Falling to Ash Page 3

  Those dinners are just grand. Not.

  ‘I can’t make it tomorrow.’

  Caitlín blew out a frustrated breath. ‘You said that last week.’

  ‘I know, I’m really sorry.’ I tried to sound sincere.

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘I am! I hate letting you down.’ Well, that much was true. But this time I really did have an excuse, albeit not one that I could tell Caitlín: just that not-so-small matter of meeting my ‘new’ Family. I swallowed. Oh, joy.

  ‘Well, if you’d just come over more often you wouldn’t have to worry about letting me down.’

  I felt supersize guilt. ‘That’s low, sis. Even for you.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Whatev.’

  ‘Why don’t you just meet me after school one day next week? We can hang out. Or go shopping.’ Something normal and non-vampire-related would be nice and I could handle it for a few hours, I felt sure. If I didn’t look too closely at the people . . . Nobody here had to know about it. Being such a new vampire meant I could still be out during daylight too – at least for another year or two. If I was lucky. It got harder and harder. Like Holly, there’d come a time when I wouldn’t be able to face sunlight at all.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You know you want to.’ I kept my tone light, teasing.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘I should go. You have a good day, sis.’

  ‘OK.’ She was disappointed in me and I hated that. ‘You have a good one too. Especially now that you have an unscheduled day off.’

  She snorted. ‘I’m sure I’ll have a blast.’

  ‘Bye then,’ I said.

  ‘How about dinner next Sunday?’

  I laughed. ‘You really don’t give up, do you?’

  ‘Nope. Well?’

  ‘I don’t know, Cait. It didn’t go so well before . . .’

  ‘That’s because you spent most of the time arguing with Sinéad.’

  ‘It’s not just down to me.’ I knew I was being petty, but my big sister brought out the best in me.

  ‘Marie, can’t you be the bigger person? Sinéad really would like you to come too.’

  ‘Well, now I know you’re lying.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she replied, way too quickly. ‘So, you’ll try for next weekend?’

  ‘OK.’ It came out as more of a sigh. Would Theo let me go? By next weekend, I’d truly be part of his Family.

  ‘You will?’ Her voice rose up at the end, genuinely excited. It just about broke my heart.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really try? Don’t just say it to blow me off.’

  ‘I’m not. I promise.’ I bit my lip, wondering if I was lying to her already. ‘I really will try, OK?’

  ‘OK.’ Caitlín didn’t sound convinced. I could hardly blame her.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I love you. You know that, right?’

  But the phone had already gone dead, and I knew that my sister hadn’t heard me.

  I shoved the phone into my jeans pocket. I felt utterly drained. I did want to see my sister, of course I did. But it was so hard to be among humans. I was no longer one of them. What if I hurt someone? What if I hurt Caitlín? I could manage these short visits this first year, but I knew that I’d have to break off all contact some time. Theo had explained it all to me.

  But how could I explain that to Caitlín?

  I zipped up my jacket and pulled my mind back onto Rick. I could hardly believe it was only just past nine. I wanted to sleep, but figured that the best thing I could do was take a look at Rick’s body now before anyone moved it. It shouldn’t be too difficult to sneak in there – sneaking was something I did pretty well.

  I listened to the sudden silence in the apartment, inhaled the scent of coffee that had drifted in from the kitchen. A moment of peace before I took action.

  Of course, Holly chose that moment to slam into the apartment, tossing her motorbike helmet to one side as she headed for the kitchen. I heard her hesitate there for a blissful moment . . . before clomping on through the tiny hallway. Great. She was coming in my direction. I rolled my eyes and prepared for trouble. She hadn’t liked me ever since Theo insisted she let me share her space. So Holly Somerfield had inherited me as her roommate, and I’d inherited a love—hate relationship with a twenty-something bisexual bike courier with seriously dodgy taste in music.

  My bedroom door banged open. Holly never knocked. She seemed to have lost the whole concept of ‘personal space’ during the two relatively short decades of her undead existence.

