The van skittered around another corner and toward safety as Meghan and Gabe pulled the doors closed. The noise from the outside disappeared, sending them all into a stony silence, their labored breathing the only sound.
Reyna didn’t recognize the woman with brown skin and a bindi on her forehead who ducked into the back from the passenger seat. She rummaged through a black duffel bag and handed warmer clothes to Meghan and Gabe. She started to move toward Reyna, but Gabe put his hand out to stop her. His eyes shot to Reyna’s and then back. He just shook his head as if she were a volcano about to erupt.
The woman shrugged and passed the clothes to Gabe. He walked through the large open area in the back to where Reyna was still seated on the floor, shell-shocked. She tucked her knees to her chest, pulling Beckham’s jacket tighter around her. She wasn’t relinquishing this. No matter what anyone said.
“Hey,” Gabe said, crouching down. “You’re going to get sick if you don’t change into this. You don’t want it all to be for nothing.”
He held out a pair of pants, thick socks, a sweater, and a jacket to match Meghan’s. When she didn’t respond, he put the clothes next to her and went to talk to Meghan, who appeared a minute later with a haunted look in her eyes.
She didn’t try to talk to Reyna. She didn’t try to tell her that things would be better. She didn’t lie to her. She just acted like the nurse that she was trained to be. She helped Reyna into the pants and socks. Reyna only protested when Meghan tried to remove Beckham’s jacket. This was all she had left of him.
Tears filled Meghan’s eyes at the sight. She slung the other jacket on top of Beckham’s, rubbed Reyna’s hair gently, and then stepped away. She returned a minute later to bandage her wrist and then left her alone.
The adrenaline of the escape and chase had suddenly left Reyna’s body, leaving her utterly empty. Leaving her with her memories.
Beckham’s broken body. Him falling to the ground. Not moving. Dead.
She felt as broken as he had looked in that moment. Broken and shell-shocked and bleeding and empty. Just…empty.
Reyna could hear everyone whispering about her. “What happened to her?” the woman asked.
Gabe shook his head. “Beckham…”
“He’s gone?”
Meghan cleared her throat noisily. “Prisha,” she hissed.
“Yeah,” Gabe replied. “He’s gone.”
Tye cursed softly.
Meghan hiccupped around her own tears.
“She saw it?” Prisha murmured.
“Yeah,” Gabe whispered.
“Poor thing.”
But Reyna didn’t feel like a poor thing.
She wasn’t a wounded animal.
She was destroyed. Obliterated. Demolished.
She was as cold as ice and just as frozen. Inside and out.
She had left him behind.
And her entire heart with him.
Reyna lost track of how long they’d been driving.
It could have been hours. She had no sense of where they were going. She didn’t bother asking.
Her mind was a merciless place. As much as she wanted to burrow down into her numbness, compartmentalize, and forget what had just happened, she couldn’t. She pressed her palms against her eyes and tried to block out the images assaulting her. But it was no use. She didn’t think she’d ever go a day without seeing them.
Eventually, they pulled off the main roads. The van rumbled to a stop and they parked inside a garage. The door shut behind them, casting them into darkness. Reyna took a measured breath to still her unease before Gabe hauled the back door open again.
“Come on,” Meghan said, reaching for Reyna’s hand. “Let’s get you inside.”
Reyna let Meghan help her out. She straightened her spine at her friend’s look of pity and then left the truck. Gabe and Meghan followed her to where Prisha was standing with Tye. Prisha gestured for them to move toward a back door.
The house they entered was plain, with hardly anything in it. Just some used furniture and a foldout table in the kitchen. It didn’t look like a place where someone lived. Another safe house.
“There are three bedrooms,” Prisha said. “Washington has already taken one. I’m happy to share my own. You can decide who gets the third. I also have a couch and an air mattress.”
“Thank you for getting this set up, Prisha,” Meghan said warmly. “It will only be for a night.”
Prisha waved her hand. “It’s all gone now, isn’t it? You’ll need the space.”
“We don’t want to compromise you,” Tye said. His features were drawn. “It’s enough that the bunker was destroyed. We won’t be able to get inside to see the full damage until the smoke has cleared.”
Reyna’s heart tugged again. The bunker was destroyed. She had spent the last month living there, in Elle’s rebellion bunker on the outskirts of the city. Elle had rescued her from Harrington and brought her into the fold. Her brothers had gotten onto the security team. Brian had just married his fiancée, Laura, before he had been captured on a raid. Drew and Laura had been at the bunker when she left to kill Harrington. A lot of good that had done.
She couldn’t even think about all the other people who had been in the bunker when Harrington had bombed it.
“How many are accounted for?” Prisha asked.
