Page 46 of The Last Vampire
“You haven’t changed at all,” says Lorena, sounding breathless as she looks from him to the portrait. “Are they all vampires?”
He shakes his head. “Only four of them were at the time.”
“Why did you bury this stuff?” she asks.
“When I was turned… I struggled to accept my new identity. A friend suggested I might find closure if I buried my human self, and these things represented who I was before becoming a vampire—my family and one of my favorite books. Everything else was lost when the Legion burned down our house.”
He is not sure why he is sharing any of this with her. It has no bearing on his current situation.
“Someone actually changed our history records and erased you from it.”
Lorena’s pitch rises with every word of her question-statement. Even when faced with incontrovertible evidence, she resists the truth.
She pulls out her phone, and as she taps on some images, William wonders if she is about to break their agreement and share the recording she made of him. Then the words she is typing fill the screen:
vampires great fires of the 1700s legion of fire
Unlike the school computer, this time a list of entries populates the device. William notes how her heartbeat quickens as he leans closer to read over her shoulder. “How did you manage that?” he asks.
“The internet. It’s like this invisible web that connects the whole world.”
He takes the device from her hands. Phrases underlined in blue stare back at him, but when he reads the text excerpts beneath each line, the search terms are scattered and unrelated.
“You scroll like this,” she says, brushing her finger across the screen andmaking the text move. “And when you find an entry you want to read, you click the highlighted blue link.”
He skims through the list and clicks on the blue text when he reads:The Great Fires of New Orleans.More text appears, detailing fires that ravaged the city in 1788 and 1794. Even though the entry does not mention vampires, William is certain this was the Legion’s doing. New Orleans has—orhad—one of the greatest vampire concentrations in the world.
William returns to the results and keeps scrolling. Twenty pages later, he never comes across the phraseLegion of Fire. They have managed to remain entirely in the shadows for centuries.
“We’ve been gone too long. We should return to the group,” says Lorena, her voice distant and gaze locked on the portrait of William’s family, which she has been staring at for a while.
“I can locate them.” He holds out his hand for the portrait, and she seems to hesitate before handing it over.
William rises to his feet and pockets the piece of paper, leaving the eighteenth-century box behind on the library steps as he leads Lorena across campus toward their classmates. Since he made sure to breathe on the bus to seem human, he has the group’s scent and can pick it up.
They enter a building called the Science Center, where their classmates appear to have disbanded because their scents are no longer bound together. Then he leads Lorena toward Salma.
“Oh!” says Lorena when she spots her friend in some kind of food hall. “Let’s not interrupt.”
Salma is leaning against the wall and talking to the curly-haired boy, Trevor.
“There you are!”
It is Lorena’s other roommate, Tiffany, who a moment ago was posing for the photographer, Zach. She has just spotted Lorena and now Salma notices her, too.
The two girls leap over and grab each of Lorena’s arms. “We’ll bring her right back,” Salma says to William, leading Lorena away as if they could speak out of his earshot.
“Where did you go?” asks Salma when they have rounded the corner.
The vampire’s hearing homes in on their conversation. “He just wanted to check out some historical building, and I went with him,” says Lorena in a tone that implies it was no big deal.
“Do not downplay this, Navarro! If you’re breaking the rules, you mustreallylike him—”
“What about you and Trevor?” Lorena cuts in. “Did I just see you two flirting?”
“Shh, I don’t want him to hear you,” says Salma. “But yes—we made out.”
The girls squeal, and it’s so loud in his ears that William has to tune them out. Then he sees that Trevor is walking toward him.
