and two with an absurd amount of humidity. Lauren groaned even though inside the Angelus House, it was dark and cool as the earth.
She plopped down next to Alex on the ratty old couch. “You want to go out for a walk or an ice cream?”
Alex grimaced. “Ugh. Too hot for me.”
“I can’t leave,” Alex insisted, sliding out of her grip. “I’m on duty.”
“What could happen in five minutes?” Lauren taunted.
Alex’s gaze was steely. “A lot.”
Lauren got that same prickly feeling, but then Alex was smiling and nuzzling against her in that affectionate, hippie girl way. “I’m sorry, Lauren-a-manjaro. I wish I could go with you. Look, here’s ten bucks. I’ll take a cherry ice and get yourself whatever you want.”
“Sure,” Lauren said, staring at the tattoo on the back of Alex’s neck.
On the way out, she found Dana sitting alone on the front steps, her face turned toward the sun. Rivulets of sweat ran down her neck. The heat was beastly.
“God. Aren’t you dying out here?”
The girl shook her head. “I just wanted to soak it up while I can, you know?”
“I guess,” Lauren said. She couldn’t wait for the first cold snap to blow through.
“Tomorrow it will all be different,” Dana said sadly.
“What’s happening tomorrow?”
Dana lifted up her hair, showing off a brand-new tattoo on her left shoulder blade. It was still caked in dried blood. “Got the mark today. I’m fully committed to the program now. I’m ready.”
“Right,” Lauren said, her heartbeat quickening. “So you’re ready for the thirteenth step.”
“Exactly,” she said smiling. “The first one’s the hardest, but after that, it gets easier and easier. Anyway, I guess it’s like they say—you have to be willing to commit.”
“Dana—” Lauren started, but there was a scratching and then a pounding at the tinted window behind them.
“I think they’re looking for me,” the girl said. With a backward glance at the blazing sun, she went in.
Lauren didn’t return with the ices. She spent the night in her old room at home. Her parents had gone to Eagle Feather, but the super let her in with his key, and she went to work right away researching vampire lore on the Internet, locking all the doors and windows, hanging garlic from them, hoping she was wrong. Johannes sent her a text at ten and another well after midnight—WHERE R U? and EVERYTHING OK?
CARLA TROUBLE, she texted back. SEE U MONDAY. She added x’s and o’s and willed herself not to cry.
When the first pink claw marks of dawn faded into a pale blue morning, Lauren headed out. She looked down to see the day’s papers bundled in string. The front page showed a picture of Antonio. JUSTICE SERVED: ANGELUS HOUSE KILLER KILLED BY HIS OWN. Lauren ripped off the string and turned inside to the story. Antonio Rodriguez of the Farragut Houses had been found down by the Navy Yards with his chest torn open, his head ripped off, and every drop of his blood drained. An anonymous source claimed he was a member of the notorious Los Vampiros gang, rumored to be responsible for the city’s spate of murders.
She ran for the subway.
Twelve
AT YORK, SHE got off and walked through the sleepy neighborhood up the cobblestone street to the top of the hill overlooking the Navy Yards. She let herself into Angelus House. It was eerily quiet, cool and dark as always with that slightly earthen smell she’d always attributed to the AC. Carefully and quickly, she made her way to the back, to the small hallway that housed the freight elevator. Rakim had said it was the only way down to the basement. It had a metal gate that had to be closed first. Lauren pushed the round B. It lit up, and then she was moving down into the bowels of the old hospital.
The doors opened onto utter darkness, and for a moment, Lauren thought about going upstairs to her desk and pretending there was no basement, no mysterious detox floor, nothing going on at all. She could file papers, read her book, buy juice for the newbies, and go on loving Johannes. But she had to know. She stepped out, letting the elevator doors close behind her, and then she was tiptoeing through the dark. Her knee banged against something hard, and she stifled a scream with her fist. Carefully, she reached down and felt. It was wood—a table? Too low. A bed frame? She wished she’d brought a flashlight. The damp earth odor was stronger here; it filled her nostrils and made her want to sneeze, but she didn’t dare. Instead, she stood perfectly still, allowing her eyes to adjust. Soon, she could make out long, rectangular shapes in the dark that were oddly familiar. Coffins. Her breathing quickened as she remembered the lumber and mulch she’d hauled back from the home improvement center earlier in the summer. As gently as possible, she nudged aside the top to one of the coffins and squatted low, putting her face even with the opening. Her eyes started at the bottom, where she could make out the glint of Alex’s ankle charm bracelet; her gaze traveled up to a moonlight-pale hand with impossibly long fingers topped by razor-sharp curved nails. She bit off the cry in her throat and half-stumbled back toward the freight elevator, which wouldn’t come though she pressed the button furiously. She turned a corner, looking for a way out and found herself in another room of coffins, their new pine tops shining in the darkness, but at the far end, she could just make out a pair of double doors. Slowly, she inched her way through the room, her shaking breath the only sound among the sleeping undead. She didn’t see the coffin until it was too late, and she flew over it, knocking into two others and sending their covers to the floor with a loud thunk. Gurgling animal noises filled the dark. And then one of the things burst up from the coffin. It was gray-white as the moon, long and barrel-chested with enormous, leathery wings, a mouthful of pointed teeth and yellow eyes that stared down at her in contempt. Then it threw back its head and shrieked in alarm, and Lauren was up and running. She burst through the doors into the flickering light of the detox floor. Behind her she could hear the thing screeching, awakening the others. She tried door after door trying to find one that would open. Down at the far end of the hall, she found a knob that turned, and she threw herself inside, locking the door.
“You’re not supposed to be on this floor.”
Lauren turned around slowly. Dana stood in the corner. Her mouth was a smear of bright red blood. Two long, serrated teeth poked down over her bottom lip. Pale, thin skeletons of wings had sprouted from her back, and her skin was the color of old bones. The bloodshot yellow of her eyes was interrupted by enormous pupils that were utterly without light, and Lauren could not stop staring at her, or at the mess of a body the thing that used to be Dana had left convulsing on the floor behind her, the jugular still spurting in a thinning stream.
“You can’t be here,” Dana said again, her voice more of a snarl now.
The door opened. She heard shouting. Human sounds. Something hit her hard, and then she fell into a merciful blackness.
Thirteen
SHE WOKE TO a high, whining, machine-like buzz and the sensation of pain. She was strapped to a table, and Rakim was bent over her left arm, the tattoo needle doing its work. Blood oozed from the miniscule holes he raised.
“Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to ask you where you’d like it, so I went with the forearm. It’s a classic.” He wiped away her blood with gauze from the boxes she’d brought them every week.
From across the room, Johannes approached, so perfect and golden that it made her ache. He stroked her hair gently as she’d seen him do with the addicts, kissed her softly. “Lauren, it’s okay. Just relax.”