Tye shook his head. “We haven’t heard from any other safe houses. Communications are down. We probably won’t hear until tomorrow.”
Which meant they wouldn’t have word on Drew and Laura until tomorrow either. Reyna sighed.
Meghan put an arm around her shoulder. “Why don’t we get you into the shower and clean you up? Then I think you should rest. You can have the other bedroom.”
“I’m fine. I’ll just…take the couch,” Reyna said.
Meghan reached out to her, but Gabe grabbed her arm. “Let her go.”
Reyna glanced over at them and saw that Meghan had collapsed into Gabe’s shoulder, her own muffled tears just loud enough for Reyna to hear. Gabe escorted her from the room.
Reyna pulled Beckham’s jacket tighter around herself. She could see that the others were grieving as well, worried about what had happened to the rebellion. They were all suffering greatly for what Harrington had done. One error had cost them everything. Not just Beckham but the entire rebellion. All the people that they had known for years. She might have lost Beckham, but they had lost everything. Maybe they all needed to be alone tonight.
She curled up on the empty sofa, Beckham’s jacket her only blanket. It still smelled like him. What would it be like when it no longer held that smell? When his jacket was a lifeless as his body?
She choked on the sob that was stuck in her throat and the dam broke. Tears fell down her cheeks. They blurred her vision and superheated her skin. She felt like she was going to vomit. She couldn’t breathe. She was hyperventilating. Her chest hurt. There was a hole where previously Beckham had been.
She’d gotten away. She’d survived. She knew that there were important things left to accomplish. But right now all she felt was grief.
Beckham was really gone.
And she had to find a way to live with that.
Beep, beep, beep.
Reyna awoke in a burst of fear and desperation. For a second, she didn’t remember where she was. The sights and sounds were so foreign as to almost be familiar. It was as if she was put back into that prison cell beneath Visage, where she lived as a blood bag for that monster Harrington. She could distinctly remember lying there, an IV in her arm and the familiar sound of the heart-rate monitor beeping noisily, after she had been kidnapped.
Visage had appeared to the outside world as a benevolent company that had saved them in the midst of the great recession. Vampires came out of the darkness with the invention of the blood type cure, which was less a cure and more a Band-Aid. Vampires drank from specific humans that matched their blood type and it curbed their baser tendencies. It created “men” like Harrington and Rowland.
Reyna had only recently found out that much of what she had thought she had known was a lie. Some vampires were already predisposed to higher cognitive function. Harrington and the three vampire lords he’d recruited—Cassandra, Rowland, and Beckham—had engineered the recession for the purpose of starting Visage. To take over the world.
And they were winning.
Now only Harrington and Rowland remained. Beckham had killed Cassandra. And Beckham…
Reyna opened her eyes to dispel the lingering feeling of unease. She was in a quaint little house on the outskirts of the city. She wasn’t at Visage. She wasn’t still kidnapped. Everything was all right.
Except, it wasn’t.
Beckham was…dead.
She was alive and he was not.
“You’re up,” a voice said behind her.
Reyna shot to her feet and whirled around. She was still wrapped in Beckham’s jacket. Roger Washington stood in jeans and a high-neck sweater. She had never seen him look so…normal. He was the vampire doctor who had invented the blood type cure in the first place. He’d worked with Harrington for years before turning coat and helping out Elle. He was the one who had determined that she and Beckham were a perfect blood match. A once-in-a-lifetime pair whose blood matched the other’s actual blood composition, the equivalent to a soul mate.
“I’m up,” she said softly.
“I’m so thrilled that you made it out. I was asleep when you came in last night and missed everything,” Washington said.
Reyna sank back into the couch. “Do you have any word on what happened with the bunker?”
Washington shook his head and poured himself some coffee. He held the pot up to her in offering. She nodded. “Unfortunately I know no more than you do. Sydney sent me out of the bunker to separate all of Elle’s high command as a precaution, so I was already here when I got word.” He crossed the living room and handed her the coffee. She took a long sip and shuddered against the bitterness. “How did last night go?”
“It was a disaster.”
“I’m sorry for that, Reyna.”
Sorry. He was sorry. She knew that Washington couldn’t have changed the outcome. But it still rankled her.
“You don’t understand. Harrington won. Penelope is a vampire.” She hated even mentioning that double-crossing bitch. Penelope’s love for Beckham had turned her rotten and in the end she had doomed them all. “And Beckham…” She couldn’t force the words out. Her heart felt as if it were being ripped from her chest all over again. “He’s…he’s dead. Harrington killed him.”
“I…didn’t realize. Is there anything I can do?” he asked cautiously.
“No,” she said, letting her anger extinguish. It wasn’t his fault that Beckham was dead. The only blame belonged to Harrington.
