Afterlife

“He is essentially unharmed,” Ranulf said, shaking off the impact of Lucas’s last blows. “The stake through the heart only paralyzes; it does not kill. When the stake is removed, Lucas will be as he was, except for a scar.”

“I know—but—” The sight of him lying at my feet, crumpled and dead as he had been just a few hours ago, was too raw for me to bear.

Balthazar stepped closer. In the relative darkness of the wine cellar, his shadowy form seemed more imposing than usual, which made the contrast with his quiet voice especially striking. “Lucas staked me once to save me. I’m returning the favor.”

“You probably enjoyed it.” I turned away from him then, but already I’d realized we couldn’t unstake Lucas yet. As he was, he was uncontrollable.

“Until we have fresh blood for him to drink, leaving him unconscious is a kindness,” Balthazar said. Just when I might have softened toward him, he had to add, “When you calm down enough to act like an adult, you’ll see that.”

“Please do not force me to listen to romantic bickering,” Ranulf said.

Ranulf’s request was simple enough, but it was an uncomfortable reminder of everything that had happened between Balthazar and me—how much more he had wanted, and what I had been unable to give. Although I didn’t think jealousy drove Balthazar’s actions, I wondered if it allowed him to gain some satisfaction by staking Lucas.

Balthazar had insisted on going after Charity the day after my death, and he had brought Lucas along, knowing that Lucas was too grief-stricken to truly fight. Lucas, near suicidal, had plunged in unprepared. The aftermath of Balthazar’s mistake would be on Lucas forever. That outweighed everything that had happened between us before, good or bad.

This is what you get for hanging out with the wrong kind of dead people, a sardonic voice said.

That would be Maxie, the house ghost. The others couldn’t hear her. She’d been connected to Vic throughout his childhood but had never appeared to him or any other living creature— except me. Anticipating my transformation into a wraith, she’d begun appearing to me back when I was a student at Evernight Academy; now that I’d died, she wanted me to abandon the mortal world and join her in other, more mystical realms. The whole idea terrified me, and I’d never been less in the mood to talk to her about it.

An awkward silence filled the room. A dead body on the floor made casual conversation pretty much impossible. Balthazar studied the wine racks for a few minutes, in what I thought was just a distraction, until he pulled a bottle out. “Argentinean Malbec. Nice.”

“You’re going to sit here and drink wine?” I protested.

“We’ve got to sit here and do something.” Balthazar looked around for a corkscrew, failed to find one, and then simply smashed the neck of the bottle against the tiny sink. Spatters of red fell onto the floor. “It’s not a particularly expensive bottle. We can replace it.”

“That’s not the problem,” I said.

“What is the problem, Bianca?” He, too, had become frustrated. “Are you freaking out because I look underage? My face might be nineteen, but I’m legal plus four hundred years or so.”

He knew that wasn’t what I meant either. Before I could snap at him, Ranulf groaned. “Still there is bickering.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Truce.” I was too tired for any of this.

Although Balthazar looked like he might keep it up, he finally let it go. From his pocket he withdrew my bracelet. “Picked this up off the lawn,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said flatly. But I hastened to clasp it around my wrist again. Since my death a couple of days ago, I’d learned that only a handful of things I’d bonded to strongly in life had the ability to empower me to be fully corporeal again—this coral bracelet, and a jet brooch in Lucas’s pocket. Both of them were made out of material that had once been alive; it was something we had in common. As the bracelet enhanced my power, I felt gravity settle around me, and I no longer had to work at retaining a regular form.

Balthazar sighed heavily, grabbed two glasses from the rack beside the sink, and poured for himself and Ranulf. After a moment, he said, “Can you drink wine anymore? Drink anything?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t seem to need food or water.” The mere thought of chewing was faintly disgusting to me now, I realized—one more difference between me and the living world.

There are better things than eating and drinking, Maxie said. Increasingly her presence could be felt, a sort of cool spot right next to me, but Balthazar and Ranulf remained oblivious. Aren’t you curious about what they are?

I ignored her. I had eyes only for Lucas, so pale and broken upon the floor. A thin circle of bloodstains ringed the stake, no more: evidence that his heart had stopped beating forever. The strong features that had always captivated me—his firm jaw, his high cheekbones—were more sculpted now, his handsomeness as compelling as it was unnatural.

