The Vampire Book of the Month Club (20 page)

I stand, surprised my legs have not been bound either.

I soon find out why: the double doors to the room are locked.

I rattle them, shake them, try to yank them open—and off—the way the giant Guardian did with Reece's door, but I guess I'm not that kind of a vampire yet.

I stalk the room, stretching my legs, arching my sore arms over my head, tilting my head from side to side like I used to do after a long night hunched over the keyboard writing about Count Victus.

The floor is clean cement, and a few scattered chairs are stacked in one odd corner. I look at them, smiling faintly because they look just like the blue-and-orange chairs they used in Nightshade's cafeteria.

The room is quiet, but the hallway outside is bustling, and I wonder how long it will be before the Guardians come and collect me for whatever it is they've hijacked us for.

I stand looking at the stack of chairs, feeling the vague sting in my neck from the needle the Guardian shoved in just after tearing off my own car door and peering in with his leering, fanged smile.

Now here I am, somewhere, alone in a room, water dripping and footsteps marching in my direction.

I grab the top chair and lift it off, fairly effortlessly. It is molded blue plastic, fixed to four metal legs. There are really only two metal legs, though; each has been bent in the middle to create two legs.

The footsteps stop outside my door.

I whimper vaguely, if only to cover the sound of me prying the thin blue plastic off the double chair legs. It yields surprisingly easily, not much more difficult than peeling the stubborn lid off a tub of margarine.

I smile, wondering how long that would have taken me last week, when I was still a mortal.

I toss the plastic seat in a far corner and yank the two legs apart. I'm left with one leg, long and metal and shaped kind of like an upside-down
U
. I straighten it in the middle, like a pipe cleaner in kindergarten craft time, until it is one long leg about the size of your average sword.

I hide it behind my back, tiptoeing toward the middle of the room, as keys clatter in the lock of my double doors.

A Guardian appears, his head gleaming in the weak overhead lighting of my sad little hospital room. He's at least a foot taller than I am, and his face is expressionless as he inches in.

I think,
This isn't going to be so hard, after all
. I tense my hands on the bar at my back. I'm ready to pull it out and go all samurai on that shiny chrome dome, when in walks another Guardian, then two more.

I creep back; they creep forward.

Soon Guardians fill the small room, and I sigh, letting the metal bar clang to the floor.

The one in front breaks rank and oozes a small, weak smile before zipping it back up. “Nora Falcon?” he asks.

I look around with a snarky
Who, me?
face.

He's not having it.

“Nora Falcon,” he says louder.

I nod.

Nodding back, he barks, “Come with us.”

I shrug and take a step toward him. “Promise you won't drug me this time,” I say as the hulks surround me and lead me from the room.

“That was for your protection,” says the big lug who asked my name.

“Really? What exactly does knocking me out cold and locking me up in some deranged hospital room have to do with my protection?”

He grunts. “The less you know about our location, the better.”

I follow silently, suddenly wondering if this is where Reece was taking us all along: the Council of Ancients.

The hallway is long and wide, as if it were built big enough to accommodate golf carts—or tanks.

Lights flicker overhead as we pass door after door. We don't turn; we just walk straight and fast, and the hallway seems to go on forever.

The pack of Guardians separates from us a little as we walk. Some slow down; some speed up. They don't quite leave, but they're not tripping all over me anymore either. Eventually it's me and the Big Guy.

“Where are you taking me?”

Without looking down at me, he says, “The Council is very eager to see you, Nora Falcon.”

I grin to hear him say both of my names like that: Nora Falcon. Like he's some alien from another planet and thinks you always say both names, every time, even after you've been formally introduced.

“What about Reece?”

He doesn't answer right away.

Oh yeah, I forgot. “What about Reece
Rothchild
?”

Big Guy stutter-steps just for a second, then grunts. “The Council is even
more
eager to see him.” There is something so menacing in his tone, it makes me think the Ancients aren't the only ones around here eager to see Reece.

