The Lair

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Lily

“I’m fine.” Lily tried to keep the tremor from her voice, but the shiver wracking her body made it almost impossible. She had meant to reassure him. In the future, it would probably be better to keep her mouth shut and just shiver in silence. Not that she had much of a future.

Carter stalked over to the door.

“Come on, somebody open up right now!” Carter pounded on the door. When nobody answered, he gave the knob a violent rattle—for about the hundredth time in the past hour. When it didn’t budge, he slammed his foot against the door.

She understood his frustration. This was not how either of them had pictured this going. They had come here to confront Roberto. To get the cure. And maybe to turn the tide in the battle. Instead, they’d been locked in this empty room for over an hour.

After they’d talked to the guard at the gate, they had been escorted through the compound in a pair of Hummers. The guard had refused to answer any of their questions. So what the hell had he meant when he’d said they’d been waiting for them? They’d driven through acres and acres of open ranch land before finally reaching a cluster of buildings that could only be described as a village. There were a few dozen houses, a general store, a school, and even a medical clinic. It all looked very peaceful if you ignored the military barracks.

They had been shown into a room in the clinic. A medic had come in dressed in full hazmat gear. He had checked her over, given her a shot, all without saying a word. He’d given another shot to Carter. Carter had obviously been tempted to hassle the guy, but the armed guard watching over them with an AR-15 kept him in check. Then, both the guard and the medic left and locked them in. The room was completely empty: bare walls, no chairs, no storage. Since they’d been patted down on their way in, they didn’t have much to work with. Carter would have been able to open a normal door with the bobby pin he’d kept hidden in his shoe, but the lock on this door was operated with an electronic passkey and foiled all his attempts.

In the hour or so that they’d been in the room, Carter had become more and more frustrated. Lily, on the other hand, was feeling worse by the minute. The chills wracking her body made it hard to do more than curl up on the floor. Carter had given her his hoodie and his shirt, but she refused to let him hold her in his lap to share warmth.

In the last days of the Before, the newly formed National Pandemic Disease Control Organization had said that the virus was spread by direct contact and that it was not airborne yet, but she wasn’t ready to trust that. For all she knew, she’d already exposed Carter merely by riding in the car with him for those few hours on the way here. She had tried to keep her mouth covered, but clearly the disease was very communicable.

“You’re freezing,” Carter said.

She looked up to see him standing by the door. She’d made him promise to stay on the other side of the room as much as possible.

“I’m okay,” she said, burrowing deeper into his hoodie. She had her legs pulled up under the hoodie and her arms wrapped around her body.

Carter let out a string of curses, which nearly made her smile. He didn’t handle this kind of thing well. She didn’t blame him. The situation sucked, even more for him than for her. She had the aches and pains to distract her from the threat of imminent demise.

“Do you think this is their plan?” she asked.

“What?”

“Just lock us in here and wait for me to turn? Takes care of both problems, right?”

“Lily . . .”

“No. I shouldn’t have let you come. We needed the cure, fine, but I could have driven myself.”

“You really think I was going to let you do that?”

“I could have taken the car and just driven off.”

“I would have followed.”

“I could have—”

“No matter what, I would have followed.” He blew out a breath and turned away, running his hand through his hair. “If this is their plan, then fine. If we go down together, there are worse things. If—”

Before he could finish his thought, the lock on the door gave a little series of beeps.

Carter whirled toward it, automatically widening his stance to face whatever was coming through the door. Except it was the last person she expected.

Mel walked into the room.

If Lily hadn’t already been sitting, the shock would have knocked her to the ground. The phrase shaken to the core might have been appropriate, but she was already shivering so much that her whole body trembled.

Mel stopped just a step inside as the door closed behind. Tension radiated from her body. She stood as if poised for flight, though where she would go in that tiny room, Lily couldn’t guess.

Lily wanted to throw herself at her sister. To wrap her arms around her. To hold her for hours, sobbing.

But Mel hadn’t liked that kind of display of affection even before she’d been turned into a vampire. Besides, Lily couldn’t stand, much less walk.

So instead, she simply looked at her sister. They’d been apart for nearly two months—longer than they’d ever been separated in their lives—and Mel had changed so much in that time. Which was all the more disconcerting because Mel had never really seemed to change much as they grew up. Her social skills had developed as slowly as her language. She’d never gone through the stages of adolescence that girls went through. Grooming and physical appearance had never interested her. So she hadn’t seemed to mature like other girls. She had only seemed to grow, so that as she aged, she’d looked like a bigger and bigger version of the little girl she’d been.

At least, that was how she had seemed to Lily.

Except suddenly, she looked not like a girl at all. And not like a teenager either, but like a woman—an extremely fit and beautiful woman. Despite the cold, she wore only skinny jeans and a cap-sleeved T-shirt—or maybe it wasn’t cold at all. Maybe it was only Lily who felt cold.

