it true? I felt something for him, I knew that much. But what, I couldn’t be sure. It could be love. Or maybe it was simply lust. Or friendship. The hardest part was not knowing what to say.

“It’s okay,” Chance said. He took another step toward me. “If you do, it’s okay.” He lifted my hand into his again, the cold shock of his skin unsettling. Several seconds passed before he spoke, his voice barely a whisper. “It’s okay.” I hadn’t realized I was crying until he brushed a tear from my cheek. He smiled, a Human Chance smile that rushed into my heart and lit up some of the darkness that had settled there. “Let’s go.” He dropped my hand and headed back toward campus, and though I just wanted to crawl into myself and never come out, I followed him.

“Let’s just tell them it was a false alarm,” I said once we cleared the woods and stepped back onto campus. The number of students milling around had thickened, dense crowds of people making it difficult to talk. I couldn’t help but note that not one of them seemed to notice what had just gone down. Lucky us.

“Got it,” Chance said, cutting us a path through the maelstrom of people.

“Good.” I followed him to the back entrance of the anthropology department building, just as a weird sense of unease settled over me. Something was off. “You feel that?” I asked, tugging on Chance’s arm to get him to stop.

“Feel what?” he asked back, his body tense and his eyes immediately searching the area.

“No, it’s not anything vampire.” I let go of his arm. “It’s just, I don’t know, a feeling.” Chance stopped searching the university campus and looked down at me. “Like something’s wrong.”

“I don’t feel anything,” he said, moving away from me and heading inside. Somehow, I didn’t think he was only referring to right now.

“We need to hurry up and get out of here,” I whispered once I caught up to him inside. “I have a bad feeling.”

“Yeah, you said that already.” New Chance was back, stoic and unemotional.

“Some things bear repeating.”

“Yeah.” Though he wasn’t looking at me, I heard a smile in his words. The dark feeling that had tried to wash over me outside was all but gone as we made it to Dr. Harper’s office. It came rushing back just outside the door.

“Oh God.” I threw the door open, ignoring the smattering of blood on the glass. “Erik!” I rushed to Erik’s motionless body lying crumpled in the floor, ignoring the sweet scent of the blood oozing from a gash in his head.

B
AGGAGE

C
hance! Help me!” I slid Erik out into the middle of the floor flat on his back, covering his wound with my hand. I lay my other hand on his chest, just to be sure, painful fear wracking my senses. His breath came shallow and smooth. He was unconscious; unconscious, but not dead. I could breathe again.

“I-I…can’t, Ava,” Chance said. I looked up. He was far across the room, practically glued to the wall.

“What?! Why not?” I refocused my attention on Erik. I tore a piece of his shirt and smashed it against the still-bleeding cut on his forehead, pressing down as hard as I could.

“It’s…his blood.” I heard Chance shuffling, moving around behind me. “I can’t be here.” Then a click of the door, and he was gone. I was furious at him for leaving me, for leaving when I needed him most. But I understood why he had to. Chance had only been a vampire a couple of months. He was barely able to be around a large group of people without wanting to snatch one up and take a drink of their blood; he obviously couldn’t deal with open wounds. My heart wanted to go out to him, but there was no more room. What little bit that wasn’t hurt already was taken up by Erik. I had to help him.

“Erik? Erik, can you hear me?” I leaned down and whispered in his ear, the soft sound of his breathing lulling me into a false sense of peace. Nothing was peaceful at the moment. I was frantic. The situation was frantic. Kayla was—

Gone.

I kept pressure on Erik’s head and sat upright to scan the room. Pictures were knocked off the walls, reduced to shattered piles of glass and wood. All the papers once filling the top of the large desk were now scattered about the floor, trampled and torn. There had obviously been a fight.

A fight that Kayla didn’t win.

“Chance!” I yelled for him, desperate to bolt from the room and hunt Kayla down. “Chance, get in here!” A few seconds went by before his large frame appeared behind the glass of the office door.

“What?” he asked from the other side.

“Kayla’s gone!” He looked around the room, too, only opening the door once he realized I was right.

