The Vault (A Farm Novel) (6 page)

LILY

I wake to pain. That dull achiness from a virus. The chills. So strong I can’t stop shaking long enough to ask Mom for a blanket. Or to move me somewhere more comfortable. A strange dizziness that makes the sky above me seem to shift and buckle. A weird scratching, scuffling sound, too. Loud and close and somehow soothing. Despite the pain, I close my eyes and sleep again.

It’s harder next time, to drift away again. But I do. I slip in and out with the pain and the scuffling and the jabbing, scratching at my back and the bending, shifting sky overhead. It doesn’t stop.

Until suddenly it does.

Then I’m out.

Next time I wake up, the sky above has stopped moving. Why am I outside?

The pounding in my skull and the chills racking my body tell me I’m sick. Very sick. But why am I outside?

Where am I? Outside, yes, but outside where? Not home, where the lawn service keeps our St. Augustine crisp and green. The grass here is patchy and wild, like we used to see by the side of the road on long drives. The dirt is the dull red-brown of Texas clay. I’m far from home. Far from the city.

I twist my head to look around, stopping—not because of the pain—because there’s a man near me.

Not just a man. My father.

My father?

That can’t be right.

I haven’t seen him in years. In almost eight years. But it’s him.

He’s sitting, leaning against the trunk of a scrub oak. His head tipped back and his eyes closed. Is he dead? Then I see his chest rise and fall with a shuddering, pained breath.

Still, I can’t reconcile what I know of my father with the image before me. His hair is graying at the temples and the lines of his face are sagging with age and exhaustion. There’s a bloody gash from his right temple to his cheekbone and another, shorter one by his mouth. One of the sleeves of his shirt is missing. The rest of the white oxford cloth is dusty and he has sweat stains under his arms. The last I heard, my father was working at some kind of brain trust in southwest Texas. He was rich and successful and totally not interested in me. What the hell’s happened to him? What’s happened to me?

I reach out a hand and try to speak, but the sound comes out as a garbled croak.

His eyes flicker open. “Lily,” he says on a groan thick with pain.

“Daddy?” This time it comes out clearer. Tears burn my eyes, because I haven’t seen him in so long. And I’m in so much pain. All I want is for him to pull me into his arms like he used to when I was child. I want his strength. His warmth. Oh God, his warmth. “So cold,” I gasp out.

He pushes away from the tree. Leveraging his weight with his hands, he pulls himself along the ground toward me. That’s when I see his leg. He’s dragging it uselessly behind him. Something dark brown is tied around his thigh and there’s an odd lump under the bulge. No. Not brown. Dark red. And the lump isn’t just a lump. It’s a compound break. The lump is his bone. The brown fabric is his once-white sleeve drenched in blood.

My stomach flips over and I manage to turn my head to the side before I puke all over the ground.

There’s not much in my stomach, but after I empty it, I feel . . . not better. Steadier.

This foggy feeling, the nausea. It all seems familiar. I push myself to my hands and knees and crawl to my father’s side. His eyes are closed now, his breathing so shallow I worry again that he’s dead. A moment later, his eyes flicker open. He reaches a hand toward my face, but it’s icy cold. Again I’m hit with a feeling of déjà vu, but I shake it off. He’s lost too much blood. Even knowing nothing else, I know that.

How do I know that?

What happened?

A car crash? But I don’t see a car. And why was I with my father? I haven’t seen him in years. Or have I?

A memory flashes through my mind of a sterile white room. And Mel was there, looking hyperalert and talking about mice. In rhymes. She hasn’t talked in rhymes since . . . I can’t remember.

But I get another flash of memory. Mel saying, “Red rover, red rover, let Carter come over.”

Carter?

Carter Olson?

“What happened?” I mutter aloud.

My father’s too-cold fingertips brush my cheek. “So sorry. I tried.”

“What?” I demand, but my voice sounds suddenly harsh. “What did you try to do?”

“To keep you safe. At the Farm. You were supposed to be safe from the Ticks there. Top priority.”

And then I get a blast of memories. The Tick outbreak. The virus that mutated people into unstoppable killing monsters. The Farm. Where Mel and I were supposed to be safe, but where we lived in fear and “donated” blood to keep the monsters away. Leaving the Farm, escaping with Carter Olson. And a vampire. Mel nearly dying. Being bitten by Sebastian. Turned into a vampire herself.

I am bombarded by image after image. The terror. The fighting. The camp in Utah where the resistance was. Sleeping curled up against the warmth of Carter’s chest. My friend McKenna, dying. Her cold hands handing me her baby. Being shot with a tranquilizer gun.

