Hourglass (13 page)

“My money is your money,” Vic said, like that was the most obvious thing in the world. “Name it, it’s yours.”

“Are you sure?” I knew that Vic came from an extremely wealthy family, but still, I hated asking for handouts. “We have a little already, and we’re going to get jobs.”

“Seriously, anything. And, oh, wait, hey, genius idea, inbound—” Vic snapped his fingers. “The wine cellar.”

“Wine cellar?” Lucas said, glancing away from that spot on the window he’d been glaring at ever since he’d found out that I’d betrayed the Black Cross cell. I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking—that Vic was going to suggest we steal bottles for a party.

Vic drummed on the laminated menu. “We have this big wine cellar beneath the house. Enormous. It’s got climate control to keep it nice and cool in summer, and it’s not very crowded, because my dad doesn’t collect wine the way my grandpa did. There’s a bathroom on the basement level, too.”

Sleeping in a basement for the summer? On the other hand, it would be free.

“I swear, it’s nice down there,” Vic said. Ranulf nodded encouragingly. “I’d let you guys stay in the house, but my parents are going to put on the whole security system, with the lasers.” He interlaced his fingers to mimic the laser beams. “The wine cellar has a separate entrance and security system, but it’s
just a simple four-digit code. I can give you the code, and you guys can stay there from the night of July fifth on. How does that sound?”

“That sounds—good.” Lucas nodded slowly. I could tell he was still tense and angry, but he was in control of himself. “Vic, you’re the best.”

“I’ve long suspected as much,” Vic said. “Glad to know the word’s getting out.”

“What about Ranulf?” I asked. Although we needed a place to stay pretty badly, I thought maybe Ranulf would need it even more. “What will he do while you’re gone?”

Ranulf smiled. “I am going to Tuscany as well. The Woodsons have invited me to travel with them. I have not visited Italy in many years, so I look forward to seeing what has changed.”

Just then the waitress arrived to take our orders. While Ranulf ordered his eggs and Spam, Lucas and I traded a look. If Vic had any idea that his buddy was a vampire, there was no way he would’ve extended the invitation. On the other hand, I felt sure that Ranulf would never hurt Vic, and probably Lucas had already picked up on that, too.

So we wouldn’t have said anything, if Vic hadn’t come out with, “So, despite the whole char-grilled factor the place has going on right now, I think I’m going back to Evernight Academy in the fall.”

Lucas and I both stared. I managed to stammer out, “W-what?”

“Yeah, I know. It’s Creepy Central, and the no-cell-phones
thing gets incredibly old, but I guess I’m used to it.” Vic shrugged. “Besides, I never got to take fencing. Really wanted to try that.”

“Other schools teach fencing.” Lucas put both hands on the table, leaning forward for emphasis. “Vic, seriously, listen to me. Do not go back there.”

“Why not?” Vic looked completely bewildered, as did Ranulf, who really should’ve caught on.

It wasn’t like I could tell him the truth. I knew he wouldn’t believe me. But I didn’t want him anywhere near Mrs. Bethany. “There are really good reasons, okay? The night of the fire, the weird stuff that was going on…” My voice trailed off. How could I explain?

Lucas tried, “What happened at Evernight was more than just a fire. Can we leave it at that?”

Vic stared at us. “Wait, are you guys freaking about the whole vampire thing?”

No way had I heard that right. “What?” I said, sort of weakly.

“About it being mostly a vampire school. Is that what you’re on about?” Vic stopped and smiled easily up at the waitress as she slid our orders onto the table. Ranulf, unworried by this conversation, tucked into his Spam as though he could actually taste it. As soon as the waitress walked off, Vic continued, “I mean, come on, Bianca. You
are
a vampire, right? Or, like, half?”

I turned to Ranulf, outraged. “You
told
him?”

“I did not!” Ranulf insisted. “I mean—yes, I did tell him
about you, when he asked. But not about the school. That, Vic already knew.”

“How did you know that?” Lucas said.