“What?” He stepped just inside the door, closing it behind him. “Where is she?” Though he was clearly concerned for Kayla, his struggle to fight off the scent of Erik’s exposed blood was still evident on his face.

“How the hell should I know?” Erik shifted beneath me. “Lie still,” I told him, using my hand to hold him down.

“Kayla.” His voice was less than a whisper. “Took her.”

“What?” I leaned down next to his mouth. His breath was warm on my skin, sending chills down my back.

Perfect, Ava. Your best friend is missing and possibly dead, and you can’t control your hormones.

“Kayla,” he whispered again, a fraction louder than before. “They—” He winced, sucking air into his lungs, then added, “took her.”

“Who?” I asked, panic settling into my veins. “Who took her, Erik?”

He slowly opened his eyes, their vibrant blue tinted with blood that had run down from his forehead. “Vampires,” he said, trying to sit up.

“No, don’t.” I gently but assertively pushed on his chest, forcing him to give up and lie back. “Vampires took her?”

“Yes.”

“How many?” Chance asked, still clinging to the door like a lifeline.

“Not sure,” Erik grunted, pain choking his words. “Three, maybe more. Knocked me out.”

“Dammit!” I was furious, enraged that another person I cared about was in danger because of me. I lifted Erik’s hand and placed it on the piece of shirt plastered to his wound. “Kayla’s been kidnapped,” I went on. “Probably by the same coven that has her dad. And we have no clue where she is.” I hadn’t realized I was pacing the room until I nearly ran into Chance. Surprisingly, he had stepped away from the door.

“The bleeding stopped,” he said, pointing down at Erik, who was still lying on the floor. Before I could get to him, Erik removed the cloth from his head, revealing an open—but almost bloodless—slice in his skin.

“Are you okay?” I asked Chance.

“Yeah,” he said after a few seconds. “I’ll be fine.”

“That makes one of us.” Without my hand to stop him, Erik had managed to half-sit, half-lie on the floor. His eyes were wide open now, seemingly alert. I prayed he hadn’t suffered a concussion, knowing we didn’t have the time to sit in a hospital emergency room all day.

“Do you need to go to a hospital, Erik?” I didn’t want to ask, which made me a horrible person.

“I’ll be fine, too,” he answered, lifting himself up off the floor. I quickly rushed to his side to help steady his shaky frame. He leaned on me a moment until he was able to stand on his own.

“Good, because we have to get out of here and find Kayla.” I dropped to the floor and began ruffling through the scattered papers, praying for any clue.

“What are you doing?” Chance asked, kneeling down beside me.

“Trying to find out where she is, who took her.” I tossed papers from side to side, barely looking at their contents. I knew, deep down, that I was wasting my time. But I had to try.

“There’s not gonna be anything in there,” he said, grabbing my arm. “We need to do like you said and get out of here.” I let Chance lift me off the floor, the possibility that I may never see Kayla again—alive—finally sinking in.

“We have to find her, Chance.” I fought off tears. “We have to.”

“We will,” he said, pulling me into his arms. The feeling of his body against mine was soothing, instantly calming my erratic nerves. “We just have to hope that whoever took her contacts us.”

“I think they already did.” We both turned to look at Erik, who had maneuvered his injured body behind the desk. He was looking down at the desktop, where a single piece of folded-up paper sat.

“What’s that?” I asked, noticing it for the first time since entering the room.

“Don’t know,” he answered. “But it’s weird that it’s the only piece left on here.” He reached out to pick up the paper.

“Wait,” I said. I crossed the room and stood in front of the desk, directly across from him. “Let me look.”

“Why?”

“Because. What if there’s poison or something on it? Like the stuff you guys dip your stakes and arrows in?”

“Then you definitely shouldn’t be touching it. That stuff’s lethal to vampires.” He stared right at me, those blue eyes drawing me in all over again. After he had told me at Kayla’s that he was done if I helped Chance, I thought I would never again get the chance to stare into them. Now, I didn’t want to look away. “So let me do it.” He pulled his eyes from mine and lifted the folded paper from the desk. “Well,” he said, opening it up. “No burning. No itching. I think I’ll live.” A blow to the head and unconsciousness didn’t hinder his sense of humor.

