Chapter 14

"Y-You guys don't understand. I saw her! I saw my sister. They're holding her prisoner."

I rejoined my friends on the sunny boardwalk that was now completely picked clean of convenience store loot. While I was with Dr. Lemeris, Holly and Jack were busy scouring the boardwalk for intact bags of junk food to carry back to our house. Jack carried shopping bags with a smiling face over the words, "Thank You!" The bags were filled with various delicious snacks.

Neither of my friends looked especially interested in my revelation that I found my sister in one of the Levarsi tents.

"Are you sure it was her?" Holly asked. Suddenly, her perpetual coldness — which only last night had seemed like strength and will to live — now did nothing except annoy me.

Holly didn't care about anyone else except for herself.

In Holly's eyes, she was the survivor, and Grace was just dead weight.

Suddenly, I wondered if Holly would discard me just as quickly if I were caught in the Blight Rain. I couldn't believe I thought she looked radiant that morning in that matted blue sweater. Now it seemed stupid to me that she hand-washed it last night because being as stuck-up and as picky as she was — she wouldn't be caught dead in men's clothing.

She even took an hour that morning to powder down her face. I suddenly had an urgent desire to tell her the foundation on her face didn't match the color of the skin on her neck. I was sure if I said that, she would hate me forever.

"Even if it was her, what are we going to do about? Stop dreaming, Ailith! Do you think that the ancient pill is going to work?"

"Yeah, maybe it wasn't even her," Jack offered. "All vampires look pretty much alike. It's all grrr! Slobber slobber! Drink blood!"

"Shut up, jerk," Holly said and motioned for Jack to stop talking. At least she could see how upset Jack's comments were making me.

Undeterred, the oblivious Jack Fayer continued ranting on and on.

"Gawd, that's so creepy that your sister followed us all the way here from Windflower Springs. You're giving me goosebumps just thinking about it. If the Levarsi hadn't caught her, we might have been her next meal."

"Look, I have to get this pill to her!" I yelled, trying my best to contain my wild emotions at the thought of my sister being someone's science experiment. "I'll do it by myself if I have to."

"Are you just going to march in there, past their guards, and do it?" Jack asked with a laugh. "I think I saw dudes with guns walking back and forth along the beach. They'll shoot you both."

"Why? Do you have a better idea?"

"Uh — yeah. Save that pill for someone else! Who knows if it will even work after all this time?

"I'm going to go find out." I turned and started to walk away when Holly came and blocked my path.

"Okay, stop it," she said. "Ailith, you don't always need to be so direct and blockheaded about everything. Maybe if we asked nicely, they will let us."

"Well, good luck doing that," Jack said.

"I worked in customer service. I know a thing or two about manipulation," Holly said and walked over the nearest guard holding a rifle.

I saw her laugh as she talked to him. She flipped her hair and beamed. Even though the sky was overcast, her pearly white teeth looked like a blinding source of light. Back in high school, I would have rolled my eyes at her. It was so dumb that the popular girls thought they could get away with anything by playing stupid while bending over and tossing back their shampoo-commercial perfect hair.

He spoke to her, and I saw her throw back her head to laugh. She waved me over and pointed at the tent.

Walking over, I felt my cheeks grow hot in embarrassment. I couldn't believe that the move actually worked. The guard nodded at me.

"You have a Lumin pill?" He asked. "And you want to give it to one of the infected?"

I nodded and showed him the pill in my open palm.

"That's nothing like any Lumin I've ever seen," the guy said, his brows furrowing with suspicion. "Where did you get it?"

"Oh, I found it," Holly said. "My ex-boyfriend kept it in our medicine cabinet. I didn't give it back to him when I threw him out. Can you believe he evacuated with his new girlfriend? Men are such jerks. Now, I want to do the right thing and give this pill to one of those poor people who are infected by the storm. Can my friend go in there and hand it over, pretty please?"

"Sure, do it quick," the guard said and waved me into the tent. "Don't reach into the cage, okay, missy? They're vicious. Will take your hand off at the wrist if you let them."

"Do I need to put on a special suit or anything?" I asked as I hesitated outside the tent.

