Fawn's Blood, page 23
The doctor put an IV in my arm and held a juice box in front of my face until I’d drunk the whole thing through a plastic straw.
Then he left again.
“Is that light meant to hypnotize you?” I asked Silver.
“To test my sensitivity to sunlight, probably. It’s like, some kind of ultraviolet, I can feel it. Don’t worry, I’ve been drinking a ton of blood. It’ll be an hour or two before I get burned.”
“If you hadn’t been drinking fresh blood at all, you’d get fried?”
“I’d hurt. Only real sun can turn us to ashes.”
I didn’t feel like watching Silver get gradually more burned. I strained against my cuffs, the way he just had, but then I heard footsteps in the hall again.
Rachel came in. She immediately unplugged the light facing Silver.
“Uh, okay, cool,” Silver said.
“She’s with the slayers,” I told him. “She used me to get in to the Pearl.”
“What?”
“I’m trying to help you,” Rachel said, and she sounded like a high school mean girl. “Shut up.”
“If you’re coming to drink more, I’m plumb out,” I said to Rachel. “They’re preparing my gravestone already.”
“A vampire with the slayers?” Silver looked at Rachel. “Are you stupid?”
Rachel blanched, but then seemed to collect herself.
“We don’t have much time,” Rachel said. “Fawn, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for you to get caught up in this too. I know it’s—” she teared up, her nose crinkling, her hands rising to her face. Her tears were red and got on her wrist. “I tried to get out earlier, and I couldn’t. And it just kept cascading and cascading. Cain’s evil, but it’s . . . There’s tons of vampires here that my mom brought them to test on. They’ve burned some of them. I’ve seen them. They grabbed Ned who runs the shelter. They’re going to give the Daylight blood to everyone, but they’re going to have Mom kill anyone who doesn’t take it. I can’t believe I thought they were good.”
“Can happen to the best of us,” Silver said. “Just last Tuesday I accidentally joined a hate movement that hates me specifically. D’oh!”
I laughed. “You mean your ex-girlfriend did.”
Silver snarled.
“Please. I have the key to the cuffs,” Rachel said. She held up a key and went to work on Silver’s cuffs. “Fawn, I’ve been trying to get out. June’s my mother. It’s hard. I saw—there was this girl from my school that Brid killed, and I realized then. I should have done something then, but I’m doing something now.”
“Aw, I hate it when my murder friends murder people,” Silver grumbled, but he freed his hands and rubbed them gratefully.
“I’m going to try to get you both out of this. The vent above you leads to these huge air ducts. I know they have to vent the air in here. And I’ve seen the ducts go through a hallway at the end of the floor, it’s a tight squeeze but it’s big enough for a person. If it doesn’t go directly outside you should be able to get into the staff area four rooms over and leave from there—” she pointed down the direction of the hall, then right. “I think you can get out that way. You could do the door, but Flo’s out there.”
I tried to imagine scrambling up into the air ducts. Like a ’90s movie. Bending, Rachel undid my cuffs, handed me a Phillips head screwdriver. I yanked out my IV and held my finger over it. Rachel saw, turned, rummaged in a drawer for a bandage.
“How do we get in? It’s shut,” said Silver.
“I’ll lift you and you can unscrew it,” Rachel said, and hurriedly wrapped her arms around my knees. She was strong, and the ground disappeared from under me. I let out a yelp as I was hoisted toward the ceiling.
I’d put together a bookshelf and a birdhouse. The screw turned. When the grate on the vent came off, I wasn’t sure if I’d fit through the hole, but Rachel pushed me up anyway, as if I were as light as a doll. My shoulders got stuck, but the space beyond the opening was big enough, and as I felt Silver push my foot too, I unstuck and slid up. I had just pulled up my boot and was turning around to reach down to Silver when we heard more footsteps, fast. Click-clack.
“Shit,” Rachel said, and blocked the door with her body as someone banged against it. “They’ll know I did it.”
