The Craving sd-3 Read online

  But the words echoed hollowly within the crypt, having nowhere else to go.

  CHAPTER 27

  There was nothing to indicate the passage of hours inside the windowless vault – not the barest suggestion of sunlight ever made its way under its doors. Days melted into weeks, maybe months. It felt as if an eternity had passed, and yet another stretched out endlessly before us.

  Lexi and I had stopped talking. Not out of anger or hopelessness, but just because we couldn’t anymore. We didn’t have enough strength to force ourselves to scream when we heard someone approach, much less get up and fight the stone that kept us buried. There was no more strength to fight the darkness, no strength to stand up. If I’d still required my heart to survive, I’m not sure I’d have had the strength to keep blood pumping through my veins.

  We lay silently next to each other. If anyone ever found us, a hundred years from then, we would look pathetic, like a sister and brother in some horrible fairy tale trapped in a witch’s basement.

  Each passing second drained me of my Power. My eyes no longer parsed the darkness. The silence was absolute as sounds from the outside world faded into oblivion. All that I had left was my sense of touch – the feel of Lexi’s waxy hand, the rough wood of the battered coffin next to me, the cool metal band of my useless ring.

  I felt almost human again, in the worst possible way. And as my Power retreated painfully, so with it went my immortality. I had never noticed its continual presence until it began to disappear, leaving meat and bone, brain and fluids and taking away all that was supernatural about me with it.

  Except for my hunger.

  My vampire side reacted to starvation. My teeth ached and burned with need so badly that I would have shed tears if I’d had any. Blood weaseled its way into my every thought. I dreamed of how it had beaded up, jewel-like, on Callie’s finger when she’d cut herself. How smoky my childhood crush, Clementine Haverford, had tasted. How, as my father lay dying on the floor of his study, his blood had spread out around him like greedy, searching fingers, staining everything in sight a dark, delicious red.

  In the end, everything comes back to blood. Vampires are nothing but hunger personified, designed expressly for the purpose of stealing blood from our victims. Our eyes compel them to trust us, our fangs rip open their veins and our mouths drain them of their very life source.

  Blood…

  Blood…

  Blood…

  Blood…

  The word whispered to me over and over, like a song caught in one’s head, filling every crevice of my brain and coating each memory with its tantalising scent.

  And then a very familiar voice began to talk to me.

  ‘Hello, Stefan.’

  ‘Katherine?’ I croaked, barely able to get the words out.

  I managed to turn my head just enough to see her sprawled voluptuously on a set of silk pillow cushions. She looked exactly as she had the night of the massacre, before they took her away and killed her. Beautiful and partially undressed, her pouty lips giving me a knowing smile.

  ‘Are you…alive?’

  ‘Shhhh,’ she said, leaning over to stroke my cheek. ‘You don’t look well.’

  I closed my eyes as her intoxicating scent of lemon and ginger swept over me, so familiar and so real that I swooned. She must have fed recently because the heat from her skin burned in the cold tomb.

  ‘I wish I could help you,’ she whispered, her lips close to mine.

  ‘Your. Fault,’ I managed to breathe.

  ‘Oh, Stefan,’ she scolded. ‘You may not have been as willing as your brother, but you didn’t precisely object to my…ministrations.’

  As if to emphasise her words, she leaned over and pressed her soft lips to my cheek. Again…and again…dragging them down my parched neck. Very, very delicately, she teased me, letting the tips of her fangs just puncture my skin.

  I moaned. My head spun.

  ‘But. You. Burned,’ I rasped. ‘I saw the church.’

  ‘Do you wish me dead?’ she asked, fire in her eyes. ‘Do you want me to burn, to collapse to the ground in a pile of ashes, simply because you can’t have me all to yourself?’

  ‘No!’ I protested, trying to push her off my neck. ‘Because you made me a monster…’

  Her laugh was light and melodic, like the wind chimes Mother had hung on the front porch of Veritas. ‘Monster? Really, Stefan, one day you will remember what you knew to be true back in New Orleans – that what I have given you is a gift, not a curse.’

