The Lair

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Mel

Things change after the night with abalone sky. Sebastian decided to teach me to hunt Ticks. I don’t fight him anymore. I hardly need to talk—Sebastian talks enough for the both of us. He lets me keep my rhymes. Perhaps he knows how I need them.

However much I don’t want to rely on him, I must. He is the kaleidoscope through which I must see the world. The view is fractured and confusing enough. Without him, I’d have no hope of making sense of it.

There is no cloud cover tonight. The abalone shell has been flipped over to reveal a sky so black it might have been painted in Indian ink, the stars just pricked in afterward like a child’s art project. The icy air nips playfully at my skin. Used to be that I never felt the cold. Now I’m cold all the time.

I long to go back to the house. To curl up on the sofa in front of the TV that doesn’t work. To stare at the blank screen. But he won’t let me. Besides, the gravy train is gone. He won’t feed me again and I must hunt or starve.

“What do you see?” he asks.

Everything.

Of course, I’ve always seen everything. In my Before, I saw so much more than anyone else. Dead screen pixels, freckles on the back of Ian Milan’s neck, a cow’s pores impressed in leather. Every split end in my hair. Every dot in the acoustical tiles in the classroom ceilings. I saw it all. Do I remember them so clearly because I heard them all, or did I hear them all because I saw them?

Now, I see more but hear less. Nothing sings now. Nothing even breathes. Except me and Sebastian. His music is louder every day. I never heard it when I was moping, but now it rings in my ears, almost making up for so much other silence. I had expected something darkly complex, a never-ending Beethoven symphony. The seventh, maybe. With layers and movements and emotional connotations I barely understand. With passion and depth. Instead, he is an ancient tribal beat and I find myself dancing to his rhythm.

Even now. Even when I don’t want to. Even when I resist, I dance.

“What do you see?” he asks again.

I make myself look again. It’s not what I see; it’s what I should be looking at.

We are outside of town now. Which town, I don’t know. The houses are small and thin here. More Baltic Avenue purple than Boardwalk blue.

This house, the door is ripped off and dangling. The frame splintered, not just at the dead bolt, but like a cartoon doorway a monster forced its way through. The weedy green has been trampled—not all over, but from the woods behind the house to the door. Like the path the neighbor’s dog wore in their lawn from food bowl to doghouse.

I look at Sebastian. “Birds of a feather nest together?”

He looks exasperated for only a second before smiling. “Yes. I think so, Melly. They’re out now, but they’ll be back. We can wait here for them or go out and hunt them. You choose.”

Mel the girl would never choose to hunt anything. Mel the girl couldn’t kill a cockroach because she couldn’t stand the crunch or the tinny sound of its death.

But excitement dances along my nerves and I nod. “Hunt.”

Sebastian’s tribal beat picks up and he smiles. “Good girl.”

I am already trotting off into the woods after them when he stops me.

“Not yet. First, how many are there?”

I look at the house. The yard. The dog path. Then the house again. I move toward the house, but he stops me.

“No. Don’t go look in there for clues. Actually finding a nest like this—that was lucky. You won’t be lucky next time. You can’t rely on that. Figure it out on your own.”

I’m supposed to just guess?

“Don’t frown at me like that,” he chides. “I’m not asking you to just pick a number at random. You should be able to tell, to sense it. What did Carter always call it?”

I hum a few bars of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” to help him out.

He nods. “That’s right. My spidey sense. You have one, too. So use it.”

This I don’t believe at all. I’m not known for my sense. Common sense. Number sense, book sense. Sense of humor, least of all. Spidey sense seems too far-fetched for me to be fetching Ticks.

But I try.

I close my eyes and reach out through the moist, heavy air. Through the scent of honeysuckle and the musty, mold scent of decaying leaves in the underbrush. I wait for a new smell. A musky whiff of pheromones. Of the dogs that wore the path through the grass. It doesn’t come.

I open my eyes growling in frustration.

He only laughs. “Giving up so soon? Poor, Kitten.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Of course you don’t. All your life people have done things for you. Now that something requires you to actually work, you’re baffled.”

