The Lair

CHAPTER ONE

Carter

No one starts a rebellion expecting to fail. No one leads the charge into battle thinking their troops will be massacred. And no one falls in love knowing their girl will die horribly.

I thought I’d trained myself to expect the worst life had to offer. Being ignored by my mother, beaten by my father, kicked out of countless schools, and arrested when I was sixteen did that to a guy. And that’s all the good stuff. The stuff that happened in the Before. Before two percent of the population mutated into bloodsucking monsters that devoured every human in their path, especially the teenagers with yummy hormones. Before the U.S. government sold us all out by rounding teenagers up and keeping them penned on Farms to feed the monsters we’d all taken to calling Ticks.

Hey, this is life, right?

Don’t bitch about things unless you’re willing to get off your ass and change them.

But that’s the attitude that got me into this mess to begin with. I never planned on being the leader of the rebellion. I just didn’t want to be farmed for my blood. Not when I knew the Ticks could be defeated. Not when I knew there was one bad-ass vampire behind the fall of civilization and if we could stop him, we could defeat the Ticks.

I never thought it would be easy to rescue teens off Farms and form a rebellion. To track down and kill Roberto, the vampire behind it all. To find and rescue Lily and keep her safe. I didn’t expect it to be easy, but I thought it would be possible. I thought I could do it.

I hate it when I’m wrong.

I didn’t know how wrong I was until Lily, McKenna, and I finally made it to Base Camp after what had to be the worst road trip since the Donner party. A little over a week ago, Sebastian and I had rescued Lily; her twin sister, Mel; and McKenna and her boyfriend, Joe, from a Farm in north Texas. And, yeah, only three of us were left by the time we made it to Base Camp.

Base Camp was located in an abandoned underground storage facility snuggled up under the mountains in Utah. The human rebellion operated out of Base Camp. There were less than two hundred of us: the forty-three guys I’d fought with when the Ticks attacked Elite Military Academy, plus another sixty or so kids we’d since rescued from Farms. Sometimes Sebastian was with us; sometimes not. But he didn’t really count as a human anyway.

Getting to Base Camp was hell. Not just the part where Ticks were trying to rip out our hearts or even the part where the deranged Dean had tracked us across the country. Once all the bad shit was over, the actual driving sucked, too. Even though it was unseasonably warm, there was still ice on the roads. Very little, thank God, or we wouldn’t have been able to drive, even in the Hummer we’d picked up in Nebraska.

Since I knew the way, I did all the driving myself, letting McKenna rest in the back, while Lily curled in the front seat beside me. It was peaceful, somehow, but I knew it wouldn’t last.

Base Camp was supposed to be safe.

We rolled into Base Camp around mid-afternoon. Normally, the fenced parking lot outside the old storage facility was bustling with activity during the day. When you live inside a mountain with minimal electricity, you spent as much time as possible outside, even when it’s cold.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw what was left of the fence. When I’d left to go find Lily, the fence had encased the entire parking lot. It wasn’t electrified—we didn’t have the solar panels to operate that kind of thing anyway—but it was topped with razor wire and nothing had gotten through it in the time we’d lived there. Now, a swath big enough to drive a semi through was torn out and peeled back. Like someone had sliced open a sardine can. Something had gotten past Base Camp’s first layer of defense.

I stopped the Hummer about twenty feet shy of the gate and left the keys in the ignition. “I’m going to go in first. See what’s going on.” I shot Lily a look. She was frowning as she looked through the front windshield. It didn’t take a genius to figure out this wasn’t exactly the safe haven I’d led her to expect.

She cocked her head. “Maybe everyone’s just inside?”

“On a warm day like this? Everyone should be outside. We don’t have the electricity to power the lights during the day. At the very least, everyone with KP duty should be out in the yard, cooking.” I pointed to the two oversized garage doors set in to the mountainside. They led into the loading dock and were big enough to drive a train through. The tracks went a hundred yards into the storage area. Beside the two bay doors was a simple steel door, which led in to the office area of Underground United, the storage company from the Before. “At the very least, those doors should be open. Besides, when I left, this fence was intact.”

I didn’t mention the stretch of dirt on the far southern side of the parking lot. Just outside the fence, but away from the tree line was a round spot where the snow had been cleared. Or where a funeral pyre had melted it.

Even though I didn’t say this aloud, Lily’s gaze seemed to follow my own.

