----------------------- Page 21-----------------------
opposites-attract thing. “Riley knows he can trust me to clean up my messes. Speaking of which, do you mind running a quick errand?” I was starting to be entertained by this strange boy. Curious about him. I wanted to see what he would do. “Sure,” I said. He bounded across the dock toward the road that ran along the waterfront. I followed after. I caught the scent of a few humans, but I knew it was too dark and we were too fast for them to see us. He chose to travel across rooftops again. After a few jumps, I recognized both our scents. He was retracing our earlier path. And then we were back to that first alley, where Kevin and the other guy had gotten stupid with the car. “Unbelievable,” Diego growled. Kevin and Co. had just left, it appeared. Two other cars were stacked on top of the first, and a handful of bystanders had been added to the body count. The cops weren’t here yet because anyone who might have reported the mayhem was already dead. “Help me sort this out?” Diego asked. “Okay.” We dropped down, and Diego quickly threw the cars into a new arrangement, so that it sort of looked like they’d hit each other rather than been piled up by a giant tantrum-throwing baby. I grabbed the two dry, lifeless bodies abandoned on the pavement and stuffed them under the apparent site of impact. “Bad accident,” I commented.
----------------------- Page 22-----------------------
Diego grinned. He took a lighter out of a ziplock from his pocket and started igniting the clothes of the victims. I grabbed my own lighter Riley reissued these when we went hunting; Kevin should have used his and got to work on the upholstery. The bodies, dried out and laced with flammable venom, blazed up quickly. “Get back,” Diego warned, and I saw that he had the first car’s gas hatch open and the lid screwed off the tank. I jumped up the closest wall, perching a story above to watch. He took a few steps back and lit a match. With perfect aim, he tossed it into the small hole. In the same second, he leaped up beside me. The boom of the explosion shook the whole street. Lights started going on around the corner. “Well done,” I said. “Thanks for your help. Back to Riley’s?” I frowned. Riley’s house was the last place I wanted to spend the rest of my night. I didn’t want to see Raoul’s stupid face or listen to the constant shrieking and fighting. I didn’t want to have to grit my teeth and hide out behind Freaky Fred so that people would leave me alone. And I was out of books. “We’ve got some time,” Diego said, reading my expression. “We don’t have to go right away.” “I could use some reading material.” “And I could use some new music.” He grinned. “Let’s go shopping.” We moved quickly through town over rooftops again and then darting through shadowy streets when the buildings got
----------------------- Page 23-----------------------
farther apart to a friendlier neighborhood. It didn’t take long to find a strip mall with one of the big chain bookstores. I snapped the lock on the roof access hatch and let us in. The store was empty, the only alarms on the windows and doors. I went straight to the H’s, while Diego headed to the music section in the back. I’d just finished with Hale. I took the next dozen books in line; that would keep me a couple of days. I looked around for Diego and found him sitting at one of the café tables, studying the backs of his new CDs. I paused, then joined him. This felt strange because it was familiar in a haunting, uncomfortable way. I had sat like this before across a table from someone. I’d chatted casually with that person, thinking about things that were not life and death or thirst and blood. But that had been in a different, blurry lifetime. The last time I’d sat at a table with someone, that someone had been Riley. It was hard to remember that night for a lot of reasons. “So how come I never notice you around the house?” Diego asked abruptly. “Where do you hide?” I laughed and grimaced at the same time. “I usually kick it behind wherever Freaky Fred is hanging out.” His nose wrinkled. “Seriously? How do you stand that?” “You get used to it. It’s not so bad behind him as it is in front. Anyway, it’s the best hiding place I’ve found. Nobody gets close to Fred.” Diego nodded, still looking kind of grossed out. “That’s true. It’s a way to stay alive.”
