Rachel Caine & Kristin Cast & Claudia Gray & Nancy Holder & Tanith Lee & Richelle Mead & Cynthia Leitich Smith & P. C. Cast (22 page)

Ms. Howison got up out of her chair and walked out of the gym. The overhead fluorescents were on. Jilly followed her past the coaches' offices and then into the girls' locker room, past the rows upon rows of lockers, and then through another door into the shower area.

Ms. Howison cleared her throat and said, “She's here.” Then she stepped back and slammed the door between herself and Jilly.

Jilly tried to bolt.

Sean was there, and he was a vampire. All the color in his long, narrow face was gone. His eyes looked glazed, as if he was on drugs. And she should know.

He grabbed her, wrapping his arms around her like a boyfriend; she smelled his breath, like garbage. He wasn't cold; he was room temperature. She was completely numb. Her heart was skipping beats.

She wet her pants.

“I'm glad to see you too,” he said, grinning at her.

He wrapped his hand around her bicep and dragged her forward. She burst into tears and started wailing. He clamped his other dead hand still over her mouth so hard she was afraid her front teeth were going to break off.

“Shut up,” he hissed, chuckling. “I've wanted to say that to you forever. Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

She kept whimpering. She couldn't stop. Maybe he knew that; he dragged her along with his hand over her mouth. His fingernails dug into her arm and she knew he had broken the skin, but she didn't feel it.

He walked her into a storage room where they kept cleaning supplies—brooms, mops, big jugs of cleaner. She started screaming behind his hand, and he slapped her, hard. Then he slammed her against the wall. With a gasp, she bounced back off and fell on her butt.

He slammed the door, leaving her in darkness. With a sob, she crawled to it and started to pound on it.

“
Don't
,” he hissed on the other side.

He's going to get Eli
, she thought.
Oh, God, he's going to vampirize him. That's what he's here for.

But why would he? He was the King of Bitter. And she would never leave without Eli.

She fumbled around for a light switch, found one, and turned on the blessed, wonderful light. Her arm was bleeding and it finally began to sting. She didn't know if she wanted to feel anything. She wondered what it would be like when he—

The door burst open, and Sean came back inside. His eyes were glittering. He looked crazy. “Eli says hi.”

“No,” she begged. “Don't do it. Please, Sean. Don't change him.”

Sean blinked at her. Then he laughed. “Honey, that's what love is all about, don't you know?”

She doubled up her fists and bit her knuckles. He lifted a brow.

“I smell fresh bloo-ood,” he sang. “Yours. It smells
great.
If you were alone in the ocean, the sharks would come and chew you up. Alone in the forest, it would be the wolves. Alone in the city, and it's us.”

Vampires
. “How . . . how did this happen to you?”

He ignored her. “I'm going to give you a choice, girlfriend. The choice is this: You can change, or he can change. The other one of you . . . is the blood in the water.” He moved his shoulders. “I'll let you pick.”

She stared at him. “What are you saying?”

“God, you are so stupid. So incredibly, moronically stupid. I could never figure out why he loved you.” He shook his head.

Why did it matter, she wondered, when Eli still loved him more?

“Does it even matter which way I choose?” she said. “You don't even like me.” Of course he would change Eli and let her die.

“Maybe it doesn't. Maybe I just want to see what you'd say,” he told her. “I'm giving him the same choice.”

She stared at him in mute terror.

“I told him that I would change you if he asked me to.” He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the back of the door. He didn't look different at all—he was the same surf-charmer Sean.

“You know I'll say to change him,” she said. What did she have to live for, after all? Only Eli. And if he were gone. . . .

“Be right back,” he said, turning to go.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

He didn't turn back around, just looked at her over his shoulder, as if she was being a nuisance.

“I don't know why he's so loyal to you. He doesn't love you the way he loves me.”

“But he loves me,” she said, as she realized. “That's why. . . .”

He turned around and stared at her. The expression on his face was the most frightening thing she had ever seen. She took another step back, and another. She bumped into the wall.

He raised his chin, opened the door, and left.

She paced. She thought about drinking the cleaner. She tried to break the mops and brooms to make a wooden stake. She couldn't so much as crack one of them.

She fell to her knees and prayed to He/She/It/Them,
Get us out of here get us out of here come in, God, come in, over. . . .

The door opened, and Sean came back in, grinning like someone who had finally, really, totally gotten what he wanted. Triumph was written all over his face. He looked taller. Meaner.

Ready to kill her.

“Eli will be changing,” he said. “GMTA. You both made the same choice.”

She jerked.
No, he wouldn't.

“And you'll be his first meal. Have you ever seen a newly changed vampire? All they want to do is suck someone's blood. That's all I wanted to do.”

“You're lying,” she said. “Eli would never. . . .”

But Eli
would.
He hadn't even asked her if she wanted to leave his parents' house to help him look for Sean. He had put her in harm's way, for Sean. He didn't love her the way he loved Sean. Lovers did things differently than friends.

“If it makes you feel any better, he feels terrible about it.” Sean sneered at her.

“He's going to hate you for making him do this,” she said. “He'll never forgive you.” She was talking to a vampire. To a vampire who was going to kill her. To a gay vampire who was going to turn Eli into a gay vampire.

She felt reality begin to slip away. This wasn't happening.

“I'm going to get him now,” he said, going for a smile, not quite pulling it off. Irritated, he slammed the door.

She stood as still as one of the mops she couldn't turn into a vampire stake. Her heart hammered in her chest and she had no idea how she could hear all that thumping and pumping because she was

Ms. Howison was going to have a change of heart and rally all the people in the gym and rescue her.

