The Vampire Book of the Month Club (15 page)

There was a gurgling fountain in one corner, a heated, vibrating, leather recliner for Abby to doze off her anesthesia in, a matching one for me to read magazines in, a full soda-and-water bar, snacks, aromatherapy candles, and ambient music oozing from a tiny Bose sound system in the corner. Enya, I think it was. Or Sade. Something soothing and sensual like that.

Anyway, when Abby woke up, she was still a little loopy from the anesthesia, and man, was she
thirsty
.

The nurse had warned me—vehemently—not to give her any water, but Abby didn't know that. She also didn't know how to say the word
water
anymore. At least, not while still coming out of the anesthesia. Everything she said came out garbled, upside down, or backward.

At one point she said, “Fountain the from it take.” She was slurring her words, sounding mushy, so it was hard to comprehend. But she just kept repeating it, like you do when someone's hard of hearing, even though if that person can't hear you the first time, what makes you think he'll hear you on the one hundred first time?

At one point I thought she said, “Ferngully is a lake.”

Then it sounded like, “Rockefeller's on the take.”

I made the international scrunched-up face for
Huh?
and she slapped her thighs, repeating herself over and over—“Fountain the from it take”—until the nurse came back into the recovery room, checked her out, gave me her prescriptions to be filled, and released us.

The walk to the car was confusing and probably painful, the sunlight hitting her in the face. She winced as I slid her into the passenger seat of her black Lexus. That shut her up, and she quit going on and on about “Fountain the from it take.”

I didn't think twice about it until I was coming back to the car, her two prescriptions in hand, and Abby was sitting there in the passenger seat, clear-eyed and frowning at me, her face pale, her eyes quite bright.

“Why didn't you give me the drink I asked for?” she said, arms crossed.

“What drink? When?”

“Back in the recovery room,” she said very clearly. “I asked you for a drink out of the fountain.”

As I pulled out into traffic and hugged the right lane, I said, “No, you didn't. You said ‘Fountain the from it take.'”

She slapped her thigh again and said, “No, I was saying, ‘Take it from the fountain!' But I didn't want the nurse to hear, so I said it backward. Gosh, some BFF
you
are. I could have died of thirst in there. What if we were on some superduper spy mission trying to save the world and you missed my code? We need to work on that.”

We never did, of course. Abby's codes were mostly in her mind, and we'd certainly never agreed beforehand to speak backward, sideways, Pig Latin, or French after her surgery!

The memory fresh in my mind, the sounds of dying field mice ringing in my ears, the vampire's bloodlust making me sick to my gullet, I open a fresh document and type in the phrase as it's found in the book:
dark the in kept be shall
.

They sit there at the top of that blank page and, reading them from back to front, I suddenly see what Reece is really trying to say:
shall be kept in the dark.

I stare at the words, play with them 101 different ways, but only
this
way makes sense.

It's no coincidence. It can't be.

Reece isn't forcing me to write a book about vampires.

He's writing a book
for
vampires.

And he's using me to do it.

But why?

A
t hour seventeen on the seventh day of the winter solstice in the year of our Lord 2017 shall we meet on the banks of Lake Hammer in west Texas for the purposes of conveying this year's business to include a restructuring of the ruling party and also lifting the ban on turning male vampires it has come to the Council's attention that several members of the Rothchild clan have been breaking the ban in the decade since our last conclave the Council wishes to remind our international brothers and sisters that they should be in country for ten days prior to conclave to avoid any unnecessary delays it is very important that all or as many of us as possible attend the conclave and spread the new bylaws passed to those who cannot attend for whatever reason all nonvampire friends and family shall be kept in the dark about conclave it is to last four full days and on the fifth day as is our custom we shall feast the town of Hammer has a population of thirty thousand which I'm sure you'll agree is more than enough if we share until then rest and travel safely in good time.

This
is what the words on the spreadsheet say when you read them backward.

This is the code Reece is using in the fifth Better off Bled book.

