Crave 02 - Sacrifice (14 page)

“Shay. Don’t,” he said.

Shay crawled toward him, extended her fangs, and bit his throat. The blood flowed freely. She could almost feel its strength taking over her body, reaching now to each tiny capillary, to every part of her. Transforming her.

Sam,
she thought.

And there he was. Her father was shackled to the ground, heavy chains driven into the dirt that made up the cellar floor of the old farmhouse. There were chains around his legs and one around his waist, and he was fighting. Writhing, panting, hysterical.

Shay gaped at him. She’d seen Sam in so many visions now, through so many years of Gabriel’s life. He had always been calm, comforting, in control.

Now he looked like a mindless animal crazed with fear.

And then his emotions hit her—hit
Gabriel
. Fury, hatred, terror. Gabriel turned away, unable to face his brother. The one who had been by his side for hundreds of years. The one who he himself had turned in.

Millie stood next to him, with Luis and Richard arranged so that they formed a circle around Sam. Richard’s new partner, Tamara, was there too. On Gabriel’s other side stood Ernst.

“The youngest will begin,” Ernst announced. “Then on to the next youngest, and so on. Drink only what your body can handle. The ritual will last for three nights—none of us need get sick from the poison of his blood.”

My turn comes last, except for Ernst,
Gabriel thought. Their new family had been made here, in America. They were all younger than Gabriel and Sam, much younger. Even Tamara had been made a vampire little more than a century ago, or so she said.

“How can you? How can you do this?” Sam wailed, pure desperation in his voice.

Millie knelt beside him, hands shaking. Fear and doubt flowing from her in waves, she turned and gazed at Gabriel. So did Sam.

“Gabriel? I held you when you were little more than a baby,” Sam said, suddenly quiet. “I trusted you with my secret. I wanted to share my joy with you as I’ve shared my whole life with you.”

“Begin,” Ernst commanded Millie.

Her gaze stayed on Gabriel, an unspoken question in her eyes.

“He put the family in danger, Millie,” Gabriel whispered. “Begin the ritual.”

Millie nodded, eyes brimming with tears. She bent and sank her eyeteeth into Sam’s shackled wrist. He screamed, like a horse with a broken leg, like a pig at slaughter, like a madman in an asylum. Gabriel flinched, steeling himself against the onslaught of fury that shot through the communion from Sam.

Sam . . . they’re draining him,
Shay thought as she watched Millie
drink.
One at a time, they’re going to drain him.
She wanted out of this vision, she wanted back to the safety of the cave with Gabriel—Gabriel, who loved her; Gabriel, who was saving her.

“Gabriel, how can you do this?” Sam asked, panting and panicked as Millie drank.

“You saw our family slaughtered in Greece. Humans did that,” Gabriel said, choking on the words. “Yet you revealed our secret to one.”

“To one I love,” Sam cried, anguished. “How can you punish me for love? When your turn comes, will you really do this, brother?” His eyes burned into Gabriel as his terror seeped through the communion. “Will you kill me?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “I will.”

Shay tore her fangs from Gabriel’s vein, rending his flesh. The cave around them was bright as day, and she could smell each individual bat hibernating above. She could hear their slow heartbeats and the drip of water somewhere far away, and she could see each crag of rock and each grain of dirt between them. She felt the strength in her arms, her legs, her lungs, her heart . . . in every cell of her body.

The sick girl was gone.

Shay was a vampire now.

Gabriel lay on the rock shelf, pale and feeble, his breathing fast, his eyes wide with horror. “Shay . . .”

I’ve drained him. My blood made him sick, and then I drained him almost dry,
she thought.
He’s weak. And I’m strong.

“Shay. What did you see?” Gabriel whispered.

“I saw
you
,” she told him. “You murdered my father.”

L
ICHEN
. S
TAGNANT WATER.
Bat dung.

Shay doubled over, feeling sick. The caves swam around her, endless and dank, one after another after another.

A drop of water, moisture from the roof falling to the floor. A single drop.

“It’s too much,” she moaned, pressing her hands to her ears. That one drip might have been a mile away, but she’d heard it as if it were right next to her head. She heard the breathing of the bats that slept above her, heard each individual heartbeat, heard the barest whisper of wind making its way though the labyrinth of caves.

And the smells. Every scent of this strange, underground world
came to her as its own thing. It wasn’t just a stuffy, dank, bad scent. It was a bat, a rat, a decomposing fish in a dark stream. It was water, and air that had been inside for too long, and
rock
. Who knew that rocks had a smell?

Gabriel had told her about vampire senses—that every sensation was heightened. She’d known that he could smell things and hear things from far off. She’d known that he could see in the dark.

But not like this.

I should be grateful for the night vision,
Shay thought miserably. It was better than being trapped underground in a strange place with no lights at all. If she were still human, the darkness of these caverns would have driven her mad.

But she wasn’t human. And the fact that she could see every detail of a place that she knew—she
knew
—was pitch black, well, it freaked her out.

Shay wrapped her arms around herself and sank to the ground.
I thought it would be like in the visions.
When she’d experienced Gabriel’s life through her visions, she had also experienced his vampire senses. She’d seen in the dark, and tasted the individual flavors in a Giver’s blood, and felt the rush of strength in his muscles. She’d just assumed that that was the way it felt to be a vampire. But the visions hadn’t been what she thought. She had been in Gabriel’s body and she’d experienced his life, but it was as if there were a layer of gauze over everything. She hadn’t known it at the time, but now she did.

