“Not if we win,” Raquel began, but stopped when she saw Dana’s expression.
“They know our location now,” Lucas said. “More vampires will come. We’ve got to run. Help us get ready to run. That’s the best thing you can do right now.”
Raquel never looked away from Dana as her face shifted from determination to resignation. “Next time,” she said. “Next time I’ll know how to fight.”
“We’ll be in this together next time,” Dana agreed. Her gaze shifted to the brush and the pursuers. Nobody needed vampire senses to know how close they were now. “Get your butt out of here.”
I grabbed Raquel’s hand and pulled her back into the warehouse. After a few days being confined here, always with dozens of people around, I felt weird seeing it almost empty. The blankets were disheveled, and some of the cots had been tipped over in the rush. Still in shock, I started folding a blanket.
“Screw the blankets.” Lucas headed toward the weapons lockers. Almost everything had been taken by the hunters, but there were still a few stakes, arrows, and canisters of holy water.
“We get the ammo ready. The rest we can replace.”
“Of course.” I should have thought of that. But how could I? My brain was stuck, like when the needle of Dad’s record player caught in the scratches of his old jazz records: Are my parents outside? Is Balthazar? Will Black Cross kill people that I care about, people who are probably only trying to rescue me?
Outside I heard a shout—then a scream.
All three of us froze. The noise swelled outside from a few cries to a roar, and the metal wall of the warehouse thudded. It wasn’t a body—a rock, maybe, or a misfired arrow—but Raquel and I jumped.
Lucas shook it off fastest. “Pack this stuff up. When they call for us, we’re gonna have about two minutes to get our gear into the vans. That’s it.”
We got to work. It was difficult to concentrate. The cacophony outside frightened me, not only because of my fear for the others but also because it reminded me powerfully of the last Black Cross battle I’d witnessed: the burning of Evernight. My back still ached from the fall I’d taken while running across the flaming roof, and I imagined I could still taste smoke and ash. Before, I’d been able to comfort myself by thinking that it was all over—but it wasn’t. As long as Lucas and I were stuck with Black Cross, the battles would always follow us. Danger would always be near.
With every shout, every thud, Lucas seemed to get more worked up. He wasn’t used to staying out of fights; he was more likely to start them.
Trunk shut, locked, moving on. Do they want to take the wood that hasn’t been carved into stakes yet? Surely not—they can get wood anywhere, right? I kept trying to figure it out, working as fast as I could. Next to me, Raquel was simply grabbing armfuls of junk and dumping it into boxes without even checking to see what it was. She probably had the right idea.
Something slammed hard into the metal wall again, and I gasped. Lucas didn’t tell me it was going to be all right; instead, he grabbed a stake.
At that moment, two sprawling figures burst through one of the side doors. Even my vampire senses couldn’t tell me which was my own kind and which was the Black Cross hunter, because they were too tangled together—a blur of motion, sweat, and snarled curses. They staggered toward us, oblivious to our presence, only to their life-and-death struggle. The half-open door behind them showed a sliver of light, and let the screams come through even louder.
“Do something,” Raquel whispered. “Lucas, you know what to do, right?”
Lucas leaped forward, farther and faster than a mere human should’ve been able to, and swung his stake into the fray. Instantly one of the figures froze; the stake had paralyzed the vampire. I looked at his still face—green eyes, fair hair, features frozen in horror—and felt a flash of sympathy for him in the instant before the Black Cross hunter slid a long, broad blade from his belt and severed his opponent’s head with a single stroke. The vampire shuddered once, then crumbled to oily dust upon the floor.
The vampire had been an old one, then; there was very little left of the mortal man he’d been. As the others stood there, looking down at the remains, I could only wonder if this had been one of my parents’ friends. I hadn’t recognized him, but whoever he’d been, he’d come here in the belief he was helping me.
“How did you even do that?” Raquel said. “That was, like, superhuman.” She meant it only as a compliment, and luckily the Black Cross hunter was too exhausted and relieved to notice that Lucas had just called upon vampire power.
