I can't leave Vivi!" I shout, looking back and seeing her petite body still lying on the stage. Whether Sin has fed her his blood yet or not, I don't know.
"It's too fucking late for her, Dawn."
Michael drags me with him, and even though my heart rebels, my mind knows he's right. We have to get out of here; we have to get help.
We rush around the outskirts of the crowd, Michael's hand wrapped tightly around mine, until we get to a distant window. While everyone has pushed to the front, we've gone to the back of the room. Michael rips the makeshift curtains from the window. He quickly picks up a chair and throws it, the glass exploding onto the sidewalk. We leap through the opening.
We race down the street. I hear shouts. Screams. Sirens. Even sporadic gunfire. Sin's plan obviously involved more than the Daylight. Maybe the madness erupted there, but it's spreading like a virus. I check my cell phone again, desperate for a signal. I need to alert the Agency, Jeff, Victor—
Michael suddenly stops short, and I slam into his back.
"Why'd you—" But then I clearly see what's arrested his attention.
In the middle of the deserted street ahead of us stands Hoodie.
"Don't fight him," I plead. "He's connected with Sin, somehow."
"You picked the wrong night to mess with us!" Michael shouts, pulling a stake from his belt.
"Michael, please!"
But my words are lost on him as he charges in. Hoodie doesn't even look at his approaching attacker. His gaze is fixed on me. Though his face is still covered by what seems like a constant shadow, I can feel him staring. And I think that will be his doom. His obsession with me has blinded him to everything else. Especially Michael.
But as Michael lunges with the stake, Hoodie grabs his arm, and I hear Michael's wrist break, followed by his scream of agony. Hoodie delivers a devastating strike to Michael's chest, and I hear more bones crack, robbing Michael of his breath. With a backhanded slap, he sends Michael to the ground like a child who's stepped out of line. And then he comes for me. Slowly stalking up the street like he has all the time in the world.
I can't leave Michael. But I can't get to him either, and even if I could, I can't lift him up and drag him away. So I pull my own stake from my boot. Hoodie's gaze has never left mine. And as I prepare to defend myself, out of the corner of my eye I see Michael getting up. Even injured, he's so fast, so powerful. With his uninjured hand, he brings his stake down on Hoodie, the metal going cleanly into Hoodie's back. Hoodie releases a pain-filled grunt.
But then he throws his elbow backward, catching Michael squarely in the nose. Michael staggers and drops to one knee.
"Run," Michael calls to me, as Hoodie turns his attention to him.
I just shake my head, my voice knotted in my throat.
"Run!" he repeats.
"I … I can't." Too many people have risked everything to protect me.
Michael lunges at his opponent, trying to distract him, even though he must know he's outmatched. He's not hoping to win; that's impossible. Michael is just hoping to buy me time.
"Dawn, run!"
His desperate command snaps me out of my trance, and I haul ass. Not so much to escape, but to draw Hoodie away from Michael. He wants me. I know he'll follow me. And I'm right. I turn down the first alley I see, knowing I can't match his speed, but hoping I can lose him in the brick maze.
But he's there. Every turn I take, every corridor I run down. Like a nightmare, I can't escape him. He's in front of me, then behind, and then I seem to lose him altogether, until he appears in the corner of my eye as a fleeting image. But always there is that constant stare from under the darkened hood. I'm out of breath. I'm sweating. I slip on pieces of garbage. I keep slamming into walls and shouldering doors, trying to open them, only to find they're locked.
And my stalker dogs me patiently. He knows time is on his side. This labyrinth is too large, too confusing.
The dead end catches me off guard, and I have nowhere left to run. I rest my back against the wall. I put my head down, pulling in the air. When I look up, he's there, waiting for me.
"We have unfinished business, Dawn," he says, his voice like a scratched childhood record, familiar but destroyed.
No matter how fast I ran, no matter which direction I took, it was always going to end here. I feel stupid because he knew that, didn't he?
"I won't go down easily," I say, gripping my stake.
"Don't fight me."
