Almost Final Curtain (10 page)

“So did you,” Nikolai said quietly.

“You heard it? You did, didn’t you? Was it as good as I think it was? I mean, it was crazy! Right?”

“It was.” Nikolai stopped walking and grabbed me lightly by the shoulders. He swung me around to face him. I blinked into his amber eyes. I found myself comparing the moment and the men. I could feel Nikolai’s strength in his grip, but it hummed under the surface like a hidden danger—not the WYSIWYG way of Thompson, who wore his physical prowess like his letter jacket for everyone to see. “This is important, Ana. Can you focus on us for a moment?”

I shook myself out, as if trying to brush everything away. Nik released me, watching with those intense, fraught eyes. We stood near the gym’s double doors. Around the corner, I could hear the dwindling noise of those remaining souls waiting for their audition. “Sorry,” I explained. “It’s been a really weird day. You didn’t help, by the way. What’s with letting Bea ask you out on a date?”

He shrugged guiltily. “She’s always liked me, you know.”

“Oh, I
know
,” I stressed.

He waved off this thread of conversation impatiently. “Look, it was your idea to take a break.”

“You agreed awfully quickly,” I snapped. The audition broke something loose in me and everything I’d been holding back came spilling out. “Admit it: you’ve been waiting for an excuse to dump me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on, are you saying you don’t notice all the hot groupies?”

His eyes slid away. “Of course I do, but what does that have to do with us?”

“You’re kidding me, right? It has everything to do with us.”

He shook his head, like I was talking nonsense. He sneered, “They’re mundane.”

Bea wasn’t, which I suppose made her fair game. But was that really what he was trying to suggest? “So what’re you saying? You only date people from the coven now?”

“And vampires.” He smiled.

Was he serious? I couldn’t tell, except that his whole scornful expression regarding nonmagical people seemed genuine. “That’s a small gene pool,” I commented.

He looked like he had some kind of response, but his words were lost in a loud squeal. We’d come to the end of the corridor and Bea spotted us from across the room. She shouted, and pretty soon everyone who was still hanging around the theater came rushing toward us. “OMG, were you awesome or what?” shrieked Taylor. “Best ever!” agreed Lane. Bea, meanwhile, caught sight of Nikolai and her smile faded. She gave a possessive sidelong glance at him, and said a bit poutily, “Nice enough, I guess.”

People I hardly knew came up to tell me how epic Thompson and I had been. Everyone kept repeating the same thought I had, “I had no idea Thompson could sing like that, did you?”

We all agreed Thompson had played the dark horse. Everyone had a theory. I got caught up in the swirl of speculation. Suddenly, I realized I’d been talking a while. When I turned to ask Nik if he wanted to get going, I discovered he was nowhere in sight. I skimmed the crowd for his familiar leather. In a panicked moment, I thought he might have just gotten bored and left. Then, over by the first row of lockers, I spied him and Bea with their heads together.

My fangs clicked into place with a painful shift in my jaw.

I covered my mouth. I hadn’t intended for them to come out, but the sudden flare of jealousy I felt must have brought them down.

Despite the intensity of their conversation, Nikolai must have sensed my transformation, because he glanced up. The overhead light glinted in his eye. Something about his intense, hooded expression made me take a step back. I nearly knocked Lane over.

“Sorry,” I mumbled around the teeth and my hand.

“Are you okay?” Lane asked, frowning deeply. “You look really pale all of a sudden.”

The last thing I needed was for everyone to see me in full-on vampire mode. What if my eyes changed? How would I explain that? The whole school thought I was weird enough after the licking incident. “Got to go,” I said, and pushed my way deeper into the crowd toward the door.

Behind me, I heard Nikolai shouting for me to wait.

Vampires can move pretty fast when motivated. I was out the door and into the cool kiss of the night in the blink of an eye.

I stood on the sidewalk in front of the school’s main doors. With the moonlight on my cheek, I felt light and buoyant. Vampire senses on high, my feet itched to run—to become part of the night. When I heard the doors swing open behind me, I gave in to the impulse. The pavement flew underfoot. I moved easily. In fact, a wild, wide smile danced on my face. I started singing, “I could have danced all night. . . .”

