Page 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Kade shifted uneasily on Felicity’s kitchen floor.
“Quit it,” Felicity told him, muffled by a mouthful of bread and the crispest cheddar Kade had ever eaten. Beverly Sloan had given them cheese sandwiches and orange juice after they’d both bled helpfully into a glass for Theo to bring to Skeeter.
He rolled his bony shoulders against the kitchen counters they were sitting up against.
“Your elbow is digging into me.”
Felicity dug her elbow into him even harder. Then she relented, scooching further away from him across the kitchen floor. It was checkered and polished and deeply ugly, further deepening Kade’s loathing of rich people having money and then not doing anything interesting with it. Even the glass they’d bled into had been boring. Where were all the chipped mugs? The horrible thrift shop finds brought on a dare? Where was the life ?
Felicity examined the bandage on her inner elbow. “There’s no point giving your blood to a vampire if you don’t even get a high from it. I get why you put up with burns.”
Kade nodded, feeling the bandage on his own elbow. Theo had promised to heal both of them once he was back. But he’d healed Kade earlier, and he needed all the strength he could get in case Skeeter woke up feral again.
Felicity popped the last of her sandwich in her mouth and chewed loudly. She was wearing a lacy negligee two sizes too small and a baggy pair of sweatpants. Both were stained with egg and mouthwash. She had a zit on her chin, covered in white cream that she ordered from out of state. She used to glare at him when he saw her at anything under Peak Hotness, daring him to say anything. But the glares had gradually stopped. According to Theo, this meant she trusted him. That she viewed him as a friend, not just as Theo’s boyfriend who she tolerated on hangouts.
Kade downed the rest of his juice and braced himself. Friends asked each other for advice. Felicity seemed like she’d even appreciate what Kade was about to say. He just didn’t want her to appreciate it too much.
“Hey,” he said slowly. “I don’t want you to get all… you about this, but you can have sex without going skin to skin, right?”
Felicity stared at him, her blue eyes so bright with mirth that he immediately wanted to take it all back.
“Never mind,” he tried, but she had already latched on.
“Oh my god,” she said. She burst out laughing. “Are you two seriously not doing it? I thought Theo was joking! Get creative, guys!”
“Never mind,” Kade said, louder. “Turning me into a vampire will nix the burning shit, and we won’t have to worry about it.”
She grabbed him, rubbing her dyed hair against his shoulder like a cat. “Nooo, I love it! God . Have you dumbasses never heard of dry humping?”
“ Yeah ,” Kade snapped. “I did it with your boyfriend .”
This was a lie. If he’d done it with Aaron, he would’ve remembered it existed when he was pining over his and Theo’s nonexistent sex life.
“Ex,” Felicity reminded him, amusement not dimmed in the slightest. Kade had thought she would be put out by the discovery that her first and only serious boyfriend had been cheating on her for the first few months of their relationship. She’d definitely been hurt— he’d caught it on her face before she yanked up a sharp smile and made a stupid joke about greedy bisexuals that she insisted wasn’t offensive because she was one—but she never threw that hurt back at Kade. A surprisingly mature move for a girl who purposely left chocolate to melt in the pocket of Kade’s best jacket to get back at him for stealing a bottle of vodka from her party.
She continued, “What about a gimp suit? You’re a fashion designer, you could make one!”
“Shut up ,” Kade hissed. He shoved a hand over her mouth. She licked it, then when that didn’t work she grabbed his arm and twisted it. He tried to resist, but her muscles had only gotten more toned since she’d spent the last year combat training for several hours a day.
The living room door swung open.
“Skeeter’s awake,” Theo announced, looking mercifully unmauled. “She wants?—”
He stopped, blinking at the scene on the kitchen floor.
Felicity let go of Kade’s arm, which she’d twisted behind his back. “More blood? Happy to help. If she coughs up the venom.”
Kade winced, stretching his twinging arm toward the juice they’d nearly knocked over during their tussle. “I’ll pass. I’m over my daily withdrawal limit.”