----------------------- Page 24-----------------------
I shrugged. “Did you know that Fred is one of Riley’s favorites?” Diego asked. “Really? How ” No one could stand Freaky Fred. I was the only one who tried, and that was solely out of self-preservation. Diego leaned toward me conspiratorially. I was already so used to his strange way that I didn’t even flinch. “I heard him on the phone with her.” I shuddered. “I know,” he said, sounding sympathetic again. Of course, it wasn’t weird that we could sympathize with each other when it came to her. “This was a few months back. Anyway, Riley was talking about Fred, all excited. From what they were saying, I guess that some vampires can do things. More than what normal vampires can do, I mean. And that’s good something she’s looking for. Vampires with skillzzz.” He pulled the Z sound out, so I could hear how he was spelling it in his head. “What kinds of skills?” “All kinds of stuff, it sounds like. Mind reading and tracking and even seeing the future.” “Get out.” “I’m not kidding. I guess Fred can sort of repel people on purpose. It’s all in our heads, though. He makes us repulsed at the thought of being near him.” I frowned. “How is that a good thing?” “Keeps him alive, doesn’t it? Guess it keeps you alive, too.” I nodded. “Guess so. Did he say anything about anyone
----------------------- Page 25-----------------------
else?” I tried to think of anything strange I’d seen or felt, but Fred was one of a kind. The clowns in the alley tonight pretending to be superheroes hadn’t been doing anything the rest of us couldn’t do. “He talked about Raoul,” Diego said, the corner of his mouth twisting down. “What skill does Raoul have? Super-stupidity?” Diego snorted. “Definitely that. But Riley thinks he’s got some kind of magnetism people are drawn to him, they follow him.” “Only the mentally challenged.” “Yeah, Riley mentioned that. Didn’t seem to be effective on the” he broke out a decent impression of Riley’s voice “ ‘tamer kids.’” “Tame?” “I inferred that he meant people like us, who are able to think occasionally.” I didn’t like being called tame. It didn’t sound like a good thing when you put it that way. Diego’s way sounded better. “It was like there was a reason Riley needed Raoul to lead something’s coming, I think.” A weird tingle spasmed along my spine when he said that, and I sat up straighter. “Like what?” “Do you ever think about why Riley is always after us to keep a low profile?” I hesitated for half a second before answering. This wasn’t the line of inquiry I would have expected from Riley’s right-hand man. Almost like he was questioning what Riley had told us.
----------------------- Page 26-----------------------
Unless Diego was asking this for Riley, like a spy. Finding out what the “kids” thought of him. But it didn’t feel like that. Diego’s dark red eyes were open and confiding. And why would Riley care? Maybe the way the others talked about Diego wasn’t based on anything real. Just gossip. I answered him truthfully. “Yeah, actually I was j ust thinking about that.” “We aren’t the only vampires in the world,” Diego said solemnly. “I know. Riley says stuff sometimes. But there can’t be too many. I mean, wouldn’t we have noticed, before?” Diego nodded. “That’s what I think, too. Which is why it’s pretty weird that she keeps making more of us, don’t you think? ” I frowned. “Huh. Because it’s not like Riley actually likes us or anything….” I paused again, waiting to see if he would contradict me. He didn’t. He just waited, nodding slightly in agreement, so I continued. “And she hasn’t even introduced herself. You’re right. I hadn’t looked at it that way. Well, I hadn’t really thought about it at all. But then, what do they want us for?” Diego raised one eyebrow. “Wanna hear what I think?” I nodded warily. But my anxiety had nothing to do with him now. “Like I said, something is coming. I think she wants protection, and she put Riley in charge of creating the front line.” I thought this through, my spine prickling again. “Why wouldn’t they tell us? Shouldn’t we be, like, on the lookout or something?”
