The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (4 page)

I shifted uneasily at the last word. Diego kept waiting for my answer, like he hadn’t said anything weird. I took a deep breath
and thought back.

“I was close enough,” I admitted after a few seconds of his patient watching. “Not there yet, but in a few more weeks…” I
shrugged. “You know, I don’t remember much, but I do remember thinking there was nothing more powerful on this planet
than just plain old hunger. Turns out, thirst is worst.”

He laughed. “Sing it, sister.”

“What about you? You weren’t a troubled teen runaway like the rest of us?”

“Oh, I was troubled, all right.” He stopped talking.

But I could sit around and wait for the answers to inappropriate questions, too. I just stared at him.

He sighed. The scent of his breath was nice. Everybody smelled sweet, but Diego had a little something extra—some spice like
cinnamon or cloves.

“I tried to stay away from all that junk. Studied hard. I was gonna get out of the ghetto, you know. Go to college. Make something
of myself. But there was a guy—not much different than Raoul. Join or die, that was his motto. I wasn’t having any, so I stayed
away from his group. I was careful. Stayed alive.” He stopped, closing his eyes.

I wasn’t done being pushy. “And?”

“My kid brother wasn’t as careful.”

I was about to ask if his brother had joined or died, but the expression on his face made asking unnecessary. I looked away,
not sure how to respond. I couldn’t really understand his loss, the pain it still clearly caused him to feel. I hadn’t left
anything behind that I still missed. Was that the difference? Was that why he dwelled on memories that the rest of us shunned?

I still didn’t see how Riley came into this. Riley and the cheeseburger of pain. I wanted that part of the story, but now
I felt bad for pushing him to answer.

Lucky for my curiosity, Diego kept going after a minute.

“I kind of lost it. Stole a gun from a friend and went hunting.” He chuckled darkly. “Wasn’t as good at it then. But I got
the guy that got my brother before they got me. The rest of his crew had me cornered in an alley. Then, suddenly, Riley was
there, between me and them. I remember thinking he was the whitest guy I’d ever seen. He didn’t even look at the others when
they shot him. Like the bullets were flies. You know what he said to me? He said, ‘Want a new life, kid?’”

“Hah!” I laughed. “That’s way better than mine. All I got was, ‘Want a burger, kid?’”

I still remembered how Riley’d looked that night, though the image was all blurry because my eyes’d sucked back then. He was
the hottest boy I’d ever seen, tall and blond and perfect, every feature. I knew his eyes must be just as beautiful behind
the dark sunglasses he never took off. And his voice was so gentle, so kind. I figured I knew what he would want in exchange
for the meal, and I would have given it to him, too. Not because he was so pretty to
look at, but because I hadn’t eaten anything but trash for two weeks. It turned out he wanted something else, though.

Diego laughed at the burger line. “You must have been pretty hungry.”

“Damn straight.”

“So why were you so hungry?”

“Because I was stupid and ran away before I had a driver’s license. I couldn’t get a real job, and I was a bad thief.”

“What were you running from?”

I hesitated. The memories were a little more clear as I focused on them, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that.

“Oh, c’mon,” he coaxed. “I told you mine.”

“Yeah, you did. Okay. I was running from my dad. He used to knock me around a lot. Probably did the same to my mom before
she took off. I was pretty little then—I didn’t know much. It got worse. I figured if I waited too long I’d end up dead. He
told me if I ever ran away I’d starve. He was right about that—only thing he was ever right about as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t think about it much.”

Diego nodded in agreement. “Hard to remember that stuff, isn’t it? Everything’s so fuzzy and dark.”

“Like trying to see with mud in your eyes.”

“Good way to put it,” he complimented me. He
squinted at me like he was trying to see, and rubbed his eyes.

We laughed together again. Weird.

“I don’t think I’ve laughed
with
anybody since I met Riley,” he said, echoing my thoughts. “This is nice.
You’re
nice. Not like the others. You ever try to have a conversation with one of them?”

“Nope, I haven’t.”

“You’re not missing anything. Which is my point. Wouldn’t Riley’s standard of living be a little higher if he surrounded himself
with decent vampires? If we’re supposed to protect
her
, shouldn’t he be looking for the smart ones?”

