Night Runner (28 page)

“And what of your promises to me?”

“We both made promises,” she said. “To love each other forever. To give up the old ways. And to be decent. But you broke your promises. You became what you are. What you were. You gave up your goodness, and so you gave away the only part of you that was worth loving.”

“Oh, spare me the melodrama,” he snapped. “We are vampires. You know what this means. To live—to be truly alive—we must hunt and we must kill.”

“And since when did that include terrorizing children?”

The question hung in the air, unanswered, for a long time.

“So you would choose this boy over me?” the Baron asked.

Nurse Ophelia looked at him squarely, then her eyes slipped past him to where I was waiting. Her head shook slowly and she smiled such a perfect smile I could have cried.

“Vlad, you demented sadist, I would choose a sewer rat over you.”

I cringed when I heard Ophelia speak. Then I felt Vrolok's hate and anger swell. I was overcome by the feeling that the most terrible things I could imagine were about to happen. The presence of evil that had nearly undone me at Stoney Lake filled the room until it was practically bursting.

Vrolok rose. He made no effort to disguise the malice in him. Instead, he unleashed it. It was foul. You could hardly breathe the air.

“There is a third option,” he said. “I could rip this boy's throat out and feed his friends to the crows.” Then he turned around to grab me.

Well, the look of surprise on his face when he saw me is difficult to describe. He'd forgotten about me, and I'd been busy. For a moment he was too confused to act. He had expected to find me curled up at his feet, exhausted and humbled, but I wasn't there. I was right in his face, chest to chest, eye to eye, tooth to tooth, and I was so angry, so ready to go berserk, that I'd have made the most insane mountain gorilla proud. My body was healed and I was strong again. Supernatural. And I can tell you, if the Baron had been given a choice right then and there to face me or dive into a pool of hungry sharks, he would have been wise to go find a bathing suit.

So while he stared at me in amazement, I wound up and threw a punch that nearly broke the sound barrier. And when it hit him in the jaw, he flew clear across the room.

Y
ou have to be wondering how I managed this. Perhaps you've figured it out already.

While the Baron and Ophelia were having their argument, I was trying to convince Charlie and Luna to crawl out the door with me. But Charlie wouldn't move. He just shook his head like I was asking him to jump off a cliff. And I couldn't get Luna to even acknowledge that I was there.

“Come on,” I whispered, “hurry!” But I might as well have been speaking Swahili. She didn't respond at all, even when I untied the ropes around her wrists and shook her gently by the shoulders. When I shook her again, she just squirmed back against the wall. So I had to come up with another plan.

This whole time, I was still listening to the conversation between the Baron and Ophelia. I didn't think he was going to let us go. And
I knew Ophelia wasn't going to leave us there. They couldn't both have their way, so things were going to get messy.

Well, there was no way I was going to let Ophelia face the Baron alone. He wasn't like that boy she'd tossed into the trash—a drunken teenager armed with nothing but a foul mouth. He was a killer. And my uncle—underneath that suit he was a piece of iron. If he got his hands free, he could certainly tip the balance. And so I did the unthinkable.

I bit Charlie and I drank until he died.

I hope you can forgive me for this. He was my best friend, and I loved him. I didn't mean to do it. I just needed enough blood to fix myself. I thought that if I took just a little, Charlie would be fine. After all, it was supposed to take more than one bite to turn someone into a vampire. But that's not what happened. I started drinking and I couldn't stop myself. The killing urge took over. And it felt so intoxicating that I didn't give my friend a second thought, not until he started having a heart attack. Then I looked into his face. I wish I hadn't. It was the most tragic thing I'd ever seen. His fear and confusion. It gave way to a terrible pain. He looked as though someone was pulling his insides out. His back arched. When he settled back to the floor, he was gone.