“Yeah, I heard about all that. I mean . . . where is he? Has he come? And gone? Do I have to see him again?”

Big Guy starts to answer. I can see the muscles on the back of his neck as his jaw opens, but suddenly we turn one last corner, and my answer is there, waiting for me.

“Hello, Nora. Have a nice sleep?”

R
eece looks rumpled but rested.

“Where'd you get the snazzy clothes?” I ask, noticing his all-white ensemble. Somewhere along the line he lost his last outfit, stained as it was with his own skin. Now he looks pretty radiant, the starched white linen clinging to his lean, muscular body, even if the high collar of his shirt highlights the dark red of his melted, seared, goopy face. He looks back at me with a quizzical smile. “Same place you got yours, sunshine. Courtesy of our good friends, the Guardians, here.”

I look down and, sure enough, I'm in the same clothes, covered from head to toe in white linen—and nothing else. The material is loose but comfortable, and on my feet are soft slippers, the kind with backs. Reece has them on too. Suddenly self-conscious, I blush to think who changed me, how long it took, where my other clothes went—and why.

I feel my hair; it's damp. I smell my wrist, and there is the slight scent of cheap, generic, public school sink soap lingering on my pale skin. You mean . . . they bathed me too?

Naturally, Reece is enjoying my suffering. He opens his blistered mouth—

But Big Guy cuts him off. “We had to make you presentable for the Ancients, Nora. Don't worry; you were attended to by a female.”

“You mean there are female Guardians?” I look around the crowded vestibule area to see some long, flowing—maybe even red—tresses among the shimmering, identical bald heads.

Reece laughs triumphantly and says, “Not bloody likely, Nora. There hasn't been a female Guardian in centuries.”

“Well, that doesn't sound fair.”

Reece merely snorts.

We are standing in a waiting room of sorts, the kind you'd see outside a courtroom, with empty bulletin boards on the wall and benches beneath.

Reece sits on one; the rest are empty.

The Guardians stand around, erect and silent but occasionally shifting their weight nervously.

I gulp. These Ancient dudes must be pretty badass to make the Guardians nervous.

Reece is admiring me coolly, sitting back on the bench, arms open wide across the back of it, legs crossed daintily.

I ask him, “What happened out there?”

He shrugs. “An ambush, no doubt. It was bound to happen, I suppose.”

“But why? You were taking us to the Ancients anyway, so why did—?”

Big Guy chuckles, which is a first. “Taking you
here
? Is that what he told you? Nora Falcon, he was running away, headed in the opposite direction.”

“What?”

Despite all that happened, how many times he fooled me already, it never occurred to me that Reece would try to run from the Ancients.

But then . . . maybe he had a very good reason.

“Running?” He smirks jauntily, as if Big Guy isn't strong enough to break him in two like a toothpick after a very large dinner. “Who said I was running? Just taking a little detour; that's all.”

I look at Big Guy and say, “Forget him. What about my friends?” My voice is slightly hysterical now, my blood boiling to think I might get blamed for Reece's stupid high jinks.

Reece says, “They're fine, Nora—”

Big Guy silences him with a wave. “They are being healed,” he says quietly, giving me a wise but gentle glance.

I start to open my mouth, but the big double doors crack open slightly, and the Big Guy quiets me with the hardest case of side-eye I've ever seen. “The Ancients will see you now,” he says grimly.

Even Reece rises without cockiness, without comment, without so much as a sneer.

S
even Ancients sit along a far wall on a long couch.

This room is like the one I woke up in, only about four thousand times bigger. White tiles line the wall, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them. Millions, maybe. But unlike in my tiny waiting room, these are clean and bleached white and stretch two, three, maybe four stories high.

The couch is low but looks soft, like something you might find in a very, very rich person's house.

