The Vault (A Farm Novel) (26 page)

MEL

It’s not that I’m sad to leave El Corazon.
Sad
’s the wrong word altogether. But I am . . . conflicted about it. So much has happened here. I can’t help but feel as though I’ve lived more of my life here than anywhere else.

Nanna—the only one in the family who’d really loved to travel—had kept a map of the world on her bedroom wall, with pins for all the places she’d been. Most of the pins were just sewing pins, the ones with brightly colored heads. But a few of them—San Francisco, Prague, Omaha—were pinned with big pushpins. When I asked her why, she’d told me those were the places where big things had happened—where she fell in love for the first time. Where she met Grandpa. Where her kids were born. Those places felt bigger to her. They had more gravitational pull.

That’s how I feel about El Corazon. Like I could leave here, but it would always be pulling me back.

We are almost to the outskirts of town when I jerk up in my seat and say, “Wait! We have to turn around.”

Sebastian slams on the brakes. “Please don’t tell me you left the oven on.”

“Not back to the house. To the car. The one I came in. There was a satellite phone in the car.”

“Now, see, that might have been useful to have when we thought we were trapped in Roberto’s safe room for the rest of our lives. Shame you didn’t think to bring it with you.”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly planning on being stuck there forever. How was I supposed to know you’d want it?”

He smiles. “I might have wanted to have a pizza delivered.”

Sebastian circles back through town. Thankfully, we don’t see any more Ticks. Maybe they’re all back at the house getting drunk on Roberto’s blood and leftover antifreeze. It only takes a minute for me to retrieve the bag that Carter had stashed the phone in, which is a good thing, because I’m not sure that Sebastian wouldn’t drive off without me if he had a chance.

As he drives back out to the main road, I dig through the bag to find the phone. It has an antenna, which is bulky, but I manage to get it set up in the backseat. It doesn’t work as well as it would have if the car wasn’t moving, but it should be good enough. I feel like I should check to see if there’ve been calls, but I don’t know how. I push a few buttons but can’t get anything to work.

“I don’t understand. It worked before.”

“You might try plugging it in.”

“Oh.” I frown at it. “You think the battery’s dead?” I dig through the bag until I find a cord and get the phone plugged in.

“You really are worthless with electronics,” he says.

“Sorry, some of us weren’t busy prepping for the apocalypse in the Before.”

“Yes, but what about your uncle? Rodney, the nut job. Didn’t he prepare you for this kind of thing?”

“Maybe he did that with Lily. With me, we just listened to Elvis songs. I—”

I break off when the phone finishes powering up and emits a beep. And then another. And another. And another.

“Is it supposed to be doing this?” I hold it out to Sebastian.

“You have missed calls.”

Thankfully Sebastian dials down the snark as he talks me through it. I listen with a growing sense of dread, despair, and disbelief. After the last message from Carter, I put down the phone.

“The cure works.”

Sebastian shoots me a look. “I told you it did. Did you need to see the FDA testing results?”

I ignore his smartassery and tell him about the helicopter crash and how Carter had to track down Lily and administer the cure.

He’s silent for several minutes and I’m grateful for it, because my mind is reeling. I’m still not wholly used to the full brunt of the emotions I feel now that I’m not human anymore and the last thing I need is to try to deflect Sebastian’s sarcasm and process my grief at the same time. “What about your father?” he asks quietly.

“Dead. Carter didn’t—” The words choke me, but I push them out anyway. “Carter didn’t see the body himself, but someone else did.”

Sebastian doesn’t ask the question that’s on my mind. If Lily had turned after the crash, was she the one who’d killed him? I know she’s human again and I can hardly imagine what that would be like. To be human and live with the memories of a monster. Maybe with the memories of killing a loved one. It’s bad enough living with the memory of my father the last time I saw him—at El Corazon, looking so . . . cocky. So full of energy and confidence and total belief in the rightness of whatever part of the apocalypse had been his doing. Bad enough trying to sort through my new hatred of him and my grief. Because despite whatever horrors he’d caused, he was still my father. He was still the only one I’d let hold me when I was a child and I was upset. He was still the man who’d read
Goodnight Moon
to me every night until he left when I was ten. He was still the hand I wanted pressed to my forehead when I was feverish.