Why he forced me to write the book.

Why he stalked me for who knows how long, hunted me down, enrolled in my school, charmed me, made one friend a vampire and the other a victim and
ruined my life
.

The words on the spreadsheet aren't just random keywords he's using to boost my book sales or further some secret cause. They aren't even random at all. It's a coded message buried in the book, one word on each page, so cleverly hidden you couldn't find it, not in a million years, if you didn't know two very important things:

1. The code itself
   
2. The fact that you had to read it backward
   

As the vampires finish their hunting trip, I print the coded message, fold it, and slip it inside a rarely used pocket deep inside my leather messenger bag.

Then I stare at the latest page of the book and wonder why.

Why me?

It's not just because I write vampire books.

Dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of writers do that.

But he doesn't care about the guts of the book. The plot, the details, the pacing, the tone, the theme—all those things I've been working so hard to finesse since he kidnapped Wyatt and brought me to this place—mean little to him. Mean nothing.

He gave me that admittedly juicy story line only to throw me off track. What he wanted was a warm body—a human body—to sit at this laptop day and night until the manuscript was through, until each word of the code was safely buried in the guts of this book, right where he wanted them. Just as planned.

What did Reece say, way back when, when I asked him if he was going to turn me?

“Of course not,” he said. “You would be useless to me then.”

Useless.

To.

Me.

It made me feel safe at the time, like the folks with immunity on
Survivor
, but now I know it's yet another clue, just like the backward words he's using for the code.

Digging deeper, racking my memory, weak and confused as it is, I flash back to when Reece called me a liar. When he called my bluff about the page count. He was sitting in this very chair, the laptop right in front of him, and yet he printed the pages and read them that way.

Why?

At the time I figured he was just old school—like Mrs. Armbruster or some other more technically challenged teachers at Nightshade—and preferred reading print to online, but now? I stand up, step back from the desk, and look at my laptop.

What is it about my laptop Reece doesn't like?

It can't be the shiny cover, because he wouldn't care if he couldn't see his reflection, and I already know he's a vampire, so . . . what else?

It can't be the electricity, because he uses electric stuff all the time: his car, his portable razor, the fridge under my desk where he stocked all that Jolt Cola that turned me into a lean, mean writing machine.

So what else?

What else would make him print the pages instead of reading them off the screen?

Why in the world would an impatient thug like Reece waste all that time and energy waiting for 120-plus pages to print out when he could just as easily open my laptop and read it on that nice, big, wide . . . glowing . . . screen?

That's it: the
screen
!

But not just any screen: the glowing screen.

My laptop was open when I left it sitting there untended, and he caught me in a lie.

But first he closed it.

I think of Bianca and how often she used her cell phone before Reece turned her. You couldn't get that witch
off
the thing, day or night. Now she never uses it at all.

Come to think of it, Reece doesn't even seem to own a cell phone. I never saw him text or call anyone.

I hear them outside, laughing, high off their bloodlust, sated from their kills, chattering as dawn approaches. They stumble into the warehouse like drunks off a three-day bender, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, their skin alive, their dark eyes liquid and all-seeing.

Bianca kicks off her shoes, Reece pulls off his boots, but Abby leaves on her sparkly pink sneakers to dance around the vast empty warehouse, drunk on quarts of fresh blood, tempting Wyatt in his cage with a blood-splattered hoodoo dance.

I shut my laptop tight and stand near it. “Abby!” I shout, seeing an opportunity to test my theory. “Quit teasing him like that. Abby, come here!”

Reece looks up, sees me standing there, defenseless, no weapons, no training, just another mortal bookworm at his mercy. He ignores me and goes back to polishing the dirt off his boots by the front door.

Abby saunters over, haughty, strong, immortal, and asks with a sigh, “What
is
it, Nora? Can't you see I'm
busy
?”

“Busy doing
what
? Sucking the life out of field mice? Have you already forgotten you're a vegetarian?”

