Chapter Fifty-Three Nightmare On My Street Part ?
My stomach churns at the thought that more people are dying, and I swallow down the sudden fear that’s dragging me into an abyss of horror. Because if all of these students are outside, and none of the adults who are currently in charge of us are anywhere to be found, something really bad is happening.
Or, more likely, has already happened.
“What do you think is going on?” I whisper to Jude.
He must not hear me above the chaos of the storm, because he doesn’t answer.
I turn to look at him, but his face is stoic even as the rain slaps against him again and again.
“Jude.” I raise my voice this time to make sure he can hear me, but he still doesn’t answer as he stares, blindly, into the storm.
“Jude!” I yell his name now. “We’ve got to help them.”
He nods, but he doesn’t move. Just keeps peering into the dark.
I don’t know if that means he’s in shock or if he’s just as overwhelmed as I feel. Either way, I can’t leave him like this. Can’t leave any of them like this—not when so many people obviously need help.
I grab his shoulders and shake him until his multicolored eyes meet mine and snap back into focus. “We have to help them,” I say again.
“I’m trying,” he answers, which makes no sense considering he’s just standing there.
But now that I have his attention, I’m not going to ask what he means. Instead, I say, “I think we need to find our friends. They can go get help while we look for Bianca.”
I studiously avoid mentioning the fact that our friends might not have made it through whatever this is. Eva didn’t. And neither did Belinda.
I can tell by the clench of his jaw that the same nightmarish thoughts are running through Jude’s head.
I pull out my phone again and try to text Luis. But—just like earlier with Michaels and my mom—it doesn’t go through. I try to keep the panic at bay, but it’s hard when I think about Eva.
“Where do you—” Jude starts but breaks off when a scream splits the night, followed by a series of several more.
I whirl around, heart in my throat, just in time to watch a girl run out of her cabin and melt not twenty feet from me. Like actually dissolve right in front of me.
“Oh my God!” I scream and take off down the ramp toward her while Jude simply vaults over the railing.
But he’s only gone a couple of steps before he snarls, “Fuck!” and turns back toward me, holding a hand out to stop me in my tracks. His voice is hoarse when he says, “Don’t come this way.”
At first, I can’t figure out what he means. But he’s standing under one of the old hurricane lamps that line the center mall, and I watch in horror as the rain washes blood off his shoes.
A scream wedges in my throat, and it takes every ounce of self-control I have to swallow it down.
“Whose is that?” I ask when I finally succeed.
Jude shakes his head, and for a second, he looks as defeated as I feel.
“We need to find them,” I tell him. “We need to—”
“We already have,” Mozart says as she and Simon come up on Jude’s left. “It belongs to one of the freshman girls. A fairy.”
“What happened to her?” I ask.
Mozart just shakes her head.
“The same thing that’s happening to a bunch of people in the dorm,” Izzy tells me as she and Remy come toward us, making sure to skirt the ever-growing puddles of blood-tinged water pooling on the sidewalk. “They wake up all freaked out and then—”
She breaks off as more screams split the air.
My stomach plummets as I glance toward the cries just in time to see one of the senior banshees walking on the roof of her cottage. Her eyes are closed, and it seems like she’s still asleep as she walks closer to the edge.
“No!” I scream as I run toward her, waving my arms. “Wake up!” Izzy races ahead of me, but even the vampire can’t get to her before she dives straight off the roof of her cottage. A sickening crack fills the air as she lands right on the top of her head.
“We have to stop this,” Ember whispers, eyes wide with horror as she comes up behind me. “We have to…”
She trails off, as lost as the rest of us are right now.
Across the center mall from her, a sophomore dragon is crawling along the ground, pulling himself forward one slow inch at a time.
Jude gets to him before I can and crouches down beside him, looking devastated.
At first, I don’t know why, but as I get close, I realize that half the boy’s face is missing and his jugular is torn. He’s hemorrhaging blood all over the path, and it doesn’t take much more than a freshman health class to know that if we don’t stop the bleeding, he’ll be dead in three minutes, maybe less.
I drop to my knees beside him and press my hands to his wound, but Izzy—who is right behind me—says, “That’s not going to be enough, Clementine. He’s already bled out too much.”
“We have to try,” I tell her. “I can’t just leave him like this.”
“No one’s asking you to.” She squats down next to me. “Move over a little bit.”
“If I move, I’ll—”
She gives up waiting and just flat-out shoves me out of the way. Then she leans down and licks the wound several times.
My stomach revolts, and I turn away. I know vampires’ saliva has special coagulating properties that our power lockdown doesn’t take from them, but it’s one thing to know that and another to see it in action. Still, I’m grateful she wants to help the boy, so I force myself to look anywhere but at them until she’s done.
When Izzy finally lifts her head, I whirl back around and do my best to ignore the fact that she has blood dripping down her chin. “Did you stop the bleeding? Is he going to be okay?”
She says something, but there’s so much going on around us right now—screaming and crying and yelling and fighting—that I can’t hear her even though she’s only a few inches away from me.
I glance at the boy, and he’s still alive, which is saying a lot considering the shape he was in. But his eyes are at half mast, and his breathing is so shallow that it’s hard to believe he’s not going to die any second.
“We need to get him to your aunt,” Jude says as he starts to pick him up.
“We’ve got him,” Remy answers, and there’s a seriousness to his usually amused tone that I’ve only heard when he’s talking about Carolina. “You stay here, see who else you can help.”
At first, I think Jude is going to argue, but then he nods grimly and hands the boy over to Remy, who takes off running toward the faculty quarters with Izzy right behind him.
“We need to find my family members,” I say as I watch them go. “And anyone else who can help.”
“We can do that,” Ember volunteers.
“Yeah, we’ll split up. See who we can find,” Mozart agrees while Simon nods.
As they take off running, I turn to Jude. “We still need to find Bianca. She could still be alive.”
“She’s not,” he answers.
I’m really scared that he’s right, but still, we can’t assume. “You don’t know that—”
“I do. I found her on our way over here.” He points to a broken-down bench in the shape of a giant pink sea anemone that’s been here since resort days. “She’s right there.”
There’s one of the old-fashioned standing hurricane lamps not far from the bench, and now that I know where to look, even through the rain, I can see her legs sticking out from behind the bench, both bent at weird, unnatural angles.
Sorrow floods through me as I think about the year we spent in group therapy together. She used to talk about how she wanted to move to Greece one day. She’d tell me stories about the Mediterranean and how beautiful it is and how amazing the people there are. She even memorized Greek recipes so that she could make them when she got out of here.
It seemed like she had a really nice life planned there, and it guts me that she’ll never get to see the sun sparkle off the water like in the pictures she showed me.
Because she’s gone, just like Eva and Serena and Belinda and who knows how many others at this point.
It’s heartbreaking and terrifying, and I would give anything to wake up in my warm bed—even with a snake on top of me—and realize that this is all just a bad dream. That none of it is true. That everything in my life, in all our lives, hasn’t gone completely sideways.
But as I look at Jude’s face, I realize that’s just a fantasy. This is real. It’s happening right now, right this instant, to all of us. And it’s going to keep happening if we don’t figure out what’s going on.
“We have to stop this,” I tell Jude.
He nods grimly, the sharp planes of his face gone craggy with a pain I don’t understand. “I will,” he tells me, and it sounds like a vow.
“You? How can you—” I break off when I hear someone calling my name from behind us. I turn to find Luis staggering toward me, his shirt soaked with blood.