My eyes sought Lucas’s. I was relieved to see no triumph there, only a plea for understanding. When he’d been forced to choose, he had to protect his fellow hunter. I got that. What I didn’t get was what would have happened if this vampire had been my mother or father.
Eduardo leaned in through the open doorway, panting but somehow exhilarated by the fight. “We’ve pushed them back. Won’t have long before they return, though. We’ve got to load up now.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Someplace we can do real training. Get you new recruits into shape.” Eduardo glanced at me as he spoke, and although he didn’t look friendly, he looked—well, like possibly he hated me less. Now that I was a potential soldier, maybe he finally saw me as useful. But then his grin changed, becoming more cynical as he turned toward Lucas. “You won’t have any more excuses to run from a fight next time.”
Lucas looked like he might punch Eduardo in the jaw, so I grabbed his hand. His temper sometimes threatened to get the better of him.
“Come on, people!” Kate called from outside the warehouse.
“Let’s move!”
Chapter Three
WITHIN TWENTY MINUTES, EVERYONE HAD PILED into Black Cross’s ramshackle armada of old trucks, vans, and cars. Lucas and I made sure to get into the van Dana was driving, and Raquel took the shotgun seat. With the rest of the van piled high with the group’s gear, we were on our own for the trip.
“Where are we going, anyway?” I shouted to Dana, over the wailing on the radio.
Dana pulled out, to join the caravan. “Ever been to New York City?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Nobody was kidding. Lucas gave me a confused look, like he couldn’t understand why I thought that was weird. I tried to explain. “You guys carry around all these weapons and go out to attack vampires. In a big city like that, don’t people—you know—notice?”
“Nope,” Dana said. “She’s never been to New York before.”
Raquel laughed as she thumped on the dashboard in sync with the song. “You’re gonna love it, Bianca,” she promised. “My sister Frida used to take me to Manhattan once a year. There are all these crazy galleries, art so bizarre you can’t believe anybody ever dreamed it up.”
“We’re not going to have a lot of time to spend in museums,” Dana said. Raquel’s drumming faltered, but only for a moment; as soon as the chorus started over, she was pounding the dash as hard as ever.
“It still seems weird,” I said to Lucas. “How are we even supposed to find space there?”
He said, “We have friends in New York. It’s home to one of the biggest Black Cross cells in the world, and they have a pretty extensive support network.”
“In other words,” Dana called over the music, “those guys are rolling in dough.”
I joked, “What, do they live in penthouses?”
“Not hardly,” Lucas said, “but you ought to check out their arsenal. I think there are some armies that don’t have the firepower the New York cell’s got.”
“How come the New York cell is so big?” I asked. Despite the seriousness of our situation, I could feel my spirits rising with every mile we drove. It felt so good to be on the move.
“Why aren’t they like all the rest of you?”
“Because New York is a city with a serious vampire problem.” Lucas looked grim. “The vampires got there almost as soon as the Dutch did, back in the 1600s. They’re entrenched in that area—massive power, major influence. That Black Cross cell needs all the resources it can get to stand up against them. Actually, that was our first cell in the New World. At least, that’s what they tell us. It’s not like we show up in the history books.”
I thought about vampires in old New Amsterdam, and then I thought about Balthazar and Charity, who had been alive then. When Balthazar had told me about growing up in Colonial America, I had thought it sounded so unfathomably old, so mysterious and impressive. It was weird to think that Black Cross went that far back, too.
Raquel must have been thinking along similar lines, because she asked, “Is that when Black Cross was founded? The sixteen hundreds?”
Dana laughed at her. “Try a thousand years before that.”
“Get out,” I said. “Really?”
“Started in the Byzantine Empire,” Lucas said. I tried hard to remember who the Byzantines were—I thought maybe they were what came after the Roman Empire, but I wasn’t sure. I imagined Mom’s disgust if she knew how vague I was about this: some history teacher’s daughter I made. “At first, Black Cross was the guard for Constantinople. But soon it spread throughout Europe, then into Asia. Went to the Americas and Australia along with the explorers. Apparently the kings and queens used to insist on at least one hunter traveling on every expedition.”