She looked back at me. “I don’t like this. I’ll wake up McKenna. We should all go in together.”

McKenna had been asleep in the backseat for the past several hours. No one would have blamed her for bailing on the rebellion. She was six months’ pregnant. But even though I’d offered—over and over again—to drive her up to Canada in search of some last outpost of civilization, she’d refused. She wanted to come to Base Camp. If her boyfriend, Joe, was alive out there somewhere, he would be heading for Utah, so that’s where she wanted to be. Which was all well and good, but that didn’t mean I wanted to put a pregnant girl at risk.

“No,” I whispered. “I should go in by myself. I can move faster on my own if things go bad.” Then, because Lily didn’t like being ordered around, and I didn’t blame her, I asked, “Do you mind staying here?”

She seemed to think about it for a minute. I sure as hell wouldn’t wait in the car while she went in. Lily could take care of herself, but I was hoping she’d want to stay to take care of McKenna. Finally she nodded.

“I’ll stay here.” Then she looked up at me with real fear in her eyes. “But, Carter, if things do go bad, I’m driving straight through the fence and coming after you.”

And this . . . this was why I loved her.

Lily had never backed away from a fight in her life. She scared the hell out of me, but there was no one I wanted on my side more.

She leaned forward, and I couldn’t resist slipping my hand behind her neck to pull her in for a kiss. Her hair was soft against the back of my hand and her breath warm on my mouth. She tasted like cinnamon and hope. And fear. Yeah, there was always a hint of fear mixed in there. That was the world we lived in, but here in the car, with the craziness locked outside, I could almost block out everything else. I could almost believe that it was going to be okay. That I would be able to keep her safe and that we’d be able to make a difference. Almost.

A moment later, I was out of the car, slipping between the jagged edges of the chain-link fence to walk across the vast, open space of the yard with only a hunting knife in the sheath at my boot and a Glock pressing into the small of my back.

I skirted around the edge of the yard and approached the door to the office. Just outside the door, I pressed the sole of my boot to the rock, so I could pull out the knife without bending over or taking my eyes off the woods. I left the gun where it was. Unless you had enough bullets to take down a bull elephant, guns didn’t do a lot of good against Ticks. I couldn’t hear anything from my side of the door. I raised my hand to the steel and tapped out the first five beats of “Shave and a Hair Cut.” I held my breath, waiting for the next two beats. Nothing.

For one endlessly long moment, there was zilch.

What if that was it? What if Base Camp was just gone? What if I’d rescued Lily, dragged her halfway across the country, and got her sister turned into a vampire all on the promise that there was a rebellion to join, only to find out that it had been wiped out?

I was good at talking my way out of almost anything. At bluffing. But even I couldn’t bluff my way through this. If Base Camp was gone, we were screwed.

I returned my knife to its sheath and pulled out my lock picks. A voice from behind me said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

A voice I recognized. Thank God.

I slowly turned around to see Eddie Mercado, one of the guys I’d gone to the Elite Military Academy with, pointing a rifle at my chest. I nearly laughed. “What are you going to do, Merc? Shoot me?”

Merc studied me cautiously. He didn’t look pissed off or angry. Not the way you’d expect from a guy who wasn’t lowering his rifle. Instead he looked nervous. Maybe even a little afraid, something I’d never seen before. He’d told me once that his mother was black and his father was Cuban, but I’d always suspected there was a little rino in there somewhere, too. The guy was just that tough. I could fight him, but there was no way I could win. Certainly not when he was the one with the rifle.

But instead of lowering the nose of his weapon, he said, “No. I’m not going to shoot you. I’m going to escort you and the two ladies in the van into quarantine. And if you try to rip my heart out anytime in the next three days, then I’m going to shoot you.”

I looked from Merc to the locked door and then out toward the charred patch of grass just outside the mangled fence. Suddenly, this all made sense.

I nodded and slipped my knife back into its sheath. “Sounds like a plan.”

After that, I shut down my emotions. As I listened to Merc’s story, my mind whirled, trying to fill in the missing gaps, to formulate a plan. Find a solution. All my anger, my fear, my panic—I just shut it all down.

Sebastian—my “mentor”—would have been so proud. When you’re fighting for survival, there’s no room for emotion; only strategy, action, and reaction.

