I refused to answer. I wouldn’t let him trick me into opening my mouth.
“You will bite me, or I will shoot you in the head. Do you understand?”
I jerked one last time and felt the plastic cuff break. Remembering what Dick had told me about my phone, I put my thumb on the one button, prepared to hold it down until I heard the beep. My problem would be getting ten feet away. Because I still didn’t know what would happen when I heard the beep.
Just then, I heard a door swing with a creeeeaaaaak, followed by the patter of little Mary Janes on the floorboards. Georgie wandered into the room, her eyes wide and guileless. She was dressed in her favorite pink sweater and jeans, with her golden hair in pigtails. She could not have looked more harmless or adorable, though I picked up a dangerous flash of silver in her eyes as she passed through a beam of moonlight.
I had never been so relieved to see a tiny vampire in all my life. Because if Georgie was OK, that meant Ben and Gabriel were OK. And some sort of rescue effort was being made. I wouldn’t have to have Dr. Fortescue’s hand on my face much longer. He was starting to palm-sweat at gross levels.
Georgie’s pale bottom lip trembled. “Have you seen my mommy? I’m lost.”
I swear, it took iron control over every single muscle in my face to keep from smirking. The cavalry had arrived. The cavalry was wearing pigtails and was scary as hell.
“Now, what is a little girl like you doing out this late?” Dr. Fortescue demanded. “Get out of here.”
Real humanitarian, Dr. Fortescue.
“We were Christmas shopping downtown, and we got separated. Do you have a phone I can use?” Georgie asked. “Please, I need help finding my mommy.”
Fortescue sighed heavily, as if being forced to help a lost child was the most inconvenient thing that had ever happened to him. Tina rushed forward and cooed over Georgie, stroking her hair and pressing Georgie’s face into her poncho. I grimaced, but Georgie kept a brave face.
Under Tina’s arm, hidden from Dr. Fortescue by Tina’s poncho, I could see Georgie flash four fingers. Then three and two. I pressed the one key, and just as Georgie flashed one, I heard it beep.
I threw myself sideways and tossed the phone at Dr. Fortescue. He jerked, fumbling for the phone. In his panic, he fired at me, but the bullet went out through a window just as my pink-and-purple plastic phone exploded near his feet. He shrieked, and Tina screamed, running forward to pat out the small fire eating through his pants.
The warehouse exploded in shards of glass. Gabriel, Jane, Ben, Dick, Andrea, Cal, Gigi, and Nik all burst into the room, fangs out and growling. I let out a joyful whoop at the sight of them. I yanked my hands free of the chair and ran for Ben. Jane rushed forward and slapped the gun out of Dr. Fortescue’s grip with one hand and bitch-slapped him with the other. Tina screamed and ducked behind a crate, only to be routed by Gigi and Andrea, who dragged her out into the open by her armpits. I threw my arms around Ben and kissed him for all I was worth.
“I’m so glad you’re OK!” I cried.
He tucked his face into my neck, cradling my head in his hands. “I was so scared.”
“I love you,” I told him. “I love you. I’m so sorry I had that realization in the middle of the team murder-timeline meeting. But I do, and I didn’t know how to tell you, and I’m basically an emotional wreck, and you should be prepared to deal with that for a while.”
His whole face lit up. “I can handle that.”
And we were kissing again, which totally took the focus off the burning in my wrists.
I heard Jane clear her throat. “Hey, kids, I’m thrilled about this show of emotional maturity, but if I could have your attention for a moment?”
“Sorry,” I told Jane, wiping at my mouth with the back of my hand.
Despite the backhand to the face, Dr. Fortescue was just crazy enough to smile at the approaching vampires.
“Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale!” he cried, shaking her hand vigorously. “I’m so delighted to finally meet you! And young Mr. Overby, too. What a coup. I was so hoping we would meet. You will, of course, join Miss Keene in my collection of specimens.”
“Is he for real?” Ben asked.
“Oh, yeah, he waved bye-bye to rational thought a long time ago,” I muttered out of the side of my mouth.
“As you can see, Jane—may I call you Jane?—my formula, the formula I attempted to discuss with you several times, is a complete success. Mr. Overby and Miss Keene are perfect specimens, examples of what vampires could be with scientific intervention. I would think, after the appropriate trials, you would want to start introducing the inoculations to the populace within two years.”
“OK, you totally misinterpreted that dramatic bursting-into-the-room thing,” Jane said. “We’re here to arrest you. Also, you shot my dog. So I’m inclined to rip your head off when you least expect it and use it for bowling. But I’m going to do one worse. I’m going to let those two”—she paused to point at Ophelia and Georgie—“come up with your punishment.”
The Lambert sisters’ shared grin was so terrifying it was almost enough to keep me from walking across the warehouse and punching Dr. Fortescue in the gut. But not quite. So I did.
“You thought I didn’t have a family. I have the most screwed-up, dysfunctional, awesome family in the world. So suck it.”
“Was that necessary?” Jane asked.
“Yes, it was.”
“OK, take the lulus into custody.” Jane sighed. “Put them in the SUV, and I’ll drive them to the Council office.”
