Chapter 29
“Jenn.” She’s standing at the far end of the room. Her eyes are blazing, and she’s blocking the only exit with her flaming sword.
Nick’s head snaps toward me at vampire speed. “ Jenn? ” he demands of me, his voice full of incredulity. “You know her? You know this slayer?”
I nod slowly, but I keep my attention on Jenn. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
“What you should be doing,” she says.
“How did you get back here?” I ask her.
“I was very persuasive.”
I think about that nice vampire at the backstage entrance. Did he get away? Or…
Bile rises in my throat, but I quickly swallow it back down. This is so not the time to be getting queasy.
This is the time to be strong.
I can’t let Jenn do what she’s come here to do.
I stretch out my arm and, like I did the morning I first woke up changed, I breathe. I focus. And I call to the superhero inside me.
In a flash, my own fiery blade appears. I hear the gasps behind me, and I know I’ve just outed myself, just marked myself as an enemy when I was so close to making friends. But sometimes you need to choose the hard thing.
Sometimes, you need to have the tough confrontations.
I display my weapon of fire, and it really is my weapon. I’m the one in control of it. Not my slayer. Me. Unlike Jenn, my vision is clear, no red filter clouding it. My mind is sharp, and I know the power is mine to wield as I see fit.
Jenn indicates my sword. “I hope that means you’re joining me.”
I shake my head. “Never.”
“You’re on the wrong side,” she says.
“Why do there have to be sides?”
“Because there’s good,” she says. “And then there’s evil.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, look around,” I tell her. I motion at Quentin and Zach, who have stepped up in front of Nick, ready to protect him from harm; at the other vampires here, who have abandoned their refreshments and their conversations to huddle together, trying to shield one another as well as their human friends from danger; at Arlo, who… is hiding under the buffet table? “Don’t you see?” I continue. “Not all vampires are evil.”
“What I see,” Jenn says, eyeing me up and down, “is that not all slayers are cut out for the job.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It looks to me like you’re the one who’s shirking.”
The fire in her eyes wavers slightly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look at you. You’re just sitting back and letting your slayer take the driver’s seat,” I say. “You’re doing what’s easy. And I get it, because I used to do what’s easy too.
“But the first time I saw you, you were bench-pressing more than your own body weight. You don’t even have to train to keep your muscles, but you do anyway.” I shake my head. “You don’t strike me as somebody who usually shies away from hard work. So I don’t understand why you’re not doing the hard work here.”
The red blaze in her eyes wavers again, and I start to have hope that I might be able to reach her.
“The hard work isn’t fighting vampires,” I tell her. “It’s fighting your own demons and getting past them.” I pause. “And trust me, you’ll never be happy unless you do.”
No reply.
Still no reply.
We stand face-to-face, taking each other’s measure. The room is silent except for the crackling of our twin flames.
Jenn’s eyes dim a third time, and I dare to think I might’ve won her over.
“I’ll never be happy anyway,” she says.
So much for winning her over.
Her eyes flash, and she raises her sword, and that’s when I know for sure that I’ve lost her.
“Step aside,” says Jenn.
I don’t budge. “I can’t do that,” I say. “You know I can’t.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says.
“And I don’t want to hurt you.”
We continue our stare down. Then Jenn breaks eye contact. Looking past me, she raises her sword higher and tries to leap over my head, launching her attack on the vampires behind me. Instinctively, I lift my own blade and spring up to block her. With both of us suspended in midair, our fiery weapons collide.
A crash like thunder but more deafening explodes around us.
Sparks fly up from our interlocked blades, creating a kind of indoor fireworks show. I imagine that Bittersweet, the band that’s currently playing, is treating its audience to an unexpected display of pyrotechnics.
“Back off!” shouts Jenn.
“You back off!”
Hovering up toward the ceiling, blades still clashing, we continue our struggle. Jenn’s drive to slay vampires battles against my desire to stop such blind, senseless killing. Jenn is more experienced, but in this fight, I think I might have the edge. I’m not just acting out of compulsion. I have a real stake in this game. I need to protect Nick.
The sparks from our crossed swords grow more intense and more colorful, exploding more and more rapidly until—
With a sputter, both of our flames extinguish.
For a time, Jenn and I just hang, kind of like cartoon characters who haven’t yet realized that they’ve run off the edge of a cliff. Then, all at once, we drop to the floor.
I land on my feet, but I stumble. Jenn, I see, is also trying to find her balance. When she does, she raises her sword arm again, but her blade doesn’t emerge.
“Get her!” shouts Arlo, suddenly brave as he crawls out from underneath the buffet. “Get the slayer!”