  She posed in the doorway: all cobalt-blue hair, multiple piercings and attitude. The effect was slightly ruined by her T-shirt, which was purple with little black bats on it. Holly had a thing about bats.

  ‘Who the hell’s been drinking my coffee?’

  I sighed. It was like living with my own personal member of the three bears.

  Chapter Three

  ‘WE SHOULD MAKE Theo buy us a dishwasher,’ I said.

  I was sitting in the kitchen watching Holly crash mugs around in the sink, supposedly washing up so that she didn’t have to drink her coffee out of a shot glass.

  ‘How nice for you that you can “make” Theo do anything,’ she replied tartly.

  Lines of small hoops ran the length of each ear. They weren’t silver, of course. Vampires were violently allergic to silver, so if they had been silver Holly wouldn’t have much of her ears left. All the piercings had been done pre-vampire. It was the same with her blue hair – she was stuck with it forever, which was a sore spot with her. ‘You try looking like you belong in a sci-fi movie for all eternity,’ she would snap if anyone dared to comment. I only made that mistake once.

  I just needed to get Holly out of the way. Hopefully, once she’d finished clearing up the kitchen (she was kind of OCD at times), she’d go to bed. Or maybe she’d do some crafting. Seriously. That’s just one more reason that she resented my being here: I’d taken the room she’d originally converted into a workroom. She made Goth-style jewellery (lots of bats, of course) when she wasn’t roaring around on her motorcycle doing courier stuff, and ran her own little mail order business on Etsy.

  ‘Hey, whose are these?’

  I glanced up from lacing my boots to see what she was holding: an expensive-looking lighter and a crushed pack of menthol cigarettes.

  Trent. ‘Oh. One of the cops must have left them here.’

  Holly had been horrified to hear about our visit from the police, though I’d kept the details to a minimum. I’d realized I had to tell her something – both she and Theo would be seriously mad if I hid something like this from them, and the police might be back. I told her they were just making routine enquiries about someone I might have known at college who’d gone missing, and that seemed to satisfy her. You never knew for sure with Holly, though. She could be more sneaky than me – which was probably the only thing we actually had in common. Maybe it was a vampire thing: Cunning. Wits. Guile. All of that good stuff.

  Well, that and our mutual love of coffee. With my reluctant roommate’s help, I’d discovered that if you soak up enough caffeine you could actually cut down on your weekly blood intake. I was still experimenting with quantities, but it honestly seemed to work. At least, it seemed to help. Thinking about that made me contemplate joining Holly for another coffee before I made my escape, but when I saw her dig a bag of the ‘red stuff’ out of the refrigerator I changed my mind. She tossed the bag from one hand to the other.

  ‘Now that I’m back, wanna join me for breakfast?’

  Blood was the last thing I wanted after thinking about Rick’s violent death. ‘No, thanks.’

  I slipped Trent’s cigarettes and lighter into my jacket pocket and headed for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I opened the door and paused. ‘What are you, my mother?’

  ‘Theo doesn’t like you going out when I’m sleeping.’

  ‘Well, you’re not sleeping yet, are you?’

  Holly
scowled. ‘Don’t be a smartass.’

  Anger warmed my cold limbs. I knew I should feed, but I didn’t want to delay any longer. Rick’s body was at the hospital, but for how much longer? This was my chance to do something for myself – to play detective and figure out my own problems.

  My roommate stalked toward me, a predator lurking in her silver eyes. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’ I crossed my arms across my chest and tried to look like I wasn’t scared of her.

  ‘You really aren’t cut out for this,’ Holly said. ‘You shouldn’t go out alone. And it’s daylight now.’ There was no judgment in her voice. More like . . . sympathy.

  I bristled. ‘I can manage a bit of daylight.’ She gave me a look that said, Yeah-right-for-now.

  ‘Later, roomie.’ I flipped her off and ran out the apartment, using my vamp-speed to sprint down the staircase.

  I smiled to myself as I hit the street and almost ran through the maze of narrow lanes and redbrick buildings that filled the oldest neighborhood in Boston. I headed for the tunnels.

