Crave 02 - Sacrifice (6 page)

Play along with me, Gabriel,
she silently begged. She didn’t know what would happen if the other vampires discovered that he’d been about to escape with her. He might end up locked away somewhere too.

“What is going on here?” Ernst demanded. “Gabriel. How are you awake?”

“I thought she might try to get out, so I wanted to keep watch. I
thought you’d decided to sleep in the caves,” Gabriel said. “I fought the death sleep with all my strength.” His eyes were still locked with Shay’s, and she could see the torment of his emotions. He
had
conquered the death sleep, and she couldn’t imagine what it had cost him. And now it was all for nothing.

They couldn’t fight Ernst. He was old and strong. Shay was too weak to do much of anything, and even Gabriel looked drawn and tired. He’d always said that it was nearly impossible for a vampire to stay awake during the day. And she couldn’t ask him to battle his own father anyway.

“Well done, my son.” Ernst lay his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “You go back to your chamber now. I’ll handle the halfblood.”

Shay blinked away tears, gazing at Gabriel’s face. He looked as if he’d been punched in the gut. Devastated.

“What will you do with her?” he whispered.

“We can’t have her wandering around when we’re vulnerable,” Ernst replied. “We need her someplace more secure until we spring the trap. I’m moving her to the vault.”

He grabbed her arm and jerked her roughly through the lab room and past a thick metal door. Gabriel gasped in horror, but Shay didn’t dare turn back to look at him. She didn’t want Ernst to think there was anything between them. It was bad enough that she was a prisoner. She couldn’t risk Gabriel’s freedom as well.

Ernst dragged her down a long corridor and through a door that led to another stairwell. The door slammed shut behind them, cutting her off from Gabriel.

Shay bit back a sob. Would she ever see him again?

I
T’S
F
RIDAY
. I don’t know what time, not since Millie took my phone. The weird thing is that Ernst didn’t say anything about that. Maybe Millie didn’t tell him? I thought they all had a psychic link, but I guess it doesn’t mean they have a hive mind or something. Gabriel said it was more that they shared emotions, they could tell when a family member was upset or in danger. So it’s not mind reading. Still, I didn’t think Millie would cover for me.

I’m in a different room now. Ernst called it “the vault,” which freaked me out because it sounds like something out of a horror movie, but it’s really just another storage room. It’s in a different part of the compound, under the lodge where they live, I think. I
saw a tricked-out living room through an open doorway when I was being dragged down the hall.

This room has paper, so now it’s my journal. Why bother? I’m not sure. Maybe Gabriel can get these pages to Mom after I’m dead? Or maybe it’s just to keep me sane. Martin always said that habit = comfort. And I am in the habit of writing a journal.

So . . . Friday. Daytime still, I think.

Gabriel looked like hell. I mean, he looked gorgeous. He can’t help that. But he’s never been able to stay awake during the day before, and I could see the effort on his face and in his eyes. I don’t think he’ll manage it again tomorrow. But it doesn’t matter. Obviously, Ernst will keep defying the death sleep as long as I’m here. He wasn’t nearly as wrecked as Gabriel—I wonder how often he stays awake during the day? Gabriel said the older the vampire, the easier it is to resist the sleep. But Gabriel isn’t young. He’s been a vampire since the seventeenth century, and he could barely stay awake to give Ernst an explanation of what had happened. So how old must Ernst be?

It’s strange that I don’t know. There’s so much about them I don’t know. When Gabriel and I were running from Martin, I was so focused on learning about the vampires’ strengths and weaknesses, all their rules, I guess you’d call it. I didn’t think about their history.

Ernst made this family, that’s all I know. He was always the father, even back with the family in Greece before they were all killed. Even Sam—Dad? Sam. Too weird to call him Dad when I never met him. Even Sam considered Ernst to be his father. But when was that? How long ago? And was it in Greece? Did Sam come from Greece like Gabriel did?

You would think I’d know things like this about my own father. His age, his history. What happened to him.

They all call him a traitor, like he did some awful thing just by loving my mom. Even Gabriel thought that, back before he knew me. So what happened? Did they expel him from their family? Or did he leave because they were angry?

Mom always hated my father because he left her. I always hated him for leaving me before I was even born. But now I’m starting to wonder if maybe Sam left us in order to keep Ernst from finding us. Because Ernst wants me dead. I can see it in his eyes.

Shay dropped the pen and shook her hand, trying to ease the muscle cramp in her fingers. That was a new symptom—she’d never had trouble writing in her journal before. But then, she’d never gone for so long without blood
or
food either. And Martin had told her she was getting worse. He’d said she couldn’t live without Gabriel’s blood for more than a few days. It had been a day and a half since she’d had any blood.

Are they going to let me starve?
she thought, hugging herself against the chills that had begun to wrack her body.
Is that what it is, starving?
For a vampire, maybe. To live without blood would be to starve. But for a half vampire? Who knew?

There was no point in thinking about what would happen now. She couldn’t escape, and Gabriel wouldn’t have another chance to save her.

Had Ernst believed that Gabriel was trying to stop Shay from escaping? She’d been as convincing as she could, but Gabriel’s whole family knew he brought her to them because he thought she’d be safe. If Ernst didn’t believe the lie, what would happen to Gabriel for going against Ernst’s wishes?