The makeshift apartment in the wine cellar was where we had lived for the final weeks of our lives, virtually the only time we’d ever had to just be together without rules to keep us apart. We’d tried to make spaghetti on the hot plate, watched old movies on the DVD player, and slept together in the bed. Sometimes our situation had seemed so desperate, but I realized now that it was the greatest joy we’d ever shared. Maybe the greatest we ever would share.

We’re together, I reminded myself. You have to believe that as long as that’s true, we can make it. That belief had never been more important, but it had never felt so fragile.

I heard car doors slamming; Vic had apparently managed to get rid of the police. Ranulf and Balthazar lifted glasses to each other, or to Vic. Within a few seconds, there was a rapping on the door, and Balthazar opened it to let Vic in.

“Those guys did not want to believe my home invasion story,” he said. Vic remained on the doorstop instead of coming in. “Apparently my neighbors called them even before I did and said it was a wild party, though how that looked like a party, I don’t know. They made me take a Breathalyzer—oh, man.” Vic saw Lucas on the floor. “What did you guys do?”

“The staking will not harm him,” Ranulf explained. “When it is removed, Lucas will revive. Do you require some wine?”

Vic shook his head. He just stood there in his T-shirt and jeans, awkward and miserable, staring down at Lucas. “He won’t . . . he can’t . . .”

“He won’t attack you,” Balthazar said. “For the time being, Lucas can’t move. And we won’t unstake him until we can get him fed.”

Vic crammed his hands in his pockets, and although he had to know Balthazar was telling the truth, he couldn’t bring himself to walk any closer.

I realized that, no matter how upsetting this was for me, it had to be a hundred times worse for Vic. He was the only human in the room, and despite growing up in a haunted house and attending Evernight Academy, Vic’s experience of the supernatural was fairly benign—or it had been, before tonight, when one of his best friends had tried to kill him.

Balthazar took a pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket and began jotting something down. “Vic, if you can stay awake a while longer, you should head to this address,” he said. “It’s a butcher’s in town. They open within the hour. These guys have a side business in blood. You show up with cash, and they don’t ask any questions about why you need it.”

“Don’t think I could sleep right now,” Vic said. “I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m ever sleeping again.” Though he was trying to joke, his voice broke on the last words.

I went to him in the doorway and embraced him tightly. “Thank you,” I whispered. “You’ve done so much for us, and we’ve done nothing for you.”

“Don’t say that.” Vic’s hands patted my back. “You’re my friends. Nothing else to it.”

How could we begin to repay Vic everything we owed him? Not just money—though we owed him that, too—but his loyalty and his courage? I didn’t know if I had it in me. The rest of us had powers, but Vic might have been the strongest one.

When we pulled apart, Vic gave me an uneven smile. “All my best friends are dead people. Someday I’ve got to figure out how that happened.” Despite everything, I laughed a little.

“Come, Vic,” Ranulf said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I, too, would like to purchase a few pints. And perhaps we can repair some of the damage to the grasses in front of your home later today.”

Vic shook his head as they started out the door. “Doubtful. Unless you spent all your time in ye olden Viking days doing landscaping.”

The door shut behind them, leaving me and Balthazar basically alone. It was hard to know what to say; the silence between us was terrible. “The blood—that’s going to snap Lucas out of it,” I said. “Right?”

“That’s not how being a vampire works. You should know that.”

“Can you please stop lecturing me?”

“You’re one to talk.”

This situation was only going to get worse. Balthazar and I definitely needed some space between us for a while. I unfastened my bracelet and again released my tie to the physical world. “Watch Lucas,” I said as I began to fade out.

“He’s not going anywhere.” Balthazar sat down and took a deep swallow of his wine.

The cellar became dimmer in my vision, until it faded into a blue-gray fog. As the mists closed around me, I concentrated on my memories of Maxie’s face and the first place we’d talked after my death, the attic of Vic’s home. As I imagined it—the old Persian carpet, the dressmaker’s dummy, the bric-a-brac lying around—the place took shape around me. So did Maxie. She stood there in the long, billowy nightgown she’d died in back during the 1920s, just as I wore the white camisole and cloud-printed pajama pants I’d had on at the end.

“Sorry about your boyfriend,” she said, and for pretty much the first time since we’d begun speaking, she truly did sound sorry. Maxie’s usual hard demeanor was softer now. “It’s lousy that you had to lose him like that.”

“I haven’t lost him. We’ll find a way.”

Maxie cocked an eyebrow, her saucy sense of humor already returning. “I already told you. Vampires and wraiths? Not a good mix. A really, really bad mix. We’re poison to them, and they’re no friends to us.”