That last bit especially caught my attention. “Kings and queens? You mean—like, the government knows about you guys?” I tried to imagine Lucas as a sort of paranormal Secret Service agent. It wasn’t that much of a stretch.
“Not so much, anymore.” Lucas leaned his forehead against the window on his side. The highway rippled by, so fast the side of the road was a blur. “You guys—I mean, you guys know that vampires basically went underground not long after the Middle Ages.”
I gave Lucas the wide-eyed look that means, Shut up, will you? He looked appropriately apologetic. Obviously, he’d nearly said you guys went underground—in other words, he had come close to referring to me as a vampire in front of Dana and Raquel. It had been only a slip of the tongue, but that was all it would take.
Luckily, neither Dana nor Raquel had caught it. Raquel said, “So vampires fooled everybody into not believing in them. That meant they could move more freely—and that Black Cross wouldn’t be as powerful anymore. Right?”
“You got it, smarty-pants.” Dana frowned at the road ahead of us. “Damn, but Kate’s got a lead foot. Does she want us all to get speeding tickets? We can’t break formation!”
Lucas pretended he didn’t hear her bitching about his mother. “Anyway, we don’t get big grants from the crown anymore. There are people who know what we do. Some of those people have money. They keep us afloat. That’s pretty much how it is.”
I imagined Lucas as the figure he might have been in the Middle Ages—resplendent in a suit of armor, honored for his hard work and bravery with feasts in the greatest courts in the land. Then I realized how much he would’ve hated that, dressing up and making nice at fancy parties.
No, I decided, he belongs right here, right now. With me.
“Hey,” Dana said. “At eleven o’clock. Check it out.”
Then I saw what she was calling our attention to: the shape of Evernight Academy on the horizon.
We weren’t that close. Evernight was far from any highway, and Kate and Eduardo weren’t foolhardy enough to drag us onto Mrs. Bethany’s turf again. But Evernight had a distinctive silhouette, since it was an enormous Gothic building with towers high up in the hills of Massachusetts. Even at this distance, with the school no more than a craggy outline, we recognized it. We were far enough away that the damage from the fire was invisible. It was as if Black Cross had failed to touch the school at all.
“They know our location now,” Lucas said. “More vampires will come. We’ve got to run. Help us get ready to run. That’s the best thing you can do right now.”
Raquel never looked away from Dana as her face shifted from determination to resignation. “Next time,” she said. “Next time I’ll know how to fight.”
“We’ll be in this together next time,” Dana agreed. Her gaze shifted to the brush and the pursuers. Nobody needed vampire senses to know how close they were now. “Get your butt out of here.”
I grabbed Raquel’s hand and pulled her back into the warehouse. After a few days being confined here, always with dozens of people around, I felt weird seeing it almost empty. The blankets were disheveled, and some of the cots had been tipped over in the rush. Still in shock, I started folding a blanket.
“Screw the blankets.” Lucas headed toward the weapons lockers. Almost everything had been taken by the hunters, but there were still a few stakes, arrows, and canisters of holy water.
“We get the ammo ready. The rest we can replace.”
“Of course.” I should have thought of that. But how could I? My brain was stuck, like when the needle of Dad’s record player caught in the scratches of his old jazz records: Are my parents outside? Is Balthazar? Will Black Cross kill people that I care about, people who are probably only trying to rescue me?
Outside I heard a shout—then a scream.
All three of us froze. The noise swelled outside from a few cries to a roar, and the metal wall of the warehouse thudded. It wasn’t a body—a rock, maybe, or a misfired arrow—but Raquel and I jumped.
Lucas shook it off fastest. “Pack this stuff up. When they call for us, we’re gonna have about two minutes to get our gear into the vans. That’s it.”
We got to work. It was difficult to concentrate. The cacophony outside frightened me, not only because of my fear for the others but also because it reminded me powerfully of the last Black Cross battle I’d witnessed: the burning of Evernight. My back still ached from the fall I’d taken while running across the flaming roof, and I imagined I could still taste smoke and ash. Before, I’d been able to comfort myself by thinking that it was all over—but it wasn’t. As long as Lucas and I were stuck with Black Cross, the battles would always follow us. Danger would always be near.