Then again, Sebastian had been a bloodsucking monster for the past two thousand years and he wouldn’t know a human emotion if it threw him to the ground and beat the crap out of him. So maybe he wasn’t the best role model, but in this situation, he was all I had. I listened dispassionately. I planned. And when Merc was done talking, I gave him a nod that probably looked like agreement, and I walked back to the Hummer.

By the time I reached the driver’s-side door, I was done keeping the anger in check. I wanted to rip the Hummer apart. I wanted to peel the damn thing like an orange and leave it in pieces. I might have actually done it, too, but we’d need it to drive away in.

Lily slid over as I climbed into the driver’s seat.

“What’s going on? What happened?”

I immediately reached for the ignition, but realized she still held the keys. “Give me the keys. We’re getting out of here.”

She looked down like she was surprised to see them in her hand. She hesitated, and I could feel her looking from Merc—who had followed me up to the gate and was now opening it—to my hand gripping the steering wheel so tightly I was surprised it didn’t crack.

She was too damn smart not to figure out something was very wrong. “Can you first tell me what’s going on?”

I didn’t want to tell her, but figured she had the right to know how badly I’d screwed this up. “Right after I left for Texas to find you, a group went out on a food raid and got attacked by a Tick. There were four survivors. No one realized that one of them had been exposed to the virus. He disappeared into the catacombs deep inside the mountain. Thank God someone figured out what had happened before he killed anyone else. . . .”

“Damn.” She muttered the word on a soft exhale.

“That’s why Base Camp is all shut down. They’re hiding in there. They’re too terrified to come out and risk infection again. Merc said he’ll let us in, but only if we spend time in quarantine.”

I looked over at Lily to see her staring straight out the front windshield. Her chin had that stubborn jut to it and I could tell her mind was racing through the story she’d just heard. She twisted in her seat to look at me, but she kept the keys clutched in her hand. “Okay. So what’s the problem? Why are we leaving?”

“Lily, when I got you and Mel out of that Farm, I promised to keep you safe. But I didn’t. Our trip here was one screw-up after another. But I thought that at least once we got here, everything would work out. But now—” My throat closed over the word as I imagined Lily trapped there in that mountain with a killer. Panic hit me again and all I could do was curse.

I looked over at Lily, expecting to see horror on her face. Or fear. Panic, like mine. But she was frowning, head tipped a little to the side.

“So you think we should go?”

“Yes. Hell, yes.”

“Just drive off and leave them? I don’t understand. Why would we—”

“Because I thought it was safe here and it’s not. If Base Camp isn’t safe, if we can’t even go out looking for food without getting attacked by Ticks, then we’re all screwed. We can’t survive like this. I can’t protect you—”

“Maybe it’s not your job to protect me. No, wait. Hear me out, okay?” She waited until I nodded before she continued. “When you rescued me, you thought I was an abductura, you thought I had this amazing power to lead the human resistance and sway people’s opinions. Whatever. If I had been an abductura, then, yes, keeping me alive would have been more important than anything else. But I’m not that person. Which means you don’t have to work so hard to protect me.”

“Lily, that’s not the only reason I want to keep you safe.” The thought of her hurt, in pain . . . it drove me crazy.

But she waved aside my comment. “Maybe I can’t lead the rebellion, but I still want to fight. We’ve made it this far. I’m not going to turn around now.”

“Don’t you get it? If you’re not the abductura, then there’s no one to lead the rebellion. We don’t have a leader. We don’t have security. We don’t have shit. There is no human rebellion. Which is why you need to hand over the keys so we can just get out of here.”

“No.” Lily clung tightly to those keys. “As far as you and I know, this is the last outpost of free humans on the planet. Maybe there are still pockets of humanity in Canada or Beijing or Brazil or wherever, but as far as we know, for certain, this is it. Maybe the rebellion doesn’t have an abductura who can magically brainwash other humans into joining, but the rebellion still has a leader and that leader is you. It always has been. And you can’t just turn your back on these people. Not for me. Not for anyone. They need you.”

When Lily talked like that—like I was some kind of friggin’ hero—I couldn’t even look at her. The weight of her expectations was too damn heavy on my shoulders. All I wanted was to keep her safe. To just bury my face in her hair and hold her close and maybe forget for a few hours how completely screwed up everything was. But instead, I had to go save the world.

