My jaw tightened and my stomach went leaden. “Great. You can hurt a vampire when she has a quarter of her powers. You’re real tough.”
Ophelia’s eyes narrowed and she went on, ignoring me. “I wanted to tell you—I tried to get in your mind to show you all the fun stuff that Nina and I had discovered but your mind was closed completely. It was clogged by all the others around you.” She frowned a pouty little girl’s frown. “It made me sad. Where were you—the mall?”
“Broadway.” My voice was barely audible to myself and I didn’t want to raise it. I thought of us wandering aimlessly through town, and Alex and I rolling around in bed, all the while, Ophelia was learning—and hurting Nina.
“Don’t cry!” Ophelia said. “There’s plenty left for you, too!”
I backed up, slipped my hand into my shoulder bag. Ophelia’s eyes followed the line of my arm.
“You know what else is different?” Ophelia asked. “I can’t read your mind in here.” She held her arms open, blue eyes grazing the ceiling. “Must be something about the Underworld—protects their own or something? No, that can’t be it because you don’t belong here.” She grinned. “You don’t belong anywhere.”
I gritted my teeth. “Are you through?”
“No. Like I said, I couldn’t read your mind—it was frustrating. Imagine how I felt, having to cart around that bag of bones”—she inclined her blond head toward Nina—“on the off chance that you’d be where I wanted you to be.”
I licked my lips. “So you took a chance?”
“No, silly.” Ophelia paused then, her eyes wide and dripping spurious innocence. “I couldn’t read your thoughts, so I read Alex’s.”
Ophelia smiled serenely, stepping back toward Nina. She gingerly slipped her fingers under the strap of Nina’s dress and lifted it back up to her shoulder, smoothing it carefully. Then she trailed her fingers slowly through Nina’s hair, playing with the few strands that weren’t snarled and blood caked.
“You get away from her,” I spat.
Ophelia just smiled and sweetly patted Nina’s unmoving head. “That’s okay. I’m done playing with her. Now I’m ready to play with you.”
Nina’s body lurched forward in the chair and Ophelia slapped her back. I sucked in a breath, praying that my best friend wasn’t dead. I kept my eyes fixed on Ophelia, but gingerly kicked one of the blood bags closer to Nina.
Ophelia kept up her lament.
“You know, Sophie, I should be really, really jealous of you. Alex loves you in a way that he never even considered me.” The soft lilt of Ophelia’s voice took on a hard edge. “He thinks about you so often, he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.”
Ophelia walked slowly, closing the distance between us. “He’s been so worried that I’m going to hurt you. He thinks about it constantly. He’s even thinking about it now as he drives to your grandmother’s old house.”
“What?”
“Alex was right when he said it was easy to hijack your mind—the maggots, Daddy.” Ophelia pressed her manicured fingers to her lips and giggled. “But it wasn’t too hard to put a few suggestions into his mind. Especially since they seemed to be the same thoughts that your ragtag bunch of supernatural friends were having. And because I wrote your grandmother’s address in the margins of all my books. I would have included a Google map, but I thought that would be just a little too obvious.”
I nudged closer to Nina, trying to eye her through my peripheral, to see if she was alive.
“But that Alex—” Ophelia clasped her hands and batted her eyelashes innocently. “Try as I might, I just can’t get over him. I guess it’s a girl thing—or maybe it’s those sweet baby blues of his.” She licked her lips as if the memory was a delicious one and winked at me. “You know how mesmerizing those eyes are. I still love him, Sophie; a part of me still wants him back. I just can’t do anything to hurt him. So, you don’t have to worry. I’m not going to hurt you.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and Ophelia smiled.
“I’m just going to kill you.”
Ophelia’s face fell when mine did. “Oh, honey! Don’t take it personally. I mean, we are sisters after all, and I’ve always wanted a kid sister. But you know what I want more? Complete control.”
I took another step back, the hammering of my heart so dramatic it hurt as it thumped against my rib cage. I blinked and Ophelia was right in front of me, standing on the vacated desk. She held her hands out, palms up, like a scale.