The Vault (A Farm Novel) (2 page)

MEL

Blood lust—the uncontrollable need to consume the food before you—isn’t my favorite thing ever.

In the Before—when I was a human girl—I clung to my control. Even though I was autistic, even though I sometimes spiraled out of control, I somehow always held on to the thread of myself. I was always able to pull myself out.

My vampire’s blood lust is new to me. It’s not only about hunger, but about need. The need to dominate. To protect myself. To feed. Its embrace is violent and jagged and I’m not myself when I’m in its grasp.

But this blood is all wrong.

Its sweetness sours my stomach. I nearly retch. Instead, I spit it out, then wipe off my mouth with hands clenched in feral claws. A false peace floods over me, washing away my fear and need. I stand, blinking away the blood lust.

That’s when I see Carter crouched against the wall, like a scorpion backed into a corner. He’s fierce and deadly, even though I could squash him like a bug.

“Calm down, Mel. Just . . . calm down.”

The words seem to echo in my brain. Like he’s been saying them over and over again and I’m only now hearing them.

Only then do I see the way he’s holding his neck.

I run my tongue over the fronts of my teeth, my mind racing.

I was walking up behind him, hungry, yes, but in control. Then I felt this burst of fear. He whirled around. I saw the gun and then . . .

What?

My mind was blank. Blood lust. That’s what.

Carter must sense that his efforts to calm me are working. That I’m more myself, because he changes the script.

“Are you are okay, Mel?” he asks, his eyebrows slightly raised. “You good?”

“Yes,” I say shortly. “I’m fine.”

I turn away from him. My mind still racing, because I know I’m not fine.

Carter is Lily’s boyfriend. Her love. Her
savior
. They are meant to be together.

And I almost
ate
him.

I swish my spit around in my mouth, using my tongue to scrub the last of the blood off my incisors, and then I spit out the mixture of blood and saliva.

I exhale a deep breath and try to bring my mind back into focus. My vision clears a little. I blink again and make myself look at the hall around me.

This is it. What we’re here for: the underground vault of Genexome Corporation. The storage facility where we will find the cure to the Tick virus. The cure we need to save my sister’s life.

But I’m still struggling to make sense of what I see.

There’s a door. Thick steel set straight into the concrete. An LCD panel in the wall beside it bigger than most people’s computer screens. Somehow our presence in the hall has triggered it, because it’s alive with swirling colors. There’s a digital keypad on one side and a rectangle about the size of a handprint on the other. Then to the left of the whole panel, there’s a retinal scanner.

And there, on the floor in a pile on either side of the door, are dead bodies. I do a quick head count—literally counting heads because the arms and legs and torsos are so jumbled I can’t count the bodies any other way. There are sixteen people. They all look similar, so I focus on one. He’s got the bulky look of hired muscle. He hasn’t been dead that long and it’s cool enough, here underground, that his body hasn’t started to rot, but my nose and stomach are more sensitive to that kind of thing than they used to be and their stench makes my stomach churn. It’s all I can do to focus my attention away from him.

Whatever’s beyond this door is what we came for. Of course, whatever’s beyond that door is being protected by a security system strong enough to kill the sixteen people who got here before us.

“This is it,” I say softly. Sebastian—the vampire that made me and mentored Carter—told us that the cure to the Tick virus was here, at Genexome Corporation, in the company’s underground storage facility.

“You think these are Sabrina’s people?” Carter asks.

The corpse is dressed in full SWAT gear, but they aren’t police or even military. I point to the emblem stitched on the front of the jacket. “That looks like the Smart Com logo to me.”

“I don’t suppose when Sebastian told you about the cure, he mentioned how to get past all this security.”

“No, he didn’t.” Of course, I’d just staked him through the heart in a fit of vampire rage, so neither one of us was feeling super communicative at the time.

Carter walks up behind me. Slowly and loudly. Like he’s waiting for me to freak again.

He studies the setup, shaking his head, his hand still pressed to his neck.

“This is a dead end.”