“Exactly how excited do you think they’re all going to be when they realize that after everything we’ve done to find to you, I was wrong?” She didn’t answer, just stared blankly out the front window. I followed her gaze and realized that up ahead, Merc had opened the gate and stood waiting. Watching us talk in the car. “Think about it, Lil. Those kids are terrified. They expect a leader. When they find out you’re not that person, they are going to freak out. There might not be a rebellion left to lead. The only thing holding Base Camp together is the hope that we can fight the Ticks. That we’ll be able to get more and more kids out of Farms and that someday we’ll be able to fight back. I think the Greens believe it because the guys from Elite believe it. The guys from Elite believe it because I’ve told them we could. Because I believed you would be able to lead us.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“Why are you sorry?”

She glanced at me from under her lashes. “Because I’m not what you thought I was. Because you thought I could be this great leader and instead I’m just . . . me.”

I reached across the console for her and cupped my hand around the back of her head so she looked at me.

Lily was crazy smart and determined. And she fought like a demon to protect the people she cared about. And I was crazy about her. Just the way she was. “You have never disappointed me,” I told her. “I don’t care that you’re not an abductura. Hell, in some ways I’m glad you’re not. But it’s my fault we’re in this situation. I’m the one who told them you could lead us. It’s my mistake. Not yours.”

She looked at me wordlessly, and I watched her swallow as she nodded. “Okay, then. We have to lie.”

“What?”

“If they expect an abductura and if Base Camp is going to fall apart without one, then we’ll have to lie and pretend I’m an abductura.”

“I’m not going to lie to them.”

“You may not have a choice. The reason civilization collapsed in the first place is because Roberto used an abductura to convince everyone the Ticks couldn’t be killed. If he can lie to destroy humanity, then we can lie to save it.”

I turned over her logic in my mind, trying to find the flaw. I didn’t want to lie to anyone. When had that ever worked out well? I’d lied to Lily when I came to rescue her from the Farm, and it had led to one screw-up after another.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “People are going to wonder. They’ll have doubts. And I don’t see how a lie like this can stand up to the questions.”

“Yeah, if it was just the one lie, it wouldn’t stand. But maybe lies are like cards. You can’t ever get one to stand up alone, but you balance them against each other and they’ll prop each other up.” Her lush mouth twisted into a wry, sad smile. “Didn’t you ever build a house of cards when you were a kid?”

“No. All I know is that they’re destined to fall down.” My childhood had been spent in the back wing of the house, playing video games and hiding from my parents, because if they forgot I was there, they were less likely to give me a hard time.

“Yeah. But we don’t need to convince everyone forever. We just need them to believe it long enough to come up with a better plan. Or find another abductura. Something. And the Elites are used to following you. If you say I’m the abductura, they’ll believe you. I don’t like it, but it’s better than driving off and leaving them here with no leader. Even if we could find safety—and there’s no guarantee for that, but even if we could—we can’t just walk away from this.”

“Lily—”

“She’s right,” McKenna said from the backseat.

Lily and I both whirled around to see her slowly stretching as she sat up. Hell, I’d forgotten she was even back there.

“We have to stay here,” she said.

Lily’s mouth twisted a little, like she wanted to smile but was too sad to really do it. “You just want to stay here because you think Joe might show up.”

“Duh. This is where he’ll go. So, I’m staying no matter what. But I agree with Lily. You need to stay, too. You’re their leader. You—”

“I can’t lead these people,” I protested.

“You’ve led them this far,” Lily said gently.

“Yeah, but that was the easy part. I had a plan: find you. Let you convince the rest of humanity to fight. Let Sebastian do the rest. I could do all of that. I can’t do this.”

“Sure you can,” Lily said. “All you need is a new plan.”

“A plan to lead these kids, who are terrified and starving? In the middle of winter, when we can hardly leave the mountain?”

“Okay, so that’s the first step in the plan: find more food. Stay close to the mountain. And then when spring hits, we go get more recruits from Farms. That’s what you were doing before, right? So that’s what we’ll keep doing.”

When she broke it down like that, it seemed doable.

All my life, everyone had treated me like I was a screw-up. My parents, my teachers, even Sebastian. They’d all expected me to fail, miserably. And all my life, that had pissed me off. Now, here I was, ready to finally live down to everyone’s expectations of me and along came Lily. And she didn’t expect me to fail. In fact, she expected me to save the world.

When she looked at me like that, I almost believed I could.