“I figured it out my first year. God, you two act like it was hard.” Vic started counting off points on his fingers. “Half the students don’t know really obvious stuff. Like, this one guy thought
Grey’s Anatomy
was a medical book instead of a TV show, and another time a girl wondered why they didn’t hang criminals anymore. Also, the whole thing where everybody eats in their rooms—secretive and weird—plus half the student body never showed to pick up any food orders. Dead squirrels all over the place. That creepy school motto. The facts add up.”

We were speechless. Lucas finally said, “You knew you were surrounded by vampires—and that didn’t bother you?”

Vic shrugged. “Judge not, man.”

I was so flabbergasted that I nearly put my elbows in my waffles. Somehow I managed to lean against the table without dousing myself in syrup. “You weren’t ever scared?”

“That first night after I put it all together—yeah, that seemed to go on for a really long time,” Vic admitted. “But then I figured, hey, I’ve been here a couple months. Nobody seems to have been eaten. So what’s the big deal? The vampires seemed pretty harmless, and I figured they just had a school where they could be sure people were leaving them alone. I can respect that.”

“It was a relief not to have to hide my nature from him,” Ranulf said.

Lucas completely ignored his corned beef hash. “You never told me about it.”

“Didn’t want to freak you out. Guess you learned to deal, though, huh?” Vic grinned. “Amazing how convincing a pretty lady can be.”

“I can’t believe you discovered the secret,” I said.

“So, my duller roommate,” Vic said to Lucas, “how did you find out about the fanged types?”

“I’ve always known about vampires,” Lucas said, finally noticing that he had food in front of him.

Vic said, “No, no, I don’t mean, like, in
Dracula
and stuff. When did you find out for real?”

“He’s always known for real,” I said. “Lucas was raised in Black Cross.”

Ranulf set his fork down with a clatter. He hung onto his knife. His eyes were wide as he stared at Lucas, and I could tell that he was this close to leaping over the table—either to escape or to attack.

“I’m ex–Black Cross,” Lucas said heavily. “I’m not going to hurt you. Take it easy.”

As Ranulf relaxed slightly, Vic said, “Whoa, what’s Black Cross?”

“A centuries-old group of vampire hunters,” I said. “The Evernight vampires are harmless—well, mostly—but there are dangerous ones out there.”

“They do not only attack the dangerous,” Ranulf said. His eyes were dark.

“I realize that now,” Lucas said. “Because when they discovered what Bianca was, they went after her, too. Now you know why we’re on the run.”

Vic nodded, already at ease with the new information. “You know, if this weren’t so dangerous, it would be really cool.”

When we finished our food, Vic suggested we drive out to his house with him. “You should see the place. I can show you where the nearest bus stop is, because you’ll need to know how to get into the city for these jobs you’re going to have. Hey, what can you guys do?”

“I’ve had to patch up cars and trucks as long as I can remember,” Lucas said while we walked out the door. Bells on the handle jingled. “There’s probably a garage that would take me.”

I didn’t answer, because I had no idea. What could I do? The only subject I knew anything special about was astronomy, and high-school dropouts didn’t get jobs at NASA.

“Here we are.” Vic pointed to his car, a sunshine-yellow convertible. Ranulf chivalrously motioned for me to take the front passenger seat, even though this meant he and Lucas would be sort of squeezed tight in the back. Given how tense—and angry—Lucas still was, I thought our being separated for a little while might not be the worst idea. On one hand, I felt proud that Lucas had finally mastered his temper enough to hold it in check. On the other hand, I’d never realized how ominous it could be, knowing somebody was furious with you but biding his time to speak.

Then Vic distracted me completely when he said, “Oh, and there’s definitely one more thing we should do at the house.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You guys should meet the ghost.”

“DO YOU EVEN REMEMBER LAST YEAR?” I SAID, AS we sat in the car on the long gravel driveway of Vic’s house. It was an imposing brick mansion, and I would’ve felt intimidated, if I weren’t so busy being scared out of my wits. “How the wraiths kept coming after me?”

Vic scrunched his forehead in confusion. “Wraiths?”

