“They’re ancient,” Jennie said. “The one with the tree roots in it might be a thousand years old, or older. They’re terrifying, I know—strong and savage—but it could be far worse. They’re weakened right now, in horrible pain, but they’re fighting through that pain for one reason and one reason only—to stop us from burying Maggie’s body in Shediak.”
“But why?” Violet asked. “Why do they care so much what happens to Maggie?”
Malcolm glanced back at Jennie. “She did this to them, didn’t she? Whatever’s causing this pain?”
“They’ve been underground for centuries,” Jennie said. “They dug themselves in deep, blinded by pain, and they’ve hibernated all this time, waiting for her to die. Maggie put a curse on them that affected the whole country, maybe the whole continent, and when she died, her curse started to unravel. If we can get her buried in the place she was born—the place she spoke the words of the curse—she told me they’ll still be bound by it. But if we don’t, the curse will break. Their pain will be gone. They’ll be free to prey on anyone, anywhere, and to make more like them—the way they did with Elias. There will be hell to pay.”
“These things,” Malcolm said. “They’re vampires?”
“Maggie always called them the Morák, but they’re so old that they go back to a time before there were names, or words, or language. Before there were people.”
Violet studied her, fascinated. “How do you know all this?”
Jennie gave a bitter laugh. “There are a few things you can dowhen the person who means the most to you in the world decides she’s not interested in you anymore. You get kind of broken. Some people search for someone else to give them meaning. Some people discover their own purpose. And some people spend their lives looking for a way to prove the one they love made a terrible mistake, that they’re worth the attention they crave.”
Malcolm exhaled. “Christ, Jennie. Is that really why you’ve been gone all this time? Just to prove something to Maggie?”
Jennie stared at him for several long seconds. She gave him a brittle smile, and then went back to the original topic as if she’d never strayed from it.
“The Morák are the reason legends about vampires exist, so if you want to call them that, I won’t argue. They’ll kill us just as quickly no matter what we call them.”
Violet shrank in her seat, sliding down, shoulders sagging. Jennie’s inner conflict had spilled out, and she would have been glad to help—to embrace her and listen to her pain. But she could barely wrap her mind around the revelations her sister-in-law shared as if they were nothing, as if such truths were universal instead of shocking, and deeply unsettling. It felt as if the impossible had inflated and begun to take up all the space inside the minibus, and she had to make herself smaller to allow room for it.
She forced herself to sit up. Even laughed a little. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to take all of this in, but it’s ridiculous. If Maggie created this curse you’re talking about, she’d have to be born in the seventeenth century, or there would be records of these monsters.”
Violet shot a sidelong look at Malcolm, then turned in her seat again and stared at Jennie, not trying to hide her hostility toward this absurdity.
Jennie shrugged. “Probably earlier, really.”
“Earlier,” Violet repeated. She shook her head. “It can’t be.”
Malcolm reached across the front seat and took her hand. He gave it a gentle, reassuring squeeze and held on. Violet waited for Jennie to say more, and when she didn’t, Violet turned and satquietly, staring out the windshield with a numbness growing and spreading inside of her.
Long minutes passed. How long she would never know.
Then Malcolm slowed a bit and craned his neck to get a better glimpse of the road ahead. They were ascending a steep hill, and the sky seemed to have lightened even more. The dark indigo of the eastern horizon had turned a richer blue.
“Almost dawn at last,” Jennie said, just before they crested the hill.
Only as they came over the top of the hill did Violet notice the light had been pulsing. A pair of police cars blocked the road, flashing lights turning the lonely stretch of pavement a ghostly blue.
Malcolm hit the brakes hard enough that Maggie’s canvas-shrouded corpse smacked against the inside of its broken crate.
“What do we do?” Violet asked. “If we stop now—”
“If we end up in a jail cell, we’ll never get Maggie to Shediak by the next sunrise,” Malcolm said.
The policemen were shouting at them, guns drawn.
Jennie opened the back door. “If we let them shoot us, it’s all over, anyway.”
Malcolm swore under his breath, kissed Violet’s knuckles, and released her hand. “Close your door, Jen.”
Jennie started to argue. Malcolm slammed the gearshift into reverse and floored it. The minibus groaned as it leaped backward. Violet could hear cops shouting to one another, taken by surprise. Jennie jerked forward, slid to the floor, fighting to keep arms and legs inside the Volkswagen.
“Are you crazy?” Jennie shouted as gunshots cracked the air around them. Something plinked into the nose of the VW bus, and a crack formed in the windshield.
Roaring backward, they reversed down the hill, out of sight of the roadblock and the path of those bullets. Violet saw the blue lights shifting, moving, and knew the police cars would be afterthem in seconds, and those engines were much faster than their sluggish bus’s.
