Crave 02 - Sacrifice (7 page)

Shay knew that Millie’s parents died of influenza. Maybe Ernst and Gabriel had somehow gotten inside the house, collected some of Millie’s things to take with her when they brought her into their vampire family?

She moved to the next box, this one a tiny chest painted black. There were photos inside, the sort of sepia-toned ones you would find in history textbooks. Gingerly, Shay leafed through them, afraid
they would fall apart. She gazed at the faces, searching for Gabriel or for her father. But the only person she recognized was Tamara, sitting rigidly on a chair next to a man who looked just like her. The clothes were fancy, but dated. Long skirts, a hat on the man. It was impossible to tell when the picture had been taken, but it definitely looked older than anything else Shay had seen yet. She turned it over. There was a stamp on the back, probably from the photographer. But the letters were from the Russian alphabet.

“Tamara’s life,” Shay murmured. She had joined the family late, already a vampire. Gabriel hadn’t said a lot about Tamara, and Shay wondered if it was because he hadn’t helped raise her, the way he had with Millie.

Shay skipped the next few boxes, looking for one that was older or that had Gabriel’s stuff in it. There was a box filled with what looked like leather-bound journals, and each was labeled with Ernst’s name. But they were just ledgers filled with numbers. Then there was a big chest with iron hinges, and inside was nothing but a bunch of glass vases, each one wrapped in cloth.

“I guess every family has its sentimental attachments,” she muttered, thinking about the shoe box full of old Barbies that her mom still had stored up in their attic.

Tucked into the corner of the chest was a smaller box made out of some kind of stone, and inlaid in the top was a design—two birds flying across a sky with a sun and a moon both.

Shay stared at it for a long moment, wondering if she’d gotten so weak that she was seeing things. That design . . . it was the same as the design on her locket.

Fingers trembling, she opened the box. There was a small sheet
of fragile, parchmentlike paper inside, covered with spidery writing in thick black ink, complete with smudges and blots.

It was in German.

“This was for my child, but my child went before me,” Shay said slowly, translating the old words. “Now it is for you, child of my heart. I cannot bear the pain any longer. I seek the sun. Your love, my Samuel, must be enough for him.”

Shay frowned, squinting at the letter. It was written to Sam, that much was clear. Was it a suicide note? For a vampire to seek the sun . . . that was death. The sun burned them; she knew that from her visions of Gabriel’s life. Sam had spoken of it on the day that Gabriel became a vampire. Sam had told him of a vampire he’d known, one who had exposed herself to daylight—

“Gret!” Shay cried. The memory rushed back as if it were hers instead of Gabriel’s. Sam had told him the story of Gret, Ernst’s wife, who had sought the sun. And all they’d found of her was a pile of black ash.

Shay turned the paper over, careful not to jostle it too much. Gret had died before Gabriel was even born, and Gabriel was around four hundred years old. Who knew how old this suicide note was?

There was nothing else. Just the note and the box, with the birds, the sun and moon. Shay reached up and unclasped the chain around her neck, sliding the locket off. She laid it gently in the stone box, where it fit perfectly. Did Gret’s note refer to her locket? Had she been walking around with a piece of six-hundred-year-old jewelry around her neck for all this time? She’d had no idea how valuable it was, only that it was meaningful to her because it came from her father.

It was meaningful to him because it came from his mother,
Shay thought.
His vampire mother.

Sam must have kept the locket, with Gret’s last letter. Kept it for all those centuries until he fell in love with her mom. She’d seen in her visions that he planned to give it to her mother when they decided to get married. When they knew they were going to have a baby.

She slid the locket back onto her chain and put it around her neck, forcing her weak fingers to work the tiny clasp. Then, exhausted, Shay closed her eyes for a moment, reliving the visions she’d had of Gabriel’s long life.

They loved one another, these vampires. Sam and Gabriel considered themselves brothers, and they thought of Ernst as their father. Ernst took orphaned children and raised them like family, and when they grew up, the children became vampires too. There was a ritual, and once they did it, they were joined together. Gabriel always spoke of his family as if it was the most important thing in the world to him. Shay’s visions had shown that too.