That’s why this feels familiar. Why I feel woozy and light-headed. Why I puked. Because I’m coming out of sedation. And it’s why I have so many patches missing from my memories. Why I’m so confused.

But I still don’t remember why my father is here.

We must have gone to the brain trust. We must have thought it was going to be safe, except . . .

No. It wasn’t a brain trust. It was Roberto’s ranch. My father didn’t work for some think tank. He worked for Roberto, the vampire who spread the Tick virus. As fuzzy as my brain is—still struggling to piece together the hours before I ended up here—I do know this: Roberto is evil. The enemy. And my father—
my father
—worked for him. My father helped bring down all of civilization.

I stumble back from him. “Roberto,” I gasp out. “You work for Roberto.”

“Yes,” he says simply, his eyes closing.

“You left us. You left Mom and Mel and me to go work for that monster!”

I know the way I’m saying it is wrong. That somehow I’m equating the leaving and the working for Roberto. As if the sins are equal, when they aren’t. And yet, they are related because as much as I’ve hated my father for leaving, I could forgive it when I thought he’d left to go try to save the world. Then it seemed almost noble. But this? This was monstrous in a way I could barely fathom.

His eyes flutter open weakly and he gazes at me with something almost like fondness. “You don’t understand.”

“You’re right. I don’t. I will never understand how you could be part of Roberto’s plans.”

“You will someday.” Weak fingers reach for my hand and clutch it. “Someday your own powers will blossom. You’ll become an
abductura
, then you’ll know what it’s like. Maybe you’ll even take my place with Roberto. You’ll see the brilliance of his vision.”

I wrench my hand from him. “I am not an
abductura
. That’s Mel. And she’s not one either now. She’s a vampire. And we would never follow in your footsteps.”

But the words stumble as they leave my mouth. Because there’s something there that set off warning bells. Something about Mel being a vampire. Because if she has the gene to become a vampire, that means . . .

And that’s when the big missing puzzle piece drops out of the sky and hits me square in the chest. The Tick virus.

I was stabbed in the foot with an arrow covered in the blood of a Tick.

I have the virus.

That’s why I was tranqed. To slow down the spread of the virus until Carter could get to the cure. But something must have gone horribly wrong. Because I’m not in some hospital on Roberto’s ranch. I’m in the middle of nowhere. With my father, who is wounded.

What the hell happened?

I don’t realize at first that I must have asked the question aloud, because my father’s eyes open again.

“The helicopter went down,” he chokes out.

“What helicopter?” I demand.

He frowns. “You don’t remember?”

Anger edges out my fear. “Why were we in a helicopter? Why was I even with you?”

“Your boyfriend . . .”

“Carter?”

“He thought we had the cure. Brought you to me. But the Ticks breached the fence. We left in a helicopter. Going to a Farm.”

But the helicopter went down.

I wait for another flash of memory, being on the ranch. Getting in the helicopter. Anything. But all I have is being in the white room. “Mel? Carter?” I ask.

“They were leaving together. To try to find the cure. They were supposed to meet us at the Farm.” His eyes roll back in his head for an instant and I think I’ve lost him again, but then he forces them open. He grabs my arm with surprising strength, forcing me to look at him. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“I know,” I say. “I’ll get you to the Farm. There’ll be a doctor or something.”

“No.” He’s shaking his head, but I don’t know if it’s because he thinks I’m wrong, or if he disagrees. “Have to get away. From the others.”

“Others? What others?”

“The other Ticks. On the helicopter. There were four of you.”

“Four? Four of me?” He’s shaking his head again and I realize that this is just my brain being sluggish. Not four of
me
. Four people who’d been exposed to the virus.

“The others haven’t woken up yet. They were sedated longer than you. But they’ll wake up soon.” He clutches my arm again. The strain of talking is wearing on him. Blood pools in the corners of his mouth. His lips are bright red with it and the rich, coppery scent of it drifts up to me. The blood is beautiful against his too-pale, too-cold skin. I’m so distracted by it I almost miss his next words. “Men like that. They’ll probably have immersion delirium, too. They’ll be mindlessly violent. That’s before they turn into Ticks.”

Turn into Ticks.

And that’s what I’ll be, too.

I will be a Tick.

I’m transforming already. The chills. The aches. They are signs of my body morphing into something else. The sudden fascination with my father’s blood.

Oh God.

Oh God.

It’s happening already.

I push my father off my lap and scramble away. I have to stop this. I have to.