“That is the more common vampire term for ghosts,” Ranulf said. “May I please exit the backseat? I can no longer feel my legs below the knees.”

“Hold your horses,” Lucas said. He leaned forward, between the two front seats, so that he could talk more directly to Vic.

“There’s no way this is safe.”

“You weren’t even there last year,” Vic scoffed.

I interjected, “
I
was there, and I remember the attacks—blue-green light and cold and all that ice falling from the ceiling. So I’m not going into a house with a wraith. A ghost. Whatever.”

What Vic didn’t know—what very few in the world knew,
even vampires—was that any child born to vampires was the result of a bargain struck between vampires and wraiths, and that the wraiths ultimately intended to claim me as their own.

During several terrifying incidents at Evernight, including one that nearly killed me, that was precisely what the wraiths had tried to do.

Vic sighed. At this point, we’d been parked in front of his house for more than five minutes, and we’d been arguing about this ever since we’d left the diner. The water sprinklers on the broad green lawn had cycled through three different speeds. He said, “We appear to be at something known as an impasse.”

“I wish to make an observation,” Ranulf said.

Exasperated, Lucas said, “You’re not the only one cramping up in this backseat, okay?”

Ranulf replied, “That was not the observation.”

“Go ahead,” I said. Nobody would change my mind.

But then Ranulf said, “Are you not wearing an obsidian pendant?”

I put my hand around the antique pendant my parents had given me this past Christmas. An obsidian teardrop dangled from an ornate chain of copper that had gone green. At the time I’d thought the necklace simply a thoughtful gift, a reflection of my interest in vintage clothes. However, Mrs. Bethany had informed me later that obsidian was one of the many minerals and metals that repelled wraiths.

In other words, it could help keep me safe. Since she’d told
me that, I’d never taken the pendant off, not even to bathe. I’d almost forgotten about it.

“The obsidian gives me some protection,” I admitted, “but I don’t know how much or for how long.”

“I promise you, this ghost isn’t a baddie,” Vic said. “Wraith. Whatever. She’s awesome. At least, I think she’s a she.”

Lucas asked, “Have you talked to this thing? Communicated with it somehow?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“So how do you know it’s ‘awesome’?”

“The same way I know I’m being mocked,” Vic said, eyes narrowing. “I can just tell.”

I still wanted to tell Vic to back his car out of the driveway and take me and Lucas back to our hotel. Yet I knew we could only afford a few more nights there, and that only because we’d gotten a lucky deal. Vic would loan us whatever cash we needed, but I wanted to borrow as little as possible. If we couldn’t stay on his property through July and early August, we’d have to ask him for thousands. I really preferred not to do that.

My hand still clasped around the pendant, I said, “I’ll go in.”

“Bianca, don’t.” Lucas looked furious, but I put one hand on his arm to steady him.

“You and Ranulf wait out here. If you hear any screaming or the windows ice over—”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Lucas said.

“I said
if,
okay?” Now that I’d made the decision, I didn’t want to sit around worrying; I wanted to do it and get it over
with. “If that happens, you guys come in and help. Vic and I will try it this time. We won’t stay here if the wraith causes a problem.”

Although Lucas still looked displeased, he nodded. Vic clambered over his driver’s side door without even opening it. As I got out, I could hear Ranulf’s knees crack as he straightened his legs and gave a long sigh of relief.

Vic’s parents weren’t home, so the house was empty. Their place was gorgeous, more like something in a magazine than any real home I’d ever been in. The foyer was tiled in green marble, and a small chandelier hung from the thirty-foot ceiling. Everything smelled like furniture polish and oranges. We walked up a central staircase that was broad, white, and flowing. I could imagine Ginger Rogers dancing down those steps in a dress of ostrich feathers; certainly a movie star would belong here more than me in my cheap little sundress.

Of course, Vic didn’t quite seem to belong here either—and this was his house. I wondered if his carefree goofiness was maybe his way of rebelling against the perfect order his parents had established.

“She only shows up in the attic,” he said, as we walked along the parquet hallway upstairs. The paintings on the wall looked old. “That’s her special place, I think.”

“You actually see her?”