She needed something to distract her. She’d go crazy if she kept thinking about what she and Gabriel were facing. Shay glanced around the room. The vault. It was a mess. Cardboard boxes covered with dust, ancient chests made of wood, a huge old filing cabinet that looked as if it came from an office on
Mad Men
. It seemed more like an attic than some kind of dungeon.

She could reach the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet without having to stand up. Shay grabbed the handle and yanked as hard as she could, which wasn’t very hard. It took three more tries to get the drawer open enough to look inside.

“Files,” she murmured. “Shocker!”

The manila folders were yellowish, and the edges of them were curled and flaked.
Old,
she thought. Like everything else in this place, including the vampires who lived here. She flipped open one folder and skimmed through the documents inside. They were dated from the 1950s, and they seemed to be research reports on bats and sonar for some government project. Shay ran her finger over the names listed at the end: Ernest Frankel, PhD; Rick Scott, PhD; Gabe Kahn, PhD. . . .

“Gabriel,” Shay breathed. She’d never asked his last name, and it shocked her to see it. But Ernest and Rick—that was probably Ernst and Richard, using whatever names they hid behind back then. Who knew where the last names came from? The names probably changed every time the vampire family switched identities. Gabriel had told her they needed to do that every twenty years or so, to avoid detection by humans. So his last name wasn’t really Kahn, any more than Ernst’s was Frankel.

She flipped to the next page, and her heart seemed to freeze. It
was a letter to some navy science officer, and it was signed by Samuel Westcliff, PhD.

Sam. Dad.
The words swam in front of Shay’s eyes until she realized that she was crying. It was her father’s signature. Just a scrawl of letters on a yellowed old sheet of paper. But it was the first concrete evidence of her dad’s life that she’d ever seen. She had the locket he’d given her mother, the one etched with two birds in a sky that contained both a sun and a moon. But it had come to Shay through her mom. And the visions she’d had of Sam, his life, had come from Gabriel. Shay herself had never met her father, never known a single thing about him, never touched him or hugged him or heard him say her name.

She traced his signature with the tip of her finger, trying to feel the microscopic bumps left behind by the ink. If only she could magically feel what her dad had felt when he wrote this.

He was probably bored to tears,
she thought, smiling. The Sam she had seen in her visions of Gabriel’s life was a happy, loving person. The kind of guy who wanted to be out among people, not holed up in a lab writing reports. Though that was before the massacre of the family in Greece. Gabriel had told her that everything changed after that. Sam hadn’t fully recovered his interest in life until he met her mother, decades after he wrote this letter.

Shay dug through the rest of the papers. More stuff about sonar and something about submarines. The vampires did research for a college now, but back then they were government contractors. She didn’t see any mention of Luis or Tamara, but Millie’s name popped up here and there as a secretary. Shay couldn’t help a smile—the vampires knew how to fit in, right down to making the woman take
dictation while all the men were scientists. Pretty typical for the ’50s.

She pulled herself up to her knees and managed to get one of the higher drawers open. More files. Shay grabbed a handful at random and dropped quickly back down to the ground, her head swimming and blackness closing in around the edges of her vision. Papers flew out all over the place, but she didn’t care. If Ernst wanted to hold her captive, she got to make a mess.

When her head cleared a little, Shay pulled a bunch of papers onto her lap and started reading. These were even older—from the 1910s. The paper was some kind of thin, crinkly stuff, and everything was written by hand. The research seemed to be about bats, but it was much more basic, just identifying different traits in order to distinguish various species. The money came from Hamilton College, and the vampire family had been based in upstate New York. This time Luis was in there—Luis Gonzalez. Gabriel’s name then had been Gabriel Makos, and Sam’s was Samuel Kazan.

“Greek names,” Shay murmured. Were those their real last names? She knew that Gabriel had been raised in an orphanage in Greece—well, at least until Ernst had raided the place and taken him when he was five years old. Sam had been with Ernst, already an adult vampire. But they spoke as if the family had been in Greece for a long time, and Shay had always assumed that Sam was Greek. She had long, thick dark hair that her mother had always envied. Her mom’s hair was fine and blond, Irish. There was nothing Irish about Shay but her blue eyes. If Sam had been Greek, that meant Shay was half Greek.

She felt a tiny thrill of excitement, just knowing something like that. All this family history stored here—it was
her
family history.

There had to be something more about Sam. Maybe a picture or a personal letter.
Something.

Shay pulled herself to her feet and tried to ignore the dizziness the movement caused. There were shelves along all the walls and a collection of chests and boxes stacked on them. Some were ornate and others were just basic pine boxes. A few of them had locks, and a couple had been labeled, though the words were in some other language. German, she thought. Shay had taken two years of German in school, but these labels were so faded that it was hard to tell for sure. The one thing all the stuff in here had in common was that it all looked ancient.

Shay opened a simple wooden box and peered inside. There was a moth-eaten doll wearing a long dress and a yellowed envelope with a lock of hair tied with a ribbon. On the envelope someone had written
Millicent
in beautiful script. Shay’s breath caught in her throat. This was Millie’s stuff, things from her life before she joined the family. Shay had seen a vision of the house where Millie lived as a child—in a rural place, somewhere in America. Millie had joined the family here in the U.S., just like Richard and Luis and Tamara. They were Ernst’s second family, after the massacre killed most of the first family back in Greece.