“I've forgotten a lot of things,” she says, eyes dark, skin supple, fangs plumping out her lips in a way that makes her look seductive and unwholesome. Always Abby has been the safe one, the only starlet in town who hasn't been to rehab or jail. Now, though she still looks like Abby, she looks like . . . Evil Abby. She may be prettier, but she's lost that human touch, that grace and gentleness and humor that drew me to her like I was drawn to Wyatt. “Not that you'd care,” she says, looking with disdain at my desk, my pillows, my flickering candles.

I shake my head. “I'm sorry, Abby, for what's happened to you.”

“Sorry? I should thank you, deserting me like that, leaving me all alone to fend for myself. I never knew how strong I was until Bianca released me from my human bondage!”

“Human bondage?” I snort. “I don't know what's worse: Vampire Abby or your last
Zombie Diaries
script.”

Abby leans in close, right where I want her. “I'm worse, Nora. I'm
much
worse!”

“Yeah, sure. It's just, I wanted you to see what I've written—”

Before she can turn to avoid the light, I flip open the laptop cover, filling my office space with its bright white glow, like a laser beam pointed straight at her face. She's stuck in its twenty-one-inch glare, her eyes instantly shutting, her beautiful skin searing, her vocal cords shrieking as she ducks to avoid the light, then falls to the ground.

I quickly shut the laptop and put it back on the desk, feeling all kinds of guilty but just as relieved.

I know the secret now. I know Reece's weakness.

Abby is mewling by the time Reece and Bianca rush to her aid, smoke rising from the floor where she lies, curled in a fetal position, clutching her steaming cheeks.

“What did you do?” Reece demands as he helps her up.

I see the fresh scars on her face, raw like hamburger meat.

“N-n-nothing,” I stammer, acting clueless. “I just wanted her to read my latest chapter. I mention her and thought she'd like it.”

“Print it, Nora!” Reece shouts without further explanation or, for that matter, suspicion. “Next time, print it for her . . . for any of us!”

He takes Abby into the next room, calming her with gentle words as Bianca follows reluctantly.

Behind them, I smile for the first time in days.

I
finish the book at noon, saving it all kinds of ways and backing it up on three separate flash drives Reece has brought me in a small Office Warehouse bag.

The vampires have entirely given up on the pretense of going to school by now, sleeping off their bloodlust in the darkest corner of the warehouse, well behind Wyatt's cage, where the light from the ceiling's broken windows never seems to reach.

I sit at my laptop, but I'm not using it. Instead, I'm keying the coded message—all two hundred words of it—into my cell phone as a draft.

But that's not enough.

I know how lethal Reece is, how much of the predator's blood roils beneath his dignified human skin.

He'll find some way to steal my phone, smash it, destroy it. I'll need backup for this to work, and plenty of it.

Abby's backpack is near the front door where she dropped it after strolling in after school the other day.

Wyatt's bag, dusty and untended, is on a wobbly wooden bar stool just outside his cage.

I hear the vampires dozing. Their closed eyes are dark under raised hoodies as they huddle together for warmth, like quivering, hairless beavers in a dam. Their breath is heavy and redolent of copper. How could Reece spend so much time polishing the field off his boots but not wipe the blood of the field mice off his lips? Gross.

I tiptoe to Abby's bag first, avoiding every broken lightbulb and rat bone in my path.

Or, at the very least, trying to.

It takes forever, because each time I land on a rust flake, I have to stop and look up to see if one of the vampires has risen. They haven't.

Not yet, anyway.

Abby's backpack is full of her old life. Blue rewrite pages from her latest
Zombie Diaries
movie. Black-and-white head shots of human Abby looking young, scrubbed, and innocent. Endless tubes of her favorite lip gloss.
Zombie Diaries
buttons and bumper stickers to give to the freshmen. The fabric journal I gave her last Christmas, which she never wrote anything in but kept anyway. I find her pink cell phone in a zipper pocket, next to $138 in cash and a stack of her talent agent's foil business cards (just in case).