Читать книгу Stargazer - Claudia Gray, Claudia Gray - Страница 10

LUCAS’S HAND CLOSED AROUND MINE AS THE VAN drove into an industrial park—one that had seen better days, to judge by the fact that half the buildings seemed to be vacant. My head still whirled from the suddenness of the vampire’s attack and our escape; I don’t think I’d even fully processed the fact that Lucas and I were together again.

Or maybe, I thought as we stole sideways glances at each other, it’s just that it feels like we’ve never really been apart.

“I don’t guess you kids met up at random.” Kate glanced toward us, and her eyes narrowed as she glared at Lucas. She wore olive cargo pants and a black shirt with a lot of pockets; her dark-gold hair was slicked back into a no-nonsense ponytail. “Lucas, don’t tell me you went back to that place.”

“I didn’t go to Evernight,” Lucas said. “I asked Bianca to meet me here. But if I have to return to the school again to see her, I will.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Can you tell me where in the world we aren’t in danger, Mom? Because I just had a closer call than I ever had at Evernight Academy.”

Lucas was exaggerating somewhat, given how my father and Balthazar had pursued him last year, but I didn’t want to undermine him while he was defending his decision to meet up with me.

Kate sighed, then shook her head. She looked at me next—not gently, because nothing about her was gentle, but in a way that made it clear she didn’t blame me for the danger Lucas and I had been in. “Glad to see you’re okay, Bianca. I didn’t trust the bloodsuckers to keep their word last year.”

Those bloodsuckers are my parents, I wanted to retort, but instead I replied, “They did. I’m back in school and we all sort of—pretend it didn’t happen.”

Lucas helped me out. “Probably they figure even if you did tell, nobody would believe you.” I hoped our explanation sounded convincing.

“That was a brave thing you did, giving yourself up to save us from the fire,” said an elderly man who sat in the back beside Dana. He’d told me his name—Mr. Watanabe, I remembered. “I think you saved us all.”

“Yeah, Bianca, that was pretty badass of you.” Dana slapped her hands on my shoulders and gave them a hearty squeeze. “Seriously, you’ve got guts.”

“It wasn’t badass. I don’t really do badass.” That made the half-dozen or so people in the van laugh, even though I hadn’t actually been making a joke. Still, my tension eased a little.

Last year, when Lucas had been discovered as a member of Black Cross, he’d been forced to escape from Evernight Academy; I’d fled with him. Together we’d reached Kate and Eduardo’s cell, and safety—at least as long as Black Cross remained ignorant that I was a sort of vampire, too. But Mrs. Bethany, my parents, and several other vampires had tracked us down. When I’d gone back with my parents, I’d not only escaped that confrontation, I’d gotten away before Black Cross found out what I really was. They still believed me to be a human child kidnapped and raised by vampire parents—something I needed them to keep on believing.

We drove to one of the abandoned buildings around back. Kate flicked the van’s headlights: off, on; bright, off, bright. A metal door, like for a loading dock, started to open, revealing a driveway that sloped down sharply. We drove into an underground parking garage that looked pretty much like any other, except that it was illuminated by lanterns hung on the walls or the concrete pillars. As Kate pulled around a corner into a spot, I saw that a few partitions had been set up—walls of boxes or just tarps hanging over a stretched cord—to carve rooms out of this dank space.

I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice as I said, “This is Black Cross headquarters?”

Everyone laughed. Lucas squeezed my hand, reassuring me that the laughter wasn’t meant to be unkind. “We don’t have an HQ. We go where we need to go, find places to crash. This is secure. We’re safe here.”

To me it looked incredibly bleak. Had Lucas grown up in miserable places like this? The air still smelled like exhaust and oil.

As our crew got out of the van, another half-dozen people walked up to us, including a tall, forbidding man with twin scars across one cheek. I recognized Eduardo, Lucas’s stepfather and quite possibly his least favorite person. His dark gaze embodied everything that frightened me about Black Cross. “I see this is the big emergency,” he said, staring at me.