His words sting, so I sting back. “You are useless as a teacher. This must be the real reason you don’t turn vampires.”

For an instant, his gaze hardens. Then he smiles, a grating smirk. “Very well, I’ll talk you through it. I’ve told you before that vampires are territorial, yes? We can sense when we are near one another. Indeed, we cannot ignore it. We feel one another’s presence. It’s rather . . . annoying.”

“Like you?” I ask.

He makes a low growling sound in his throat and his voice is suddenly serious. “No, Kitten, not merely like me. Like a berserker rage. Like a force so primal it takes every ounce of energy not to kill everything in sight.”

I am grave silent at this. I have seen Sebastian kill. I have seen him hunt and destroy. I have never seen him lose control. The idea terrifies me.

“The Tick microbe was created from the blood of a vampire. The scientists at Genexome isolated the original vampire virus and worked off of that.”

“Yes.” This part I know. Carter had explained it to Lily and me. Roberto—the vampire who owned Genexome Corporation—created the virus based on his own blood. He wanted to create creatures like vampires, but more biddable. An army he could control to take over the world. Roberto was older even than Sebastian. He had once been worshipped as an Aztec god. Was it any wonder he was a power-hungry megalomaniac? “So the Ticks are related to vampires. That’s why you can sense them.”

“Exactly, but they are merely a faint buzzing.”

“Not a berserker rage, then?”

“No, Melly. But I believe you might be able to hear them, even through you’re not yet fully vampire. And it will be quite useful if you can, so be a good girl and concentrate, will you?”

I try again. And fail again. I pull away from Sebastian, but he pulls me back.

“Try again.”

I want to stomp my foot, to temper tantrum my way out of trying, but Sebastian’s not the type to tolerate that. So I try.

I close my eyes and breathe deep and reach.

Then it hits me: not a musky dog scent, but something else. The sound of them. Not the coyote yips and yaps they make out loud, but the sound of them that I hear.

It is a far cry from Sebastian’s tribal beat, farther still from Lily’s lilting melody.

A badly tuned piano playing in a distant room. Or two floors up. Or upside down and backward. Distinctly not right. Unforgettably wrong. Their music is as twisted as their genetics. As miserably out of tune as their bodies are. And, yet, together, they are a kind of rhythm.

I open my eyes. “Four.”

“Good girl.”

His praise rolls me to the balls of my feet. I am an eager beaver to win his shark approval and that’s not the water mammal I want to be.

“How far away are they?”

“Close enough.”

I can see from the gleam in his eyes that I’ve guessed right.

He eyes me and I know he’s sizing me up for another test. “Do you want to wait here or go after them?”

I know, either from spidey sense or simple logic, that they will be back, probably before dawn. Waiting is the easy choice. The safe, Mel-ish choice, but it’s not at all what I want.

“Let’s hunt,” I say and it’s not until he smiles that I realize I forgot to search for a nursery rhyme. The fact that I have to search for nursery rhymes now disturbs me as much as my newfound thirst for blood.

The nursery rhymes used to be how I thought. Part of who I was. I don’t know why I cling to them. Or maybe I do.

As I run through the woods, following the sounds of the Ticks’ discordant notes, I wonder, do I have so much trouble letting go of the girl I was because I don’t yet know the girl I’m going to be?

Is there anything left of that other Mel?

All my life I’ve been prey. Twitchy and nervous. Fearful and frightened. Only the music made it bearable.

People say kids can be cruel, but they aren’t. They are natural predators. They are as proud as lions but more cackle than pride. Like hyenas, they hunt and scavenge. They pick off the weak, the strange, the affected. The girl I was, was perfect prey for a cackle of hyenas. Only my steady drumbeat, only my sister-flower, kept me strong. She was the rest of the herd that circles the frail and keeps them safe.

Now I live in bone-crushing darkness and soul-stealing silence, with a hunger so vast it is my everything. I miss the music, the wild cacophony that was my life in the Before. In my Before. In that other life. But for now, I am only hunger. I only feed. I am not prey, but predator.