  ‘You’re as mad…as…Klaus…’

  She sat back, alarm etching lines around her amber eyes. Her lower lip wobbled. ‘How do you know about K—?’

  The crypt doors exploded into a thousand shards of stone and wood, as though shot through with a cannon.

  I covered my face, the light burning my eyes like acid. When I opened them again, Katherine was gone, and a blurry figure garbed in black wavered in the jagged doorway, haloed by the punishing light.

  ‘Klaus?’ Lexi whispered in a terrified voice, clutching my hand.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint,’ came a wry voice.

  ‘Damon!’ I struggled to sit up.

  ‘Stefan, don’t you think it’s time you stopped just waiting around for your big brother to come and rescue you?’

  Without ceremony he reached in, grabbed my wrist, and flung me out of the crypt. I flew into the opposite wall and fell down into a heap on the marble floor. Damon was gentler with Lexi, though not by much. Another weightless corpse, she flopped against me, legs askew.

  Dust and shrapnel floated around us like fog. I blinked at the nondescript walls, trying to get my bearings.

  ‘Here,’ he said, holding out a silver flask. ‘You’re going to need it to escape.’

  I put my lips against the mouth of the vessel. Blood. Sweet, sweet, blood…

  A voice in the back of my mind shouted that it was human blood, but I silenced it with a splash of heady liquid. I drank deeply, desperately, groaning when Damon grabbed the flask away from me.

  ‘Save some for the lady,’ he said.

  Lexi drank greedily as well. Blood dripped down her chin and around her lips as she sucked hard and silently. Her skin, which had been drawn, pale and wrinkled as an old woman’s filled out and became pink and puffy.

  ‘Thanks, sailor,’ she breathed. ‘I needed that.’

  Like a lamp filling a cellar with heat and light, I felt my own Power radiate through my limbs, returning my senses to what they were, imbuing my body with a strength I hadn’t experienced since before I started eating only animals.

  As my vision cleared, I gasped. Behind Damon, a black-haired woman stood with one hand to her temple, the other gripped into a fist at her side. Her eyes were closed and her body shook with the slightest of tremors. It looked like she was in deep pain, being held in place while unknown tortures were applied to her mind and body.

  Margaret.

  And she wasn’t alone. There was a prone figure in front of her, writhing in pain, and I realised with a jolt that Margaret wasn’t being tortured – she was the one inflicting pain in another. In Lucius.

  In the super-vampire, so Powerful, yet still only a foot soldier of Klaus, the demon directly descended from hell. Lucius had murdered the Sutherlands, captured me with ease and caught Lexi like a troublesome mouse. The monster had his head in his hands and was screaming, terrible screams that seemed to send reverberations through the very chapel.

  ‘Is that Margaret?’ I asked, dumbfounded.

  Damon pulled me up, propelled me towards the door.

  ‘We can’t leave her!’

  ‘She’ll be fine!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Questions later. Running now.’

  And so, with one last look at the woman who had brought Hell itself to its knees, I ran away from the site of my imprisonment and out into moonlight.

  CHAPTER 28

  The three of us tore out of the chapel. As soon as we left the Richards�
�� estate grounds we were plunging through woods. Saplings stung our legs as we pitched downhill through the wet night, and tall pines blocked whatever moonlight might have slipped between the clouds. If we had been human, our feet would have surely skidded on the forest floor of decaying leaves. Unable to see more than a yard or so in front of us we would have crashed into the giant trunk of a tree.

  Instead, we moved like predators, coursing through the night like vampires had for hundreds of years: streaking through the wilds to the next village of potential victims, chasing down someone who had foolishly separated from the herd and decided to travel at night by himself.

  It felt good to be racing this way, with a few ounces of human blood zinging through my veins. I was almost able to lose myself in the flight, forgetting about what it was we were fleeing from.

  Then there was a noise.

  It started out like the beginning of a long roll of thunder, climbed into a crescendo of inhuman groaning and ended in a screech of despair. The noise was everywhere, filling our ears, the valley we were descending into, the sky above us.

  The three of us stopped, startled by the sound.