He’s pointing at Jenn, not me. Even though I’ve revealed my true nature, I suppose my actions have proven that I’m not a threat to his undead constituents. And I guess I could leave it at that.
Only I can’t. I can’t oppose such unthinking hatred one minute, then turn a blind eye to it the next. After all, for the last week, I’ve been living in fear of exactly this kind of a vampire assault. And just minutes ago, these same vampires might have attacked me—simply because of what I am.
No. The hate has to stop. Whether it’s aimed at vampires or slayers, it simply must end.
Once again, I insert myself between the slayer and the vampires. Except now, it’s the gathering of vampires I’m opposing. I can still feel that unnatural heat coursing through my body, but I know I’m unarmed too. At least temporarily, Jenn and I seem to have shorted out each other’s circuits.
“No!” I say. “Wait!”
Arlo gets to his feet, and like many politicians, it’s clear he’ll have no problem striking at his opponents when they’re down. “You think we shouldn’t defend ourselves against slayers?”
I search my brain for a response, but I don’t know what else to say. For a moment, I think I may choke the same way I’ve choked at way too many auditions.
But then I remember the one audition where I didn’t choke. And suddenly, I have the words. So with a few embellishments of my own—and silent apologies to the writers of Robbery-Homicide Division —I launch into my closing argument.
“But what you’re talking about isn’t self-defense,” I say. “It’s killing motivated by hatred, plain and simple. And that makes it not just a crime but the worst kind of crime. A hate crime.” I pause to look around the space. I have everyone’s attention, but I can’t tell if they’re with me or not. “Blind hate against someone simply because they belong to a particular community—slayer or vampire—is never justifiable. Do you really want to live with that? Do you want to carry around the guilt of that… forever ?”
Silence.
More silence.
Crap , I think.
Then there’s the hiss of fire.
Double crap .
I turn. Jenn has recovered from our skirmish. Once again, she’s flaunting her flaming blade. But the hatred burning in her eyes isn’t quite as intense as before.
Maybe I got through after all?
She hesitates. For a moment, I’m not sure what she’s going to do, and it looks like she doesn’t know either.
I think about what I’m going to do. Honestly, there are no good options here. I’m not a killer, and I don’t want to become one. But I also can’t let Jenn go on a serial slaying spree.
Plus, I still don’t know how my pretty little speech landed with the vampires behind me.
Talk about a rock and a hard place.
I look at Jenn, and that’s the thing. For a couple of seconds, I’m looking at Jenn . Not the serial slayer.
She’s fighting , I think. She’s doing it. She’s doing the hard work.
Then, instead of aiming her weapon at the undead gathering, she points it back the way she came. And in a blink, leaving a streak of fire behind her, the slayer is gone.
And then there was one.
Zach steps up to me.
I brace for what might be coming next.
“She’s right, you know,” says Zach, looking around at the vampire VIPs. I realize that he’s arguing my case. “After all,” he continues, “we’re not the cold-blooded killers that slayers imagine us to be.”
There are a few murmurs and nods of agreement.
“And not all slayers are the mindless assassins we imagine them to be,” he adds with a glance over at me.
Then it dawns on me: we typecast each other. Slayers and vampires have been typecasting each other. For way too long.
“This slayer defended us against one of her own. I think it’s clear she poses no threat to us. So,” he says, eyes sweeping across the backstage gathering, “I see no threat here to eliminate.”
Concurrence grows louder, stronger.
“But the laws,” begins Arlo.
“Laws can be replaced with new laws,” says Zach with a hard stare at the Vampire Council member. “Just like lawmakers can be replaced with new lawmakers.”
At that, Arlo does a visual scan, reading the faces staring back at him. Then like the true politician he is, he says what he thinks everyone wants to hear. “Very well. I’ll return to New York at nightfall tomorrow. And I’ll report that the slayer issue is resolved.”
There are a few cheers at that, and before long, the atmosphere in the VIP room becomes more relaxed. It doesn’t exactly have the vibe it had before, but it feels like a party just the same. I guess you could say it’s a celebration of sheer survival.
And boy oh boy, do I feel that.
I did it , I think. I pulled it off.
But no, that’s not exactly right.
We did it , I think. Nick and me.
Without him, I could never have controlled my slayer. And I don’t know if I would have discovered my own strength.
“Care for a drink now, love?” asks Quentin, offering me a beer.
I shake my head. All I want is to be with Nick. My eyes do a quick sweep, and I find him in the corner, all by himself, leaning against the wall.
And unlike everyone else here, Nick does not look happy.