“So Riley doesn’t need brains,” I reasoned. “He needs numbers.”

Diego pursed his lips, considering. “Like chess. He’s not making knights and bishops.”

“We’re just pawns,” I realized.

We stared at each other again for a long minute.

“I don’t want to think that,” Diego said.

“So what do we do?” I asked, using the plural automatically. Like we were already a team.

He thought about my question for a second, seeming uneasy, and I regretted the “we.” But then he said, “What can we do when
we don’t know what’s happening?”

So he didn’t mind the team thing, which made
me feel really good in a way I didn’t remember ever feeling before. “I guess we keep our eyes open, pay attention, try to
figure it out.”

He nodded. “We need to think about everything Riley’s told us, everything he’s done.” He paused thoughtfully. “You know, I
tried to hash some of this out with Riley once, but he couldn’t have cared less. Told me to keep my mind on more important
things—like thirst. Which was all I could think about then, of course. He sent me out hunting, and I stopped worrying….”

I watched him thinking about Riley, his eyes unfocused as he relived the memory, and I wondered. Diego was my first friend
in this life, but I wasn’t his.

Suddenly his focus snapped back to me. “So what have we learned from Riley?”

I concentrated, running through the last three months in my head. “He really doesn’t tell us much, you know. Just the vampire
basics.”

“We’ll have to listen more carefully.”

We sat in silence, pondering this. I mostly thought about how much I didn’t know. And why hadn’t I worried about everything
I didn’t know before now? It was like talking to Diego had cleared my head. For the first time in three months,
blood
was not the main thing in there.

The silence lasted for a while. The black hole I’d felt funneling fresh air into the cave wasn’t black anymore. It was dark
gray now and getting infinitesimally lighter with each second. Diego noticed me eyeing it nervously.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Some dim light gets in here on sunny days. It doesn’t hurt.” He shrugged.

I scooted closer to the hole in the floor, where the water was disappearing as the tide went out.

“Seriously, Bree. I’ve been down here before during the day. I told Riley about this cave—and how it was mostly filled with
water, and he said it was cool when I needed to get out of the madhouse. Anyway, do I look like I got singed?”

I hesitated, thinking about how different his relationship with Riley was than mine. His eyebrows rose, waiting for an answer.
“No,” I finally said. “But…”

“Look,” he said impatiently. He crawled swiftly to the tunnel and stuck his arm in up to the shoulder. “Nothing.”

I nodded once.

“Relax! Do you want me to see how high I can go?” As he spoke, he stuck his head into the hole and started climbing.

“Don’t, Diego.” He was already out of sight. “I’m relaxed, I swear.”

He was laughing—it sounded like he was already several yards up the tunnel. I wanted to go after him, to grab his foot and
yank him back, but I was frozen with stress. It would be stupid to risk my life to save some total stranger. But I hadn’t
had anything close to a friend in forever. Already it would be hard to go back to having no one to talk to, after only one
night.

“No estoy quemando,”
he called down, his tone teasing. “Wait… is that…?
Ow!
”

“Diego?”

I leaped across the cave and stuck my head into the tunnel. His face was right there, inches from mine.

“Boo!”

I flinched back from his proximity—just a reflex, old habit.

“Funny,” I said dryly, moving away as he slid back into the cave.

“You need to unwind, girl. I’ve looked into this, okay? Indirect sunlight doesn’t hurt.”

“So you’re saying that I could just stand under a nice shady tree and be fine?”

He hesitated for a minute, as if debating whether or not to tell me something, and then said quietly, “I did once.”

I stared at him, waiting for the grin. Because this was a joke.

It didn’t come.

“Riley said…,” I started, and then my voice trailed off.

“Yeah, I know what Riley said,” he agreed. “Maybe Riley doesn’t know as much as he says he does.”

“But Shelly and Steve. Doug and Adam. That kid with the bright red hair. All of them. They’re gone because they didn’t get
back in time. Riley saw the ashes.”

Diego’s brows pulled together unhappily.