This should have crushed me. My best friend. And it was all my fault. But all I felt was rage. And power. I had tasted human blood only once before, and that was a very small dose—the body at Luna's cottage had been nearly empty. This rush was on a different scale. I gorged until my body swelled. Charlie's blood went to work right away. My exhaustion and soreness vanished. Dark bruises faded yellow and then disappeared entirely, as though someone had taken a cloth and just wiped them away. In seconds, I was filled with an energy that you have never possessed and never will. And so when the Baron turned around I was supercharged. He looked at me with total disbelief in his eyes, and then he was airborne.

This started an avalanche of events that fell so quickly, one after the other, you would have needed a vampire's eyes to sort it all out. The Baron hit the wall behind the desk and fell to the floor. An instant later he was on his feet, moving like a blur. He had a stake in his hand, the remnants of one of the halberds. The head had been removed from the shaft, so it looked more like a blunt spear now. Fortunately, another blur got in his way. It was Ophelia. She met his charge like a rock. The shaft of wood flew to pieces. Ophelia stumbled. The Baron tried to move past, but she grabbed one of his legs. I guess she knew more than one way to stop a man in his tracks.

The Baron raised his hand to strike her, but he didn't. “Insufferable woman!” he snapped.

I picked up a small statue to use like a club, but I didn't get to do anything with it, at least not right away, because the Baron's charge had stalled. Then I noticed that my uncle had somehow freed himself. His hands were loose and he was opening one of the drawers in his desk. I whipped the statue at him, but he ducked out of the way and it exploded against the wall behind him. He rolled to his feet. The little black box, the detonator, was in his hand. I met his eyes from across the room. He nodded, smiled, then flicked his head towards the door. “
Get out
,” he seemed to be saying. Then he threw the switch.

Pain. It started with the blast. A shock wave followed that knocked me to the ground. It made my ears bleed. Then glass showered everywhere, tearing through the skin of my hands and face. But none of this compared with the sun.

The windows were facing west. As the light of the setting sun streamed into the room, I caught a brief flash of my uncle as he tipped the light on the wall, the one that activated the secret panel. Then he disappeared.

I started to burn.

Someone took hold of my arm. It was Ophelia. She was running for the door. We were almost free when I jerked to a halt just inside
the threshold. The Baron had crossed the room and taken hold of my other arm. He was screaming too, or maybe he was laughing, I couldn't tell, but I'd never heard anything that sounded so insane, so malicious. Not during eight long years in a mental ward.

And so a tug-of-war began. I was the rope, with Ophelia on one side and the monster on the other. It was excruciating. But Ophelia and I were close to the doorway and the dark hall behind. The Baron was standing directly in the sun. He wasn't going to last as long as we were.

I felt his fingers dig into my arm. All the while, he screamed his insane scream. Then he let go, and for just an instant, I thought Ophelia and I were going to make it to safety.

It shames me to be saying this, but in my panic, I had forgotten about Luna. The Baron hadn't. He must have realized he was close to death. His body was a torch. He needed blood, and she was the only source in the room, so he made straight for her.

Luna was still lying on the floor beside Charlie's body. I could see that she was bleeding heavily from the explosion of glass. I felt Ophelia pull me towards the door. She had hold of my wrist and was trying to get me into the hall and out of the sun. I twisted my hand away, then used her momentum to push her out through the door. She turned around as she fell. Surprise was all over her face. For a second our eyes met. She must have realized right then that I wasn't coming with her, because she reached out for me and called my name, and there was great pain in her voice.

I slammed the door shut and tipped a large statue in front of it so that she couldn't get back in. My skin started cracking. It was black. Charlie's blood was keeping me alive, but I didn't have long. I grabbed a picture from the wall and held it over me like a shield, then I crouched and ran for Luna.

She was kicking her way across the floor like a crab, trying to escape the Baron, who was crawling towards her. His clothes were
on fire. The sun was setting, and so the last rays of the day streamed in. They had burned through the muscles of his legs, neither of which was working. I could see some of his bones as he dragged himself farther away from me.