He moves toward me with his hands up, signaling that he means no harm. Yeah, right. I pretend to relax, taking a deep breath with each step he takes.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. So close. Almost now.
I've been through too much for it to end here.
Once he's within arm's reach, I strike with the stake. But he sees it coming. He just throws me over his shoulder and onto the ground. The precious air I'd recovered leaves me again.
"I didn't want to do it this way," he says from above me. "This isn't how I planned our reunion."
Reunion?
He pulls a syringe out of his pocket and uncaps it. I raise my arm to defend myself, but he simply takes it and twists my palm up. He injects the needle into the muscle of my biceps and presses down the plunger.
As blackness hovers at the edge of my vision, I see something. A flower. On the back of his hand. Made by coal dust trapped deep under the skin. Untouched by the years of aging he should've experienced. The little flower I used to stare at while he sat beside me and brought color to the black-and-white images in my coloring book. I barely get out his name before the darkened abyss swallows me.
"Brady…"
If there's still chaos in the city, it's died down. Then again, we're so far from the center, it's impossible to tell exactly what's happened since Sin revealed his true self at the Daylight Grill. Eighteen stories up, we don't even have the view of the Agency building; we're on the wrong side of town. They used to call where we are Greene Tower. We used to call it home.
I'm sitting against the living room wall, in the place I watched television with my family, in the place I now burn photos of them. To my right, the gigantic hole, where I perched with Victor a few nights ago, gives me a perfect image of the night sky. The moon is so bright, so many stars are twinkling, that even this place glows. Or maybe that's just the residue of my childhood memories.
Across from me, leaning against the wall, is the one I used to call my brother, who I used to call Brady.
But he isn't Brady anymore. His hood is back and I can see his face now. It's skeletally thin, like he just stepped out of a night shift at the Works. Even after all these years, it seems like the coal dust never washed off his face. It certainly didn't leave his eyes. They're pitch-black. Nothing human left in them. Why does he look like that? And why are his teeth so monstrous? It isn't one pair of fangs; it's an entire row. More demon than vampire.
In his hands, he's looking at a piece of paper with creases running along it showing how neatly folded it once was. I did that when I brought it to our new apartment. The drawing of my family I put on the refrigerator all those years ago. The drawing I still had when Brady broke in and attacked Rachel. The only thing he took. The only picture I had with all of us together. Drawn in thick, sketchy crayon.
"Why didn't you let us know you were alive?" I ask.
"Look at what I am!"
"You're still my brother."
"No! Sin changed me." His head twitches. "I was dying. He dragged me off, drank my blood until my heart was practically dry, each pump—so loud, so hard. It hurt. I was so scared, Dawn. You don't understand how scared I was of dying. And all he did was slash his wrist, let the blood hit the floor, and then walk away. He knew exactly what I would do. He's smart like that. So I licked his blood. Off the ground. But vampire blood won't save us. I died … and then I woke up. Like this. I changed … into this."
"But, Brady, you don't look like—"
He lets out a primal scream, then punches the wall behind him, his fist going straight through it into the neighbor's living room.
"Into this!"
He grabs a patch of his hair and tries to tear it out, but it won't budge, so he punches the wall again.
"Brady, stop! You're scaring me." He is frightening me, but maybe if I sound like the Dawn he knew, the scared little girl, I can reach the part of him that's still human. I can't believe he's the one who's been stalking me. My own brother was my bogeyman. In some ways, it makes it so much worse. Once he protected me, and now he's this thing that I barely recognize. I don't know what he's capable of. If Sin created him, he has to be filled with evil. It hurts seeing him like this.
"I couldn't do it, Dawn," he says, suddenly composed again, as if he hadn't just ripped the wall apart. "I just couldn't do it. Not after Mom and Dad. They'd be so ashamed of me if I did it. They'd be so ashamed if they saw me."
"What couldn't you do?" Please tell me that you couldn't kill Victor.
He screams again, and I press my back harder against the wall, as if I can retreat through it, get back inside that closet until this all goes away. He grabs a rotting kitchen chair and throws it out the huge hole in the wall, where it crashes far, far below.
