Vamped (12 page)

Rick got to the car first, being without spiked heels, and drove around to collect me before peeling out of the parking lot like a bat outta hell. He nearly ran down a pair of gangsta wannabees whose pants were in danger of sliding off their butts, revealing oh-so-sexy striped boxers.

• • •

Rick let me off in the high school parking lot where he’d first picked me up.

“Sure you don’t want to bite me and blow this Popsicle stand?” he asked before I’d escaped entirely.

I rolled my eyes. “I’ve always liked Popsicles. Besides, I have unfinished business.” And besides again, while biting him didn’t sound so bad, the idea of opening my vein in return was just gross, like week-old sweat socks.

“Well, I’ll be here whenever Connor doesn’t need me elsewhere or security doesn’t chase me off. You know, just in case.”

I looked at Rick—really looked at him. Gaunt, haggard, the skin sunken around his eyes. My defenses were so battered with all of the blows I’d taken tonight that I actually allowed myself to care.

“You all right?” I asked.

He shrugged and looked away, but I was glad for a chance to focus on someone else’s issues.

“Rick?”

“Sure,” he answered, voice brittle and bitter, “nothing a new kidney wouldn’t fix. That’s how she gets us, you know, the ones who can’t afford to buck her and go running their mouths off. We have to take the crap she dishes out, hoping and praying to get vamped. Cured.” Cured like the blond book-girl had been? If Rick knew about that—if he’d in fact instigated it, as I suspected—his position had to be totally unbearable. How desperate was his need for a kidney? I could almost understand him coming on so strong back at Melli’s house of horrors. If his time was running out, subtlety might be a luxury he couldn’t afford.

“You know, if you’d just told me all this right at the beginning instead of coming on all smarmy, I would have helped you out.”

“How about now?”

Part of me really wanted to, but I didn’t trust it. Maybe after this spark of … emotion … died down I’d be able to think clearly. “Can’t right now. Until I know just what’s what, and who to trust, I’m not creating some rogue vamp. But I’ll tell you what. When this is all over and I get all our friends freed … and if you help with that … ” I left the rest unspoken. It was the best I could do.

Hope sparked in his eyes but his lips twisted, like he’d bitten into a rotten apple. “How do I know
you
’re not just stringing me along?”

I looked him dead in the eyes. “Ricardo Lopez, have you ever known me not to say exactly what was on my mind?”

He thought about that for a second. “No.”

“Why would I start now?”

“Convenience,” he answered, but not like he believed it. “Anyway, what have I got to lose? Like I said, I’ll be here when I can in case you need me. Tell Connor about the watchdogs. I don’t think they know about the trap door exit, but they’ve got eyes on all the others.”

I nodded and shut my door. I didn’t know what use I could make of Rick … yet. Part of me really wanted to call him back, to do the blood exchange thing just in case the damage Melli and her crew had done killed him before I could save him. But for all I knew he was putting me on. My moment of weakness had passed; he was going to have to prove himself before I gave him so much as a paper cut.

15

I
got back in the same way I’d gotten out, though I had a heck of a time finding the secret passage from the outside end. I ended up rapping on the ground of, like, a square mile of woods before I finally got the passage to open. By the time I did, my spankin’ new threads were nearly as filthy as my old. I wanted a long, hot shower to wash away the dirt and memories.

All of Team Alpha, which wasn’t out on maneuvers, crowded around me as the trap door slid back. It was like a balm to my soul.

“Where’s Marcy?” Pam and Vanessa asked in unison.

“Safe,” I answered, struggling to keep my bag of new duds clean in one hand, while pulling myself up the ladder with the other.

“Safe where—at the mall?” some boy asked, looking at my haul. I didn’t recognize him from school, so I was thinking junior or sophomore. His dark hair was buzzed perilously close to his skull.

“Yeah,” I said wryly. “She’s playing mannequin. Hiding in plain sight.”

I despaired of him completely when he accepted that for an answer. As the trap door shut behind me, Cassandra leaned in.

“Where, really?” she asked quietly.

I was spared having to answer when the double doors burst open and Thing One and Thing Two, also known as the beefcakes, stood in the entrance.

“Gina,” Thing One called. Just one name, like “Pink” or “Madonna.”

The folks gathered around me stayed put, not fading back out of the way as they had before. They might even have tightened formation.

“What do you want with her?” Cassandra challenged.

Things One and Two exchanged a look, at which the latter huffed and said, “Relax, she’ll be back.”

And I would, too. I’d beaten death and a hell of a scary psychic already. Everything else was cake.

“Thanks,” I told Cassandra quietly. “I’ve got this. Watch these for me?”

She turned, looking completely unsure, but took the clothes I handed her.

I stepped gently past my protectors, touched that they’d stood between me and Melli’s goons even for a second. I felt like the Grinch—not in the Seussical green and wrinkly way with bad teeth and no pants, but in the sense that it felt like my heart grew three sizes. I had real friends, people willing to shield me from the big bad. Maybe this new life didn’t entirely suck rocks, despite Melli-noma and her merry band of misfits …

Who all seemed to be waiting for me in what must have been a combat training room, all padded walls pocked with cuts and bruises. Bobby was standing wild-eyed in the middle. There was a chair there too, a single, gunmetal gray folding chair, into which Thing One pushed me.

“Don’t
move,” he ordered.