“Everyone knows that old-timey vampires had to stay in coffins during the day,” I went on. “To keep out of the sun. That’s
common knowledge, Diego.”

“You’re right. All the stories do say that.”

“And what would Riley gain by locking us up in a lightproof basement—one big group coffin—all day, anyway? We just demolish
the place, and he has to deal with all the fighting, and it’s constant turmoil. You can’t tell me he enjoys it.”

Something I’d said surprised him. He sat with his mouth open for a second, then closed it.

“What?”

“Common knowledge,” he repeated. “What do vampires do in coffins all day?”

“Er—oh yeah, they’re supposed to sleep, right? But I guess they’re probably just lying there bored, ’cause we don’t… Okay,
so that part’s wrong.”

“Yeah. In the stories they’re not just asleep, though. They’re totally unconscious. They
can’t
wake up. A human can walk right up and stake them, no problem. And that’s another thing—stakes. You really think someone
could shove a piece of wood through you?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about it. I mean, not a normal piece of wood, obviously. Maybe sharpened wood has some
kind of… I don’t know. Magical properties or something.”

Diego snorted. “Please.”

“Well, I don’t know. I wouldn’t just hold still while some human ran at me with a filed broom handle, anyway.”

Diego—still with a sort of disgusted look on his face, as if magic were really such a reach when you’re a vampire—rolled to
his knees and started clawing into the limestone above his head. Tiny stone shards filled his hair, but he ignored them.

“What are you doing?”

“Experimenting.”

He dug with both hands until he could stand upright, and then kept going.

“Diego, you get to the surface, you explode. Stop it.”

“I’m not trying to—ah, here we go.”

There was a loud crack, and then another crack, but no light. He ducked back down to where I could
see his face, with a piece of tree root in his hand, white, dead, and dry under the clumps of dirt. The edge where he’d broken
it was a sharp, uneven point. He tossed it to me.

“Stake me.”

I tossed it back. “Whatever.”

“Seriously. You know it can’t hurt me.” He lobbed the wood to me; instead of catching it, I batted it back.

He snagged it out of the air and groaned. “You are so…
superstitious
!”

“I am a
vampire
. If that doesn’t prove that superstitious people are
right
, I don’t know what does.”

“Fine, I’ll do it.”

He held the branch away from himself dramatically, arm extended, like it was a sword and he was about to impale himself.

“C’mon,” I said uneasily. “This is silly.”

“That’s
my
point. Here goes nothing.”

He crushed the wood into his chest, right where his heart used to beat, with enough force to punch through a granite slab.
I was totally frozen with panic until he laughed.

“You should see your face, Bree.”

He sifted the splinters of broken wood through his fingers; the shattered root fell to the floor in mangled pieces. Diego
brushed at his shirt, though
it was too trashed from all the swimming and digging for the attempt to do any good. We’d both have to steal more clothes
the next time we got a chance.

“Maybe it’s different when a human does it.”

“Because you felt so magical when you were human?”

“I don’t know, Diego,” I said, exasperated. “I didn’t make up all those stories.”

He nodded, suddenly more serious. “What if the stories are exactly that? Made up.”

I sighed. “What difference does it make?”

“Not sure. But if we’re going to be smart about why we’re here—why Riley brought us to
her
, why she’s making more of us—then we have to understand as much as we possibly can.” He frowned, every trace of laughter
totally gone from his face now.

I just stared back at him. I didn’t have any answers.

His face softened just a little. “This helps a lot, you know. Talking about it. Helps me focus.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I don’t know why I never thought about any of this before. It seems so obvious. But working on it together…
I don’t know. I can stay on track better.”

“Exactly.” Diego smiled at me. “I’m really glad you came out tonight.”

“Don’t get all gooey on me now.”

“What? You don’t want to be”—he widened his eyes and his voice went up an octave—“BFFs?” He laughed at the goofy expression.

I rolled my eyes, not totally sure if he was making fun of the expression or of me.

“C’mon, Bree. Be my bestest bud forever. Please?” Still teasing, but his wide smile was natural and… hopeful. He held out
his hand.

This time I went for a real high five, not realizing until he caught my hand and held it that he’d intended anything else.