Washington held his hand out as if he was going to try to comfort her, try to say something to make it better. But perhaps his years had shown him what could and could not be fixed. Because he let his hand drop and closed his mouth. He didn’t look at her with pity like the others. Only with deep understanding. And somehow that was worse.
Why did it have to be this way? It wasn’t fair. She knew life wasn’t fair. She had never expected it to be. Not when her parents had died when she was eight, or when her drunk, deranged uncle had abandoned them three years later, or even during the weary years living in the Warehouse District. It had been a tough life, but she had always had highlights. Her brothers and Beckham. Now she was utterly bereft.
“Hey, I thought I heard voices out here,” Meghan said, appearing from the hallway. Her red hair had clearly been poorly finger-combed into submission. There were dark circles under her eyes. She looked bedraggled and defeated. It was not a sight Reyna was used to seeing on her. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” Reyna said.
“Yes, Reyna was filling me in on what happened yesterday,” Washington said.
Meghan winced. “Sorry. We should have done that last night.”
“No need. I think I have the basics now. Would you like some coffee?”
“Please.” She looked toward Reyna. “How are you doing this morning?” Meghan asked. Worry creased between her eyes.
“I’m alive. So, what’s the plan?” Reyna asked, forcing her shoulders back.
Meghan opened, then closed her mouth. She looked a bit like a fish out of water.
When she didn’t say anything, Reyna froze. “Wait, we do have a plan, right?”
“We have a plan,” Gabe said. He appeared behind Meghan. His own dark red hair was frazzled as if someone’s hands had been in it all night. Looking between Meghan and Gabe, it wasn’t too hard to guess what last night’s grief had resulted in. “Tye went to switch out plates and get Prisha another vehicle. We need something secure before we can leave.”
“And where are we going to go? The bunker is gone. The plan was to get back to the bunker after all of this. Safe houses were Plan B in case we needed a quick escape. What the hell now?” Reyna snapped.
“Plan C,” Washington said.
Reyna arched an eyebrow.
“No one knows where all the safe houses are—that way if someone got kidnapped then they couldn’t out the entire operation. Well, I’m going to take you to a safe place outside of the city until this blows over,” Washington informed her.
Reyna let the news sink in. “We can’t just run away.”
“We’re not,” Gabe said. “We need a place to regroup and we can’t stay here.”
Reyna didn’t like the sound of that. She’d rather figure out a way to make the bastards pay. But as she was about to say as much, Tye and Prisha came through the back door in a rush.
“They’re casing the neighborhood,” Prisha said.
“Time to go,” Tye said.
“Shit,” Gabe spat.
“Prisha, you should head out,” Meghan said earnestly. “You don’t want to be found.”
“You will be safe?”
Meghan nodded. “Thank you again.”
Prisha kissed Meghan on the cheek, nodded at the rest of them, and then disappeared into the garage.
Gabe and Tye grabbed their remaining supplies before hustling the rest of them out of the house. An SUV with heavily tinted windows was parked where the van had sat last night. They all piled inside as Tye took the helm. Reyna tucked her legs up underneath her and waited for what felt like an eternity as the garage door opened behind them. Tye slowly backed them down the drive and out onto the main streets.
Reyna didn’t know what she was looking for. She expected something like the police waiting for them, but what she saw instead was a small army of black vehicles in all shapes and sizes. Reyna held her breath as they passed one of the cars and saw the little red V logo for Visage on the side. Her stomach flopped.
How had they found them? What gave them away? Would they know that they were in the SUV? Were they looking for the black van?
She didn’t know.
Meghan reached out and grabbed Reyna’s hand. They locked eyes and Reyna saw her own fear reflected back at her.
She held her breath as they drove past another Visage vehicle. A vampire got out of the front seat at that precise moment. The woman turned and stared at their SUV as it rolled by. For a second, Reyna swore the woman had X-ray vision and was able to see through the tint to the people behind it. She narrowed her eyes at the SUV. Reyna watched her hand move to the cellphone in her pocket. There was doubt on her face.
“Please don’t. Please no. Please, please, please,” Reyna whispered in the backseat.
Meghan clutched her hand until it was painful. But Reyna didn’t stop her and she didn’t take her eyes off the vampire, who took a step forward. Her hand tightened around the cellphone. She opened her mouth, but didn’t form words. She just stared as if she knew. She just knew.
Reyna tensed. Ready to sound the alarm if need be.
Then something distracted the vampire. She glanced down at her cellphone, frowned, and brought it to her ear. She took one last look at the SUV before turning away as it sped past her.
Reyna released her breath. They drove the rest of the way out of the neighborhood in silence. They weren’t in the clear yet. But at least they were away from the worst of it.
If only the same were true for their morale as they drove through the remains of their broken rebellion from the city.