I glanced at the guys looming behind Bobby: Hawkman, who was looking completely psychotic and intensely focused, testing the blades of the knives strapped across his chest like Rambo’s answer to the pageant sash; and Larry, who was holding a sword and looking weirdly comfortable with it, like maybe he conducted mock D&D battles on the weekends. I felt like a nine-year-old called on to play the target in a stage show where the guy with the blades had the shakes. Then there was the dragon lady in the even deeper background, way back in a corner, where she could watch with minimal chance of collateral damage. Tonight she had on totally kick-ass leather pants that fit her like a second skin, and a scarlet top that came to a V so deep there had to be serious fashion tape keeping her puppies in place.

“
Now
there will be no holding out on me,” Mellisande said, venom practically dripping from her lips.

“But I’m not telekinetic!” Bobby protested, turning to her in horror. “Not so you’d notice, anyway. I can’t move anything heavier than a pencil!”

I wasn’t sure that was entirely true, not based on his excitement when he’d told me about his power. I couldn’t fault him for holding out on her, but from the tension in the room, I was kind of afraid to ask what had happened to the last target. I couldn’t imagine Bobby letting someone get killed, but deflecting the goon’s blades enough to save me without alerting Melli still meant pain and blood I could only recently afford to lose. No way did I want my person pierced.

“Well, then, you’d better learn, and damned fast. If you fail to stop the metal blades, I’ll be forced to resort to the fire-hardened wood. She won’t come back quite as easily from that … if at all. Or I can simply have Larry swing for the throat. It’s been years since I’ve attended a good beheading.”

Melli was going
down
. Meanwhile, I made a mental note of these sure-fire methods of vamp vanquishing, for when the time came.

“If you can’t control the weapons, control the minds,” she offered as a tip.

The beefcakes took up their positions as well. The model pulled a flip blade from his back pocket, and the professor faded back beside Melli, the better to analyze the action, maybe. So, counting the goons, it was three against one, with the possibility of two more joining in.

Bobby’s eyes met mine, and I could see him trying to find a way out for me. It had to be hard enough controlling three people without trying to be subtle on top of it … and the dragon lady had just taken that option away.

She didn’t give him any time to think of another. “Go!” she ordered.

As one, Hawkman, Larry, and Thing One all flew into action. Hawkman launched one of his throwing knives a half-second before Larry and the Thing lunged at me, bloodlust in their eyes. Larry gave an inarticulate battle cry, less Conan the Barbarian than Warrior Princess. My eyes squeezed shut instinctively, and I braced for impact … and braced …

The lack of pain seemed almost anticlimactic. I opened one eye, then the other. Before me, frozen in mid-air, were the weapons. The throwing knife hovered for an instant before dropping to the floor. The flip knife and sword did the same, their wielders struggling to lift them as if they now weighed a ton.

Mellisande laughed. It was nasty, but not the skittering chill of her psychic’s amusement. “Good boy,” she said. “You just needed the proper motivation.”

“Screw you,” Bobby spat.

“Perhaps another time,” she agreed.

“Bitch,” I snarled.

“The kind that will rip your throat out soon as look at you,” she answered. “And don’t you forget it.”

She twitched a hand and without warning, Thing Two, the professor, pulled some things out of his jacket. It was so fast that I couldn’t even see what they were before they were flying at me. Bobby, distracted, released the other weapons to stop the new threat, and the room erupted again. Only Larry, screaming bloody murder, was swinging for Bobby. I was paralyzed by indecision. Should I cry out a warning and risk distracting Bobby, fly into action myself and risk the same (since he could only focus on where he expected me to be), or freeze? But there wasn’t even enough time to think it out. One of the professor’s throwing stars caught me in the shoulder and I flinched, narrowly avoiding the other one.

Bobby ducked the sword and whirled, one arm flung out to knock the throwing knife coming at me out of the air with a burst of power that also shattered Thing One’s flip knife. Larry recovered from his missed swing and launched himself again at Bobby, at the same time Thing One switched targets, ready to throttle Bobby with his bare hands, one bleeding from the explosion of his blade.

Bobby let out a sound like a cornered grizzly bear and shot such a blast of power through the room that my hair stood on end. My skin tingled and pricked, like from a really invigorating body wrap, and everything in the room
froze
. Nothing was stirring, not even a mouse. I tested my limbs, but could only blink.

Mellisande’s glee, frozen on her face, slowly melted off, and I realized she was fighting the power. Her lips, when she spoke, were tight, as if she were in a mud mask that had dried solid and her face might crack if she moved. “I
own
you,” she said out loud.

But then Bobby flinched, his face twisting like he’d suddenly been struck with brain freeze. His mouth came open as if to gasp, but his lungs weren’t holding any air. Sweat, red as blood, glistened at his hairline.

Slowly, so slowly, the rest of the room started to move as Bobby lost focus, tied up in some kind of mental struggle for control with his dam.

Hawkman had another knife ready to throw and Thing Two another star when Bobby fell to one knee, clutching his head. Time sped up again.

“Enough,” Melli said, triumphant. This time everyone paused on her say-so. “Take the girl back. The boy and I have much to discuss.”

I reached up to pull the throwing star out of my shoulder, letting the spurt of blood from it clean the wound. I wanted to hurl the star at the dragon lady so badly I could taste it, but with my luck she’d just mind-control one of her minions to take the bullet or whatever. Not that I had any warm and fuzzy feelings toward most of them, but what if she picked Bobby? Plus, I had the feeling I’d only piss her off. She might even try to control me, and my one and only edge—my resistance to her mesmerism—might be discovered before it could do me any good. I let the star fall to the ground and met Bobby’s pain-filled eyes as Things One and Two once again pulled me from the room. I could tell from the look on Bobby’s face that he felt he’d failed. I mouthed that it was okay, but he closed his eyes and shook his head in denial of my message.