“Come on,” I yelled to Silver. I held my arms out to him. He was short, but our hands just met if he stood on the chair. I pulled at him, feeling that I was still dizzy and tired and he was too. He dangled, swung. I slipped forward. Rachel stopped holding the door and gave him a boost with her shoulder as I braced a foot against the hole, and he clambered up, me edging backward to make space inside the dark, dusty air duct—
—but then there was a crash below.
“Brid,” Rachel said weakly. I couldn’t see who she was speaking to.
“Hiding something, aren’t you?”
“Come on,” I said to Silver, and started crawling, but he yelped and fell forward onto his hands, clutching at the slick, sharp-edged metal, his fingers sliding backward.
“They got my foot,” he said. “One of them. They’re gonna kill me—”
I grabbed his arms again, and pulled, but he slid backward, pulling me with him, screaming. Sharp metal cut at my shoulder as I slid against the wall of the duct. I scrambled with my feet for purchase, but was slipping too.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck don’t let go,” Silver said, and I hated the desperation in his face, the weakness. I didn’t, but his hands were slippery, and I heard the angry growl of another unknown teenager in the room below. He slipped back, falling, and a moment later a crossbow bolt impaled itself in the metal above the duct opening. I scrambled back on my hands and feet like a crab, into the darkness.
“I’m coming for you too, you snowflake motherfucker,” the girl who wasn’t Rachel yelled up. I was terrified I’d hear her swing up after me, but as I moved forward on all fours, their voices receded.
It was noisy when I moved and there was an immediate feeling like I was breathing in a ton of dust. It wasn’t clean like in the movies, and sharp edges rose at the seams of the ductwork when I moved my hands and the metal buckled under me.
I had to get out.
15.
RACHEL
Brid looked at Silver’s form, slumped on the ground. He looked way more pathetic than he had in the club, under the fluorescent lights. She’d hit him on the back of the neck with the side of her hand in a precise way that had made him drop, unconscious. She’d always known how to do that better than me.
“So, you were helping this hostage escape, huh.”
“Brid,” I said, and wondered if I could just run out the door. I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to look at her. “I don’t think what you’re doing is right. And there’s no reason to keep Fawn here. She’s human.”
“When you summoned us to the theater early, I thought it might be a trap, that maybe you were in it with Cain. Flo was texting me some crazy shit.” Brid let her hand, with its uniform manicured fingernails, trace up my arm. “But if it was a trap, it didn’t go so good for you, did it?”
I made myself open my eyes and look at her. Her hazel eyes, which had once stared down at me in the park, under the leaves, off the trail where nobody could see us. She had a perfect little turned-up nose. Her hair was strawberry blond naturally. Mine was bleached. I hadn’t had to touch up the roots in months, since it had stopped growing as fast. Or maybe at all.
“It wasn’t a trap. Cain put us in cages. He was going to kill us. He wanted to lure Mom there. But when Mom burst in and you all started just setting people on fire, Cain didn’t get hurt. Everyone else did.”
“Everyone thinks you’re going to go over to their side at some point. All I can say is, now you’re rescuing vampires. Feeling conflicted, huh.”
Silver groaned, and Brid kicked him hard in the ribs.
“Mom’s going to kill me if I stay,” I said.
Brid’s eyes sparkled. “That’s not true, Rachel,” she said. She drew close, so I could smell her breath, which smelled kind of like sour milk. I could hear the beat of her heart, feel the brush of her stomach. “I’m going to kill you before she does.”
She took my face in her hands and kissed me, gently and deeply. I could feel her tongue tracing over my fangs, exploring my upper and lower canines. I moved against her out of habit, then stopped as the chill hit my bones.
We heard more footsteps in the hall. Clicking closer, then bam, the door again. Brid released me.
“What happened here?” Mom asked. Jonathan the non-twink Daylight representative was at her side, Diane trailing behind them with a bag of stakes—I guess just in case. Mom looked between Fawn’s empty chair to the unplugged lamp and Silver on the floor to the open ventilation duct, which had been pretty brutalized in the struggle. Jonathan was in a businesslike grey turtleneck. He had a faint ginger beard—new, since the last time I’d seen him.