How do good people do something like this?
she thought.
How can they love each other but hate me so much? Not just me—they hate so much of the world, the whole human world.

She opened her eyes and gazed at the door. Ernst had thrown her in here—literally thrown her. He hadn’t even given her a glass of water. And she wasn’t sure he would ever come back.

I’m going to die in here,
Shay thought.
I won’t ever see Gabriel again. And wherever my father went, he won’t even know what happened to me. He left us so that this wouldn’t happen, and it’s happening anyway.

A tear made its way down her cheek, tickling her skin, but
Shay didn’t bother to wipe it away. The effort would take too much strength. She lay down on the cold floor, resting her head because it felt so heavy, like a cinder block. The locket slipped out from under her shirt, and Shay instinctively wrapped her fingers around it. That’s what she always did during a transfusion, or when she was stressed, or scared.

“Where did you go, Sam?” she whispered, holding on to the locket. “You could have protected me better if you’d stayed.”

He was awake.

Giving in to the death sleep was nothing like falling asleep as a human, not that Gabriel had clear memories of that anymore. But watching Shay sleep during their time together had reminded him of the soft, slow trickle of sleep into a human’s body. The death sleep was sudden, overwhelming, complete. The sun came, and your body shut down.

But waking up was the same. Humans woke slowly sometimes, quickly other times. Vampires did too.

Tonight Gabriel was awake immediately. On guard, fear racing through him, just the way he’d finally given in to the death sleep earlier. Ernst must have moved him to his room. He didn’t remember anything other than Shay being dragged away and the thick door closing between them. Despair combined with the strength of the sun was too much to fight, and he’d let the death sleep overtake him.

But now the sun was gone and his senses were sharp. He had to get to Shay. She wouldn’t survive long without his blood. But how? His brothers and sisters would be awake now too. He couldn’t fight them all. He hadn’t even been able to fight just Ernst.

“Gabriel, come.” Ernst’s voice was clipped, but not angry. Gabriel opened his eyes and turned to see his father in the open door. A burst of fury shot through him—the doors locked from the inside, for protection. They all felt safe locked in their rooms, and to violate that privacy was an insult. No one in the family would ever open another’s door unless there was some grave emergency.

Ernst never closed my door,
he realized. His father had probably sat and watched him sleep all day long, just to be sure that he was safe. Or maybe to be sure that Gabriel didn’t wake up again. Maybe Ernst hadn’t entirely believed that Gabriel wasn’t trying to rescue Shay. It was impossible to tell.

“We’re going to restore the communion,” Ernst said. “You’ve been apart from the family for too long.”

He walked off into the common room, and Gabriel had no choice but to follow. The others were all there, even Tamara.

“You made it back okay,” he said, smiling at her.

“I drove your car off a cliff and hid in the caves. The bats kept me company while I slept,” she told him. Her voice was friendly, but he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Even when he’d been in communion with his family, Tamara had been a mystery. She’d been with them for fifty years or so, but she was the only vampire he’d ever met who hadn’t grown up in the family. The only vampire besides Ernst, in fact, who he hadn’t helped raise from childhood. Richard, Luis, Millie—Gabriel had known them all as tiny children, had taught them the ways of the family, had participated in the blood ritual when they gave up the sun. They were his siblings, but also almost like adopted children to him, the same way he had been to Sam. Sam had been his brother, true, but Sam had also been a second father to him.

“Has anyone checked on the halfblood?” Richard asked.

Gabriel’s jaw tightened at the impersonal way he spoke of Shay, but he was afraid to say anything. He had no plan now, no way to get Shay out of the vault. But the longer he could keep the others from knowing that he wanted to save her, the more freedom he would have to figure something out.

“I moved her to the vault,” Ernst said. “There’s no escape.”

True. Even if she somehow made it out of the room itself and then managed to get up the stairs, she’d never make it past the metal door that separated the lodge from the rest of the facility.

Luis glanced at Gabriel. “We’re all anxious to begin. It hasn’t felt right since you disappeared.”

