Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 92612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
“Rich coming from a species that wars among themselves constantly.”
“Not anymore.” He points at me. “Now we have a common enemy.”
“But all the vampires aren’t going along with it. Valen told Coal he killed plenty of Corvidions who wanted to rebel against Gregor’s plan.”
He freezes for a second then tries to play it off. “You don’t have vampire hearing yet you’re always eavesdropping, is that it?”
Interesting. He knows something about those executions, something he doesn’t want to tell me. I file away that tiny tidbit and continue asking questions. I’m almost at my limit; any second now David will start doing the thousand-yard stare or fly off to chase a bat.
“And the Tantuns seem to be just waiting to kill Gregor off so they can run the whole show their way,” I add.
“Not wrong there.”
“All the vampires at the party—they were nobles?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He bites down on the twig, then frowns and spits it out.
“What makes them nobles?”
“Age,” he says it like it’s obvious, the ‘duh’ heavily implied.
The nobles are the oldest vampires. Also the cruelest. Is there something to that? Does age make them more horrible? Or are they all that way? I glance toward Melody’s monument, gleaming white under the moonlight. No, they aren’t all that way.
“When does Valen come back?”
“Don’t know. But our time’s up.” He hooks a thumb over his shoulder toward the elevator. Sun’s up soon.
“What happens to a vampire in the sun.”
He gives me the ‘duh’ look again. “We die.”
“Can you be more specific? Do you turn into a vapor, burst into bats, dust, ashes, blood—what happens to your cells?”
“My cells?” He is utterly baffled.
“Never mind. Let’s go in.” I trudge past him, then stop. “Can you read ancient Romanian?”
“No, can you?”
“Ugh.” I was already pushing my luck with all the questions. Then again, David has been a lot more open to me in the days since I was taken. I think he blames himself for what happened. He hasn’t said that, and he hasn’t apologized, but I feel it in the way he’s more patient with me. The food has been better too, confirming my suspicion that he’s been my new cook all along. There was even an apple on my tray at lunch today.
He hasn’t asked me about what happened. That’s a mercy, too. I try not to go back to it in my mind, but I do. It’s like a scab, and I’m damned to pick at it, making it bleed all over again. I hope I stop doing that. I don’t know if I ever will.
26
Recovered Journal of Dr. Georgia Clark
June 7, Year 1, Emergence Era
Wyatt’s playlists are getting more unhinged. I keep wondering if there’s some way I could just ‘accidentally’ fall onto his vinyl collection. Kidding! I’m only kidding. (But am I though?) In other news, we’ve made zero progress on the virus, the power keeps going off, and I’m worried the generator isn’t going to come on one of these times. At least Gene found some jam the other day. His limp is better, too. So I guess that’s a kind of progress. *sigh*
Isneeze. The dust in this library is enough to open anyone’s sinuses. Or clog them. The books I’ve plucked from the shelves sit in a neat pile on the edge of the table. I’ve given up sneaking around. No one seems to care that I spend a lot of time in here, though David does complain here and there that he’d rather be anywhere else in the castle. Still, he hangs around in the seating area or haunts the rooms nearby while I dig through the tomes.
“Done? I feel like you’re done,” he calls for the third time today.
“No.” I finish making a stack of the few books in English, then set off into the shelves again to see if I can somehow find another copy of one of the same books but in Romanian. If I can find some way to make a cipher, I could actually get some use from the books on vampire bloodlines, history—on everything in here.
“What’s this?” Valen’s voice curls through the air like a tendril of smoke.
I lean back and spot him standing at the table, his fingers running along the spines of the books I’ve chosen. “Books.”
He looks up at me. “How droll.” He sounds anything but amused.
“If you must know, I’m trying to create a cipher so I can read these books. I can’t do anything else in this upside-down hell, so I may as well work on figuring out what makes vampires tick so I can then reverse engineer a way to murder you all.” I drop two more books in English on my stack.
The corner of his lips quirks into his familiar smirk. “Quite ambitious of you.”
“I’ve always been aces at research.” I stare up at him, daring him to try to stop me.