What Gabriel had felt and seen and experienced was a hundred times more complex and detailed than anything she’d felt in the visions. Her senses weren’t just heightened, they were a whole
different thing. This wasn’t seeing in the dark, this was nighttime turned to day—and then viewed through a telescope. To use the word “hearing” to describe this ability to detect the tiniest sound . . . it was just wrong. This wasn’t hearing. This was something else Something superhuman.

Something
un
human.

“I’m a vampire,” Shay murmured, dizzy and terrified by the truth of it. “I’m dead and I’m a vampire.”

She wanted to cry, but her body was just too stunned to do it. Or maybe vampires couldn’t cry. Had she ever seen Gabriel cry in a vision?

I should have stayed with him,
she thought.
He could have explained all this so I wouldn’t feel so overwhelmed.

It didn’t matter now. She’d run away from Gabriel hours ago. For all she knew, he’d died up there on that rock shelf. He had been weak as a kitten—whether from her drinking so much of his blood or from his having been poisoned by her blood, she didn’t know. And she didn’t care. She’d jumped off the shelf and run off at an impossible speed, and Gabriel hadn’t followed her. He’d barely lifted his head. He hadn’t said a word after she told him what she saw.

He killed my father.

He hadn’t even tried to deny it. Sam had told Gabriel about his love for Shay’s mother. He’d told Gabriel that she was pregnant and that he was happy about it.

And then Gabriel had turned on him and told Ernst about it.
He said it was verboten,
Shay remembered.
That love between a vampire and a human was an abomination, a horror.
But he had never told her that it was punishable by death. She had never in her darkest dreams
imagined that Gabriel and his family had killed Sam. All these years she had no father, all these years her mother thought Sam had abandoned her . . .

And all this time Gabriel had let her fall in love with him, and he’d never told her the truth.

She’d even asked him once what had happened to Sam, and Gabriel said he didn’t know. He had chained her father to the floor and participated in a blood ritual to murder him, and then he’d looked Shay straight in the eye and lied about it.

“I can handle this on my own,” Shay whispered. “I don’t need Gabriel for anything. He’s no better than the rest of them.”

Shay took a deep breath, strangely comforted by the hatred that seeped through her at the thought of Gabriel. Until now she’d been running, darting through the endless caves like an animal, terrified by the sounds and smells and the unfamiliar surroundings. Terrified by the strength in her own limbs, by the fact that her eyes could see things they shouldn’t see. She’d been running from Gabriel—from the truth about Gabriel—but she hadn’t been thinking about him.

Now that she had, the hysteria was dying down.

She was hungry.

Shay hugged herself tighter. She was hopelessly lost in the caverns. She had no idea how far they stretched under the mountains in Tennessee. She’d never even known there were mountains in Tennessee.

It didn’t matter. She would find her way out. She wasn’t some weak little sick girl anymore, she was a supernatural creature with outrageous strength and speed. She’d figure it out. She couldn’t
spend the rest of eternity being overwhelmed by her own senses. This was reality now. She would handle it.

Tentatively, Shay sniffed the air, turning her head to face different directions.

Stale air. Stale air. Toxic air. Another bat colony.

Focus on the air,
she told herself.
Just the air.

Rocks. Fetid water. Some kind of insect hive.

How do I even know what these scents are?
she wondered. She’d never smelled a hive of wasps in her life. Was there some kind of instinctive odor-recognizer in her vampire body? The thought brought the hysteria back, so she shoved it down.
Focus on the air.

Fungus. Stale air. Maple.

Maple!
Shay felt a burst of hope. The scent of maple meant freedom. If the air smelled like maple, that meant it was air coming into the cave from the woods, bringing outside odors in. If she followed that smell, she’d find an opening in the rock.
I’ll get outside, and then I’ll figure out what to do.

Shay got to her feet and started moving in the direction that the maple scent had come from. She could do this. She had gone through a thousand awful physical exams over the years—spinal taps and bone marrow tests and lots of other scary and painful things. She had gotten through them all, somehow. She had gotten through Martin’s betrayal, when he hit her across the face. She had gotten through being held captive by Gabriel. And later by his family.

She had gotten through dying.

So she could get through this. She just had to find her way out of these caves and get away from Ernst and his murderous vampire family.

The scent of maple grew stronger as she scrambled through another narrow cave. It opened into a larger space, but the outside air was coming through a tiny fissure in the wall of that cave. Shay stuck her leg into the fissure and tried to squeeze through. She was incredibly skinny from being sick all her life, and yet she was too big for that small opening.

Don’t panic. Focus,
she told herself.

Shay put her face to the fissure and breathed deeply. Maple and now oak.

I will not be trapped in here.
Shay thrust her arm through the fissure, dug her fingers into the hard rock, and pulled as hard as she could. There was a snapping and cracking sound, and the opening crumbled like a little avalanche, sending bits of rock tumbling and dust flying into the air.

Shay jumped back in surprise, fast enough to avoid getting hit by the rocks. Then she peered at the fissure. Still small, but bigger than it had been. She had broken through solid rock with her bare hands.

“Well, that’s pretty cool,” she said aloud. She inched up to the opening again and squeezed herself inside. Maybe it would collapse on top of her now that she’d weakened the rock. But maybe she’d be strong enough to live through it if it did.

She shimmied and twisted her way through the fissure. It was tight, but she managed to make it through. On the other side was a narrow space, more a tunnel than a cave. About ten feet later, it opened out into a cavern. The scent of trees came from somewhere high above.