“Just read it,” I said.

His eyes scanned the paper before he let it fall back to the desk. I slowly picked it up. “They have her,” he said. “If we wanna see her alive again, we have to meet.”

“Meet who?” Chance asked from behind me. I was suddenly struck with the realization that I was yet again sandwiched between two possibly ex-boyfriends. How did my life get so screwed up?

“Doesn’t say,” Erik answered. His voice had returned to its normal lighthearted tone, though the pain he was feeling—that we were all feeling—was just beneath his words.

“It says that if we want to see Kayla alive again, we’re to go to New York City. We’ll meet at midnight.” I read over and over the kidnapper’s note, hoping and praying that Kayla would still be alive when I got there.

“Then what are we waiting for?” Chance moved from behind me and crossed the room to the door, flinging it open and bolting down the hall.

“Chance, slow down,” I said as Erik and I tried to catch up to him. By the time we did, he was halfway across campus.

“There’s no time,” he said, never looking back at us. “They have her. They want us. I’m giving them what they want.” His focused determination to help Kayla was inspiring—and a tad strange. I mean, he had always liked Kayla—well, not at first—but this sudden urge to risk his own life to help her came as a surprise.

“Just wait a minute.” I finally reached him, falling in pace with his hurried stride. “We can’t just go running off without knowing what we’re heading into. Nobody else can die, Chance.”

“Exactly.” He didn’t stop walking, just continued cutting through meandering students. “That includes Kayla, you know.”

“Of course I know,” I said, hurt by his insinuation. “She’s my best friend, Chance. The one person always there for me.”

“Ouch.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I love her, too, Chance. I’m not gonna let anything happen to her.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I’m not letting anything happen to you, either. Or to Erik or myself.” He finally stopped walking, though he never took his eyes off our surroundings. I assumed he was making sure there were no vampires lurking behind to snatch us up, too, so I didn’t try to garner his attention. The temperature had dropped a bit, forced down by a strong wind swooping in from the north. The suddenly frigid climate had turned the once-bustling campus into a virtual ghost town, with only a handful of people in sight. “We have to be smart. That’s all I’m saying.”

“No, you’re also saying I’m not being smart.”

“I’m not. I’m just saying that we can’t let our emotions lead us right now.”

“I’m dead, remember? I don’t have emotions anymore.” Apparently satisfied that we were safe for the moment, he finally let his eyes land on me. “I’m a soulless monster. No heart. No emotions. A perfect killing machine.”

“Don’t talk like that.” His words creeped me out; it almost sounded as if he believed them. If he did, then my hope of ever getting him back was a fruitless one.

“Then don’t accuse me of being stupid, Ava.”

“I didn’t!” Stares from a passing couple told me my voice had just reached beyond a pleasant level; I reeled it in a bit. “I didn’t say you’re being stupid, Chance. I would never say that.” He was fuming, the tiny muscles of his jaw flexing. I tried to ignore his mood. “Let’s just go, okay?”

“Go where?” I had all but forgotten that Erik was behind me. His voice actually made me jump.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we can’t stay here.”

“We don’t know where she is,” Erik said. His voice was strained, weak.

“You don’t look good.” His face was pale, his eyes a bit glassy. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just a cut.”

“You were unconscious, Erik. That’s more than just a cut.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“I can’t help it.” As he stood there staring at me, I couldn’t help but think of the unspoken feelings between us. I cared for him, deeply, and he had already confessed what he felt for me. I had no idea what would happen next, but I knew that I wanted him in my life.

“Can you two save the flirting for later? We have more important things to worry about right now.” Chance’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts about Erik.

Chance.

I had just been flirting with Erik right in front of Chance.

I was something else.

“Okay,” I said, turning away from Erik, who was grinning. “Any ideas on where we should go once we get to New York?”