Afterlife. Claudia Gray
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.”
“I love Lucas. Our deaths don’t change that.”
“Death changes everything. Haven’t you learned that much by now?”
“It didn’t change you haranguing me nonstop,” I snapped.
Maxie ducked her head, her dark blond hair tumbling around her face. If she’d had blood flow, I thought, she might have blushed. “Sorry. You’ve had a rough couple of days. I don’t mean to— I’m just trying to tell you how things are.”
A rough couple of days. I’d died, found out I was a ghost, seen Lucas get cut down and turned into a vampire, and fought off a Black Cross attack. Yeah, that counted as a rough couple of days.
“You used to play with Vic in this room, when he was a little kid.” I glanced at the place he’d shown me, where he used to sit and read his storybooks to her. “You didn’t separate yourself from the world after you died.”
“But I did. For the better part of a century, I just . . . I was stuck between here and there, and I didn’t quite know what was going on. Sometimes I’d stab into people’s dreams and turn them to nightmares, just to do it. Just to prove that I could affect the world around me.”
I’d heard of wraiths doing worse things, maybe for similar reasons.
Maxie sat on the windowsill, her long white nightgown seeming to glow as the moonlight filtered through the billowing sleeves. “As you can probably imagine, people usually didn’t stay in this house long. It was like a game for me, seeing how fast I could scare them out. But then the Woodsons took the place, and Vic was so tiny, just a couple of years old. When I showed myself to him, he wasn’t scared. That was the first time in so long that I remembered what it was like to—to be accepted. To care about someone.”
“So you understand,” I said. “You see why I can’t give up on the world.”
“Vic’s human. He’s alive. He anchors me to life and lets me experience it through him, just a bit. I don’t think Lucas can do that for you, not anymore.”
“He does. He can. I know it.” But I didn’t know any such thing. There was so much about being a wraith that I didn’t