----------------------- Page 27-----------------------
“That would make sense,” he agreed. We looked at each other in silence for a few long-seeming seconds. I had nothing more, and it didn’t look like he did, either. Finally I grimaced and said, “I don’t know if I buy it the part about Raoul being good for anything, that is.” Diego laughed. “Hard to argue that one.” Then he glanced out the windows at the dark early morning. “Out of time. Better head back before we turn into crispies.” “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” I sang under my breath as I got to my feet and collected my pile. Diego chuckled. We made one more quick stop on our way hit the empty Target next door for big ziplocks and two backpacks. I double- bagged all my books. Water-damaged pages annoyed me. Then we mostly roof-topped it back to the water. The sky was just faintly starting to gray up in the east. We slipped into the sound right under the noses of two oblivious night watchmen by the big ferry good thing for them I was full or they would have been too close for my self-control and then raced through the murky water back toward Riley’s place. At first I didn’t know it was a race. I was just swimming fast because the sky was getting lighter. I didn’t usually push the time like this. If I were being honest with myself, I’d pretty much turned into a huge vampire nerd. I followed the rules, I didn’t cause trouble, I hung out with the most unpopular kid in the group, and I always got home early. But then Diego really kicked it into gear. He got a few
----------------------- Page 28-----------------------
lengths ahead of me, turned back with a smile that said, what, can’t you keep up and then started booking it again. Well, I wasn’t taking that. I couldn’t really remember if I’d been the competitive type before it all seemed so far away and unimportant but maybe I was, because I responded right away to the challenge. Diego was a good swimmer, but I was way stronger, especially after just feeding. See ya, I mouthed as I passed him, but I wasn’t sure he saw. I lost him back in the dark water, and I didn’t waste time looking to see by how much I was winning. I just jetted through the sound till I hit the edge of the island where the most recent of our homes was located. The last one had been a big cabin in the middle of Snowville-Nowhere on the side of some mountain in the Cascades. Like the last one, this house was remote, had a big basement, and had recently deceased owners. I raced up onto the shallow stony beach and then dug my fingers into the sandstone bluff and flew up. I heard Diego come out of the water just as I gripped the trunk of an overhanging pine and flipped myself over the cliff edge. Two things caught my attention as I landed gently on the balls of my feet. One: it was really light out. Two: the house was gone. Well, not entirely gone. Some of it was still visible, but the space the house had once occupied was empty. The roof had collapsed into ragged, angular wooden lace, charred black, sagging lower than the front door had been. The sun was rising fast. The black pine trees were showing
----------------------- Page 29-----------------------
hints of evergreen. Soon the paler tips would stand out against the dark, and at about that point I would be dead. Or really dead, or whatever. This second thirsty, superhero life would go up in a sudden burst of flames. And I could only imagine that the burst would be very, very painful. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen our house destroyed with all the fights and fires in the basements, most of them lasted only a few weeks but it was the first time I’d come across the scene of destruction with the first faint rays of sunlight threatening. I sucked in a gasp of shock as Diego landed beside me. “Maybe burrow under the roof?” I whispered. “Would that be safe enough or ?” “Don’t freak out, Bree,” Diego said, sounding too calm. “I know a place. C’mon.” He did a very graceful backflip off the bluff edge. I didn’t think the water would be enough of a filter to block the sun. But maybe we couldn’t burn if we were submerged? It seemed like a really poor plan to me. However, instead of tunneling under the burned-out hull of the wrecked house, I dove off the cliff behind him. I wasn’t sure of my reasoning, which was a strange feeling. Usually I did what I always did followed the routine, did what made sense. I caught up to Diego in the water. He was racing again, but with no nonsense this time. Racing the sun. He whipped around a point on the little island and then dove deep. I was surprised he didn’t hit the rocky floor of the sound, and more surprised when I could feel the blast of warmer
----------------------- Page 30-----------------------
