It takes all my strength and willpower, but somehow I manage to pull away, ripping my fangs from her flesh and staring down at her blotchy face, full of broken blood vessels. Is she dead? Did I kill her? Oh God. I’m supposed to be the good guy here. And the good guys arrest the bad guys and bring them to justice. They don’t eat them.
“Bertha?” I venture after a hard swallow. “Um, are you okay?”
Suddenly her eyes shoot open and she flips me around. With one movement, the tables are turned and I’m the one on my back. Pinning me between her strong thighs, she reaches for her stake, managing to grasp it in her fingers.
“Now we see who’s the real vampire slayer,” she snarls, her face beet red and her mouth dripping blood. She pulls back, ready to stake me through the heart. I squirm, desperately trying to get away. But she’s too strong. She’s got me down. This is the end. My final swan song.
“Please, Bertha!” I cry. “Please don’t—”
I squeeze my eyes shut, not wanting to watch myself poof into dust. What will it feel like to die? Where do I go afterward? I sold my soul a long time ago to become a vampire. Does that mean this is it? The end of me? Or the beginning of a life of eternal suffering?
Suddenly Bertha screams. My eyes fly open. Sunny has her by the hair, dragging her off of me. “No one stakes my sister, you bitch!” she cries in a voice I’ve never heard her use before. She smacks the stake out of Bertha’s hands.
I try to scramble to my feet, to help my sister. But I’m woozy and stunned and stumble backward instead. Bertha yanks free from Sunny’s grasp—leaving my sister with nothing more than a handful of hair extensions. (I should have known that gorgeous head of hair was nothing more than a weave!) Then, as I watch in horror, she pulls something else from her pocket.
A knife made of iron.
No! I dive at Bertha, using everything left inside of me to get to her before she can touch my fairy sister and poison her with her blade. As a vampire/fairy combo, I have some resistance to iron—it won’t kill me, but it’ll make me pretty damn sick. But Sunny—one touch and…
I leap onto Bertha, trying to wrestle the knife away. I manage to knock it from her grasp and yank her backward. This time there will be no mercy. She’s gone too far. I rip out her throat with my teeth and let the blood spill onto the floor without any interest in drinking. She’s too repulsive for that.
A moan interrupts me and I drop Bertha to the ground and run to my sister. Oh God! My eyes widen as I realize that my efforts were too late. Sunny falls to the ground, blood seeping from a small cut in her arm. But it’s enough. The poison is already swimming through her veins.
“Rayne!” she cries, her eyes going glassy and her legs and arms flopping uselessly.
“No!” This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening! I fall to the floor, grabbing her arm, trying to suck out the poison best I can. I suck and I suck until I puke, but it doesn’t seem to be doing any good. Her body convulses and her eyes roll to the back of her head.
“I’m cold, Rayne,” she sobs as I pull her into my arms, rocking her close as bloody tears stream down my cheeks. “So cold.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I try. But I know in my heart it won’t be. The poison will take her, just as it stole our dad away.
And it’s all my fault.
“Rayne…” she tries to speak, but I can see it’s an effort to do so. “Rayne…”
“Shhh…” I try to shush her. “Be still.”
“You’re the best sister a girl could ever have. I love you.” Sunny whispers before closing her eyes. I watch in horror as her breath dies in her throat and her body goes limp.
“No!” I cry, trying to shake her awake. “Sunny! Stay with me!” But even as I scream and pound at her, I know it will do no good.
My sister. My beautiful, innocent, sweet twin sister is dead. Forever. And there’s nothing I can do to bring her back.
13
I can’t tell you how long I sat there in the cold, dank, dark abandoned subway tunnel underneath the skin of New York City, my sister’s lifeless body resting silently in my lap. I can tell you that I didn’t cry much at first. Not that I didn’t want to, but for some reason the sobs refused to break free from my frozen body. Instead, I mostly stared into space, into the darkness, numb with overwhelming grief and filled with wild wonderings of when the hell I was going to wake up and realize this was all some terrible nightmare. That my sister wasn’t actually dead.
Because she couldn’t be dead. That’s not how this story was supposed to go. I was supposed to rescue her and we were supposed to live happily ever after. I mean, who would ever want to read a story or see a film where the heroine dies a bloody, nasty death for a crime she didn’t commit? Hollywood doesn’t work like that.
Unfortunately, real life, I realize with a sickening thought, often does.
Eventually I manage to haul myself to my feet, dimly aware that, though at the moment, nothing else seems to matter, in truth something does. Jareth and Magnus—did they survive the attack? Are they worried sick—wondering where we are? I need to get back to them. I need to tell them what happened. If they’re even there to tell. My stomach heaves and I lean over to empty the rat blood I drank a mere hour ago, mixed with Bertha’s vile bodily fluids. It’s insane how one hour can change the rest of your life.
I want to take Sunny. I don’t want to leave her lifeless body sprawled out on the tracks, a gourmet meal for some lucky subway rats. But try as I might, I can’t manage to carry her dead weight in my arms. Especially not through the tiny crawl space we came from. You know that old sixties song “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother”? Well, either that dude had some seriously anorexic brother—or he spent way more hours than me in his local gym. Finally I give up, deciding to drag her to the collapsed section of the tunnel and cover her body as much as I can with stones and debris. The best burial I can do under the circumstances.