Chapter 30
Yasmine had never been to Allentown, New Jersey before.
At least, she had no memory of it.
It could be because it looked like every other copy-paste suburb in the Tristate area.
A Presbyterian church with a white steeple; a few “historic” houses—American historic, which meant they barely qualified to use the term—a pizza place, and a bunch of nostalgic-sounding cafes with names like Petunias and Wallace Bobby Coffee.
But not a single thing rang a bell. It was driving Yasmine insane.
She’d seen herself in that video footage, in her stupid nineties cardigan and loafers, sipping a coffee as she and Rebecca walked from the main district into the woods.
She saw herself point towards the horizon, and watched the camera zoom in towards a rusted fence.
A rusted fence. Yasmine came back to the present as they were about to speed by it.
“This is it,” Yasmine inhaled, pounding at the window of the car. “Pull over!”
It was like a frame right out of the video. The Allentown Water Utility building.
The driver stalled the car at the end of a narrow service road. Just like in the footage, a chain-link fence surrounded the property, though several sections sagged inward as if no one had maintained them in years.
That’s the trick. It looks unmaintained. A public building with no funding to demolish it and no use in rebuilding it, it was the perfect specimen.
Yasmine slammed the car door behind her and started stalking towards the building’s entrance.
Despite the rest of the property’s dedication to looking abandoned, Yasmine immediately spotted the security cameras mounted beneath the roofline.
They still looked intact, meaning no one had tried to disarm them.
Her shoulders sagged in relief when she tried the door. It didn’t budge.
“How’s it looking?” Bella said, coming up behind Yasmine. She had this permanent guilty edge to her voice now, even though Yasmine had reminded her a hundred times in the car that she couldn’t have known.
“It doesn’t seem like anyone’s tampered with anything.” Yasmine moved towards the keypad mounted to the side of the doorframe. A small red light glowed above the pad, indicating that security was still online. “Which could be a good or a bad sign.”
“Why would it be a bad sign?”
Yasmine forgot to reply as she began to wordlessly punch the numbers in. She had no idea what the code was, but her fingers seemed to remember.
The keypad buzzed, and blinked green.
A chill went down Yasmine’s spine.
“We’re in,” she breathed.
Inside, the lights shuddered to life, one after another. There were generators buzzing on all sides of them, but Yasmine could barely hear anything over the pulse in her ears. Her fingers were twitching uncontrollably as she called for the freight elevator.
She probably looked mildly on edge to the random observer, but internally she was trying everything she could not to lose her mind completely.
If her powers destroyed any part of this facility, the security measures would fire, and they would be stranded on the top level, completely locked out of the inner bunker beneath.
And they’d have no access to Wallace.
A warm hand touched Yasmine’s, and it felt like spying a buoy over a dark horizon. Her eyes snapped up to meet Bella’s sharp pupils.
The elevator shaft was small, so even though they were leaning on opposite walls, there wasn’t much space to hide in. She could still hear Bella’s pulse, even over the whining of the cables.
“We should talk about what to do if my family is down there,” Bella whispered. “Or if they arrive shortly after we do, and we don’t have time to get out first.”
Yasmine’s eyes widened. She had been expecting Bella to placate her—not strategize with her. Bella was always supposed to be the optimistic one.
That didn’t bode well.
“Right,” she said, taking in a haggard breath. “Yes, good idea.”
Bella nodded, then looked out of the shaft, towards the cold cement walls that were whipping past. She kept her eyes trained there as she spoke.
“All my mother wants are two things. The contract, and me. If she gets both of those things, I trust she’ll leave you and Wallace alone. So in the case that she has the contract, I’ll just go with her. Then you can take Wallace.”
“Why do you keep doing that?”
Bella blinked, furrowing her eyebrows. “Doing what?”
“Offering yourself back to her. All your ideas start with that as a given.”
Bella’s eyes went cold. She looked shellshocked by the accusation—as if it wasn’t obvious. Maybe to her, it wasn’t.
Yasmine didn’t leave her to stew in it. She shook her decisively, and continued.
“Either way, even if you did go back with her, I think expecting her to leave me and my son out of it seems naive. If I were her, I would definitely try to kill me. I’m just about the biggest nuisance she could ever invite into her life.
Allowing me the time to strategize and plot a counter-measure against her would be a mistake. ”
Bella paused for a long moment as they plummeted through the dark.