"Nope," the guard said. "Only those handing the contaminated waters need to. The vampires can't transmit their virus just by coughing on you. Just don't get close enough for them to grab you or bite you."

"Sorry," Holly whispered to the guard. I saw her rolling her eyes at me as though she couldn't believe I asked such a stupid question. "She's got a lot of book learning, not much common sense."

I decided not to stick around, or the guard might change his mind. Summoning up my courage, I walked straight into the tent and opened the glass door leading to the cages.

Grace sat in the far corner of her cell and showed no sign that she recognized me. I kneeled down in front of the thick glass that separated us and opened my palm to show her the pill.

"Grace, it's me — Jiejie."

Grace didn't react to that nickname. It meant older sister in Chinese, and she hated calling me that. She wanted to call me by my name like her schoolmates called their siblings. I expected her to sniff in disdain at me. It would have comforted me, gave me a sign that she was Grace inside that pale, battered, haunted body, but she didn't react at all. Her knobby knees were stained with black fluid.

I didn't know if it was more Blight Rain or if her very blood ran inky black now like the waters that had transformed her. Loose strands of her hair hung over her dirty, muddy cheeks. I saw her eyelids flutter, revealing a glimpse of a glowing pupil. She reminded me of a cat caught in the headlights.

I cleared my throat and continued in a more serious, more desperate tone.

"It's me, your sister... Ailith. If you eat this, you'll feel better," I said. When she didn't budge from her place at the corner of the cell, I inched closer to the glass. I reached into one of the glass holes for airflow and offered it to her.

As she caught my scent, Grace slowly raised her face to me. Her wet black hair hung over her eyes, and black streaks of watery slime dripped down her milk-white skin.

My sister pushed herself up from her dark spot and crawled towards me. I noticed how animal-like her movements were, how she balanced herself on the balls of her feet and the tips of her fingers. She was cat-like, and her eyes emitted a grayish light.

Growing up, Grace loved stray cats. She used to sneak lion-head meatballs outside for a little black cat that lived in our yard. I remembered that she would cover the meat with a layer of white rice so that our mother wouldn't notice. My parents would have barked if they knew she was feeding the stray cat expensive meatballs.

Grace loved animals; she didn't care if they were strays who had fleas, ticks, and worms.

One winter day, that cat died in the worst possible way. It crawled under the hood of our dad's car on a wintry day and got trapped. Every day, our dad's car smelled more and more like something sweetly rank. Whenever we turned the heater on, a foul smell filled the car. When I finally told our father to check under the hood, I remembered him pulling into the cat's broken, decayed body. I recalled the tangled black hair falling off the cat's limp body in patches where its skin had sloughed off to reveal rotten flesh.

I don't know why that memory came back to me in that instant as I tried to hand Grace the Lumin pill. As she neared me, Grace's lips parted. Inside her mouth, I didn't see a human tongue. I saw black fur just like that decayed cat. I smelled that cat emitting from her pores.

She opened her mouth as though to shriek, but no sound came out. What emitted from her lungs was a whiff of odorous breath that reminded me of the sitting in our father's car suffocating under the thick smell of death.

I drew my hand back, dropping the precious tablet on the ground inside the cell.

When I reached into the cell to reclaim it, Grace snapped at me. I heard her teeth crack with the force of her attempt to bite me. I snatched my hand back and left the pill inside. She trampled it under her feet in her anguished attempt to grab me.

I fell onto my back and instinctively inched away. Something primal overtook me. It no longer mattered that she was my sister. All my courage left me. I just needed to get away.

She sensed my terror. At that second, her vampire instinctive took over too. Hunger. Famished, uncontrollable desire for warm bloody human flesh; that was her entire existence now.

Unable to reach me, Grace pounded her entire body against the glass. Her neck snapped back with such force that she couldn't possibly be alive. The glass cracked, and she left smears of ash-colored blood all over.

She didn't stop, not even as the shards of glass drove under her skin and impaled her.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Her torso continued to pound on the glass wall. Even as her ribs cracked and her limbs flailed uselessly around her.

I backed away with such force that I banged my head against the opposite wall. I didn't know what happened after that. But even under my closed eyes, I could hear her banging against the glass.

Thump. Thump. Thump.