With every shout, every thud, Lucas seemed to get more worked up. He wasn’t used to staying out of fights; he was more likely to start them.
Trunk shut, locked, moving on. Do they want to take the wood that hasn’t been carved into stakes yet? Surely not—they can get wood anywhere, right? I kept trying to figure it out, working as fast as I could. Next to me, Raquel was simply grabbing armfuls of junk and dumping it into boxes without even checking to see what it was. She probably had the right idea.
Something slammed hard into the metal wall again, and I gasped. Lucas didn’t tell me it was going to be all right; instead, he grabbed a stake.
At that moment, two sprawling figures burst through one of the side doors. Even my vampire senses couldn’t tell me which was my own kind and which was the Black Cross hunter, because they were too tangled together—a blur of motion, sweat, and snarled curses. They staggered toward us, oblivious to our presence, only to their life-and-death struggle. The half-open door behind them showed a sliver of light, and let the screams come through even louder.
“Do something,” Raquel whispered. “Lucas, you know what to do, right?”
Lucas leaped forward, farther and faster than a mere human should’ve been able to, and swung his stake into the fray. Instantly one of the figures froze; the stake had paralyzed the vampire. I looked at his still face—green eyes, fair hair, features frozen in horror—and felt a flash of sympathy for him in the instant before the Black Cross hunter slid a long, broad blade from his belt and severed his opponent’s head with a single stroke. The vampire shuddered once, then crumbled to oily dust upon the floor.
The vampire had been an old one, then; there was very little left of the mortal man he’d been. As the others stood there, looking down at the remains, I could only wonder if this had been one of my parents’ friends. I hadn’t recognized him, but whoever he’d been, he’d come here in the belief he was helping me.
“How did you even do that?” Raquel said. “That was, like, superhuman.” She meant it only as a compliment, and luckily the Black Cross hunter was too exhausted and relieved to notice that Lucas had just called upon vampire power.
My eyes sought Lucas’s. I was relieved to see no triumph there, only a plea for understanding. When he’d been forced to choose, he had to protect his fellow hunter. I got that. What I didn’t get was what would have happened if this vampire had been my mother or father.
Eduardo leaned in through the open doorway, panting but somehow exhilarated by the fight. “We’ve pushed them back. Won’t have long before they return, though. We’ve got to load up now.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Someplace we can do real training. Get you new recruits into shape.” Eduardo glanced at me as he spoke, and although he didn’t look friendly, he looked—well, like possibly he hated me less. Now that I was a potential soldier, maybe he finally saw me as useful. But then his grin changed, becoming more cynical as he turned toward Lucas. “You won’t have any more excuses to run from a fight next time.”
Lucas looked like he might punch Eduardo in the jaw, so I grabbed his hand. His temper sometimes threatened to get the better of him.
“Come on, people!” Kate called from outside the warehouse.
“Let’s move!”
Chapter Three
WITHIN TWENTY MINUTES, EVERYONE HAD PILED into Black Cross’s ramshackle armada of old trucks, vans, and cars. Lucas and I made sure to get into the van Dana was driving, and Raquel took the shotgun seat. With the rest of the van piled high with the group’s gear, we were on our own for the trip.
“Where are we going, anyway?” I shouted to Dana, over the wailing on the radio.
Dana pulled out, to join the caravan. “Ever been to New York City?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Nobody was kidding. Lucas gave me a confused look, like he couldn’t understand why I thought that was weird. I tried to explain. “You guys carry around all these weapons and go out to attack vampires. In a big city like that, don’t people—you know—notice?”
“Nope,” Dana said. “She’s never been to New York before.”
Raquel laughed as she thumped on the dashboard in sync with the song. “You’re gonna love it, Bianca,” she promised. “My sister Frida used to take me to Manhattan once a year. There are all these crazy galleries, art so bizarre you can’t believe anybody ever dreamed it up.”
“We’re not going to have a lot of time to spend in museums,” Dana said. Raquel’s drumming faltered, but only for a moment; as soon as the chorus started over, she was pounding the dash as hard as ever.
“It still seems weird,” I said to Lucas. “How are we even supposed to find space there?”