“Not for me either, brother,” Gabriel replied truthfully. “I don’t think I ever realized how much I rely on our communion. This past month is the first time I’ve been truly on my own since . . .”

“The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth?” Millie finished for him.

They all laughed, and Gabriel joined in. “Are you saying I’m old? You’re no infant yourself, you know.”

She grinned at him like she’d done a million times before. But then there was an awkward silence, as if nobody could figure out how to go back to normal. As if they all knew that normal was never going to happen again.

“It feels strange to do a blood ritual in the common room,” Richard said finally. “Like we’re reality-show vampires hanging out in our fake house. Can we at least turn the overheads off?”

Ernst flicked off the lights, and Gabriel’s eyes immediately adjusted to the darkness. “We could go to the caves,” he suggested.

“No need,” Ernst said. That settled it. Ernst always had the final
decision. “I’ll begin. You all remember how we brought Tamara into our family?”

Gabriel nodded along with the rest. It was a ritual Ernst had come up with, a sort of miniature version of the blood ritual that created a vampire. When a child raised in the family made the decision to give up the sun, the entire family gathered and together drained the human’s blood. Each vampire drank of their new sibling’s blood until he or she was emptied. Then, at the moment of death, the candidate drank from the family—one at a time, taking the blood of each family member in, and with it, their very life essences. When it was done, the new vampire shared in the communion of the family. The new vampire could feel the emotions of each one he’d drunk from, and they could feel his.

Tamara had already been a vampire when Richard brought her to them. They couldn’t empty her of blood, and she couldn’t drink their blood, because vampire blood was poison to another vampire. So Ernst had made up a new ritual: Tamara drank a drop of blood from each of them, just enough to burn the tongue, not enough to cause any damage. And then they all fed from her, just a tiny bit. It had made everyone a little sick, but it had also worked. She became linked to them. And their healing powers had cleared the effects of the poison within an hour.

Tamara’s communion has never been that strong,
Gabriel thought now. He’d always wondered if it was because they hadn’t shared as much blood during her ritual. It used to make him sad, but now it seemed like a blessing. If this ritual allowed Gabriel’s family to access only a tiny portion of his emotions, maybe they wouldn’t realize how madly, utterly in love with Shay he was. Maybe they wouldn’t be
horrified enough to storm down to the vault and kill her immediately.

I can’t think about that. I can’t think about Shay at all,
Gabriel told himself as Ernst approached him. He couldn’t let his strong emotions for her into his mind as they drank.
I’ll think about Martin instead, about how he captured me and tortured me. Maybe the strength of my fury at him will mask the strength of my love.

Ernst nicked a vein on his wrist and held his arm out to Gabriel. “Drink, my son, and rejoin your family,” he said.

Gabriel obediently bent his head to his father’s wrist. He took only a taste of Ernst’s blood, powerful and old, toxic to Gabriel. It burned like lava in his mouth, but even so, it was
Ernst
. His life in all its joy and sorrow shot through Gabriel: love for Gret, his wife; anger at Sam, his son; horror and fear and fury at the humans who murdered their family in Greece; relief at seeing Gabriel home safe.

Gabriel lifted his eyes to Ernst’s, and smiled.

“Richard?” Ernst said.

Richard stepped forward, opening his vein. Gabriel lifted his brother’s arm and drank. The essence of Richard filled him—his happy youth with the family, how he’d adored Sam and Gabriel back when he was a child in New York; the shot of pure love he felt when he met Tamara; and then the misery over Sam. And something new, too, a feeling that Gabriel didn’t remember ever having gotten from Richard: jealousy. Jealousy toward Gabriel.

He dropped Richard’s arm, surprised. But there was nothing unusual in Richard’s expression, and he leaned over to put his arm around Gabriel’s shoulders, a brief hug.

Now Luis offered his blood. Gabriel was starting to feel a little dizzy from the poison, but he forced the feeling aside. He drank
from Luis, taking in the distant sadness of Luis’s parents dying on their Texas farm; the impatience to become a vampire as he stood guard over Ernst, Gabriel, and Sam while they slept; the overwhelming boredom of the bat research; the guilt about Sam.