"I just couldn't do it," he says, laughing at his own inside joke. "I wanted to. God, did I want to! I wanted to know what it tasted like. I had to know. I had to know why they wanted us so badly. Why they needed our blood. Why we had to be scared every night!"
He slams his foot into the wall, and I see bits of the ceiling flake off and fall down on him. It's as if his sanity is currency, and once he runs out, he has to destroy something to get it back.
The shock of seeing my brother like this is unbearable. A part of me always thought he might've been alive. But why is he like this? Losing his grip on reality, rambling and repeating himself, twitching like he has some neurological disease.
And then I realize what's happened to him. I'm not sure when, or for how long he's been suffering this way. But there's no question why he has rows of fangs, why his eyes are blackened, why he's a stranger in his own body, why he disarmed Michael so easily.
The Thirst.
"You couldn't feed on humans, could you?" I ask.
"Never. I never did, Dawn. I want you to know that. I never did. All those vampires, for all those years, I stalked them on the outside. Killing and drinking them. I didn't want to do that either; I wanted to stop. But it was too late. It's all I can think about. It's all-consuming. But it'll end tonight. It'll end very, very soon. When Victor comes for you."
My eyes go wide. I'm the bait. No, he can't be that cruel, to use me in that way.
"I've been watching you," he says, answering me before I can ask. "Someone had to, after Mom and Dad died. I've been protecting you. That vampire at Dawson Elementary. He wanted your blood. I wouldn't let him have it. Or any of the others. When they got too close, I took care of them."
By ripping out their throats.
"Only one is left. Old Family Victor. And when he comes here, I'm going to kill him. Then I'm going to drink his blood. And I'll be cured, Dawn. I'll become human, and then we can be a family again. I can get my job back at the Works, and I can come home every night and we can watch TV together, and we can—"
"That won't cure you, Brady. There's no cure for what you have."
"No! He told me! He said it would cure me."
"Who told you that?"
"Sin!"
"Sin?" His favorite creation. His perfection.
My brother nods. "He slit his wrist and bled onto the ground. His blood is like gold. It costs him so much to give away even a little to another. So he has to be very select in who he turns. He has to turn the right people for his army. Because of him, I can walk in the sun. But because I feed off of vampires, I've become this! I … I thought that Sin would hate me for that. I had taken his gift of day walking and become a monster. But he didn't hate me. He gave me a special mission. He told me … he told me that Victor wanted to hurt you. He said I could protect you by killing him, and then drink his Old Family blood. And it would cure me."
Sin. He took Brady and now he's trying to take Victor. Only he won't do it himself. He must not be as strong as his half brother. Letting Victor kill his father, then letting this perverted version of my once-loved brother kill Victor. Is that Sin's weakness? Does his ability to walk in the sun come at the cost of the strength and speed gifted to every other vampire? He may have power that exceeds humans', but he could still be weaker than other vamps.
"Sin lied to you," I say. "There's no cure for the Thirst! He's just using you as a pawn in his game."
"No!" He digs his nails into the wall, brings them down, scoring it, paper and plaster crumbling onto the floor. He makes fists and pounds the wall like an upset child. "He told me the truth! He had to; it's the final escape from this … this torture!"
Oh, Brady. The only reason you're like this is because you couldn't harm another human, couldn't drink their blood. If you had taken their lives, you would've saved your own sanity.
My heart is heavy with sadness. But it's heavier with the guilt I'll soon have to swallow. Because there's no cure for the Thirst, except the stake.
"Victor's no good," he snarls. "He's using you. My precious little sister. So innocent. So naive. No one's good enough for you."
"I'm not a little girl anymore!"
Though to him, I am. To Brady, who heard my screams as he fought, I must still be trapped, still need his protection. Has he played that night out over and over again in this room? Has he found a way to change things? Has he found a way to be redeemed? That's why the final confrontation has to be here. Victor, not Sin, will be the vampire who stole his life eight years ago, but this time Brady will win. In his mind, when he drinks Victor's blood, he'll be cured