Unlike the modern room, the Ancients look frail and impossibly old. Their hair is either gone completely or silky white and sparse, their skin so paper thin and pale you can almost see through it to the fat, black vampire veins pulsing just beneath. Their eyes are shrunken and opaque; they might all have cataracts, like my grandmother in the nursing home back in Florida. Some of their fangs are permanently out now, like those sports cars with pop-up headlights that after a while never go back down; they are yellowed by time and, perhaps, use. Some fangs are gnarled and broken, others so thin and sharp they're more like needles than teeth.

They are dressed all in white—white linen, to be precise, just like the material Reece and I are dressed in. Well, at least, in
theory
. On the Ancients it hangs like big brother's hand-me-downs on a third grader: drawstring pants, pirate-type shirts with ties at the neck and puffy sleeves around bony wrists, white slip-on shoes like your grandfather might wear to shuffle around the porch yelling at stray cats that aren't there and haven't been for six years.

They sit in a row, close enough to lean against one another should their hearts suddenly give out but far enough away for me to realize that the couch is in fact seven high, padded chairs pushed together.

Next to each Ancient is a cane with a silver tip, and behind each puffy white chair a black-clad Guardian stands at the ready, uniform stiff, spine stiffer, with gleaming, shaved heads like white cherries on top of an evil sundae.

Two smaller chairs are lined up next to each other facing the Ancients at a great distance away.

Four Guardians, their legs long, their arms bulging with sculpted muscles, their faces blank masks of endless rage, show us into the Council's giant meeting room and guide us efficiently to our seats.

They remain guarding us long after Reece and I sit down.

The giant room is deathly quiet.

The Ancients shift slowly in their seats, some crossing their legs, some clacking their jaws, some combing clawed fingers through wispy hair. In the awkward silence that fills the room, I try to picture where we might be and why the Ancients have chosen this place.

I feel disoriented, not knowing how we got here or how far it is from the accident in the middle of that deserted road or even, for that matter, what the outside of this building looks like. Is the entrance old and decrepit like my waiting room? Or clean and modern like this gargantuan meeting hall?

Are we high atop a mountain or far underground?

Heck, for all I know, we could be underwater. I haven't seen a window since I woke up.

The room, the hallways, the white linen, the sparkling tile, the vaguely antiseptic smell that lingers everywhere—all give the place a scientific feel, like maybe we're in the bowels of some giant laboratory. Rats in a maze. The imagery seems fitting, though I don't dare say that out loud.

No one speaks for quite some time.

Reece is uncharacteristically quiet. He sits erect, his face a mask. I know he's angry, I'm sure he feels this gathering is beneath him, but I also know he must sit here just like me and take his punishment.

Oh, how it must kill him to do so, especially since he was running away when the Guardians tracked us down and found us.

What will his penalty be for that, I wonder, on top of all the other crimes—or are they sins—he's already committed?

He focuses directly ahead. Even when I peek at him, he stares straight at some point over the Ancients' heads.

Time passes. Who knows how much? One hour, two . . . three? I get the feeling that for vampires this old, time isn't quite the same as it is for a busy teenage author.

I hear no clock ticking, no feet moving, no water dripping; only the steady flickering of endless rows of dense overhead fluorescent lighting and the ceaseless pounding of my cold and undead heart.

Finally, a firm voice issues from the Ancient sitting in the middle of his dusty, moldy comrades. “Reece,” the voice says much clearer—and louder—than I imagined. “Kneel before the Ancients to plead your case.”

“Master,” Reece says, his voice suddenly gentle and oddly reverent. He quickly stands, then just as quickly kneels. “I come here today with great sorrow in my heart, for I readily confess that I have broken one of the Ancient laws.”

“Which law didst thou break?” asks another Ancient from the end of the row of seven, his lips barely moving.

“Our most recent, Your Lordship. I confess to turning a mortal male into one of us.”

There is no gasp, no sound of shock or outrage, just a quiet murmuring among the pale faces that make up the Council of Ancients. They don't even look at one another; it appears they've been together so long, they no longer need to.

A clear voice interrupts the murmuring: “May I ask, Reece, what happened to your face?”