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“If you need a friend,” I said slowly, “you have to act like one.”
The attic, and Maxie, disappeared. This time, the fog hardly seemed to close around me before I found myself back where I wanted to be—with Lucas.
In the blink of an eye, I had returned to the wine cellar, where Lucas and Balthazar sat at the small table. They looked even more exhausted than they had before. Lucas leaned against the green wall, stubble shading his angled jaw. The dark circles beneath his eyes made it look as if he’d been beaten up. Next to him, Balthazar leaned his forearms on the table, and his head drooped forward.
Neither of them could see me, apparently. I was so happy to see them that I couldn’t even be upset about my invisibility.
My hearing kicked in mid-sentence, as Balthazar said, “—phone call, maybe, or a letter. That might be a smarter move.”
Lucas shook his head. “The cells move around too much to be sure of a letter, and she lost her cell phone during Mrs. Bethany’s attack. Four hundred years old, and you never bothered learning anything about the guys who hunt you?”
He was baiting Balthazar, like he always did, but the sting in the words was gone. Their old rivalry had become no more than a reflex for them.
Balthazar ran his finger along the wall of the wine cellar, tracing an irregular shape—movement without purpose. “You said Black Cross tracked e-mail, too.”
“Yeah, but I can at least be sure Mom will get the e-mail. If she knows something—maybe even if she doesn’t—she’ll come.”
Then Lucas shivered, and his eyes narrowed. “You feel that?”
He knows me! Lucas knows I’m here!
“Yes.” Balthazar turned to search the room, and I hoped against hope that he’d catch a glimpse of me. But his gaze traveled past the spot where I felt myself to be. “I think she’s back.”
“It’s definitely Bianca,” Lucas said, after a pause.
“I agree. It—it feels like Bianca. And that perfume she used to wear sometimes, the stuff with the gardenias—”
“Yeah.” Lucas glanced over at Balthazar, obviously not thrilled that somebody else could recognize the scent I’d worn. But he seemed more relieved than angry. Maybe the most important thing for Lucas now was having someone who could convince him that the haunting was real, and not evidence that he was going crazy.
“Is it any consolation?” Balthazar asked quietly. “Knowing that something of her lives on?”
“What do you think?”
Balthazar sighed. “No, of course not.”
“I want her here.” Lucas slumped forward onto the table. “I keep thinking, if I want it bad enough, if I just figure out how, I can undo everything that’s happened and go back to when she’s safe. Like this can’t possibly be for real.”
“I remember that feeling.” Balthazar lifted his head and stretched his shoulders, grimacing as though it hurt. “After Charity—after what I did to her—I wanted it not to have happened so badly that it seemed impossible I couldn’t make it right. I couldn’t make myself believe that the universe could work so differently from the way it should work. Obviously, I know better now.”
Lucas frowned. I realized what he was going to say. No, no, Lucas, don’t, you remember what this does to him, don’t!
“Charity’s in town,” Lucas said.
So much for telepathy.
Balthazar straightened in his chair. “You’ve heard rumors, found evidence of the tribe—”
“No, we got kidnapped by the tribe about a week before Bianca—about a week ago.” Lucas swallowed hard, then kept going. “Charity was hot to turn Bianca into a vampire. She had some stupid idea that it would make you and her and Bianca one big happy undead family.”
“She was going to kill Bianca?” Balthazar looked so wounded, so disappointed in her. Despite the ample evidence that Charity was a psychopath, he still believed in his sister and loved her as much as ever. His faith would have been touching, I decided, if it hadn’t been so willfully blind. “You rescued her, though.”
Lucas shook his head. “The ghosts did that.”
“The wraiths saved you?”
“That’s what it seemed like at the time.” Lucas’s gaze became more distant. “Now I see it, though. What they were really doing was making sure Bianca would die when they wanted, the way they wanted. So they’d get their prize. If Charity had done it, she’d have been doing us a big favor.”
“I told you before, being a vampire isn’t the same as being alive.”