“You’d prefer another kind of emergency?” Kate said it like she was teasing, but she wasn’t. I could hear the real message in her words: Lay off my kid.

Either Eduardo didn’t hear that message, or he didn’t care. “The vampire got away? Again?”

Lucas’s jaw clenched at that again, but he said only, “Yeah. She’s fast.”

“Did you see her gang?” Kate shook her head, and I thought, What gang? I knew the lonely girl I’d seen tonight didn’t have any friends, much less a gang.

“You go to school with vampires for a year and can’t figure out why they’ve admitted humans, then you luck into a shot at this vampire and completely lose her while you’re hanging out with your girlfriend.” In the lantern’s light, Eduardo seemed to have been roughly carved from weathered wood. “This isn’t what we trained you for, Lucas.”

“What did you train me for? To shut up and follow your orders no matter what?”

“Discipline matters. You’ve never understood that.”

“So does having a life.”

“That’s enough,” Kate interjected, stepping between her husband and her son. “Maybe you two aren’t sick of this argument yet, but the rest of us are.”

They’re still freaking out about the human students at Evernight, I thought. If I figure that out and tell Lucas, we’d show Eduardo. Seeing how dismissively he treated Lucas made me want to take Eduardo down a notch or two. Or ten.

“Bianca looks really winded,” Dana said. “Lucas, you better get her to the first aid room and make sure she’s all right.”

“Oh, I feel—” I realized what Dana was doing and stopped myself. “That might be a good idea.”

Kate didn’t say Kids, but I knew she was thinking it. She waved us off. Eduardo looked as if he might object, but he didn’t.

The murmur of conversation welled up behind us as Lucas led me toward a side door. I realized that this led to the room the parking lot attendant had sat in when this was a garage. “Are they talking about us?” I murmured.

“Probably talking about that damn vampire. But as soon as they get done with that, yeah, they’ll start talking about us.”

“Who was that vampire?”

“I was kinda hoping you could tell us something,” Lucas said as we went up the short stairway to what was now the first aid room, “seeing as how you guys were hanging out.”

“She just sort of came up to me. I never met a vampire on the street before—I was curious.”

“Seriously, Bianca, you’ve got to be more careful.”

Before I could say anything else, Lucas turned on the small electric lantern in the first aid room. The area was hardly bigger than the one cot that was pushed against the wall. Dark gray carpet covered the floor, and this room was small enough for the lantern to fill with soft light. This was almost cozy, and definitely private. Lucas shut the door behind us. I felt a river of warmth flow through me as I realized that we were alone together at last, really alone.

Lucas grabbed me and pushed me hard against the wall. I gasped and he kissed my open lips, then kissed me again harder, as I started to respond. My arms slipped around his neck, and his body was pressed against mine from our knees to our mouths, and I could breathe in the scent of him, the one that reminded me of the dark woods near Evernight.

Mine, I thought. Mine.

We kissed frantically, like we’d been starved for each other the way people can be starved for food or water or air. The way a vampire can be starved for blood. I cupped his face in my hands and felt the stubble of his beard against my palms. His knee pushed slowly between mine, so that both my thighs straddled one of his, and one hand came up against the small of my back, beneath my shirt. The touch of his skin against mine made me dizzy but not weak. I felt stronger than I ever had in my life.

“I missed you,” he whispered against my neck. “God, I missed you.”

“Lucas.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say but his name. It was like there was nothing else worth saying.

I kissed him again, more slowly this time, and that only intensified the kiss. Both his hands pressed against my back now, and we held each other tighter, and I started to wonder how much closer we could get—and then I remembered what it had felt like when I drank his blood.

“Wait.” I turned my head away. My breath came in shaky gasps, and I couldn’t quite look directly at him. “We have to slow down.”