By the time I finished the chorus, I was coming around the block of my house, ten miles away. I skidded to a stop. I hadn’t even broken a sweat. I laughed with the joy of it. If only I could do this in the daylight! Think of how small my carbon footprint would be!

I was still laughing breathlessly when my hypervamped awareness caught the impression of movement out of the corner of my eye. I swiveled my head, like an animal tracking a scent. Out of the shadowy tangle of hedges, a tall, pale figure materialized briefly. Ghostly skin flashed and then disappeared.

Someone was stalking through the bushes around my house.

I had no doubt it was a vampire. But what kind? Was s/he friendly?

Vampires could move stealthily when they needed to too. Kicking off my shoes, I tiptoed along the sidewalk. The pavement felt cool and damp with evening dew. My socks snagged slightly on the roughness, which sounded loud to my ears. I had to assume that the intruder was as supersensitive to noise as I was, so I was about to slip them off when my cell phone bleeped.

The clamor might as well have been a cannon going off.

Whoever had been sneaking around dashed through the underbrush with an explosion of speed and leaves.

“Crap,” I muttered, especially since the guilty flight of the prowler indicated that the vampire in question was probably not of the friendly variety. Elias, for instance, wouldn’t have run off.

When the phone rang again, I scrambled to retrieve it from my pocket. Irritated, I flipped it open without even checking caller ID. “What?” I hissed.

“Still feeling vampy, eh?” It was Nikolai. There was something in his tone I wasn’t sure I liked. Was it threatening or ... did he sound turned on?

“You sure call me a lot for a guy I broke up with.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. I’d scored a hit, though I wasn’t proud of that. I needed to learn to curb my impulse to blurt out the first thing on my mind when I was upset.

Nikolai cleared his throat finally. “Yeah, well, I was going to tell you how I fixed that, but I guess you don’t care. Oh, and I’m no longer an apprentice hunter.”

“You ... ? What?” But I was talking into dead air. He’d hung up.

I
stared at the neon green “call ended” message on the screen, and tried to catch my breath. What had he just said? He was no longer an apprentice? Did he mean he quit or did he graduate? But ... but there was only one way to become a full-fledged hunter!

My finger jabbed the redial button. It rang through to voice mail. He must have turned off his phone. That Nik was a much better drama queen than I was just made me angrier. “If you mean what I think you do, we are so over. For good.”

My heart hammered in my ear. The air was cool enough that my breath misted in sharp puffs. Perhaps the interloper had come to warn me of Nik’s new hunter status. But if the vampires knew, why wouldn’t Elias have come himself?

Unless he couldn’t. Because ... because he was ...

Oh no! Nikolai couldn’t have, could he?

I struggled to remember exactly what Nik had said when he’d arranged our date. Something about a “game changer”?

I had to find out if Elias was okay.

“Come back!” I shouted into the neighbor’s shrubs. I frantically dashed through into the “naturalized” landscape, my stocking feet squishing wetly in moss and fern. “Come back!”

But the vampire—friend or foe—was long gone.

How was I going to find out if Elias was okay? I vaulted the fence between the yards in a bound worthy of a superhero. Rather than take the time to go up the stairs, I scrambled over the porch railing. It wobbled, threatening to give way under my weight. Instead, the wood gave a loud groan of protest. I pulled at the door, surprised to find it locked.

Had Mom gone to bed?

Stretching up on my toes, I peeped through the door windows. Everything looked dark. But that could just mean that she was in the back office/craft room upstairs.

I dug out my keys. My thought was that I’d leave the sock “welcome” in the window for Elias. And then ...

Wait, I guess.

Hmmm, that plan sounded pretty frustrating, actually. But what else could I do? Even though I’d been the vampire princess for a couple of months now, I didn’t go into the underground unescorted very often. St. Paul was riddled with natural sandstone caves, abandoned rail tunnels, bootleggers’ caves, and sewers. It would be pretty easy to get lost down there. According to Elias, one of the main jobs of the Igors, besides watching over me, was to keep the urban spelunkers from invading vampire lairs.

Oh! The Igors! They could get a message back to Elias or someone who might know if he was okay.