Luna reached the wall and couldn't go back any farther. Her emerald green eyes were wide. Her shock was gone. She knew exactly what was about to happen. She was kicking at the Baron. His moustache and hair were gone and the skin on his face was burned black so that his head looked like a charred skull. He pushed her feet out of the way, put his hands around her shoulders and pulled her neck towards his mouth. Then he stopped.

He stopped with my hands around his throat.

After feeding on Charlie's blood, catching a half-baked corpse with fried legs wasn't all that difficult. I hauled him off the ground as if he were made of straw. He scratched at my face, but his strength was gone. Mine wasn't. Not quite. I held him at arm's length and looked him straight in the eyes. I can't tell you what I saw there. Insanity, perhaps? Pain? Or fear? There was so little left of him that was recognizable, there was no way to know.

The only thing that wasn't charred was the necklace he was wearing. I'd never seen the two pieces attached as they were now. The golden crescent fit perfectly along the edge of the full silver moon. Both reflected the fading orange light of the sun. It had nearly set, and the same rays that were stretching out to warm the bottoms of the clouds were streaming into the room, killing me.

There was little left to the Baron now. He weighed less than a child. Still, there was something in him, an awareness, a soul. I can't say. But he was still alive, or still undead. I thought of what my father would have done. And I thought about what Mr. Entwistle had told me in the safe house when we'd discussed the vampire problem. I looked out the window, then spun and threw him as far from me as I could.

I picked Luna up in my arms. I needed to take her somewhere she could get help. The pain nearly finished me. I stepped towards the secret passage, hoping it might take us somewhere safe, but I didn't have the strength. My legs buckled. I fell and dropped her to the floor. We landed in the shadow of the desk. She moaned softly and her eyes fluttered open. I would like to tell you that she recognized me, that there was understanding in her expression, but that's not what I saw. She was scared stiff. And who wouldn't have been? I must have looked like something straight out of a zombie movie.

I wished at that moment that there were some way to go back in time. I would have returned to the bonfire and started all over again. I felt cheated. Like this could have been a different story if I'd just done a few things differently. It seemed a terrible injustice—that I'd spent all those years alone in a mental ward only to die so soon after tasting real life for the first time. But life is like that sometimes. The things you want most are impossible and there's nothing you can do about it.

Life is also about choices. That's what my father believed. He chose to offer vampires a shot at redemption. He respected their right to decide for themselves whether they could give up the hunt. Nurse Ophelia had made her choices. To leave the Baron. To look after me when my father died. The Baron had made choices, too. Cruel ones. And Maximilian—he had chosen survival.

Me? I had one last choice to make. As my uncle had said: to be good, or to be something that was less than good. You see, all I could smell was blood. Old blood on Luna's clothes from the twin's body, and the fresh stuff that had leaked from the cuts on her neck and face. I was almost finished, and the hunger in me was more intense than the fire in my muscles and bones. All I had to do was pull her in and drink. She was weak, barely conscious. She wouldn't have been able to stop me. But she was alive. And she looked as though she was going to make it. Maybe. Once I'd started feeding, it would have
been impossible for me to stop. And I would have needed all of her blood. It would have killed her, just like Charlie. So that isn't what I chose. I chose to be good. I chose to die.

I reached up. I was still holding the necklace. There wasn't much flesh left on my fingers and I nearly dropped it. I wanted her to take it. If anyone should have it, I thought, it should be someone who believed in giving people second chances, people like the young offenders she worked with. My father would have liked that. He believed in second chances, too. And I wanted her to know she'd be okay. That I wasn't going to hurt her.

I think she must have understood, because her expression changed. She took the chain that was hanging from my hand and held it up so that the moon charm caught the fading sunlight, just as it had caught the light of the bonfire that first night on Stoney Lake. The night I discovered real joy. She must have remembered too, because she smiled. It was the tired smile of a friend in pain. But it was still perfect, and it made everything all right.

And that was the last thing I saw before I died.