Carter clearly wasn’t ready to trust Mel not to lunge for their jugulars, because he immediately stepped forward and put himself between her and Lily. “Okay,” he said slowly. “This is interesting.”

Mel looked from Lily to Carter. The old Mel had never seemed to focus on people much. Lily had always felt like she knew where everyone in the room was, but she never cared much what they were doing or why. With this Mel, it was the opposite. She seemed hyperaware of them. Like her attention was completely focused on them. One hundred percent.

Mel looked back at Lily. “How are you?”

“Great,” Lily muttered, “except for the likely possibility that I’m turning into a monster.”

“Sebastian told me,” Mel said, taking a step toward Lily.

Lily nodded. “Yeah, I figured.”

Carter didn’t budge, still standing between them. “More important, are you good? Can you control yourself?”

Mel flinched and dropped her eyes. “Sebastian always could, couldn’t he?”

“He’s had more experience with it than you.”

“Sometimes old dogs have new tricks for new dogs.” Mel’s words were almost like the kind of singsongy thing she’d have said when she was human. Almost.

The words were right, but her tone was all wrong. Thoughtful and self-aware in a way she had never been when she was human.

Plus there was that eye-contact thing. When she was human—and autistic—Mel hadn’t liked to look people in the eyes, at least not dead on. Instead, she’d turn her head to the side, bird like, and look at you sideways.

Now, she maintained normal eye contact. No twitches, no hiding. No hair pulling.

So why was she still relying on her rhymes?

Then she stepped closer to Carter and made as if to hug him. Lily felt only a stab of confusion until she saw a flash of something dark and plastic in Mel’s hand. Then Mel came to her and knelt down. This hug was even more awkward, but she knew why Mel had done it. In the instant her arms closed around Lily, her hand slipped up under the edge of Carter’s hoodie and pressed something into her hand. It was plastic and heavy. A little bigger than a cell phone. Too small to be a sat phone, but with a rounded nub on one end. An antenna? So it was a radio of some kind.

The guards had patted both her and Carter down thoroughly. They’d found and removed her spare gun and both her knives. Mel couldn’t have snuck in three radios; she must have stolen them from the guards. Which meant they were probably tuned to the guards’ frequency, and they would have to be changed before being used. How would she know what frequency to use?

Mel pulled back to look at Lily. “One a penny, two a penny. Hot cross buns.”

The nursery rhyme made Lily’s head spin. How? How was she supposed to figure out what that meant? “Jesus, Mel,” she muttered.

But before she could complain about the rhyming, Mel blurted out, “Three blind mice. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. See how they run?”

Another, deeper shudder went through Lily’s body.

Did she see how they ran? No, she didn’t. Not at all.

And she didn’t even understand why Mel was talking in rhymes. Sebastian had said she wouldn’t be autistic anymore. Had he been wrong? Or was this a trick? Was Mel trying to tell them something? Why not just say it out loud?

Lily looked over at Carter. She couldn’t tell if he was just as confused as she was. “I don’t understand. Mel, I’m sorry. I just don’t get it.”

“The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout. Down came the rain”—Mel seemed to pause on the word rain and she tapped her chest. Just once and Lily wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it—“and washed the spider out.”

“You’re the rain?” Lily asked.

“Three blind mice,” she said slowly. “Three blind mice. See how they run?”

Instead of answering, Lily just pulled her knees closer to her and rested her swirling head.

When they’d been on the Farm, it had taken her months to figure out what Mel had meant when she’d said “Red rover, red rover,” over and over again. How on earth was she supposed to figure out “three blind mice” in a matter of hours? There were three of them. Maybe they were the three blind mice. Or maybe three was one of the numbers in the radio frequency. “One a penny, two a penny” had numbers in it, too.

Suddenly, it all seemed like too much to bear. She’d fought so hard. Done so much. Maybe it wouldn’t be awful to go like this. Just so long as she didn’t take anyone with her. That was all she wanted now.

That and to know that Mel had forgiven her. She’d made so many mistakes when it came to Mel. Maybe the biggest one was asking Sebastian to turn her into a vampire. Had she made the right decision? She couldn’t tell. She had no way of reading Mel now. No way of knowing if Mel was okay or would have been better off dead. She could only hope that someday Mel would understand what she’d done. Maybe that was the most anyone could hope for: understanding from the people they loved. Or maybe even that was asking for too much. Maybe she should just be thankful that she’d had the chance to see Mel one last time. No matter what else happened, she was luckier than so many other kids. She’d had a chance to live outside the Farm. She’d made a difference. And she’d had Carter.

Then the door emitted another series of beeps and started to swing open. Somehow, Lily knew. This would be it. This would be the guard who would take her away and execute her. The door opened and a guard walked in. But instead of crossing to her, he stepped aside and left the door open for another man to enter.

For a moment, Lily just blinked at him in confusion.

Carter took a step toward the door. “Who the hell are you?”

Mel turned around, but—despite her newfound verbosity—couldn’t find the words.

So it was Lily who answered. “He’s our father.”