current flowing from what I had thought was no more than an outcropping of rock. Smart of Diego to have a place like this. Sure, it wasn’t going to be fun to sit in an underwater cavern all day not breathing started to irritate after a few hours but it was better than exploding into ashes. I should have been thinking like Diego was. Thinking about something other than blood, that is. I should have been prepared for the unexpected. Diego kept going through a narrow crevice in the rocks. It was black as ink in here. Safe. I couldn’t swim anymore the space was too tight so I scrambled through like Diego, climbing through the twisting space. I kept waiting for him to stop, but he didn’t. Suddenly I realized that we really were going up. And then I heard Diego hit the surface. I was out a half second after he was. The cave was no more than a small hole, a burrow about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, though not as tall as that. A second crawl space led out the back, and I could taste the fresh air coming from that direction. I could see the shape of Diego’s fingers repeated again and again in the texture of the limestone walls. “Nice place,” I said. Diego smiled. “Better than Freaky Fred’s backside.” “I can’t argue with that. Um. Thanks.” “You’re welcome.” We looked at each other in the dark for a minute. His face was smooth and calm. With anyone else, Kevin or Kristie or any of the others, this would have been terrifying the constricted
----------------------- Page 31-----------------------
space, the forced closeness. The way I could smell his scent on every side of me. That could have meant a quick and painful death at any second. But Diego was so composed. Not like anyone else. “How old are you?” he asked abruptly. “Three months. I told you that.” “That’s not what I meant. Um, how old were you? I guess that’s the right way to ask.” I leaned away, uncomfortable, when I realized he was talking about human stuff. Nobody talked about that. Nobody wanted to think about it. But I didn’t want to end the conversation, either. Just having a conversation at all was something new and different. I hesitated, and he waited with a curious expression. “I was, um, I guess fifteen. Almost sixteen. I can’t remember the day… was I past my birthday?” I tried to think about it, but those last hungry weeks were a big blur, and it hurt my head in a weird way to try to clear them up. I shook my head, let it go. “How about you?” “I was just past my eighteenth,” Diego said. “So close.” “Close to what?” “Getting out,” he said, but he didn’t continue. There was an awkward silence for a minute, and then he changed the subject. “You’ve done really well since you got here,” he said, his eyes sweeping across my crossed arms, my folded legs. “You’ve survived avoided the wrong kind of attention, kept intact.” I shrugged and then yanked my left t-shirt sleeve up to my shoulder so he could see the thin, ragged line that circled my
----------------------- Page 32-----------------------
arm. “Got this ripped off once,” I admitted. “Got it back before Jen could toast it. Riley showed me how to put it back on.” Diego smiled wryly and touched his right knee with one finger. His dark jeans covered the scar that must have been there. “It happens to everybody.” “Ouch,” I said. He nodded. “Seriously. But like I was saying before, you’re a pretty decent vampire.” “Am I supposed to say thanks?” “I’m just thinking out loud, trying to make sense of things.” “What things?” He frowned a little. “What’s really going on. What Riley’s up to. Why he keeps bringing the most random kids to her. Why it doesn’t seem to matter to Riley if it’s someone like you or if it’s someone like that idiot Kevin.” It sounded like he didn’t know Riley any better than I did. “What do you mean, someone like me?” I asked. “You’re the kind that Riley should be looking for the smart ones not just these stupid gang-bangers that Raoul keeps bringing in. I bet you weren’t some junkie ho when you were human.” 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
----------------------- Page 33-----------------------
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.
----------------------- Page 34-----------------------
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?”
----------------------- Page 35-----------------------
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
----------------------- Page 36-----------------------
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
----------------------- Page 37-----------------------
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
----------------------- Page 38-----------------------
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.
----------------------- Page 39-----------------------
“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
----------------------- Page 40-----------------------
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.”