But how?

I scuttle back to him, almost as fast. “You can’t let this happen. You have to kill me. Do it now.”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s okay. You’ll be fine. You just have to get us to the Farm.”

“To a Farm?”

“They’ll protect you. Put you back under. Until the cure.”

I rear up and look around. If there is a Farm nearby, I don’t see it.

If I knew where it was, could I get there in time? Would they really take me in? The Farms feed the Ticks, but they keep them out. They don’t lure them in and protect them. I can’t go to a Farm. And I don’t even trust them to kill me, because that’s not what they do. The Farm system is about controlling the Ticks, not eradicating them.

No. I have to find a way to kill myself. I have to do it before I become a mindless, conscienceless monster.

MEL

Roberto’s house is a Victorian mansion by way of the Addams Family. It’s three stories of Gothic gingerbread and frilly wrought iron. It is not a fortress you can hole up in to protect yourself from an angry mob of monsters.

I haul Sebastian up the steps and through the front door, which had been left open during the battle that had happened here the previous day.

“Do you think there are already Ticks in the house?” I ask, almost hesitant to close the door behind me. I
so
don’t want to lock myself in with the monsters.

The question is rhetorical, since I’m not sure Sebastian is capable of answering.

I look around the house as I shut the door behind us. There can’t possibly be more Ticks inside the house than there are outside it. I glance down at Chuy, who is sniffing the air but not freaking out. To my left is Roberto’s “study,” where he kept a creepy collection of vampire assassination tools—those I’ll pilfer later. For now, I need a place to stash Sebastian while I secure the house. To my right is an elegant living room with—thank God—a sofa and a fireplace, which might prove useful if we live long enough for me to tend to Sebastian’s wounds.

I hobble with him into the living room and dump him on the camelback sofa, too worried about the monsters on the outside to take care of the monster inside. I run back to the door, Chuy by my side, throwing the dead bolts—there are several. Chuy and I dash through the rest of the first floor. I check doors and windows, watching him for signs there might be something hiding that even I can’t sense. We check the second and third floors just to be sure there aren’t Ticks nesting somewhere, and I grab a first-aid kit out of one of the bathrooms. A set of sheets I can tear into bandages. And towels. I bring lots of towels.

Back on the first floor, Chuy prowls around a little before settling just inside the front door, waiting. Sebastian looks even worse than before. Maybe it’s the loss of blood, but his skin is gray. His breathing is shallow and labored. And it hits me—I could lose him. He could die. Right here.

After all we’ve been through, after every horrible thing he’s done and I’ve done, I could lose him.

I’d panic, but there’s no time for that. Instead I race through what needs to be done in my mind: get the stake out, clean him up, bandage him up, and then feed him. Exactly what I’m supposed to feed him, I don’t know. I’ll worry about that if he lives long enough.

I dash back to the kitchen—ignoring the pots big enough to boil body parts and a terrifying array of food processors. I look for the basics: soap, more towels, water. But the water must run on an electric pump, because it doesn’t come on. And there’s tons of dish soap—probably for washing all those food processors—but not a simple bar of soap.

Panic edges into my thinking, moving me faster. Okay. No soap. No water. Then how do I clean a wound?

My mind races back to the Before and lands on some old TV show. A western, I think. Where they cleaned a wound with alcohol. I throw open the cabinets and start searching. I don’t know if vampires even drink alcohol. I hope so. A couple of cabinets in, I hit pay dirt. Big-time. I’m guessing this stash had belonged to Roberto’s valet. If I’d been the human responsible for disposing of Roberto’s victims, I’d need to drink a lot, too.

Back in the living room, Sebastian doesn’t look any better. His eyes flutter open. “Took you long enough.”

I kneel beside the sofa. “What? No sarcastic quip?”

“Quipping takes too much energy.”

“I’ll try to hold up the conversation for both of us, okay?” I say as I unbutton the front of his shirt. I peel back the right side, but hesitate on the left. The stake went through his shirt, which undoubtedly means there are bits of fabric deep within his heart. Fabric that he’d been wearing for who knew how many days. And who knew how clean it had been when he’d put it on. I think of the bacteria and panic starts to creep back in. Pushing it down, I focus on how to get his shirt off instead of why I need to.

I’ll have to slip the shirt off his right arm and around his back, leaving it pinned to his front until I pull the stake out.

“Cuffs,” Sebastian gasps out.

“What?”

He raises a hand weakly. “You haven’t undone my cuffs.”