That’s when I see the seam in the wall about three feet back from the doorway. I run my fingers along the seam on one side and then the other. On the ceiling, the seam bulges out slightly. On the other three sides, the seam is indented. Guide tracks for a door. But it’s the vents in the ceiling above the LCD display that make me nervous.

Carter clearly sees everything I do. Maybe more, since he knows a lot about this kind of thing. “I’m guessing if you trigger the security system, a door drops down, trapping you in.” He points to the pair of vents. “And then you get gassed.”

“I could probably live through it,” I point out. There’s not much that can kill me.

“You don’t know that. Sabrina threw a lot of people at this and none of them made it.”

“None of them were vampires.” I glance at him, looking pointedly at his neck. “How bad is it?”

“Not bad.” He pulls his hand away and glances at it. There’s a smear of blood on his fingers, but it’s already clotting and the smell of it is repulsive to me. He wipes his fingers on the sleeve of his coat and then presses the back of his other sleeve to his neck to wipe off the last of the blood there. Then, as if he hasn’t just been cleaning up the wound I gave him, he says, “The point is, we need a plan B.”

“No. Sebastian must have thought we could get in. He wouldn’t have sent us here otherwise.” I look at Carter’s neck again. “I’m, um . . . sorry. About that, I mean.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He shrugs, still studying the security system. He holds out his palm, maybe five inches from the LCD screen, like he’s sizing it up. “What do you think? That look about the size of my palm?” Then he shakes his head, muttering a curse. “We need Sebastian.”

My heart gives a strange little thud. “He could be dead by now.”

Carter shoots me an odd look that I have no trouble interpreting.

Carter and I talked about this. When we left Sebastian with a stake through his heart, pinned to the ground on the green in the middle of El Corazon, we hadn’t really killed him. The only way to be sure a vampire is dead is to chop off his head. No, Sebastian is most likely still alive. Either he is clinging to life or he’s already freed himself. Somehow I know this. Sebastian is stronger than death.

He is the vampire who made me, who trained me, who manipulated and lied to me. He lied to everyone.

Suddenly a horrible thought occurs to me. “What if there is no cure?”

Carter doesn’t even look at me this time, but I know he heard me because his entire body goes tense. “There is a cure.”

“He lied about everything,” I say. “What if he lied about this, too? What if—”

Carter whirls to face me. “There is a cure.”

“You don’t know—”

“Yes, I do know. You know how I know? Because if there is no cure, then that means Lily is lost. Maybe forever. I’m not willing to believe that.”

“But what—”

“We just need a new plan. That’s all.” He takes in a breath and I sense him struggling with his own doubts and fears. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll split up. You go back to El Corazon and find Sebastian. If the cure is still here, he’s the one who can get us in.”

The idea of going back there sends panic skittering along my nerves. But I will do it. I have no choice, because it’s like Carter said, the alternative is to give up hope. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to Sabrina’s. If the cure isn’t here, then she has it.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” I tell him.

“What did you see in the rest of the lab? Did you see any sign of a cure? Any sign Sabrina got there first, too?”

“Yes.”

Sebastian had brought me to meet her, just before he’d sent me to El Corazon. But vampires are territorial and it had been a risky move on his part. She could have killed us both. Instead, he’d bought our freedom with information about the location of the cure.

The same information he’d given Carter and me after the battle at El Corazon.

When we’d first arrived at Genexome, Carter and I had split up. He’d gone to search for the underground storage. I’d searched the rest of the industrial compound. I was faster than Carter and could cover more ground in less time, so it had made sense.

“I found the labs. It looked like someone or something came through there recently just like here.” I reach into the pocket of my jeans and pull out a glass vial. I hold it out to him carefully. “I did find this.”

He takes it and rolls it over to read the white label imprinted with the code EN371.

“Jesus, this is the virus?”

“Just like he said it would be,” I say. “But that only proves they created it here. It doesn’t mean—”

“What is it you want me to do? Just give up?” That’s when Carter turns to face me head-on. No longer cocky. Just determined. “Humans are losing this fight against the Ticks. If this cure doesn’t work, then Lily will finish her transformation. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the chance is slim that Sebastian is telling the truth. Maybe there is no cure. But the alternative is to just accept that Lily is going to be a Tick. Are you really ready to do that? Because I’m not.”