Knowing he was a monster made me hate him more, but it didn’t make me love him less.

Knowing he was a monster only made me question my own wickedness. If I forgave myself, did I have to forgive him, too?

I’m already drowning in my thoughts when I feel a hand on mine.

“I’m sorry about your father,” Sebastian says.

I shrug. “He was an asshole.”

Sebastian is silent again for a long time as he winds his way down the two-lane road that leads off of Roberto’s property and we approach the gates to the world outside. They’re still open, which is how I left them when I came through. There was no point in shutting the gates when a huge swatch of the fence was down anyway.

Sebastian slows the car to drive through them and says softly, “I still remember when my parents died.”

I suck in a breath, because I’ve never heard him talk about his life before he was a vampire. “That was . . .”

“Hispania. A very long time ago. Before I was turned. There are some things you never forget. No matter how long you live. No matter how much you might wish you could.”

Will this be me, in two thousand years? Wishing I could forget the loss of my family? My father who is dead. My mother and uncle who are lost. I’ll probably never know what happened to them. Even if the world is restored tomorrow, I’ll have no idea how to find them. And no matter what happens, I’ll lose Sebastian. Which means the only person I really have left is Lily.

Who, if Carter’s messages are correct, is frantically wondering if I’m even still alive.

I tell Sebastian the rest then. About how Carter and Lily are going to Genexome to try to get into the vault to get the rest of the cure.

“Wait,” he says, interrupting me. “If Carter hasn’t gotten into the vault yet, then where did he get the cure that he used on Lily?”

“From Sabrina.”

“He went to Sabrina’s? On his own?”

“Yes. He didn’t have any other choice.”

Sebastian mutters a curse.

“What?” I ask, panic tripping up my heartbeat. “Please tell me that the cure you let Sabrina find wasn’t somehow . . . not the cure. I mean it worked, right? So it wasn’t somehow poisoned or something.”

“No. It’s fine. I just would have preferred that Sabrina not know about Carter.”

“Because he’s an
abductura
?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

“Yes. For the past twenty years, Sabrina’s
abductura
was Paul Workman.”

“The computer guru? But he died right before the Tick virus was released, didn’t he?”

Sebastian shakes his head. “I think she probably reported he’d died, but I sensed him when we were there. He was still alive, but just barely. She needs another
abductura
.”

“But Carter got away. She didn’t try to keep him there.”

“If he got away, it’s because she’s going to try to grab him somewhere else. In that last message, did Carter say where they were?”

“Just outside of someplace called Junction, but I have no idea where that is.”

“That’s just south of here. Call him back and tell him to stay put. Wherever he is. We’re coming to get him.”

“Can’t we just meet them at Genexome?”

“No. I want him under our protection as quickly as possible. I don’t trust Sabrina.”

I can’t help but feel a little stab of anger at that. “I thought she was the love of your life. The one person you were willing to do anything—even give up some of your powers—to be with.”

“Exactly. Which is why I know her best.”

LILY

Reunions are supposed to be cheerful things. Or at least emotional.

This one isn’t.

Maybe we’re all too tired. Maybe Mel and I just don’t know what to say to each other.

I don’t even recognize her when she climbs out of the car with Sebastian. A dog hops out after her—something large and covered with long brown fur. It looks more like a bear than a dog.

I tense, because Mel has always hated dogs. Their exuberance scares her. And they smell. When she was a kid, just the sight of one could send her into a full meltdown. But before I can rush over to distract the dog and steer it away from her, it sidles right up next to her and her fingers curl into the fur at its shoulder.

Everything in me rebels.

This girl standing between Sebastian and a huge dog can’t possibly be my sister. Her hair is cut into a sleek short bob. Her lips look unnaturally red. And weirdest of all—even weirder than the dog—she looks right at me.

In the Before, she almost never did that. She’d look through just one eye, in a birdlike way.

But now she looks from me to Carter and then back, eyes directly on mine.

Unsettled, I link my fingers with Carter’s, seeking his strength and comfort, needing it so badly that I almost miss how tense he is. He nods stiffly in Sebastian’s direction by way of greeting, but doesn’t say anything, which surprises me, because they used to be . . . well, maybe not friends, exactly. But they used to get along.