Lucas closed his eyes tightly, then nodded. “Mom is outside.” He was saying it to himself, not to me. “Mom. Outside. Mom. Outside. Okay, that kinda sobers me up.”

Our eyes met, and then we started to laugh really hard. Lucas stepped away from me, enough that I could breathe normally again, but he clasped both my hands tightly. “You look gorgeous.”

“I just got chased down the street. I probably look like a train wreck.” I knew my hair was mussed every which way, and my jeans were dusty.

“You gotta learn how to take a compliment, because I’m not going to stop making them.” Lucas lifted one of my hands to his mouth. His lips were soft against my knuckles. Outside I heard the conversation between the others in Black Cross getting louder. “How long can you stay?”

“Until tomorrow afternoon.”

“Almost a whole day?” He brightened so much that I couldn’t help but blush happily. “That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, it is.” By next week, I knew, this short time would seem like nothing. But for now it stretched out before me as infinite as a sky full of stars, and I didn’t want to think about what would come after. That would ruin it. What mattered was here and now.

I sat down on the corner of the cot, and Lucas sat beside me, laying his head on my shoulder. His arms circled my waist. I ran my fingers through his scruffy hair.

His voice was muffled against my shoulder as he said, “There were times I thought I’d never see you again. Sometimes I told myself that would be the best thing for both of us. But I couldn’t accept it.”

“Don’t ever believe that.” I kissed his cheek. “Not ever.”

The noise from downstairs grew louder yet, and I realized that it was an argument. I tensed, but Lucas sat up and sighed. “Eduardo’s mad as hell.”

“That girl—the one from tonight—she’s the one you guys are here to hunt?”

“That’s the whole reason we’re in Amherst. There have been reports in this area for a few months now. This vampire—we think she’s part of a gang that’s been causing trouble more and more often.”

“Reports? Like, in newspapers?”

“Sometimes, though of course the papers don’t know what they’re reporting. But we hear from people—people who know what’s really going on in the world, who know about us. Every once in a while, we even get info from vampires. They’ll try to buy us off by telling us there’s somebody more dangerous around the corner. Sometimes they’re telling the truth. The word we got was that this gang is killing about once a week—and that’s a lot, even for the deadliest vamps out there.”

I tried to think of that as encouraging. Even Black Cross hunters could talk to vampires rationally sometimes. “The girl we saw tonight can’t be part of any deadly gang. Lucas, she was scared to death.”

Lucas looked over at me again, and in his dark-green eyes I saw that he was wary. We’d had this discussion before, but it never ended well. Quietly he said, “Some vampires really are dangerous, Bianca.”

“Some really aren’t,” I said, just as quietly.

“I know that now.” Lucas leaned his head back against the wall, and I could glimpse a kind of tiredness in his eyes. He was three years older than me, an age difference I hadn’t really been able to see last year, but his maturity was more visible now. “There are bad vampires who ought to be stopped. We stop them. So I tell myself that what I’m doing here with Black Cross is the right thing to do. But if we were wrong about this girl tonight—if we’re ever wrong, even once—I don’t know how to deal with that. And I don’t know how to tell what’s true about the vampires we hunt.”

I wanted to provide some answer for him, but I didn’t know what that answer could possibly be.

Footsteps echoed on the floor outside, coming closer. “Incoming!” Dana called before she opened the door. When she did peer inside the first aid room, she frowned. “Oh, man, I thought I was going to interrupt some crazy monkey sex in here. Figured at least I’d get flashed for my trouble.”

I blushed bright purple. Lucas rolled his eyes. “We’ve been alone for five minutes, Dana.”

“You gotta learn to strike while the iron is hot. Because privacy and this place do not go together.” Dana braced her arms against the doorjamb. “We’re about to head back out. Kate and Eduardo want to resume the hunt before the vampire’s gone too far away.”

Resume the hunt? Oh, no.