With Carter here, pinning me with his glare, coaxing me with his resolve, I realize that no, I’m not ready to give up.

But I still have doubts. Can Sebastian be trusted? Can Sabrina? Can
any
vampire be trusted? Even me?

I want to believe that there might be good in Sebastian. That maybe there is a reason he created the Tick virus. Something I don’t yet understand. Something beyond his seething need to exact revenge on Roberto. I want to believe there is goodness in him and that that goodness drove him to create a cure. Because if he might be redeemed, then there is hope for me, too.

I want to believe, but it’s hard.

“Any chance you have a plan C?”

He ignores my sarcasm. “Yeah. You and I go to the Farm, where your father took her. We bring her out of the medically induced coma and you bite her.”

“What?”

“Just like Sebastian did for you when you were dying, after you’d been attacked by that Tick. You bite Lily. You save her life.”

“If I bite Lily, she becomes a vampire. Like me.”

“Exactly.”

“No!” Every cell in my body, every functioning brain cell, recoils from this idea. “No! I’m not turning my sister into a vampire! You don’t know what you’re asking me to do!” Because the thought of turning my sister into a vampire—into a thing like me—it’s repulsive. It’s like a poison in my blood. “You’re asking me to do this to her—to turn her into a monster—without her consent.”

“If it saves her life, then yes.”

“No!” That’s what was done to me. In a darkened parking lot, after a horrible attack by Ticks, I sacrificed my life to save my sister, and she repaid me by begging Sebastian to turn me into a vampire. And Carter strong-armed him into it. I’d had zero say in the matter. I’d died a hero and woken up a monster.

“You don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” I say again. “She wouldn’t be Lily anymore. She’d be . . .” There are simply no words to describe the transformation she would go through. All I can come up with is “something else.”

“She would be alive.”

“She would want to eat you.”

“She would fight the urge,” he insists.

“It’s not an urge. The need to kill isn’t like a craving for Taco Bell. It’s not just something you fight.”

“You fought it,” he says, gesturing toward his neck. “You didn’t kill me just now.”

“It would be months, maybe years, before she could actually be with you. Longer before she could be comfortable around you.”

“You think I wouldn’t wait?” he asks. “You think I want Lily now and only now? You think I’m going to lose interest if this takes too long? I’m not,” he says fiercely. “I am in this for her. I don’t want her just when it’s easy or convenient. I love her. Forever. No matter what.”

My heart twists itself into a knot, because I almost believe him. What would it feel like to be loved like that? To love like that? Unconditionally. Forever.

My family loved me like that. When I was human. But no guy has ever felt that way about me. And now? Now that I’m this monster? I couldn’t even be with a guy without wanting to eat him. Not quite the all-consuming love of girlish fantasies.

I can’t contain the jealousy that slices through me. Lily always seemed to have it all compared to me. I hadn’t minded. I’d had order and music and power I didn’t even understand. I had never wanted what she had. And now I do.

It shouldn’t bother me. I don’t want it to bother me.

Carter is just looking at me. Waiting for a response.

I say the only thing I can think of. “I would
never
have chosen this for myself. This was forced on me. I won’t force it on her.”

“She’s been exposed to the Tick virus!” he yells, like I don’t understand. “Don’t you think she’d rather be a vampire than a Tick?”

“No,” I snarl back. “I think she’d rather be dead than a Tick.”

“Are you threatening to kill her?”

Suddenly Carter is right in my face, and now I have more to contend with than just his anger. The desperation. The fear. The love. It’s all right there, ready to shove my own will out of his way.

But what would it hurt, really? Would it be so bad? My sister as a vampire? As a murderer? My sister, who has always been so determined to do the right thing. To make the world a better place. To protect the weak.

It would kill my sister to become a vampire. To see humans as kine. To feed off the people she loves.

But maybe she’d be stronger than I am. And Carter would be with her. He could help her control herself. He could . . .