“Like a figure in a sheet or something? Nah. You just know she’s there. And every once in a while—Well, we’ll try it. Don’t want to get your hopes up.”

My one hope at that moment was not to get freeze-dried by a wraith. Silently thanking my parents for the pendant, I watched as Vic opened the door to the attic stairs and started to climb. I took a couple of deep breaths before I followed him.

The Woodsons’ attic was the only messy part of the house. The clutter was nicer than in most attics, I suspected. A blue-and-white Chinese vase sat on a dusty desk as wide as a bed and probably almost a hundred years old. A dressmaker’s dummy wore a jacket of yellowing lace and an old Edwardian ladies’ hat still jaunty with plumes. The Persian rug underfoot looked genuine, at least to my uneducated eye. Although the air smelled musty, it was a nice sort of musty, like old books.

“I like it up here,” Vic said. His face was more serious than usual. “This is probably my favorite place in the whole house.”

“This is where you feel comfortable.”

“You get it, huh?”

I smiled at him. “Yeah, I get it.”

“Okay, let’s just sit down here and see if she shows.”

We sat cross-legged on the Persian rug and waited. My nerves reacted to every creak of the wood, and I kept looking nervously at the one small window behind the dressmaker’s dummy. The panes hadn’t frosted over.

“I’m going to give you the cash, instead of Lucas,” Vic said as he played with the shoelaces of his Chucks. “I’ve got about six hundred dollars on hand—and you’re taking it all. Usually I’d have more, but I just bought a new Stratocaster.” He hung his head. “I feel stupid, blowing that much money on a guitar I can
hardly play. If I’d known you guys were going to need it—”

“You couldn’t have known. Besides, it’s your money to spend however you want. It’s good of you to share it with us.” I frowned, momentarily distracted from the suspense of waiting for the ghost. “Why give it to me instead of Lucas?”

“Because Lucas would probably refuse to take more than a hundred or so. Sometimes he’s too proud to admit he needs help.”

“We’re not proud.” I remembered jumping the subway turnstile with some embarrassment. “We’re way too screwed for that.”

“Lucas is always going to have a pride thing going on. Always. You’re the reasonable one.”

My lips twitched. “I wish I could tell him you said that.”

“He knows,” Vic said. “The two of you make a good team.”

I remembered the night before and felt my cheeks turn pink. “Yeah,” I said softly. “We do.”

A grin spread across Vic’s face, and for one horrified second I thought he’d somehow been able to tell what I was thinking. But that wasn’t why he was smiling. “Do you feel it?”

The chill in the air swept around me. I hugged myself. “Yeah. I do.”

No ice crystals formed. No frost carved out faces against the window. Nothing visible appeared. I simply knew that a second ago, Vic and I had been alone. Now something was with us.
Someone.

At first, I was confused. Why wasn’t this as violent and scary as the other ghostly manifestations I’d seen? Wraiths didn’t
gently creep into the corners of rooms; they stabbed their way in with blades of ice. That was the way it had always happened at Evernight Academy—

Wait.
The school had been specially built to repel ghosts; the iron and copper the wraiths despised were built into the school’s walls and beams. Although the wraiths had been able to force their way in, that had been difficult for them. Were the bizarre manifestations of ghostly power I’d seen before—the frozen stalactites and rippling blue-green light—evidence of that struggle? Maybe in a place like this, an ordinary house, the wraiths didn’t create effects so dramatic.

“Hey there,” Vic said cheerfully. “This is my friend Bianca. She’s going to hang out in the wine cellar for a while with Lucas, also a friend. They’re fantastic; you’re going to love them.” He could have been introducing us at a party. “They were just kind of nervous, because Binks here has had some ghost issues before. But nothing personal, okay? I wanted to make sure you guys would be cool.”

There was no reply, of course. It seemed to me that the light was a little brighter in that corner of the room, maybe a little bluer, but the difference was almost too subtle to discern.

Then I saw her.