“Use these, and make them extra tight.” With a pair of tongs, I tossed two pairs of the silver-plastic cuffs at Jane. She slipped on a pair of latex gloves and looped the plastic around Tina’s and Fortescue’s wrists. Cal and Nik dragged them toward the door.
“Glad you’re OK, beda,” Nik said, ruffling my hair as he passed.
“What did he call me?” I asked Gigi.
“ ‘Trouble’ in Russian, so you know he meant it affectionately,” Gigi said, her lips twitching in an attempt to stifle her smile.
“It’s fitting,” Andrea said. “And probably going to be much nicer than any nickname Dick gives you.”
Dick shrugged. “True.”
Dr. Fortescue thrashed against Cal’s hold as he dragged him out. Tina just wailed.
“But my research! My contributions! My accolades! They belong to me!” the doctor screamed.
“Yeah, good luck with all that,” I muttered as Jane threw her arms around me in a bear hug.
“I know this is not your fault and you were the victim of misdirection and bad circumstances, but please don’t do that to me again,” she whispered into my hair.
“I will do my best not to get abducted by a mad scientist a third time,” I promised.
“See that you don’t,” she said, blinking away tears and pushing my hair back from my face.
“By the way, you couldn’t have told me you’d put an explosive device in my phone?” I asked Dick. “What if I’d been holding it near my head when it went off?”
“I told you to get ten feet away!” he exclaimed. “What did you think that meant?”
“A high-pitched alarm? A smoke bomb? Not a regular bomb!”
“Well, we didn’t know you were going to set it off as we jumped in!”
“Georgie was giving me a countdown!”
“Yes, the countdown to when they were jumping through the windows, not the countdown to set off the bomb I didn’t even know about!” Georgie cried.
“Oh, yeah, that makes more sense,” I agreed. “By the way, why did you all jump through the windows instead of the highly trained UERT guys?”
“Well, Dr. Fortescue killed a couple of them outside our house. Between that and the creepy concrete possums in front of the Possum’s Nest, they declined the honor of rescuing you.”
>
“Hurtful but understandable,” I said, nodding. “How did you find me?”
“After we found the ashy blood smear in the Possum’s Nest, I got your missed call, and we took the chopper home. I arrived to panic and chaos because you were missing, Fitz was bleeding out, and UERT members were dead. I felt this searing pain in my arms and in my head. I could see the warehouse, what you were seeing. And there aren’t that many abandoned warehouses in the Hollow. Between that and the tracker in your phone, plus the information you relayed through your intentional butt-dial, you made it pretty easy for us.”
“So that’s my vampire power? I can put pictures in other vampires’ heads if they’re mind-readers?”
“No, I was able to see it because I was near Ben, and he felt it and saw it. I think your talent is specific to each other, like walkie-talkies—which is limited but fun. We can run some nonpainful tests if you’d like.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask.” I sighed. “But Fitz?”
“Is in surgery. Iris got him to a great emergency vet who was willing to work late. He says Fitz has a really good chance. Now I just have to explain why I used a Council helicopter to medevac my dog to Lexington.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed, throwing my arms around Jane. “Oh, thank God. I thought he’d died right in front of me.”
Jane stiffened at her first voluntary hug from me. She relaxed against me and patted my back. “This is nice,” she said.
“All this because they wanted the quick route to being undead,” Gabriel mused, sneering at the lab setup.
“Was it really so hard to find someone to turn them?” I asked Jane, breaking away from her.
Jane shrugged. “Sometimes vampires can sense the desperation in someone, and they don’t want to shackle themselves to such a needy, clingy childe. Or maybe the doctor just annoyed most of the vampires he came into contact with, which is just as likely. Maybe he just did it to satisfy his own twisted curiosity.
“The question is, what do we do with it? You two need to decide whether you want that research to be used. Dr. Oxmoor said she would be willing to trash all of her papers. And I believe her. Before she worked for us, she worked for the CDC’s committee on medical ethics. She’s seen what can happen when research goes wrong.”
“Is it really up to us?” Ben asked. “What sort of good could come from more neovamps?”
“An answer to our sensitivity to daylight,” Jane said. “Less traumatic transition periods. Stronger, faster, smarter vampires, which in the right hands would be great . . .”
“But with the wrong person,” I finished for her, “a vampire who can turn a bunch of people with just a nip and possibly walk around during the day, faster and stronger than other vampires, would be a disaster.”
“Exactly.”
“Burn it,” I said. “It ends with us. There are natural checks and balances that keep vampires in this spot on the food chain. We don’t need to mess with that.”
Ben nodded. “I agree.”
“You know, you’ll have to keep what you are a secret from anyone we don’t know and trust,” Jane said. “For the rest of your lives. You won’t be able to tell anyone about your lack of reaction to sunlight. The way you were turned. You definitely won’t be able to sire more neovamps.”
“We understand,” Ben assured her.
“But that doesn’t mean that you can’t find your purpose in other ways,” she said. “Think about it. You can do things that none of us can do. There are things you could accomplish for the Council—secretive, nonevil things—that would be helpful to the entire vampire community. Daytime missions, security, influencing certain human agitators to suddenly move to another hemisphere.”