Brid stepped between me and my mother. “Rachel came in and found the air duct open. The blood seller trans kid had already climbed out the ceiling. This kid was trying to follow them. Rachel called for help so I came. We pulled her down.”
I noticed her pronoun, for Silver.
My mom looked to me.
“She’s still probably in the building,” I said weakly. I could misdirect them? But Brid knew where Fawn had gone, and who helped her. She was holding it over my head that she knew. When would she let the shoe drop? Maybe at the meeting when Amber called for a leadership vote.
Unexpectedly, my mom waved a hand dismissively. “Human genderfluid kid can get lost, for all I care. They weren’t turning. Just dumb.”
“What if they go to Cain?” Brid asked. “They’re in his whole cadre of human victims.”
Mom smirked. “That would be great. We want Cain to come here, after all.”
I was pretty sure by now that Fawn didn’t really know Cain, or like him. She would be heading—hopefully as fast as possible—in the opposite direction.
Cain would know he wasn’t safe anywhere. I didn’t know if he cared about anyone, let alone the baby vampire supremacist nerd curled miserably on the floor in the white room, but my mom’s guess that he’d try to have a battle to the death with her for the umpteenth time was statistically likely.
Jonathan looked uncomfortably between all of us, clearly realizing there was more happening here than he’d bargained for. “Sorry?” he asked.
“We’ve got what he wants. Blood, his captured little friend. Perfect time to strike. He doesn’t have an organized posse right now, we just routed his friends at the Pearl. He’s got all kinds of chances to try to be a hero. We let him in, and then we don’t let him out. Once he falls, the Free Blood movement is just a few kids running amok.”
Diane looked with discomfort at my mother and at Jonathan—my mom was getting into monologuing mode. This was her weakness. Daylight wasn’t supposed to know all this yet.
“I don’t know that my supervisors are going to be okay with a confrontation at the lab itself,” Jonathan said, as if talking to a child. My mother ignored him.
“Rachel, good job keeping Silver here. We’ve got to secure him in another room, and then there’s plenty of work to go round preparing for the battle.”
I saw the way Diane was looking at my mom. She would follow orders, but Amber was effectively sowing doubts. Maybe just the way my mom was was sowing doubts too. I had always thought of her as such a classic leader, before. But she bossed everyone around and let people get hurt.
“Battle?” Jonathan asked. “Miss Sorkin, we really appreciate your operations, but I need you to press pause for a second here.”
“The dead don’t sleep, Jonny,” my mother said. “I don’t think you understand the ways of vampires like I do. They’re good at hiding and sliming around after we kill a few of them, but we escalated something tonight. Cain’s coming here, and we can beat him, but we have to be ready. Let your bosses know and I can fill them in.”
She breezed out of the room, leaving Jonathan looking at Silver on the floor.
“Young lady,” he said. “Can you stand? We’re going to relocate you now to a more secure room.”
We marched out with Silver at the front. There were four long hallways in the experiments part of the Daylight building. I’d been here before. Behind each of the doors was a vampire who either thought things were normal and they were here to get their blood tested or a vampire who was getting held against their will. Daylight had some vampires they’d deprived of blood for a while, and not given Daylight packs to yet, and they had some vampires who had been given Daylight packs at longer and longer intervals while the lamps shone on them, to find out how much Daylight fixed you so you could see the sun. We’d brought all of them here.
Silver staggered. We moved him to another white room, deeper into the labyrinth. He was chained again, and a new lamp pointed at his face. I had to think quickly about how I’d stop him from getting hurt. But I didn’t know. And Brid was right behind me. When the door shut on Silver he was shooting me a curious glance, and I should have given him a confident one back. But the keys—that was my only brave thing. I couldn’t figure out another one so fast.