Carter squats down and calls to the dog. “Come here, boy. Come on, Chuy.” The dog hesitates, looking up at Mel, before trotting over to Carter. Carter scrubs his hand over the dog’s head as Chuy greets him. “Thanks for taking care of him.”

Mel nods stiffly, but she looks almost hurt that the dog is with Carter now.

Carter stands, barely glancing at Sebastian as he turns to grab the bag with our supplies. “I figure I’ll drive since you—” He nods vaguely in Sebastian’s direction. I can only guess that he’s referring to the stake that’s still in Sebastian’s heart.

He’s explained that the stake is allowing him to be around Mel without stirring up any territorial disputes.

“Right,” Sebastian drawls. “Since I’m not at my peak right now.”

“You good to navigate?” Carter asks. “You know this part of the state better than anyone else.”

Sebastian arches an eyebrow. “I’ll try to not die long enough to get us there.”

“Yeah. Do that.”

Which puts Mel and me awkwardly in the back. We’ve spent a lot of long silent car rides together in the backseat of a sedan, since Nanna lived up in Nebraska, a fourteen-hour car ride from our home in Dallas, and Mel could never fly.

So in a way, this is familiar, even though there’s this dog in the backseat between us. And I’m able to pretend that this new silent and angry Mel is no different from the silent and aloof, autistic Mel of our youth.

It helps that I’m tired. That I’m recovering. That I’m only newly human again. Soon the shush shush shush of the tires on the road lulls me to sleep and I dream of Slinkys and of Mel humming Rachmaninoff and of Mom stroking my hair when I’m feverish.

I wake up, dizzy and disoriented and alone in the car. I can’t help remembering the last time I woke up like this in a car. When Ely had tranqed me. I expect a blast of nausea to hit me, but it doesn’t. I stumble out of the car to find Carter, Sebastian, Mel, and Chuy staring off in the distance. We’re in the desert somewhere, deep enough into West Texas that there are mountains on the horizon.

“What is it?” I ask.

Carter turns to me. “It’s not good.” He points to the west. “Is that a car?”

“Looks like it,” Sebastian says, lowering a pair of binoculars. “Everybody back in the car.”

I shuffle behind the others, still feeling disoriented. Carter takes off almost before I’ve got the door closed. “Maybe it’s someone from San Angelo,” I say hopefully, but I know Carter doesn’t believe it. He must have his foot all the way on the gas, because this car is going race-car fast for a sedan. “Or maybe it’s Dawn and Darren.”

“It’s not,” Mel says grimly.

“How do you know?” I ask.

Sebastian looks back at me and I can see him exchange a look with Mel. Something passes between them. Something that’s not wholly sexual, but not really innocent, either. Something that’s dark and a little angry and full of verve, but devoid of joy.

After a second, he looks away to stare out the front window and answers in a stiff voice, like it’s taking all of his restraint just to be here, “Because we’re already in my territory. And if that was just some humans in a car, I wouldn’t have noticed them.”

My mind is still sleep-befuddled and it takes a second for his words to sink in and for me to remember what I know about vampires and how territorial they are. “So that’s another vampire?”

“Yes. More to the point, it’s Sabrina.”

“But I thought you were allies with her?” I try to lock eyes with Carter in the rearview mirror, but he’s so focused on the road he doesn’t meet my gaze. “Carter, isn’t she the one that gave you the cure you used on me?”

There’s a long stretch of silence where I can tell everyone is trying to figure out how and what to tell me.

Finally, it’s Mel who answers. “Actually, he stole the cure from her.”

“You stole it? From a vampire?”

“What was I supposed to do, Lily?” He glares at me in the rearview mirror. “She had the cure. I needed it for you.”

“Okay, then.” I give Sebastian a poke on the back of the neck. “You know her. How bad is it? How much trouble are we in here?”

“She and I aren’t exactly close.”

“But you know her, right? Is she going to play nice? I mean, you have more of the cure in the vault at Genexome, right? If you just offer her more of the cure, will she let us go?”

“That’s the plan,” Carter says, but I don’t think anyone in the car is fooled.

Sebastian slants me a wry look. “Oh, is it? I didn’t realize we had a plan.”

“Yeah. Me neither. You got any better ideas?”

“Nope.”

It may have been the plan, but it didn’t sound like a very good one.