Theo watched him drink. He had energy drinks hidden all over Sundance’s house. There were oat bars in the glove box of both their cars, and trail mix in the trunk. Kade had once caught him sneaking a bag of chocolate-covered raisins into Kade’s backpack. Theo despised them, but it was one of the only snacks Kade actively sought out.
“She doesn’t want blood,” Theo said once Kade finished the glass. “She wants to tell us what happened at the Founder’s Day party.”
Beverley Sloan was kneeling next to Skeeter’s chair, untying the ropes.
“Just a precaution,” she assured Skeeter as she pulled the last rope from her leg and went to stand next to her daughter. “You understand.”
Skeeter gave her the rapid nod of a teenager who agreed automatically with whatever an adult said, no matter her personal opinion on it.
“Hi,” she said to Kade and Felicity. “Thanks for the. Um.” She nodded at their bandaged elbows.
“It’s on us,” Felicity said. “Next drink will cost you.”
“Oh. Um. Okay.” Skeeter gave her a bewildered smile and fiddled with the hem of her borrowed flannel shirt. Beverly had dressed her in Felicity’s lazing-around clothes after Theo dumped her sheet-clad body in the living room.
“Can I talk to my parents?” Skeeter asked Theo.
“Later,” Theo said. He gave her a reassuring smile, only a little strained. Kade was glad it was him squatting down next to her and not Kade, who couldn’t squat that low anyway and would be doing a much worse job at pretending everything was fine.
Skeeter nodded. This meek attitude was the reason Kade was surprised to learn she’d smacked her opponent in debate club. If Aunt Sundance thought he was dead, Kade would start picking pockets and gnawing on the walls. He’d send smoke signals. He’d start hollering and wouldn’t shut up until someone got word to her that he was alive. He’d promised to outlive her. He meant to make good on it. Even if he had to technically die to make that happen. She wouldn’t care if he didn’t have a heartbeat as long as he was still around.
“You said someone was calling your name,” Theo prompted.
Skeeter swallowed. “Yeah. So I…I followed it away from the party. We’ve walked through those woods all our lives, you know? I thought I was safe.”
She reached up and touched her neck. At first Kade thought she was groping for her cross necklace, which was long gone. Then he noticed her stroking fingers and realized she was searching for the scars Hawthorn had given her last year.
“Was it the same one?” she asked. “The one who attacked me last year—was it him?”
“No,” Theo said quietly. “This was a different guy.”
He ran a hand through his blond curls. He did that lately when he thought about his dad. Kade’s fingers twitched at his sides, thinking back to Theo sobbing and chopping at his hair, the hair he shared with his father, blond curls drifting off the cliff onto the lake where Victor had dropped him.
Felicity thumbed at her phone case, which she’d been peeling on and off since Skeeter started talking. “They said there was a blood trail. That you ran from something. Did you karate chop him so hard he let you go?”
Kade gave her a sideways look.
Felicity snapped her phone case back on. “We took a self-defense course together in grade school.”
Skeeter scratched absentmindedly at her neck, as if confirming the skin was still intact.
“I ran,” she said. “While they were fighting.”
“Who?” Felicity and Theo said in unison.
“The man,” Skeeter said. “I don’t know who it was. I was running. It was… feeding on me. It cut its hand, dripped some black stuff in my mouth. Then it just…stopped. There was an ax in his shoulder. It dropped me, and I ran. I heard them fighting, but I just kept running. Until I couldn’t. The blood…”
She stopped, looking up at everyone with huge, wet eyes, dark liquid pooling at the corners. “You can reach my house through those woods. I kept thinking if I just made it to my room…like when you’re a kid. Right? Turn off the lights and run to bed. If you run fast enough the monsters won’t get you.”
