Sun Damage (The Sunshine Series) (34 page)

“You’re the one who’s been telling him where I am,” Myles says, taking the words right from my mouth.

Manny turns to us
, the red fading, but not going away. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t want to.”

My hands become hot.
“Then why did you?”

“
He was going to hurt her!” Manny screams. “I couldn’t let him hurt her.”

My mind flashes to a girl with red hair and freckles. The one he told me about, the one who betrayed him. The one he still loves. He’s though
t the image directly at me.

“
So you helped him hurt
me
?” Now I’m screaming.

Myles backs away from the door.
“We need to leave, Sophie.”

“
I’m sorry,” Manny says, out of breath as he turns to the door again. “I don’t want to hurt you either.”

Another pound on the door.
“I will not harm your girl now,” Michael is saying. “I only want this one.”

Manny doesn’t respond.

“Sophie,” Myles says, pointing above us to a window. He’s already dumping out the trash can and flipping it over so he can stand on it.

Though it
’s able to open, Myles punches his fist through the glass, causing a shattering louder than the banging that’s begun outside of the door.

“
Still running?” I hear Michael say from the other side. “You are fortunate to have so many friends, Myles.” There’s another even louder pound on the door, so loud that I’m sure the hinges are about to bust apart or a hole is about to be broken through the wood. Manny seems to be struggling a little bit, his arms out stretched to the door and his fingers trembling.

Myles slides the broken glass away from the window ledge the best that he can before climbing down and motioning for me climb on top of the trash can now.

The banging stops for a minute and Myles and I stare at each other for the longest time.

“
It is interesting,” Michael’s voice nearly echoes against the door. “How you are so willing to protect someone you are planning to destroy anyway.” He laughs. “How else are you going to survive my blood, Myles?”

Myles
’ hand is still around mine and my eyes are now locked onto his. I can’t move.

“
Guys,” Manny says. “You should get out of here. Get to the hotel. You’ll be safe there until you can leave at sunrise.”

“
What does he mean?” I whisper, my hand slipping out of Myles’

“
Sophie, we have to go,” Myles says, gesturing towards the window. “He can’t hold the door for much longer.”

I gulp. The colors begin flooding my vision again.
Red and then brown. They’re so bright that I can barely see Myles in front of me. I can no longer hear what’s going on around us.

“
Sophie,” his voice is pleading.

“
No,” I say, trying to shake the colors out of my frame of vision.

“
Oh,” I hear Michael say. “She didn’t know, did she?” He laughs more. It sounds like a goat being sacrificed.

But before I can let the colors overtake me, come through me and destroy whatever is around us, Myles is standing on the trash can with me, pushing me up and through the window, following me outside.
“What about Manny?” I ask.

“
He can apparently protect himself,” he says, grasping my hand again. “I don’t know how he knows how to do it, but he isn’t strong enough to protect us while protecting himself. We have to get to the hotel. He begins to pull me forward.

“
What does Michael mean, ‘surviving his blood’?”

We pick up speed,
flying through the darkness. There’s a hot summer breeze hitting me in the face and I want to scream into it.

I stop him when we’re a little farther from the bar, but we’re not at the hotel yet, just the middle of a deserted street lined with houses with people asleep inside.

“Tell me,” I say evenly, my voice ready to catch fire at any moment.

Chapter 18

Who’s The Monster Now?

“I cannot leave here, I cannot stay. Forever haunted, more than afraid.”–AFI

I didn’t want her to ever find out but now it’s here in front of us and I can’t take my eyes off of her.

“
Please?” Sophie asks. “What the
fuck
was he talking about?”

I want everything to stop. I want to retreat back to the hotel, before this happened and before ever
ything began to break even more, just as I was beginning to hold it all together the best that I could.

I turn back to
Sophie and her eyes are tearing. “Tell me,” she says weakly.

I take a step forward and she
doesn’t move away. “I can tell you later, “I say. “There isn’t time now. You’ll get hurt.”

She lets out an exasperated breath.
“Why does everything come down to that?” she asks. “Why is it that every time I get too close to solving my own goddamn problems, I’m told that I’ll get hurt?”

She c
lenches her fists at her sides and I can feel her anger deep in my chest as if she’s punched me there. I can also feel something else below that, something red and warm. It’s not like the anger I’ve felt from her. It’s something I felt what seems like centuries ago, but it was only last year. She loves me. Her anger is coming from fear. Because if I’m infected and she’s a vampire, she’s going to live a long time without me.

“
We have to get out of here,” I tell her. “Please.” I grab her hand and instead of letting me pull her, she switches directions and pulls me forward.

Sophie drags me through the darkened street where a bulb has gone out.
Through endless suburban streets. At first, we’re too slow. She speeds up a little but I know she can run faster. We come to stop on a busy street where cars are passing by, people are talking and drinking in bars.

“
What was he talking about?” Sophie repeats.

Without
consulting me, Sophie hails down a cab and we’re sitting in the backseat.

She tells the driver the name of the hotel, but my head is buzzing so I only hear her when she says,
“If you could go fast, we’d really appreciate it.” Her tone is pleasant. “We’re
really
late.”

The driver turns around in his seat and we start moving.

You’d better tell me right now. Or I’m going to set this car on fire.

