Wayward Son - Rainbow Rowell Page 0,77

do they want from her?”

He’s going to find this out anyway, if he helps me—“She’s a magician.”

His hands drop between his knees, and his blue eyes are wide. “Talk about starcross’d lovers!”

“I’d rather not.”

Lamb rubs his chin. “So … your girlfriend is one of their Speaker guinea pigs.…”

“There are others?”

He shrugs. “Well, there must be.”

I feel sick to my stomach. I scoot to the edge of the sofa. “Lamb, please, I’m not asking you to get involved. Just point me in the right direction.”

“You wouldn’t get anywhere near them,” he says. “They have guards, guns, archers.…”

“Just tell me what you know.”

“You’ll be killed, Bazza.”

“I’m not a precious antiquity, remember?”

“You are certainly not an antiquity.”

Suddenly—from one breath to the next—Lamb is sitting next to me on the sofa. Before I can even react, his lips are by my ear. I wait for him to bite me—can you be Turned twice?

“There’s something in the room,” he says, voice so low only a vampire sitting right next to him could pick it up. “Can you hear its heartbeat?”

I close my eyes. Can I? I hear my own heart, faint and always a few beats slow. I hear Lamb’s, a similar dirge. Ah … there. I can hear it—and I recognize it.

“Simon,” I say, my eyes flying open.

In that moment, Lamb’s empty chair lifts up and slams down into the floor. One of the wooden legs seems to tear itself off and fly towards Lamb’s chest. His fangs are out. He grabs the leg midair and raises it like a club—

“No!” I shout, catching Lamb’s arm.

Just as the door to his flat flies off its hinges.

Bunce is standing there, with the Normal, holding out her purple gem.

“Hands in the air, bloodsucker, or I’ll burn this whole city to the ground.”

53

SHEPARD

The vampire holds the stake in the air, giving Penelope some thousand-year-old stink eye. She doesn’t budge. He drops it.

I can hear Simon flapping around.

Baz dodges in front of Lamb, holding his hands out to the room. “Snow, I swear I’ll throttle you.”

“What is this, Baz?” Lamb sounds more confused than threatened. “Are you in league with these mages?”

“No.” Baz is still blocking Lamb from an invisible Simon. “Not ‘in league.’ They’re my friends, they’re trying to protect me—which I do not require. What part of ‘thumbs-up’ don’t you people understand?”

Simon shouts back: “What part of ‘Don’t leave with him’ don’t you understand?”

“I’m fine!”

“You’re in a vampire’s bedroom!”

“I am a vampire!” Baz says. “And this is a studio!”

“A vampire,” Lamb says, then looks at Penelope. “A mage…” He looks at me. “A…”

“Bleeder,” I say, waving. “Name’s Shepard.”

Lamb nods and looks over Baz’s shoulder, where Simon is disturbing the atmosphere. “And what is this?”

“His boyfriend!” Simon snarls.

Huh. I wasn’t sure. I mean, I wondered.…

Baz covers his face.

“Boyfriend?” Lamb repeats. “What about Agatha?”

“There isn’t a simple explanation for any of this,” I cut in, smiling. “But there is an entertaining one. And I swear, no one here means you any harm.”

A vase topples off a table near the spot where Simon is flapping.

I keep smiling. “Maybe we could all sit down and talk?”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, we’re all sitting on Lamb’s couches. Well, except for Simon, but that seems fair. He did break the only other chair. Lamb keeps looking over at the pieces and frowning, like he’d really rather fix his fancy chair than deal with any of us.

Lamb’s much less vampirey-looking than Baz. (I’ve been thinking that Baz must come from a long line of vampires—a Transylvania original, with that long black hair and widow’s peak. But I guess that isn’t how vampirism works.…) Lamb’s got a soft face and a head full of soft, shiny hair. He looks exactly like you’d expect an English person to look if you’d only seen them in Jane Austen movies—sort of pencil-drawn and pretty. He’s pale, of course, and gray around the eyes. But he’s not as gray all over as Baz. Not as drained and ghostly.

If this is what a vampire is supposed to look like, then maybe Baz is a vampire with an iron deficiency.

Lamb’s definitely not scared of us. Even though we have magic and numbers on our side. He’s treating us like four kids who just confessed to throwing a baseball through his window.

Baz is making our case: “I was telling you the truth. Agatha is my friend. We’re just trying to find her.”

Lamb frowns some more. “How can you be friends with mages? They hate us.”

“We grew up together,” Penelope explains. “We