  ‘Well, I guess the vampire is free,’ Damon huffed.

  ‘Margaret—’ I began.

  ‘Trust me, she’s fine. Did you see what she did to him?’ he pointed out.

  ‘What is she, though?’ I asked.

  ‘A witch.’

  ‘Like Emily?’ I wondered, my theory confirmed. Was the world simply full of witches, vampires, demons and who knows what else, most of which were invisible to human eyes?

  ‘I had a feeling there was something different about her when I couldn’t compel her…’ Damon explained. ‘So I asked. And she answered. Pretty straightforward, that one.’

  ‘So she…’

  ‘Cast a protective spell around herself and her husband, and was burning his brain meats with some mental ability or other to buy us a little time. Emphasis on the word little,’ he added. ‘Hope that protective spell is still up.’

  There was another roar.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Lexi ordered, and we began again.

  The woods grew blacker as if nature herself dreaded his approach, and we could feel the earth tremble with his every footstep.

  Damon and I leaped over a giant log, and for one fleeting moment our motions were perfectly synchronised. But then the three of us came to skidding halt at the edge of a cliff that looked out over all of upper Manhattan.

  ‘Huh,’ my brother said doubtfully, peering over its edge.

  ‘We’ll have to find some other way down,’ I said, starting to look back the way we came. ‘A path, or…’

  With a cry, Lexi hurled herself over the edge of the cliff.

  I watched her, wide-eyed with horror.

  ‘Find another way down?’ Damon said, shaking his head disappointedly at me. ‘Still thinking like a human, brother.’ And he dove after her.

  I swore under my breath, watching him disappear into the branches below. Then I followed.

  As frightening as that fall was, there was something very freeing about it. I was weightless, swimming through the air. The world whistled through my outstretched fingers and hair. It almost felt as though I were flying.

  I smashed down through thick leafy canopy and rolled into a ball, eventually coming right side up with a twisted ankle that reset itself almost before I noticed it.

  Damon and Lexi were standing still. She had her head cocked, listening to the strange quiet we suddenly found ourselves in.

  ‘He lost us,’ Damon said, triumphantly. ‘He didn’t realise we went down the cliff! He’s…’

  ‘He’s in front of us,’ Lexi breathed, eyes widening. The silence to the south was in fact complete, as if every living thing had quieted or died. We waited, unsure what to do, though it was hard to say for what.

  Then came the sound of a single blade of grass bending and breaking.

  ‘RUN!’ Lexi screamed.

  We took off. I made the mistake of looking behind me. What I saw and what I heard didn’t match up; on the one hand, it briefly appeared that an older man was following me with surprising swiftness. But the shadow cast by the moonlight was of something far bigger and inhumanly shaped. Bushes and trees fell and crashed out of his way before he even touched them.

  I doubled my pace.

  We had no choice but to head south. The woods thinned and civilisation began to rear its ugly head: a lonely, last farm, a cluster of abandoned holdings, a large estate, a hotel, dirt roads to paved avenues still crowded with horses and carriages and cabs and people even in the middle of this night.

  And behind us, gaining power from every shadow through which he passed, was the old one.

  We turned a corner around a fruit stand, knocking down baskets, and the stench of decay that issued from his raggedly breathing mouth was hot on my neck. We dashed through a slum, avoiding clotheslines and open pits of raw sewage, and he was there, throwing aside things and people to get to us. When we thought we had pulled ahead, twisting through narrow alleys and confusing side streets, we could still feel his Power, his frustration vibrating through the night.

  Lexi led us, and whether it was her own Power or a familiarity with the city, she managed to find just the right fire escapes to leap to, just the right piles of garbage to roll over. Perhaps this was not the first time she had fled from a demon of this stature.

  ‘The seaport,’ she hissed. ‘It’s our only chance.’

  Damon nodded, for once having no trouble taking orders from someone else. We made our way to the west, to the avenues bordering the mighty Hudson.

  Lexi’s eyes suddenly narrowed and she pointed. A clipper ship, a pretty shiny blue vessel just pulling away from the dock, filled with all sorts of New York goods to sell overseas.

