AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It’s not yours any longer.
Startled, I tried to look around to see who had said that. But I couldn’t really look anywhere, much less see anything besides the billowing mist. Nor had I heard another voice, exactly, so much as I had perceived one.
I’m going back to the wine cellar, I decided. I want to be with Lucas. So I’m going to be with him—right now.
Just like that, I was with Lucas once more—but not in the wine cellar. He stood in the driveway of the Woodsons’ house; I seemed to be right behind him, as if I were peeking over his shoulder. Apparently it was nearly dawn; the sky had begun to go gray and stark. A car had just pulled into the driveway, and as we watched, a tall figure stepped out.
Balthazar strode across the grounds toward Lucas, his face drawn and tense. Bruises still showed on his skin, and he walked more slowly than he normally would, but obviously he had mostly recovered from his injures. “How is she?” he said. Then he got a good look at Lucas’s face and stopped in his tracks. “Oh, no.”
“She—” Lucas couldn’t get the words out. I could see the muscles in his jaw working, like he was struggling even to speak.
“She’s gone.”
“No.” Balthazar shook his head. His expression was flat, almost panicked. “No, you’re wrong.”
Lucas said, “Bianca is dead.”
His saying it made it real. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I wanted to run, but that was impossible, too. There was no more hiding from what had happened.
Balthazar said, “Let me see her.” Lucas answered by stepping aside. As Balthazar rushed past him, he seemed to run through me—oh, that felt weird, but sort of amazing, because for one second, all Balthazar’s strength and desperation and love echoed inside me. It wasn’t like being alive, but it was something real, more real than I was.
As Balthazar ran into the wine cellar, he seemed to tow me after him. Maybe that was because of the way he’d run through me; I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I felt myself flowing past the long corridors of wine bottles, toward Balthazar’s silhouette—and then past him, so that I was in the room, looking back at him, as he looked down at me.
My body lay exactly where I’d seen it last, when Lucas had shut my eyes. Balthazar stood there, staring down at me for a few long seconds like he couldn’t believe any of it. Then he slumped against the wall and just—fell. He slid down until he was on the floor, and he clenched his fists in his curly hair.
I tried to hover over my body; it looked fine to me. A little sick, maybe, but it didn’t really look any different from the way I guessed I did when I was sleeping. The only change was that I wasn’t breathing. And I could fix that, couldn’t I? All I had to do was hop back in.
Well, that sounded easy, but it wasn’t. I kept looking down at myself, trying to feel the same magnetic pull that both Lucas and Balthazar had on me now. If I could tap into that same energy, I reasoned, I’d be drawn back into my body and would be alive again.
But the pull never came.
After a while—several minutes, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure—Balthazar pushed himself to his feet. Behind him, I heard Lucas’s footsteps. Soon they stood together at the end of the bed, looking at me.
Balthazar’s voice was hoarse as he asked, “What happened?”
“It was like I said in the letter.” Lucas sounded so tired. I wondered how long it had been since he’d slept. “She just kept getting weaker and weaker. We knew there was nothing a doctor could do, so I just had to watch—”
Lucas swallowed hard. Balthazar hesitated, and I thought for a moment he might pat Lucas on the shoulder or something, but he didn’t.
“I tried to get her to change over,” Lucas continued. “I offered to let her use me to turn into a vampire. But she wouldn’t do it unless I came over, too. I said no.” He thumped his fist against the wall. “Dammit, why didn’t I just let her do it?”
Balthazar shook his head. “Bianca made the right decision. Not only for you but for her, too. There are worse things than death.”
“You’re gonna have to forgive me if I can’t agree with you right now.”
“I understand.”
They stood together like sentinels watching over me. I kept wanting to shout at them that this was all a mistake, that there was something we could do to fix this, but that had begun to feel like a lie.
I’m dead. This is the out-of-body experience that I always read about, and any second there’s going to be some kind of bright light, and I’ll have to go into it.
I wanted to cry, but crying required a body. Even that release was lost to me. All that sorrow and terror was bottled inside me with nowhere to go.
At last, Lucas said, “I can’t call the police or an ambulance. There’s too much about this I can’t explain.”
“No, you can’t do that,” Balthazar said. “You’ll have to bury her here, and before the sun comes up, so nobody will see. I’ll help.”
Lucas took a deep, shuddering breath. “Thank you.” It was the first time I’d ever seen him drop his guard around Balthazar. They looked at each other without any rancor; the jealousy and defensiveness between them had vanished.