----------------------- Page 41-----------------------
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
----------------------- Page 42-----------------------
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. It was shockingly weird to touch another person after a whole life because the last three months were my whole life of avoiding any kind of contact. Like touching a sparking downed power line, only to find out that it felt nice. The smile on my face felt a little lopsided. “Count me in.” “Excellent. Our own private club.” “Very exclusive,” I agreed. He still had my hand. Not shaking it, but not exactly holding it, either. “We need a secret handshake.” “You can be in charge of that one.” “So the super-secret best friends club is called to order, all present, secret handshake to be devised at a later date,” he said. “First order of business: Riley. Clueless? Misinformed? Or lying?” His eyes were on mine as he spoke, wide and sincere. There was no change as he said Riley’s name. In that instant, I
----------------------- Page 43-----------------------
was sure there was nothing to the stories about Diego and Riley. Diego had just been around more than the others, nothing more. I could trust him. “Add this to the list,” I said. “Agenda. As in, what is his?” “Bull’s-eye. That’s exactly what we’ve got to find out. But first, another experiment.” “That word makes me nervous.” “Trust is an essential part of the whole secret club gig.” He stood up into the extra ceiling space he’d just carved out and started digging again. In a second, his feet were dangling while he held himself up with one hand and excavated with the other. “You better be digging for garlic,” I warned him, and backed up toward the tunnel that led to the sea. “The stories aren’t real, Bree,” he called to me. He pulled himself higher into the hole he was making, and the dirt continued to rain down. He was going to fill in his hidey-hole at this rate. Or flood it with light, which would make it even more useless. I slid most of the way into the escape channel, just my fingertips and eyes above the edge. The water only came up to my hips. It would take me just the smallest fraction of a second to disappear into the darkness below. I could spend a day not breathing. I’d never been a fan of fire. This might have been because of some buried childhood memory, or maybe it was more recent. Becoming a vampire was enough fire to last me. Diego had to be close to the surface. Once again, I
----------------------- Page 44-----------------------
struggled with the idea of losing my new and only friend. “Please stop, Diego,” I whispered, knowing he would probably laugh, knowing he wouldn’t listen. “Trust, Bree.” I waited, unmoving. “Almost…,” he muttered. “Okay.” I tensed for the light, or the spark, or the explosion, but Diego dropped back down while it was still dark. In his hand he had a longer root, a thick snaky thing that was almost as tall as me. He gave me an I-told-you-so kind of look. “I’m not a completely reckless person,” he said. He gestured to the root with his free hand. “See precautions.” With that, he stabbed the root upward into his new hole. There was a final avalanche of pebbles and sand as Diego dropped back onto his knees, getting out of the way. And then a beam of brilliant light a ray about the thickness of one of Diego’s arms pierced the darkness of the cave. The light made a pillar from the ceiling to the floor, shimmering as the drifting dirt sifted through it. I was icy-still, gripping the ledge, ready to drop. Diego didn’t jerk away or cry out in pain. There was no smell of smoke. The cave was a hundred times lighter than it had been, but it didn’t seem to affect him. So maybe his story about shade trees was true. I watched him carefully as he knelt beside the pillar of sunlight, motionless, staring. He seemed fine, but there was a slight change to his skin. A kind of movement, maybe from the settling dust, that reflected the gleam. It looked almost like he was glowing a little.
----------------------- Page 45-----------------------
Maybe it wasn’t the dust, maybe it was the burning. Maybe it didn’t hurt, and he’d realize it too late…. Seconds passed as we stared at the daylight, motionless. Then, in a move that seemed both absolutely expected and also completely unthinkable, he held out his hand, palm up, and stretched his arm toward the beam. I moved faster than I could think, which was pretty dang fast. Faster than I’d ever moved before. I tackled Diego into the back wall of the dirt-filled little cave before he could reach that one last inch to put his skin in the light. The room was filled with a sudden blaze, and I felt the warmth on my leg in the same instant that I realized there wasn’t enough room for me to pin Diego to the wall without some part of myself touching the sunlight. “Bree!” he gasped. I twisted away from him automatically, rolling myself tight against the wall. It took less than a second, and the whole time I was waiting for the pain to get me. For the flames to hit and then spread like the night I’d met her, only faster. The dazzling flash of light was gone. It was just the pillar of sun again. I looked at Diego’s face his eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open. He was totally still, a sure sign of alarm. I wanted to look down at my leg, but I was afraid to see what was left. This wasn’t like Jen ripping my arm off, though that had hurt more. I wasn’t going to be able to fix this. Still no pain yet. “Bree, did you see that?”