It was two in the afternoon before the higher-ups could be scheduled to meet with us about the fact that the leader of the vampire underworld might want to break into their building. There was nowhere to shower or change, and we sat in the staff room for hours in front of a tiny TV, my mom talking the whole time and me tuning her out and Brid on patrol with Flo and then coming back to look menacingly at me. I was hoping the whole time that Fawn had gotten out, gotten away. My mom was in business mode. She’d had Stacey buy everyone coffee while coming back from taking Amber to the hospital. Stacey looked terrible. The Starbucks plastic cups wept into the little holster they’d come in. We were talking to the people more important than Jonathan who didn’t usually meet with us, and Jonathan still looked nervous, and Brid still hadn’t told on me, but was shooting me scary secret smiles every time our eyes met. I tried not to have them meet.
“We need to secure the warehouse areas,” Mom said. “If Cain conducts a raid, those are going to be where they hit. Ideally, we want to let Cain into the building but prevent him from accessing product or test subjects.”
I desperately wished I could drink coffee or sleep. I watched my mom sip the cold brew. I tried to comfort myself. After all, in a few hours I would probably be dead.
“We can station a few more contract security around,” said the man whose name was Brad. “But we’re familiar with Cain. He won’t operate during the day. More importantly, maybe we should work on rehousing you and the other MAVIS members temporarily. Your homes could be targets, now that you’ve taken out two major vampire spaces.”
“Which we appreciate,” said the man named Arnold. He was in a casual suit that truly rich people wore, and I could tell he had more money.
“Vampires can’t access our homes without invitation,” Mom said dismissively, waving her hand. “Happy to stay in a hotel, but frankly, it’s not going to get that far. This is a tonight or tomorrow thing. This is not a weeks-away situation. This is tight. Think about a movie. We’re in the last thirty minutes. They’re almost beat, but this guy is always popping back just when you think he’d slink off.”
“He has totally been popping back a lot, hasn’t he?” Stacey piped up, and my mom looked over at her sharply. She’d been talking to Amber.
Arnold gave Stacey a patronizing look.
“Well,” he said, “You girls sure are enterprising. I guess I can have Jonathan give you all a tour of our refrigerated warehouse areas, and you can direct our security team. I’ll let you have ten more guards tonight, and we’ll see if anything odd happens. We’re busy with launch logistics this week, we’ve got Times interviews, new stuff going on with HBO for a documentary, so we won’t be around, but we can hop on a meeting the day after tomorrow.”
My mom smiled her cheerleader smile that was more tense these days, like a rictus. “Sure thing,” she said. “I think twenty guards would be better. We had one of our crew get stabbed earlier, so we’re down one.”
Brad looked disturbed. Arnold looked peaceful.
“Ten,” Arnold said. “They’re not going to be able to get inside.”
I knew Mom would make sure that they did, though.
She took me aside in the hallway, after Arnold and Brad walked away, with Brid standing right there, and it would have been the perfect time for Brid to rat me out for helping Fawn, but Brid stood there saying nothing.
“Baby,” Mom said. “I want you to know how brave you’re being, helping us with this. I just want you to know that we’re going to get through it, okay? And when Cain is dead, and Daylight is normal, we can just be a normal family. We don’t have to do all this anymore. I’ll take you to the movies all the time.”
It was like she knew there was something wrong with me, but she was pleading instead of getting angry. She was scared of losing me. She was scared of what I could be if she lost me. She wanted me on her side. I felt sad, suddenly. She would be so sad when I died, whether she killed me or not.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I mean, it’s always been like this.”
Brid loomed like a lightning bolt.
“You’re so brave,” my mom said again, and kissed me on the forehead.
Diane said, “Maybe the girls can do a tour of the storage facilities, to scope it out for security tonight. They’ll know better than the contract guys what’s going on.”
Brid nodded. “So true. I think Rachel and I should tour the freezers. I saw them earlier. I think they’re pretty secure, but the loading docks are a point of weakness. Don’t you think, Rachel?”
“Yeah.” I felt numb.
“Okay, great. You guys get to it,” Mom said. Diane handed me some of her big bag of stakes.
“We need an authorization key. Jonathan?”
“He gave me one. This should be the uber-access code for the building. If it doesn’t work, page me.” The paper was handed to Brid.