  I was free.

  Boston’s abandoned subway network was mostly blocked off now: spooky tunnels filled with rats and long-abandoned areas where trains used to be turned around in specially built junctions. Theo liked to tell stories of how he’d been around when the tunnels were first built in the late nineteenth century: America’s first ever subway system. The tunnels were pretty unstable, which was why most of them had been closed in the first place. I was happier down here in some ways. Strange, considering how pathetically grateful I was still to be able to walk about in daylight.

  Crowds disturbed me, though. All those warm bodies, hearts beating and pumping blood: prey. Yet I still couldn’t truly stomach the taste of blood taken fresh from the source. Sure, the bagged stuff we ‘liberated’ from hospitals had a strange aftertaste – like those disgusting artificial sweeteners people put in their coffee – but at least it didn’t feel alive as it slipped down my throat. And it did the job. It gave me the energy and nutrients I needed to survive without any of the ethical issues.

  I still got urges to drink from live donors; that constant gnawing hunger was hard to ignore, but I did the best I could and hadn’t fed from a human since I’d survived the dark days of my transition. It made me feel sick just thinking about it, remembering it. One week after Theo had turned me, he’d been forced to hunt me through the city as I went looking for fresh blood.

  The iron-rich taste of hot blood in my mouth, running down my throat. The pain in my body – the pain that I thought would last a hundred years, a thousand, forever – immediately passes. I feel as though I am hooked up to an IV filled with pure energy. Sunlight. The blood burns as it goes down, but it feels so good. It wakes me up and makes me feel powerful. I can have anything I want, anyone I want. I only have to reach out and take it . . .

  I remember the expression on Theo’s face as he pulled me off my unfortunate prey. A homeless woman, middle-aged and alone and sleeping beside a dumpster in an alley. She wasn’t dead, thank God. I’d only fed from her arm. Theo used his hypnotic gaze – his power over humans – to convince her that she’d been attacked by a large dog . . .

  The scent of the tunnels was overpowering, bringing me back to the present. I sloshed through puddles in silence for a while, trying to orient myself beneath the hospital by memory. The tunnel came to a sudden stop around a sharp bend at a wall with a rusty iron ladder climbing up into the gloom. This was a narrow side tunnel, maybe a service access or something similar, though why it would be directly underneath Massachusetts General was a mystery to me. The lighting here also stopped completely and I was glad of my night vision. It wasn’t perfect, but it was way better than regular human eyesight. I knew this part of the tunnels well; scaling the ladder was child’s play, except that it always felt like it was going to break away from the wall despite how little I weighed.

  I sighed and shimmied up the ladder, keeping my weight as evenly distributed as possible. The trapdoor in the roof at the top was made of rotten wood reinforced with steel hinges and a rusty bolt on my side. I reached for the bolt, intending to wiggle it free, but stopped with a jolt of surprise. The trapdoor had already been opened. The bolt was free of its crumbling moorings and the mechanism had clearly been forced. OK, this wasn’t good. I thought for a moment. Abort the plan? But there could be a totally reasonable explanation for this. For one thing, I certainly wasn’t the only person to know about this ‘back door’. Plenty of the other vamps in the city were aware of it. Though come to think of it, surely anyone Theo had sent on a food run wouldn’t have to force the bolt – they’d already know it wasn’t half as rusty as it looked.

  My Maker would be furious if he knew what I was up to, but I was determined now. Why? To prove myself to him – and to the Elders I’d be meeting tomorrow night? Or because I somehow felt I owed it to Rick to see what had happened to him? If I was being honest, I was also sick of being told what I could or couldn’t do by Theo all the time. Just because he’d made me what I was didn’t mean that he owned me.

  Except, of course, he did.