“Like spies?” I guessed.
“Or superheroes?” Ben asked, his eyes alight.
“Something like that,” Jane said, nodding. “If that’s something that interests you, I’d like to discuss it with some of the more trustworthy upper-level Council reps, to determine where you could be useful, on an as-needed basis. It wouldn’t be your full-time gig, just an on-call situation. I would make it a condition that your work would only start after you graduate. I want you two to have your degrees to fall back on. Besides, who knows what sorts of abilities you’ll develop over the next few years? You would have to remain under my supervision and work from my office, so you don’t have to move away from home. You two have already had enough upheaval in your lives. You’re part of my family. And I will not let anyone take advantage of my family. But I’m not about to hold you back from your potential, either. I just want you to reach that potential in a safe, well-supervised way . . . close to me.”
I wasn’t crying. There was dust in my eyes. “I’m up for it,” I said, a little sniffily . . . because of the dust. “There has to be some good that comes out of all this.”
I looked to Ben, to see if he was in agreement, but he was already nodding enthusiastically.
“Do we get secret identities?” Ben asked, hopeful. “By night I’m your trusted computer programmer, but by day I’m moving very slowly to save the world?”
“Nerd,” I whispered fondly.
How he could kiss me while grinning I’ll never know. But he did a good job of it. “She’s crazy about me, Jane. Honestly.”
Jane pulled a face. “Gross. Not in front of me, kids.”
16
There will come a time for your childe to leave your nest. This is one of the few natural steps left in a vampire’s rather unnatural existence. Let your childe go with as little fuss and emotional scarring as possible.
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
All of Dr. Fortescue’s research and any evidence that his drugs had been used on Ben and me were destroyed in the Council’s crematory, along with Dr. Oxmoor’s notes on us. Gigi had cracked Fortescue’s storage cloud and uploaded a devastating virus, deleting his work from cyberspace permanently. And wherever Fortescue was being held, he was in no condition to remember his own name, much less complicated chemical formulas. Jane said it was better that I didn’t know what the Lambert sisters planned for him. It was also better for me not to question why the Council needed a crematory.
In Jane’s defense, Fortescue had hurt Fitz. He deserved a pantload of retribution.
Fitz survived his ordeal with a few stitches and one of those embarrassing lampshade collars. While the wound had been bloody, the impact of the bullet had been mostly absorbed by one of the folds in his coat. He had passed out from blood loss, but thanks to Iris’s resources and the quick thinking of Jane’s late-night vet, he would make a full recovery. He had already reclaimed his spot at the foot of our bed.
The Council agreed to let Ben and me graduate before taking advantage of our superpowers. They were so eager to use our special skills that they agreed to all of Jane’s conditions, including the part-time status and Jane’s supervision. And if anything happened to her, Dick would be our go-between with the Council.
It took weeks of negotiations, three reams’ worth of paperwork, a solemn blood oath that we would not harm our fellow students, and approval by the university president, but we were finally allowed to return to campus for the spring semester. Jane figured that if we hadn’t lost our cool and attacked humans during two scientific abductions and working for the Council for three months, it wasn’t going to happen.
I was ready to get back to class, to normal. But everything would be different now. I had a boyfriend. The way I spent time with Morgan and Keagan would have to change. But it would be good. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I liked to read. I liked to talk about books. I didn’t think I wanted to teach. But I had all the time in the world to figure it out.
I would have a single, because I wasn’t allowed to room with humans anymore, but I was sort of looking forward to a private room. Besides, Ben would spend a lot of his nig
hts with me anyway. He had to take one more class—a lab course he couldn’t take online—and he was out. I got the feeling that he was only going back so his parents could watch him walk the stage at graduation.
We’d had a very low-key Christmas and were now packed up and ready to head back to campus. Ben’s parents had come by for a quick presemester visit, but they were still a while away from welcoming him home for weekends. A Council-issued SUV was loaded with our stuff, and Ben and I were bundling up to drive over the rare half inch of snow causing so many night commuters to panic on the news. Ophelia and Jamie had run—ahem, driven, they’d driven—home a few days before. Ophelia and Jane had hit their limit of togetherness.
“It’s going to be weirdly quiet around the house without you.” Jane sighed. “I’m going to miss you both. But I’m going to take the opposite approach from my mother’s when I left for college, which is to save the crying breakdown for after you leave.”
“We appreciate that, Jane,” Ben said, hugging her.
“Call me when you get there,” she told him. “And just call me anyway. I’ve gotten used to talking to you. I don’t expect daily calls, but weekly would be nice.”
“Got it.” Ben gave her a little salute and approached Gabriel for a manly handshake.
Jane took a deep breath and hugged me. “You come back anytime. This is home for you now, got it?”
I nodded. “Next summer, I would like to come home and work at your bookshop,” I told her. “And eventually, I would like to buy in as a partner, using the money the Council is giving me for reparations for Dr. Hudson’s kidnapping and general douchery.”
“We’ll talk about it,” she said. “Silent partner.”
“That’s unlikely.” I snickered.
Georgie was lingering near the door, frowning at us all. I approached her slowly.
“I will not miss you,” she told me. “I won’t even notice that you’re gone.”