Not with my eyes—not that kind of sight. It was more like when a memory comes back to you so powerfully that you can’t even see what’s in front of you any longer, because the images in your head are so vivid. The wraith was in my mind, the same one from my dreams—one of those I had seen at Evernight Academy last year. Was that Vic’s ghost? Another? Her short, pale hair
seemed almost white, and her face was sharp.

You might as well stay
, she said.
Not like it matters.

Then the vision was over. Startled, I blinked my eyes a few times, trying to center myself. “Whoa.”

“What happened?” Vic looked around the room, like he might be able to see something. “You went all spacey for a few seconds there. Is everything okay?”

What had the wraith meant by that message? I already knew that I didn’t understand her very well.

Yet I didn’t feel the same kind of fright I’d known after every other encounter with a wraith. This one had shown no signs of hostility, hadn’t made any demands like
stop
or
ours
or anything like that. Either she liked Vic as much as he liked her and would leave us alone for his sake, or my obsidian pendant was a definite safeguard.

As Vic carefully studied my face, he said, “Well?”

I smiled. “We can stay.”

For a little while, at least, Lucas and I had a home.

Vic drove us back to our hotel. Before he and Ranulf left, Vic made a discreet trip to the ATM and gave me the six hundred dollars he’d promised, a wad of bills I stuffed inside my purse. We had the keys and code to turn off the security system in the wine cellar, and once we had jobs, Lucas and I would be able to save money. Before they left, I hugged Vic tighter than I had hugged almost anybody else in my life.

Then it was time for me to face the music.

Lucas hadn’t smiled once on the way home. He talked some with Vic and Ranulf, thanking Vic for giving us a place to stay, but it was like I was invisible. He’d held on to his temper while we took care of business, but now his mood was darkening.

We rode up the hotel elevator in silence, the tension around us weighing heavier by the moment. In my mind, I kept seeing Eduardo’s death at Mrs. Bethany’s hands over and over again, and hearing that sickening crack.

When we entered our room, I expected Lucas to begin shouting at me right away, but he didn’t. Instead he went into the bathroom and washed his face and hands, scrubbing hard, as though he felt dirty.

As he dried off with a towel, the suspense got to me. “Say something,” I said. “Anything. Scream at me if you have to. Just—don’t stay quiet like that.”

“What do you want me to say? I told you not to use e-mail? We both know that, and we both know you ignored me.”

“You didn’t say why.” He glared at me then, and I realized how weak I had to sound. “That’s not an excuse. I realize that—”

“I told you months ago that we had to watch out for e-mail being traced! Did you think I didn’t e-mail you last year just because I didn’t feel like it? Why wasn’t that alone enough to tell you that was a good reason?”

“You’re shouting at me!”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want to overreact to something as insignificant as
people getting killed
.”

It hit me then, the full weight of what I’d done, in a way it hadn’t since the night of Mrs. Bethany’s attack. I smelled the smoke and remembered the screams. In my mind’s eye, I saw Mrs. Bethany viciously twist Eduardo’s neck and the light fade from his eyes as he fell down dead.

I ran from the hotel room, tears stinging my eyes. I couldn’t face Lucas’s anger at that moment, even though I deserved it. My own guilt had come crashing down, punishing me more horribly than he or anyone else could. I had to be alone, to cry it out for myself, but where could I go?

Blindly, I pushed into the stairwell, listening to my sobs echo as I hurried upward. I wasn’t running anywhere in particular, just running—as though I could outrace the knowledge of what I’d done. When I reached the rooftop and could go no farther, I walked out to the pool. A few kids splashed in the kiddie area, but for the moment I had the deep end to myself. I kicked off my sandals, dunked my feet, hung my head, and wept quietly for a long time until all the tears had run out.

At dusk, someone finally sat beside me at the pool’s edge—Lucas. I couldn’t quite bring myself to meet his eyes. He sat by my side, unlaced his shoes, and dunked his feet, too. I should have found that more encouraging than I did.

Lucas spoke first. “I shouldn’t have shouted.”

“If I’d had any idea what could happen—that Mrs. Bethany might find us from that and come after the group—there’s no way I would’ve sent the e-mail. I promise you.”