You
don’t mean that. You’re just angry.
And scared.

Are you infected?
The way she directs the question at me makes me hold onto the door handle. I feel like she could throw me out of the cab by force of will.

Keep in mind that we
’re in a moving vehicle with a human driver at the wheel,
I tell her. T
hat if something happens to him, he could hurt a lot of people and himself.

She seems to calm a little bit at
that.
Okay.
She looks up at me, her eyes glistening in the dim light.
Can you please just answer me? Are you...are you infected?

I go over how I should word it in my
mind. How to tell her the last thing I was trying to keep her from finding out. But in the end I just answer:
Yes.

I hear her take in air. I hear her heart beat
against her ribcage, desperate and trying to escape.

“
What?” She says out loud in a horrified whisper.

“
Shh.” I wrap my arm around her so the driver can’t see her face in the rearview mirror.

The rest of the drive is qui
et. Neither of us says anything and we both stay out of each other’s heads. When we’re finally let out of the cab ten minutes later, I pay, and the driver leaves us alone on the side walk. It’s midnight and neither of us know what to do.

Sophie falls to the ground as soon as the cab is out of sight, her knees making a hard knock against
the cement but I doubt she even feels it.

“
We need to get inside,” I try to urge her. “We can talk once we’re there,” I say, kneeling down with her when she doesn’t move or take her gaze off of the crack in the sidewalk in front of her. “It isn’t safe here.”  

Sophie doesn
’t move for a long moment, only shifting her eyes upward to my own. “No,” she whispers. “No,” she says again, this time, a little bit louder. One of her fists smashes against the cement. “No, no, no.” She continues, punctuating each word with the resounding pound of her knuckles against the sidewalk.

I am frozen in place. Once again, I
’ve done it. I’ve done this to her. I’m the one hurting her because I’m keeping things from her. Now that every last lie and secret is out, I don’t know if she can ever be repaired again. I start to hear the sidewalk break apart under the weight of each blow. The crack she has been staring at since she kneeled down has grown. When I start to smell blood, I take her hands in mine. I can feel the muscles in her arms and fingers protesting against me.  

I take my chances of being burned alive or thrown into the street by her mind and wrap her up in my arms. It
’s the only thing I can think of that will make everything stop. Not that any of it will. It never will. And I started it all.

“
Let’s go inside,” I whisper in her ear. “We can talk there.”

She shakes her head under me
but she isn’t saying no to my suggestion. She’s saying no to all of it.

Sophie pushes me away and I let her.
“No,” she repeats once more, wiping her face and leaving a trail of blood from her knuckles on her cheek. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me that you’re either lying or that there’s some kind of sick joke behind all of this because on top of everything else, this
cannot
be happening. It just
can’t
.”

I take a second to gather myself before I can gather her. Manny can
’t hold Michael off forever and he’ll eventually find out where we’ve gone. If we can stay inside the protected hotel at least until daylight, we can get back on the bus and continue moving, until we get back to Club Midnight. Until I
figure out what to do.

“
Sophie,” I say, trying to remain gentle.

I didn
’t want to do this, but right now, she isn’t leaving me many other options. I can’t worry about trying to fix things right now, I have to worry about holding them together. Her eyes slowly trail back up to me as I stand. I take a deep breath and prepare myself for what I need to do next. I channel everything I want into one sentence in my mind first. Right now, all I want is for her to follow me into the building. Other than that, I can’t count on wanting anything else, like her to forgive me, maybe forget that she knows I’m infected.

“
Get up,” I say, making sure my gaze is burning right through her.

Her eyes are watering, like she
’s trying to shut them. She knows I won’t allow that.

“
Right now.”

Sophie’s legs lock in place, and I offer her a hand when she tries to st
and, expecting her to reject it but she grabs onto my hand. Hers is freezing cold. She needs blood and I’m the one that can give it to her. I need to hold her together.

“
We’re going inside now,” I say, turning toward the hotel entrance. “Then you’re going to sit down and try to calm yourself before we start talking about this.”

I add the last part for everyone
’s good. If she gets too upset, who knows what her strength of mind and emotions would do to the hotel building or the people staying inside of it? Sophie turns to me, towards the building. She stares into my eyes but doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even ask me to stop. A sense of calm comes over me when she looks into my eyes, like she wanted me to control her at this moment but didn’t realize she wanted it until it was happening. Maybe it’s easier that way. Easier than trying to form words or thoughts around all of the things I’ve had to tell her and all of the things she’s gone through because of me. All the things she still might have to go through because of me.

We walk the few feet to the hotel entrance and we go inside without incident. Another protector, Daniel, an older vampire with light brown hair and hazel eyes, is standing by the front desk, waiting for us.
He’s disguised as a security guard so no one notices him, and he nods when he sees me. I nod back.

We check in separately
even though we’re both going to my room. Once we’re inside, I move my suitcase off of the arm chair so she can do as I instructed. She sits without protesting, holding her hands out in front of her so she doesn’t get blood on the upholstery. I go into the bathroom and wet a cloth with warm water and come back to her.

She
’s quiet, concentrating on her breathing as I wipe her hands clean and bandage them the best I can with a few Band Aids I found in the bathroom. Then I leave her alone, standing in front of her as she stares at the dingy blue carpet.