He said, “We have friends in New York. It’s home to one of the biggest Black Cross cells in the world, and they have a pretty extensive support network.”
“In other words,” Dana called over the music, “those guys are rolling in dough.”
I joked, “What, do they live in penthouses?”
“Not hardly,” Lucas said, “but you ought to check out their arsenal. I think there are some armies that don’t have the firepower the New York cell’s got.”
“How come the New York cell is so big?” I asked. Despite the seriousness of our situation, I could feel my spirits rising with every mile we drove. It felt so good to be on the move.
“Why aren’t they like all the rest of you?”
“Because New York is a city with a serious vampire problem.” Lucas looked grim. “The vampires got there almost as soon as the Dutch did, back in the 1600s. They’re entrenched in that area—massive power, major influence. That Black Cross cell needs all the resources it can get to stand up against them. Actually, that was our first cell in the New World. At least, that’s what they tell us. It’s not like we show up in the history books.”
I thought about vampires in old New Amsterdam, and then I thought about Balthazar and Charity, who had been alive then. When Balthazar had told me about growing up in Colonial America, I had thought it sounded so unfathomably old, so mysterious and impressive. It was weird to think that Black Cross went that far back, too.
Raquel must have been thinking along similar lines, because she asked, “Is that when Black Cross was founded? The sixteen hundreds?”
Dana laughed at her. “Try a thousand years before that.”
“Get out,” I said. “Really?”
“Started in the Byzantine Empire,” Lucas said. I tried hard to remember who the Byzantines were—I thought maybe they were what came after the Roman Empire, but I wasn’t sure. I imagined Mom’s disgust if she knew how vague I was about this: some history teacher’s daughter I made. “At first, Black Cross was the guard for Constantinople. But soon it spread throughout Europe, then into Asia. Went to the Americas and Australia along with the explorers. Apparently the kings and queens used to insist on at least one hunter traveling on every expedition.”
That last bit especially caught my attention. “Kings and queens? You mean—like, the government knows about you guys?” I tried to imagine Lucas as a sort of paranormal Secret Service agent. It wasn’t that much of a stretch.
“Not so much, anymore.” Lucas leaned his forehead against the window on his side. The highway rippled by, so fast the side of the road was a blur. “You guys—I mean, you guys know that vampires basically went underground not long after the Middle Ages.”
I gave Lucas the wide-eyed look that means, Shut up, will you? He looked appropriately apologetic. Obviously, he’d nearly said you guys went underground—in other words, he had come close to referring to me as a vampire in front of Dana and Raquel. It had been only a slip of the tongue, but that was all it would take.
Luckily, neither Dana nor Raquel had caught it. Raquel said, “So vampires fooled everybody into not believing in them. That meant they could move more freely—and that Black Cross wouldn’t be as powerful anymore. Right?”
“You got it, smarty-pants.” Dana frowned at the road ahead of us. “Damn, but Kate’s got a lead foot. Does she want us all to get speeding tickets? We can’t break formation!”
Lucas pretended he didn’t hear her bitching about his mother. “Anyway, we don’t get big grants from the crown anymore. There are people who know what we do. Some of those people have money. They keep us afloat. That’s pretty much how it is.”
I imagined Lucas as the figure he might have been in the Middle Ages—resplendent in a suit of armor, honored for his hard work and bravery with feasts in the greatest courts in the land. Then I realized how much he would’ve hated that, dressing up and making nice at fancy parties.
No, I decided, he belongs right here, right now. With me.
“Hey,” Dana said. “At eleven o’clock. Check it out.”
Then I saw what she was calling our attention to: the shape of Evernight Academy on the horizon.
We weren’t that close. Evernight was far from any highway, and Kate and Eduardo weren’t foolhardy enough to drag us onto Mrs. Bethany’s turf again. But Evernight had a distinctive silhouette, since it was an enormous Gothic building with towers high up in the hills of Massachusetts. Even at this distance, with the school no more than a craggy outline, we recognized it. We were far enough away that the damage from the fire was invisible. It was as if Black Cross had failed to touch the school at all.
