“No, I had to die,” he said charily.

I choked on my eggs, bits and pieces spewing from my mouth and nose. Ewe…so gross. “You died?” I coughed.

“Yeah, but I don’t remember that part either. I just know that I had to die in order to be what I am now,” he said with a matter-of-fact attitude.

I eyed him over, taking note of his pale skin, his extremely red lips, and his abnormally bright blue eyes. As bad as this was going to sound, I had to admit, for a dead guy, he looked pretty good.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “So I still don’t get it. Why would someone let a vampire bite them?”

He gave a quiet laugh. “You really ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“Sorry,” I said, feeling stupid.

“No, it’s okay.” He took a deep breath, which puzzled me. I mean if he was dead, then why was he breathing? But since he’d just pointed out that I ask a lot of questions, I decided to stick a tack in that one for now. “Human’s let vampires bite them for a few different reasons. There’s the whole thrill of the danger that being bit brings. Sometimes it’s out of sheer curiosity. But most of the time, people do it to stimulate their…desires”

Okay, so I’ve felt embarrassed before, but never absolutely mortified. Wow. It had been awhile since I’d felt the prickle. I could feel my face heating up, so I let pieces of my hair drift down across my face.

“Yeah…so anyways,” Laylen said, in an attempt to change the subject and remove the awkward silence that had gripped the air. “Going back to that prickle thing you were talking about. Do you feel it every time you experience an emotion? Or does it just happen every once and awhile?”

“It only happens when I experience a new emotion,” I told him and then shivered, suddenly feeling cold.

He considered this. “Hmm…I don’t think I’ve heard of anything like that. But seeing as that there are hundreds of different forms of magic out there, there are a lot of things I haven’t heard of.”

“So how can we find out?” I shivered again. It was getting really cold.

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you cold?”

I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. “I’m freezing. Aren’t you?”

“I always run cold.” He glanced around the kitchen, and then he jumped up from the stool and sprinted over to the window.

“What are you looking at?” I stood up and walked over beside him. “Is there something out there?”

“What the—” He jumped back, curse words flying. “How the heck did they find us?”

“What are you…Oh!” I panicked. “The Death Walkers are here!”

He looked at me, his beautiful bright blues eyes flooding with a sea of fear. “Yeah, there right outside.”

Chapter 24

“Shouldn’t we be hiding or something?” I asked Laylen.

After discovering a swarm of Death Walkers marching across the desert toward the house, Laylen had grabbed me by the arm and sprinted down the hall back to the room where Alex and Aislin had transported from. Then he’d started throwing books off of the shelves. What was the purpose of this, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe he was having a momentarily lapse in sanity—too much stress or something. I don’t know

But what I did know was that I was freaking out.

“Laylen!” I hollered over the thudding of the books hitting the floor. “What are you doing?!” A book flew straight at me, and I had to dodge to the side to avoid getting smacked in the face by it.

“There’s a key somewhere around here…” He glanced inside a book and tossed it on the floor, “To a trapdoor just below that rug.” He nodded at a black and red checkered rug on the floor. “We can hide you there until…” He chucked a book over his shoulder and it landed on the floor right in front of my feet.

“Until what?”  I asked anxiously. Jeez, would he just finish a sentence already. There were tons of Death Walkers heading right for us, burning with the desire to kill me.

He ripped an old leather-bound book from the shelf and flipped it open. “Until I can lead them away from here…get you out of dan…” His blue eyes lit up as he plucked a small, silver object out of the inside of the cover. He dropped the book on the floor and hurried over to me. “Here we go.” He held up the silver object, which as it turned out was a key.

“What’s it for?” I asked, my voice taking on that high, pitchy sound that seemed to come out whenever I was in a stressful situation. I flitted a quick glance over at the window, wondering how close the Death walkers were, but couldn’t see anything because of the curtains. “Laylen, I really think—”

“Just a second.” He went over to the rug and flipped it over. There was a small square carved in the hardwood floor that had a key hole and an indent for a handle. It looked like one of those trapdoors used on stages back in the olden days. He knelt down and slipped the key into the keyhole. Click and then he raised the door up. “Hurry up and get inside.”

Was he kidding me? I stared down at the mysterious dark hole, my feet glued to the floor. “You want me to do what?”

“Get inside and hide.”

I stole a glance back at the curtain-covered widow. The air was getting chillier by the second. Goose bumps dotted my arms and legs. They had to be getting close.

“Gemma.” The sound of Laylen’s angry voice snapped my attention away from the window and back to him.

“But what are you going to do?” I asked.

He gave me a duh look, and I understood. He was going to stay up here and fight while I hid like a coward. My gut twisted with guilt just like it had back at the Black Dungeon when Alex and I had run away and left Aislin and Laylen behind.

I started to argue. “But I—”

He cut me off. “Look, I know it’s hard—always being the one who has to hide. But that’s just the way it has to be. You can’t change who you are no matter how much you want to. Trust me.”

“This isn’t right.” I told him.

Ignoring what I said, he held out the key for me to take. “This key also locks the door from the inside. Make sure you lock it when you get in.”

Frowning, I snatched the key from him, stomped over to the trapdoor, and sat down on the floor with my legs dangling in the hole. “I still don’t think this is right,” I said as I lowered myself down into the hole.

It was dark inside, and the ceiling brushed the top of my head. If I’d been a sufferer of claustrophobia, I’d have been in trouble.

Thankfully, I wasn’t.

I looked up at Laylen and he reached down. In his hand was a golden handled, silver bladed knife.

“If something does happen,” he said, “take this and aim it straight for their heart. It might weaken them enough to give you a chance to run away.”

I reluctantly took the knife, the handle feeling cold against my skin. “And where exactly I’m I supposed to run?”

“To the car. The key’s in the ignition. Try to find your way back to Adessa’s. She’ll be able to help you, at least until someone gets there.”

Yeah, fat chance that was ever going to happen, seeing is how it was dark when we’d driven out to Vegas, and I had a really bad sense of direction.

A loud thud. It sounded close—maybe even inside the house.

“Don’t come out until you know it’s safe,” he whispered, before dropping the door shut.

Darkness suffocated me. I reached up and fumbled around until I found the lock. It took me a minute to get the key in it, but I managed. Above me, I could hear a lot of banging. The cold had crystallized the air and was biting against my skin. I shivered and chattered and every one of my senses felt hyperaware. I couldn’t see the outcome of this situation ending well—Laylen up there alone, trying to fight who knows how many Death Walkers without the Sword of Immortality, while I hid down here, freezing to death. Even if the Death Walkers didn’t kill me, the cold probably would.