  With a mighty leap Lexi cleared the water between the dock and its deck, arms poised in the air like a cat leaping upon its prey. Damon and I followed suit, silently landing on the dark deck. By the time we recovered ourselves she was already compelling a shocked sailor who had seen the manner of our arrival.

  ‘We’re on the manifest. My brothers and I have a berth below. We did not just leap aboard…’

  Damon surveyed the ship with interest, pleased with his new locale.

  I looked back towards shore. There stood a single, innocuous-seeming man leaning against the rail of the wharf, pale as if he had sucked all the moonlight into himself. He stood casually, like he was just there to watch the ships come and go.

  But the look in his eyes was deadly and eternal – and unforgiving.

  CHAPTER 29

  Her name was the Mina M. She was a speedy ship and a thing of beauty, with sleek lines and white sails. Her wooden mast was oiled to a sheen, boasting smart red flags that snapped in the breeze.

  I stood at the prow and closed my eyes, imagining our journey. The stinging salt air and the bright yellow sun would whip my cheeks red as the Mina cut through waves, leaving white foam and spray in her wake. Little silver fish would glint in the water below in their hurry to get out of the way.

  On our travels we would see tiny skiffs cross the water loaded up with bananas and rum in the West Indies. We’d trade for spices in India. I’d finally see Italy, walk through the Sistine Chapel, marvel in front of the Duomo and drink Chianti straight from the vineyard.

  Maybe…maybe this would be a new way of life for me. Travelling at the speed of water rather than confining myself to the shadows. I’d never stay in one port for too long, outrunning death and my curse. Sailors usually had no friends but the men they crewed with – I would fit right in.

  But then I opened my eyes, my fantasy evaporating into the heavy midnight that surrounded me. A dense cloud cover obscured the sky and any stars embedded there failed to shine through. The Mina slipped silently out to sea, cutting the oily water with barely a hiss.

  This was the vampire’s realm. Though my ring allowed me to walk in the daylight, my world existed in darkness. It w
as then, while the sun slumbered, that I hunted, evaded enemies, spewed curses, broke promises and gave myself over to hate. We had escaped Klaus’s minion, but we hadn’t defeated him. He and his master were still out there, somewhere, planning on future torture and death for me and Damon.

  Lexi came up on deck behind me and touched my shoulder.

  ‘We’re en route to San Francisco,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve not been there…in a while. But you’ll love the fog and dismal weather. Great for brooding.’ She gave me a thin smile. ‘And I can tell you’re going to be quite the brooder.’

  I leaned against the deck rail. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there would never be a place for me, that I would never fit. And I didn’t deserve to, after all the lives I’d ended.

  The night wind tousled my thick brown hair and Lexi tucked it behind my ears.

  ‘He said an eye for an eye,’ I began.

  ‘Yes. Well.’ She took a deep sigh and looked serious for a moment, eyes narrowing. ‘This is a fast ship and it will take him time to figure out our manifest. Besides the legal cargo of tea and coffee, there’s a sizable shipment of opium they’re planning to pick up in Frisco. The captain failed to register with the dock master, so it will be a while before anyone figures out where we turn tail to.’

  ‘No. I mean yes, that’s good.’ I rubbed a sudden spray of water from my eyes. ‘But I meant…he killed the people that were supposed to be our wives, because his Katherine was killed.’

  Lexi nodded, shivering.

  ‘And then he grabbed you…and was going to kill you and me, and probably Damon, in a church, just like Katherine was killed.’

  Lexi narrowed her eyes. ‘I’m not sure I understand where you’re going with this.’

  ‘If he was being so particular about whom he killed and in what manner, why didn’t he set the place on fire?’

  Lexi blinked. I saw her work through the logic. She stayed silent for a long time. I couldn’t read her eyes, but still I felt embarrassed to be thinking of Katherine at a time like this.

  ‘Stefan,’ she began. ‘Please listen to me. There are all levels of evil among our kind. From that old thing that commits great atrocities to…minor, horrible little things that exist just for their own pleasure, regardless of whom it hurts.