I feel myself blushing as I realize my mistake, because I wouldn’t have been able to get his shirt off at all. I’m helpless at this. I quickly undo one and I’m undoing the other when his fingers grasp mine until I look him in the eyes.

“Whatever it is you’re so worried about,” he says softly, “it’ll be okay. Just get the stake out and feed me. I’ll be fine.”

There’s such confidence there. Such faith.

No one has ever had confidence in me before. No one has ever trusted me to handle things. As much as I want to argue with him, to warn him about my incompetence and the bacteria, this time I really do put them out of my mind and I just move. Quickly.

I undo the cuff on the other side and raise him enough to get the shirt off and to put a towel down underneath him. I don’t let myself look at the smear of thick blood that’s pooled under his body. I pull out the stake, careful to tug the fabric with it. The remains of his shirt and the stake both go onto one of the towels. Then I open up the bottle of scotch and upend the bottle over his chest.

When the scotch hits the hole in his chest, Sebastian loses it. He bucks off the sofa, his arms flailing. He knocks the bottle out of my hands and scotch sprays across the room. I go flying back, but bounce quickly onto my feet. I have another bottle open and ready. I lunge for him, ready to pin him down and go again.

But he’s got his feet under him now and stumbles back. “What the hell?”

I hold up a hand to pacify him. Chuy has come to stand in the doorway, hackles raised, like he’s ready to throw himself on Sebastian. “Calm down,” I say, to both of them. To all of us.

“I’ll calm down when you put down the bottle.”

“I’m cleaning the wound.”

“You’re . . . ? What the fuck? By pouring scotch into my heart?” He brings a hand up to his chest as if feeling for the stake.

I lunge for him. “Stop touching it! You’re only going to make it worse!”

“Make what worse? You staked me and now you’re poisoning me. It doesn’t get worse!”

“Okay. I’m putting down the bottle. Just . . . just sit, okay?”

He eyes me suspiciously, swaying. He’s vertical, but just barely.

“I was trying to clean the wound,” I say, trying again to persuade him to sit before he passes out or Chuy attacks. Though maybe passing out would make him easier to deal with. “Look, alcohol kills bacteria, right? I don’t want you to get an infection.”

He just stares at me like I’m speaking nonsense. Then he laughs, which must hurt, because he has to put a hand on the sofa back to brace himself. Clearly laughing and standing at the same time is impossible, so he sits. I move a step closer, but he waves me away.

“What’s so funny?”

“A vampire with an infection?”

I scowl. “Who knows where that stake had been? And your shirt was probably filthy and—”

“When that Tick killed you, she cracked open your ribs and stuck her hands in your chest. I doubt she scrubbed for surgery first and you were right as rain within twenty-four hours. I’ll be fine.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t thought of that. I screw the lid back on the bottle. In the doorway, Chuy lies down again, this time angled so he can keep an eye on the door and on Sebastian. Clearly Chuy’s not sure about Sebastian, but apparently he likes me. Carter had said Ely was better than anyone at staying alive on his own, but I’m guessing Chuy had a lot to do with that. “But at least let me bandage you up.”

He smirks, clearly still amused. “If you must.”

I rip the sheet in long strips and then carefully wrap them around and around his chest. Until now, I hadn’t thought much about what Sebastian’s chest would look like. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a man’s naked chest. In person anyway. He’s lean, but still muscular. I know firsthand how strong he is. How fast his muscles can move. Now that the stake is out, his skin feels warmer beneath my hands. He doesn’t complain, even when I pull the fabric tight and knot it. I stop to survey my work. Did I get it tight enough or is it going to bleed through?

“Melly,” Sebastian murmurs.

I look up into his eyes. Suddenly he seems very close. His skin very hot.

Oh my God. I’m still touching him. My hand is still plastered to his chest, my palm resting on top of his bandage, my fingers against his bare skin. Before I can jerk away, his hand covers mine, pressing my fingers briefly.

I bite down on my lip, unable to pull my gaze away from where my fingers rest against his pectoral muscle, long and pale against his darker skin. Something warm and delicious stirs in my belly, like the feeling I used to get when I listened to Rachmaninoff, like I am somehow bigger than just myself.

“Thank you for coming back for me,” he says softly.

My breath catches and I jerk my hand away.

I should not be sitting here with my hand on his chest and a warm feeling in my belly. And I definitely should not be contemplating Rachmaninoff and Sebastian in the same thought.

“I didn’t come back just for you. I came back because I can’t get into Genexome without you.”

His lips twist into a smile that is both sad and understanding. “I know.”