Now that I needed one, where were they? Oh, that’s right. I ditched them. Maybe some were hanging around anyway, doing their creepy stalker thing. Before going in, I took a look around. With my fangs still out, all life around me was illuminated. There were tons of squirrels, a raccoon family, and Mr. Becker’s mangy cat. No people of any variety.

Crap. That meant I was back to plan A: waiting.

With a sigh, I went into the house. I didn’t particularly try to be quiet. After all, Mom was a pretty heavy sleeper. She knew that when I had auditions, I came home late, so it wasn’t like she was going to be waiting up to lecture me. Besides, I had more on my mind than worrying about Mom.

What would I do if Nikolai had killed Elias? It was hard to even formulate that thought. I’d seen Nik fight a number of times, so I knew he was capable of violence. But it was one thing to protect yourself and another to kill somebody.

But did he really think of vampires as somebody? There was all that talk about sending them back to where they belonged, too.

He just couldn’t have. No, not Nikolai. The guy whose lips I’d kissed—the guy who laughed at my stupid jokes and read manga and played guitar. I mean, that person was decent, nice. Not a killer.

Maybe he was trying to tell me he quit. He was awfully mad when I’d made that snide comment about how he called all the time. Maybe he’d decided to throw it all away—for me.

My socks squished on the hardwood floor, and I tossed the sneakers I’d been carrying onto the rug next to the coat-tree. I toed off my damp stockings, and wadded them into a ball. Looking around for a place to put them, I found none, so I jammed them into the pockets of my jeans.

Upstairs was dark. Mom must have gone to bed, after all. Mindful of waking her, I waited until I shut the door to turn on the light.

When I turned around, I had to swallow a scream of surprise. Elias sat on my bed.

“How did you get past the wards ... ?” I started to ask, but then I just threw myself at him and wrapped my arms around him. I squeezed as tightly as I could, just to make sure he was really there. “I’m so glad you’re okay! I thought you were dead!”

“Well, technically, I’m kind of neither alive nor—”

“Hush,” I said, and laid my head on his shoulder. Elias put his arms around me with a light chuckle.

“What’s brought all this on?” he asked after the shaking in my shoulders had stopped, and my fangs retreated. “Why did you think I’d been injured?”

I sat back so that my back rested against the bedpost. With my legs stretched out, my bare feet nearly touched his thigh. “Nikolai told me he’s no longer an apprentice.”

Elias frowned. In the harsh overhead light, his face looked drawn, almost sickly. He ran a hand through the short hairs at the back of his neck. “I have waited here some time for you. Could more have happened?”

“More?” I poked him with my toe. “Yeah, what’s with the threshold-crossing thing? I didn’t think you could do that.”

He gave an unconcerned lift of his shoulder. “My prince’s blood has been spilled inside this house. No spell can keep a pledged knight of the realm out.”

Good to know. So the house was vulnerable to any of the “good guy” vampires, and, probably, specifically Dad’s Praetorian Guard. “Okay,” I murmured a bit unhappily. “So what’s going on?”

“The talisman has resurfaced.”

My mouth hung open. “You mean
the
talisman? The one that can enslave us?”

“The very one.”

“Where is it? Who has it?”

Elias’s mouth twitched. “The Minnesota Historical Society by way of the Smithsonian. It was spotted by one of our spies on the inside. It’s listed as ‘Snake-headed goddess figurine,’ but it is as I remember it.”

“Are you serious? The talisman is at the History Center?” Like a lot of St. Paul kids, I visited the History Center on a field trip in elementary school. The only thing I really remembered about it was a big grain elevator that we could run around inside, pretending to be wheat or corn or something like that. “I can’t believe it!”

“The Smithsonian traveling exhibit opens tomorrow.”

“What are you going to do?”

Elias glanced at me. His eyes seemed tired, heavy. “Your father wants to do nothing. There’s no way of knowing if the witches know it is the one. Our memories are as sharp as the first day we were brought over. The witches are human. They grow old and die. Those witches we fought in the secret war who are still alive are in their dotage. There is a chance it may pass undetected. Our prince, your father, is afraid that if we make a move—attempt to steal it—we will have done the hard work for them. They will simply take it from us once it’s in our possession.”