Kade tugged at his earrings uncomfortably. She probably had nightmares about the thing that attacked her last year. Everybody told her it was her imagination, an animal, it couldn’t hurt her now. He imagined her mom hugging her in her dark bedroom: you’re safe, I have you. Nothing’s coming to get you. And then this.
“It was a vampire,” she whispered. “Right? The story they tell on Founder’s Day. The vampire under the town who wants out. That’s real?”
Theo nodded. “The guy we’re up against, he wants to let her out. Two weeks from now, he’s going to try.”
Skeeter nodded, dazed. “My family had stories. My Grandma?—”
Her lips thinned. She let out a shuddery breath. “He asked where her journal was. Before the ax.”
“Journal?” Kade asked, in what Theo called his eager puppy voice. I can practically see your ears prick up, he’d said once.
Skeeter nodded. “Grandma had this… spell book . She never called it that, but that’s what it was. She never said anything about it, except that we were protectors, once. Insisted she couldn’t say anything else. She tried, near the end. She tried to tell me. She touched my scars…” Her fingers stroked up and down her neck, tracing the lines where scars used to live.
Theo gave Kade a significant look. Kade felt the smallest spark of excitement— the plot thickens!— before reality set in. Like he’d once told Theo: stories were only exciting when you arrived out the other side. When you were in them, they were a dark jagged mess you couldn’t see a way out of.
“So he wants a spell book,” Felicity said, grimacing. “ That can’t be good.”
Theo asked, “The man who saved you with the ax. Do you know if he got away?”
Skeeter shook her head. “He was bleeding. He had his hands over his face.”
“So we’re either waiting on a body,” Kade said, “or a guy covered in bandages.”
“Or another vampire,” Theo added quietly.
Felicity whistled. “Another one? You guys will have to do rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets to kill your dad and turn human again.”
“Your dad ?” Skeeter said, appalled. “Wait, I can be human again?”
“We won’t have time to talk about it, we’ll be too busy trying not to get killed.” Theo turned back to Skeeter. “Skeeter, can you remember anything else about him? What he was wearing, maybe how tall he was? Did he smell like anything?”
Kade opened his mouth to snark at Theo about how humans didn’t go around noticing how people smelled in moments of mortal peril. Then he noticed Skeeter’s vacant gaze. She was staring at Kade’s arm again, eyes flickering black as she gazed at the spot of red on the white bandage.
Then she blinked hard, and the darkness was gone. “Sorry. What did you say?”
Felicity made a delighted noise. “ No more blood, huh Theo? Dibs.”
She tossed a defiant look at Kade, like she expected him to argue for it. Kade’s knee-jerk instinct was to do just that: he’d been getting regular venom highs for a year now. If he went longer than a few days without, he started getting withdrawal symptoms. He’d only had to suffer through it once, before he and Theo were even friends, but he was always eager for more. Even now, with everything going on, Kade’s first thought was to get her to back off. To take the bite for himself. Never mind he’d already given her blood twice today and he was feeling woozy. There was still that spark of annihilation in him, constantly looking for a pool of gasoline to throw itself in.
“Go for it,” Kade said, ignoring the surprise on Felicity’s face and the relief on Theo’s.
He averted his eyes as Skeeter bit into Felicity’s outstretched wrist. Felicity’s face creased up in pain before easing into indescribable bliss. He would miss Theo’s bites when he made Kade a vampire. He’d miss chocolate raisins and temperatures. He’d miss the sick relief of binge drinking and throwing himself into a fight he knew he couldn’t win. But stopping the ritual and being able to touch Theo would be worth it.
Two weeks, he told himself as Theo unhooked Skeeter’s eager mouth from Felicity’s bleeding wrist. Then his problems would be over—one way or another.
“For a second I thought it was Finn,” Skeeter slurred as the black faded from her eyes.
Theo frowned, holding Felicity up as she sagged from the venom high. “Finn Harley? Why?”
Skeeter wiped her mouth absently, licking blood off her hand.
“Because,” she explained, “that's who called me into the woods.”