I walk over to the scowling vampire and smile up at him tentatively. “Nick?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”
“ What’s wrong? ” he demands. “Are you kidding me?”
My smile fades. I honestly don’t know how to answer.
“You’ve been hanging out with a vampire slayer. Behind my back,” he says.
I’ve never seen Nick this angry.
“What? No, it’s not—”
“You accused me of keeping things from you,” he practically spits at me. “When all along, you’ve been keeping this from me?”
“No, no, no,” I say. “It’s not like that.”
“How is it not like that?”
I search my brain and try to find the right words to explain. “I wanted to tell you. Really, I did. It’s just, well, something Jenn said got into my head.”
“What?” he asks. “What did she say?”
I take a deep breath. Time to come clean. “She told me that if a slayer falls in love with a vampire, the slayer loses their power,” I tell him. Finally.
“What?”
From the look on his face, I can tell this is news to him. He didn’t know. Of course he didn’t know. There was never any kind of secret plot against me. It was just me foolishly keeping secrets from him.
“And once I heard that,” I say, “I started to wonder if maybe us getting together wasn’t real. I worried that maybe everything between us was just, I don’t know…you trying to get me to fall for you so I wouldn’t be a threat anymore.”
“ What ?”
“It was stupid, I know,” I say. Because now that I’m actually saying it all out loud to him, I realize how ridiculous it sounds. “I know that now.”
“So you didn’t trust me?” he asks, and mixed in with the anger, there’s also hurt. “You didn’t trust us ?”
“I—”
“Carrie, I put my relationship with Zach and Quentin on the line to help you,” he says. “I risked my family for you. The only family I have. And this is how you repay me?”
His words are like a stake to my heart. “Nick—”
“Dracula’s Army to the stage,” says a voice, crackling over a loudspeaker.
“I have to go,” says Nick.
“But we’ll talk later?”
“No.”
The word sends a cold chill ripping through my body.
“No?”
He can’t mean it. He just can’t.
“What is there to talk about?” he asks.
“Us?” My voice breaks with emotion on the single syllable.
“ Us ? What us ?!” he shouts. “You didn’t trust me. And now I don’t trust you. So there is no us . I’m beginning to think there never really was.”
And with that, he stomps off to take the stage.
***
A few minutes later, I locate Liv and Heather in the audience in the front of the house.
“Carrie, what’s wrong?” asks Heather as soon as she sees my expression.
“Did you lose it in front of the vampires?” asks Liv.
“No,” I say. “I–I lost Nick.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” booms a voice over the club’s sound system, “Whisky a Go Go is pleased to welcome to the stage…Dracula’s Army!”
As the curtain goes up, my tears stream down.
“Let’s go,” I say.
“But—” starts Heather.
“I need to go!” I shout. “Now!”
My friends exchange a quick glance.
“Then, we’re out of here,” says Liv. “Vámonos.”
Before she even gets the words out, I’m rushing on ahead, bawling so hard I can barely see. I push my way to the exit, bumping into people, jostling their drinks, probably aggravating quite a few along the way, but I don’t care. I just need to leave.
Suddenly, I feel a small hand grab mine and start to pull me forward. And then there’s an arm around my shoulders, holding on firmly, steering me through the crowd. With no more fight left in me, I relent and let my friends lead me toward the door.
My vision is clouded by tears, but there’s nothing wrong with my hearing. I recognize the opening strains of a song that was playing just the other night. The night I spent with Nick. It’s “Lay Down Sally.”
I stop.
This must be the new cover song the band was rehearsing, the one they planned to open the show with. The one Nick said he’d be singing just for me. The last time I heard the lyrics about a man asking a woman to spend the night with him was the night I spent with Nick.
Blinking back my tears, I turn.
The stage is a blur, but I easily pick out the shape of Nick with one of his guitars. Something tells me that for the rest of my life, I’ll always be able to pick out Nick.
He’s at the microphone belting out those lyrics, and it dawns on me that I’ve never heard him sing before. His singing voice is like his speaking voice, but more . Deeper and more resonant. More emotional and raw. Pure rock and roll.
But while the original interpretation of this tune was playful and coaxing, Nick’s is… angry . So angry. His delivery is laced with rage—a rage that I know I caused. And although the words are an invitation to stay, the message I’m getting is just the opposite.
I don’t doubt that he’s singing directly to me. Earlier tonight, that sounded like the most romantic thing in the world. But now the song just sounds like bitter regret. Every note says he’s sorry he ever asked me to stay with him in the first place. Now, all he wants is for me to go.
I can’t stay here and listen to any more of this. I just can’t.
So with a heart that is somehow both full to bursting and completely bereft, I turn. And I go.