Sean was going to open the door and take her in his arms, and tell her that he'd been so mean to her because he actually loved
her
, not Eli. That he had only pretended to love Eli so he could stay close to her. And that he wouldn't kill either of them, not if Jilly didn't want him to.

Sean was going to tell her that he was sorry, both of them could be changed, and they would go on as they were, as a trio, only nicer, like Dorothy, the Tin Woodsman, and the Scarecrow.

Sean was going to see some other hot guy on the way back to Eli and fall in love with him instead, change him, and leave.

Eli was going to escape, and find her, and they would get out of New York together.

She pounded on the door as she remembered the night Eli had confessed that he had met someone else . . . a guy
someone else . . . and he had cried because he didn't want to hurt her, his best friend.

“I will always love you totally and forever, I promise,” he had said.

The door opened, and she scrambled backward away from it as fast as she could. Her elbow rammed into a container of cleaner.
Throw it at them. Do something. Save yourself.

Sean and Eli stood close together. Sean had his arm around Eli, and Eli had on his baggy parka. Eli, as far as she could tell, was still human. His bangs were in his eyes.

He was looking at the floor, as if he couldn't stand to look at her.

“No,” she whispered. But it must have been yes, he must have told Sean to change him. Sean was going to change him, and then he was going to kill her.

Her heart broke. She was on the verge of going completely crazy, all over again.

Sean took a step toward her. “If it makes you feel any better, it's going to hurt when I change him,” he promised her. He sounded bizarrely sincere.

He shut the door. The three of them stood inside the cramped space. She was only two feet away.

Sean placed both hands on Eli's shoulders and turned Eli toward him. Tears were streaming down Eli's cheeks. He looked young and scared.

Sean threw back his head and hissed. Fangs extended from his mouth.

And Eli whipped his hand into the pocket of his parka; pulling out a jagged strip of wood—

—
Yes!
—

—and he glanced at Jilly—

—
Yes!—

—and as Sean prepared to sing his fangs into Eli's neck, Jilly rammed Sean as hard as she could. He must have seen it coming, must have guessed—but Eli got the stake into him, dead center in his unbeating heart.

Sean stared down at it, and then at Eli, as blood began to pour down the front of him. Then he laughed, once, and blew Eli a kiss.

He looked at Jilly—gargled, “Bitch,” his throat full of his own blood—then slid to the floor like a sack of garbage, inert, harmless.

Eli and Jilly stared at him. Neither spoke. She heard Eli panting.

Then Eli gathered her up. Kissed her.

Kissed her.

They clung to each other beside the dead vampire. And Eli threw himself over Sean, holding
him
, kissing
him
.

“Oh, my God, Sean,” he keened. “Oh, God, oh, God.
Jilly
.” He reached for her hand. She gave it to him, wrapping herself around him as he started to wail.

After he wore himself out, she tried to get up, thinking to see if there were more vampires, to check on Ms. Howison and the others, but he held her too tightly, and she wouldn't have moved away from him for the world.

He held Sean tightly too. “I can't believe it. How evil he was.” Eli's voice was hoarse from all the sobbing.

“I know,” she said. “He was always—”

“Sean wasn't even in there. When you're changed, the vampirism infects you and steals your soul,” Eli went on. “You're not there. You're gone.”

Tears clung to the tip of his nose.

“Sean loved you, Jilly. He told me that a million times every day. He was so glad you're my best friend.”

She started to say, “No, he hated me,” but suddenly she realized: that was going to be his coping mechanism. He was going to believe from now on that the Sean he knew and loved would have never made him kill his best friend.

She put her hand on the crown of his head and found herself thinking of the tapestry of the Jews at Masada in his parents' living room. It was a pivotal moment in Jewish history, when cornered Jewish soldiers chose to leap over a cliff rather than submit to Roman rule. Mr. Stein talked about it now and then, and sometimes Jilly had wondered if what he was saying was that Eli should take his own life, rather than be gay. She couldn't believe that, though, couldn't stand even to suspect it. The rigidity of the adult world was what had made her crazy. The unbelievable insanity of Mr. Stein, who condemned his own son just because Eli couldn't change into a heterosexual Jewish warrior and defy the invading sin of misplaced lust. At least, that was what her therapist had told her.

“You are brilliant, and you're so . . .
much
,” Dr. Robles had declared. Dr. Robles, her savior. “People don't change, Jilly. They just see things differently than they used to, and respond according to the way they already are. It's all context. Reality. Is. Context.”

Dr. Robles had saved her because he didn't try to change her. So she had never tried to change Eli.

She took a deep breath and thought about her hopeless love for him. And something shifted.

Her love was
not
hopeless. She loved him. It didn't have to break her heart. It didn't have to do anything but be there. Be there.

So she said, “Sean loved you so much.” Because that would help him the most.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “He loved you too. And I love you, Jilly.” He looked up at her, broken and crumpled like a rag—the boy she kissed in the eighth grade, a thousand million times, almost until her lips bled.

“And I love you,” she replied. “I love you more than my own life. I always have.” It was right to say that now. People didn't change, and love didn't, either. Where Eli was concerned, there was no context.

“Thank you,” he said. No embarrassment, no apologies; their love was what it was. Alone in a closet, with a dead vampire, hiding in a school because the rest of the city was overrun by vampires. . . .

She laid her head on his shoulder, and he laced his fingers with hers.

“Happy birthday, sweet sixteen,” he whispered. “My Jilly girl.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. It was the best present ever.

After a while, they opened the door. The sun was out, and for one instant, she thought she heard the trilling of a lark.

Then she realized that it was Eli's cell phone.