“She doesn’t work that way. She doesn’t really… kill people. My sisters and I kill people when she tells us to, but she doesn’t like getting her own hands messy.”
“She doesn’t kill people, or she can’t kill people?”
That made Bella pause, her lips falling open. Yasmine watched her frown thoughtfully in the dim reflection of the passing cables.
“She… can. I heard her do it several times when I was a child, but she’d always lock us in the other room, so I never saw it in person,” she said. “I think draining people tires her out. She’s much older than we are, if you can imagine that.”
“Much older?” Yasmine scoffed, startled. “How is that even possible? Was she prancing around with the dinosaurs when the asteroid hit?”
Bella huffed out a laugh. It was nice to hear again.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Honestly, I have no idea what her true age is. She’s very cryptic about her childhood. All I know is that her parents were human.”
“So she was turned?”
Bella shook her head.
“No. No one turned her. It started with my mother.”
The elevator began to creak loudly, the cables gasping for breath; they were approaching the lower floors. Yasmine could see the lights begin to click on below.
“It,” Yasmine said slowly. “You mean vampirism.”
Bella shrugged. “I mean the fungus. I think there was something in our village in Dacia… or whatever village my mother was from originally. I don’t know why it reacted only to her biology.
I’m sure there were other people living there.
You’d think there’d be way more vampires than there are, if all it took was a simple infection. ”
“Maybe there were more, and she killed them all.”
Bella hummed. “I never even considered that, but, yeah. Maybe.” She paused, her usual mischievousness coming alight in her eyes again. “Seems like something she’d do. She’s like the Tonya Harding of vampires.”
Yasmine let out a small, accidental laugh. It was like opening the oven door and letting the steam roll out; she’d momentarily forgotten just how terrified she was.
But Bella’s words kept spinning around in her head. She never saw her mother drain someone. The detail itched at her. She reached out across the space, and intertwined their fingers. Their clasped hands painted a towering shadow on the wall.
“I have a theory on why she doesn’t kill people around you,” Yasmine said, squeezing Bella’s palm. “And why she hasn’t done it since you were a child.”
Bella glanced up with a startled look in her eye, her eyebrows furrowed. The elevator seized as it landed on the ground floor, the doors shuttering open.
“What is it?”
“Because she knows not seeing it is worse,” Yasmine said, stepping out. “You can spend your whole life imagining something more frightening than what’s actually there.”
***
Six more keycode-protected hallways later, they were finally approaching the shelter. Ahead, a heavy steel door waited at the end of the corridor. GUEST ROOM was stenciled across it in oversized white letters.
Yasmine suspected the name had once been a joke between her and Rebecca.
That thought made her heart ache.
“It looks fine from here,” Bella said, sounding relieved. Or at the very least, forcing herself to sound it. “I mean, we knew it would be. You wiped everyone’s memory of this place, including Rebecca’s. And only we had the CD.”
Despite the logic in Bella’s words, something was still itching at Yasmine, even from their distance from the door. Something she’d been trying to avoid thinking about, so she didn’t accidentally set her powers afire.
“Rebecca wouldn’t need the CD to know the contract is here.”
“...What?”
“Yeah. She’s in charge of what types of items we store in each of the bunkers, so even if she couldn’t recall exactly which one she put the contract in, she could use a process of elimination to figure it out. I’m sure it wouldn’t take her more than ten minutes.”
Bella paused. “Even if she could figure it out, she could still lie to them.”
“Well, all of us can make wise choices. Doesn’t mean we always do. And being surrounded by a bunch of soulsucking vampires doesn't exactly breed rationality.”
Before Bella could get another word in, they arrived at the door.
At first, it looked identical to every other barrier they’d encountered: a flat slab of metal with a keypad attached to the left.
But when Yasmine went to punch the numbers in—remembering them immediately, 0521, May 21st, Wallace’s birthday—a sliver of light blinded her.
It was coming from inside the room. The door was left ajar by just a few centimeters, allowing light to spill out from inside.
Light, and, crucially, noise.
“Just keep applying pressure to the wound.”
Oh, god. That’s Rebecca’s voice. But it had none of the command it usually did; she sounded scattered, frenzied, strained, like her throat was hoarse from screaming.
“Get ready to lift him,” Rebecca continued. “Transport will be here soon.”