“They said no patrol tonight.” Lucas scowled. “The equipment’s not ready, half of us aren’t even dressed—”

“That’s why we train to get ready fast, buddy.” Dana grinned at me, and the overlapping tooth in the front somehow made her look almost sweet. “Bianca can stay safe and warm here. But you and me and everybody else in the crew, we’re heading out.”

“Dana.” Lucas gave her his most melting, pleading look. “I haven’t seen Bianca in months. Come on.”

That look would’ve been more than enough to dissolve me into a puddle, but it didn’t seem to do much for Dana. “You know I don’t care, but Kate and Eduardo don’t want to hear it. You’re lucky they even let her get a look at this place. Hell, when you sent that distress page in, Eduardo was this close to putting us into lockdown.”

Lucas sighed as he looked at me. “Basically, we’re screwed. But only for a little while, okay? We’ll be back before too long.”

“Whatever we can have. It’s enough.”

“You gotta move, Lucas.” Dana started edging out the door. “Like, in about two minutes, when I come back into this room to get our med supplies ready.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said. I gave Dana a quick smile as she went.

As soon as the door shut, he kissed me very gently, with his lips closed, but then more roughly as our mouths began to part. That warm tide of feeling inside me started to flow again, so that I wanted to pull him closer, but neither of us could forget that Dana was just outside. Instead, Lucas leaned his forehead against mine and cradled my cheeks in his hands. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Lucas kissed me once more. After that he let go of me, stood up, and yelled, “All yours, Dana!”

“I don’t want your girlfriend!” she called back. “Just the damn first aid kit!” A few people outside laughed, but it was a kind laugh. Maybe Eduardo saw me as a nuisance, but everybody else in Black Cross seemed happy for Lucas and me. I could never get over how a bunch of vampire hunters could seem so—well—nice.

We’ll be okay, I told myself. I can make it through this. Already I was hungry, but I knew that if anybody in Black Cross caught me drinking blood, they’d attack first and ask questions later. Tomorrow, maybe, I’d have a chance to eat in private, or at least to pour the blood in my thermos down the drain. I could hang on until Saturday night if I needed to.

Lucas edged past Dana on the narrow stairs. Although she was smiling as she set to work, she never looked at me; instead she was focused on her task, hurriedly stuffing bandages and gauze into a small plastic box. “You doing okay, Bianca?”

“I guess,” I said. “How often do you do this? Go out on hunts like these?”

“You say ‘go out’ like we had some big mothership we all return to when our work is done. We mostly travel from place to place. Go where we’re needed. Some people have their own homes they go back to from time to time, but a lot of us don’t. I don’t.” After a short pause, she added, “Lucas doesn’t either. I guess he didn’t tell you that.”

“He hasn’t really had a chance.”

“I keep forgetting that you haven’t hardly gotten to talk to each other since that whole scene went down last spring. That has to be rough.”

“I guess it is.”

“He’s a good guy.” She closed the plastic box and looked at me, serious for once. “Lucas doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. I’ve known him since we were about twelve, and you’re the only girl he’s ever acted like this about. Just in case you were wondering.”

“Thanks.” Though that was pretty amazing to hear, I was thinking about larger concerns than my love life. Instead, I kept remembering the vampire, with her broken nails and uncertain smile. Black Cross might not be an immediate threat to me, but she remained in danger. She had been so lost and alone, another person made to feel small by Mrs. Bethany.

Was that the way I might end up someday? I shivered. Never. I’ll always have my parents and my friends—and maybe even Lucas.

That didn’t change the fact that the girl I’d met earlier was in desperate danger from Lucas’s family and friends. The injustice of it sickened me. But what could Lucas do about it? What could I do about it?

The answer came to me almost immediately, terrifying but inevitable. It took me a second to get out the words: “I’m coming with you.”

Dana stared at me. “On a vampire hunt? That’s crazy.”

“You have no idea”—I sighed—“but I’m going.”