The Vault (A Farm Novel) Read Free

could have killed us both. Instead, he’d bought our freedom with information about the location of the cure.
    The same information he’d given Carter and me after the battle at El Corazon.
    When we’d first arrived at Genexome, Carter and I had split up. He’d gone to search for the underground storage. I’d searched the rest of the industrial compound. I was faster than Carter and could cover more ground in less time, so it had made sense.
    “I found the labs. It looked like someone or something came through there recently just like here.” I reach into the pocket of my jeans and pull out a glass vial. I hold it out to him carefully. “I did find this.”
    He takes it and rolls it over to read the white label imprinted with the code EN371.
    “Jesus, this is the virus?”
    “Just like he said it would be,” I say. “But that only proves they created it here. It doesn’t mean—”
    “What is it you want me to do? Just give up?” That’s when Carter turns to face me head-on. No longer cocky. Just determined. “Humans are losing this fight against the Ticks. If this cure doesn’t work, then Lily will finish her transformation. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the chance is slim that Sebastian is telling the truth. Maybe there is no cure. But the alternative is to just accept that Lily is going to be a Tick. Are you really ready to do that? Because I’m not.”
    With Carter here, pinning me with his glare, coaxing me with his resolve, I realize that no, I’m not ready to give up.
    But I still have doubts. Can Sebastian be trusted? Can Sabrina? Can
any
vampire be trusted? Even me?
    I want to believe that there might be good in Sebastian. That maybe there is a reason he created the Tick virus. Something I don’t yet understand. Something beyond his seething need to exact revenge on Roberto. I want to believe there is goodness in him and that that goodness drove him to create a cure. Because if he might be redeemed, then there is hope for me, too.
    I want to believe, but it’s hard.
    “Any chance you have a plan C?”
    He ignores my sarcasm. “Yeah. You and I go to the Farm, where your father took her. We bring her out of the medically induced coma and you bite her.”
    “What?”
    “Just like Sebastian did for you when you were dying, after you’d been attacked by that Tick. You bite Lily. You save her life.”
    “If I bite Lily, she becomes a vampire. Like me.”
    “Exactly.”
    “No!” Every cell in my body, every functioning brain cell, recoils from this idea. “No! I’m not turning my sister into a vampire! You don’t know what you’re asking me to do!” Because the thought of turning my sister into a vampire—into a thing like me—it’s repulsive. It’s like a poison in my blood. “You’re asking me to do this to her—to turn her into a monster—without her consent.”
    “If it saves her life, then yes.”
    “No!” That’s what was done to me. In a darkened parking lot, after a horrible attack by Ticks, I sacrificed my life to save my sister, and she repaid me by begging Sebastian to turn me into a vampire. And Carter strong-armed him into it. I’d had zero say in the matter. I’d died a hero and woken up a monster.
    “You don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” I say again. “She wouldn’t be Lily anymore. She’d be . . .” There are simply no words to describe the transformation she would go through. All I can come up with is “something else.”
    “She would be alive.”
    “She would want to eat you.”
    “She would fight the urge,” he insists.
    “It’s not an urge. The need to kill isn’t like a craving for Taco Bell. It’s not just something you fight.”
    “You fought it,” he says, gesturing toward his neck. “You didn’t kill me just now.”
    “It would be months, maybe years, before she could actually be with you. Longer before she could be comfortable around you.”
    “You think I wouldn’t wait?” he asks. “You think I want Lily now and