  I rolled my shoulders and pushed up on the trapdoor. A few centimeters was enough so that I could peek into the familiar disused storage room of the hospital. I couldn’t see all the way around, but despite the lack of light it still looked empty. I’d never seen anyone in here before and had even begun to wonder if the stories the nurses told about it being haunted were true. Urban legend said that a ghostly presence was the real reason this particular storage area had been abandoned. It was possible, but I had a good enough sense nowadays for these things and had never felt anything dead in here. Well, no more dead-smelling than most parts of a hospital. No matter how much bleach you used, death was one of those impossible smells to erase.

  I should know, I smell it on myself all the time.

  Shivering slightly, I pulled myself up into the cluttered space and closed the trapdoor. OK, so maybe I did smell something out of place here – something that plucked at my memory and stuck out even above the familiar scent of death.

  For one thing, it wasn’t quite pitch dark after all. The windows were blacked out and the main door into the corridor had a blind drawn over it, so where was that cold sort of light coming from?

  I turned in a slow circle and sniffed the stale air, focusing my eyes on the dim light that was coming from the far corner of the storeroom.

  Did ghosts use cell phones? OK, it was a crazy thought, especially considering that I’d never actually encountered a ghost, but still . . . There was a lot of freaky shit in the world. My existence alone led me to believe that vampires couldn’t possibly be all there is to it.

  The light disappeared with a tiny click. I only heard it because of my freakishly good hearing, but there was something about the noise that made me think someone was over there, trying to be silent – and failing. I backed up half a step as a dark shape rose behind a stack of plastic crates and flat-packed boxes.

  The figure stood to human height – a tall human male, by the looks of things – and I suddenly realized where I recognized that scent from.

  ‘Crap,’ I muttered.

  A single, naked bulb flicked on overhead, flooding the space with an eerie yellow glow that danced off shadows thrown by boxes and other packaging.

  ‘You!’ exclaimed Jason Murdoch, vampire hunter-in-training. ‘Moth! What the hell are you doing here?’

  Chapter Four

  I CURSED AS Jace looked me up and down. How could I be this unlucky? There’s no way this could be a coincidence. I refused to believe that Jason Murdoch hadn’t been following me, despite the logical part of my brain reminding me that he was here first, so how could he have followed you?

  The wannabe hunter glared at me. ‘I said, what are you doing here?’

  Jason Murdoch . . . I’d hardly given the guy a thought these past few months, what with trying to get to grips with my new life and all. But six months
ago, after Theo had sent me over to Jason’s father’s apartment, a real test for a fledgling young vampire, we’d fought. Jace had tried to kill me, and I’d repaid him with a busted leg and a kiss I still remember to this day.

  Jace was the son of a hunter who’d been a thorn in Theo’s side some months back. Thomas Murdoch had killed a number of vampires – including Maxim, a powerful master vamp who just happened to be a friend of Theo’s. More recently however, Murdoch Senior had gone pretty quiet. Too quiet. And it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Family’s attempts to shut down his operation. (‘I’m going to rip his throat out,’ were Theo’s actual words, I seemed to recall.) No, the hunter had just dropped off the radar, and Theo seemed genuinely surprised by his disappearance.

  But how had the hunter’s son ended up here?

  I took another step back and tried to slip the toe of my boot under the edge of the trapdoor. Last time I’d come up against Jace Murdoch I’d almost gotten killed.

  I attempted a sunny smile, but it wasn’t an easy trick to pull off when you were half terrified. ‘Wow, fancy seeing you here.’

  I made a big show of shaking my head as though it really was just a funny old world when you can run into the guy who might one day become your arch-nemesis. But only if this was a freaking comic book.

  Much as I didn’t want to admit it, Jace would make a damn good comic book hero. He was tall, with broad shoulders that had filled out even more since we’d last tangled. Someone’s been working out, I thought wickedly. I could tell these things, despite the dark sweater and an army jacket. I mean, not that I was an expert. Theo had been my only real relationship, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have an opinion on this stuff. Murdoch’s waist tapered down to slim hips, and long legs clad in blue jeans and Chuck Taylors that had seen better days. His blond hair caught the light; it was shorter than I remembered, though still cute and spiky and—