A Dark-Adapted Eye (19 page)

“I . . .”

His eyes turned dark. “You didn’t have to lie to me, Asha.”

An unexpected spark of anger made my nostrils flare. “Oh, you would have just let me go without a fight?”

“No, but—”

“You can’t control me, Les!”

“I don’t want to control you. I just don’t want you needlessly putting yourself in dangerous situations. You’ve gotten too comfortable with this. You haven’t been harmed so far, but what about the time you
are
harmed? What about the time you can’t get home? Who’s going to be there for you?”

I will. I’ll be there for myself.
But despite the turn of events tonight, the argument was weak. He was right. I just had a hard time admitting it, because to do so would feel, somehow, like letting go of Ivory for good.

I took a step away from him, unintentionally putting myself in a revealing patch of moo
nlight.

“Your arms,” he said suddenly. “Your clothes. Asha, what—”

Looking down at myself, I saw in the moonlight what he hadn’t noticed in the dark. My clothes were torn and smeared with dried mud. My arms were ravaged with scratches both from the thorny bush and Jordana’s nails.

He stood up straight, his eyes raking the rest of my body, searching for damage. His stony pretense cracked terribly, revealing the hellish disquiet I’d put him through these past few hours. I watched his face lose color. His eyes grew wretched and afraid and my heart broke.

“There were . . . thorns. I was in a fight.”

“A
fight
?”

“With a vampire. Rade brought her to meet us on purpose. I killed her. I drowned her. It was an accident,” I insisted. “I didn’t go
looking
for her—”

“If you’d stayed home it wouldn’t have happened. Or it might have happened some other time, but I could have been with you. You could have been
killed
, Asha. I don’t even want to think—” He stopped abruptly, troubled, his eyes darting everywhere but at me.

I knew perfectly well I’d only narrowly escaped death, but the reminder hit me hard. “Are you even
listening
to me?” I demanded. “I killed her. I didn’t want to—I wouldn’t have done it—” My words had dissolved into sobs and I was gasping in horror when I felt his arms encircle me. “I killed her, Les.
I killed her
.”

“You did what you had to do,” he murmured into my hair.

We swayed gently back and forth for a few minutes while I calmed down. When I was able to breathe normally again, he led me down the hall to the bathroom and locked the door. He turned on the shower and then, without a word, began to remove each piece of my ruined clothing until I was naked and weary before him. My arms looked even worse in the bright, golden-hued lights and I didn’t dare turn to my reflection.

Clouds of steam drifted up toward the ceiling and I stepped into the shower. I shook beneath the hot, lovely water as it softened my aching muscles. Squeezing my eyes shut, I allowed m
yself a few hard, silent sobs before I sucked in a long, fresh breath. I turned my face up and let the water slide over my skin and soak into my hair. Swirls of mud and blood disappeared down the drain, and I was clean.

“Doing okay?” Les asked.

I peeked around the edge of the shower curtain and reached for him. He came into the shower without hesitation, without even taking off his jeans. His hands slid over my slick skin and tangled in my thick sopping hair. Backing him up against the tile, I pulled down the sodden jeans and tossed them to the floor, where they landed with a heavy slap.

“I want you, Les,” I said.

“You’ve got me.”

I smiled as he lifted me to him, his arms safe and strong. And if my face was wet with tears or drops of water, I couldn’t tell.

fourteen

resonanc
e:
a state in which an orbiting object is subject to periodic gravitational perturbations by another

In the morning, I rubbed my sleepy eyes and wandered into the kitchen. Cris was rooting around for some breakfast, waist-deep in the pantry.

“Where’s Aleskie?” I asked. “I need to talk to her.”

“She moved into the room I was using. It’s darker than the living room. God, there is
nothing
to eat here!” she complained. “There’s not even coffee.”

“Why are you surprised? Les’s dad barely even lives here.”

“Well, I’m starving. Maybe I’ll go get doughnuts.” She pulled out of the pantry and looked at me. “Oh my god, your
arms
! What happened? Was it Les? Where is he?” Slamming the pantry door, she peered around with a murderous glare.

I threw my arms behind my back. “God! He didn’t do that! It was a vampire. And now it’s dead.”

“Tell me,” she said.

I hadn’t even told Les everything about last night, but Criseyde was my best friend and the words tumbled out. “I sneaked out to see Rade after telling Les I would be right back. We went to Witcher Park because he said he wanted to show me something, but he was really meeting this other vampire so she could try to kill me. Somehow I ended up killing her instead. And Rade, he . . . he asked me to kill
him
.”

Her eyes went wide. “Ex
cuse
me?”

“I know.”

“Okay.” She held her hands out in front of her, eyes wide. “Okay. So you killed a vampire. No big deal. That’s what Les and Ivory do all the time. Besides, it was self-defense. So, are you going to kill
Rade
, too? I would. That bastard.”

“I didn’t answer him. I was just . . . I couldn’t think.” I mustered a smile that felt brittle. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, at least not right now. Tell me how it went at the party. I saw you talking to Rhys.”

Criseyde smiled, accepting the change of subject. “Yes, I admit it, I was talking to the jailbait. Hey, do you remember tall, dark, and preppy guy?”

“Yeah, I saw him there. His name’s Ethan.”

“He’s Rhys’s older brother. But I think I may have underestimated jailbait boy. He’s kind of cute.” She pointed a warning finger at me before I could say a word. “Let me just tell you why. He didn’t talk about my looks, or where he wanted to take me to dinner, or how much money he wanted to spend on me. Well, he probably doesn’t have much money, but still.”

I frowned. “Is that what guys normally say to you?”

“Sometimes. Ethan was like that when I met him at the café. And it’s annoying. Rhys actually asked questions about me, and was interested in my answers. So I decided to give him a chance.”

“Good for you,” I said.

She glanced at the clock on the stove. “I go back to work tomorrow, and I’ve got some stuff to do today. Like get some breakfast, for starters. Want to come with?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got stuff of my own.”

“All right. See you later!”

“Yep.” I smiled again as she left. It felt more authentic this time, but it was such an effort.

“Hey, Les.”

Surprised, I turned to see Cris slipping past Les, who stood at the kitchen entrance. How long had he been there? Had he heard me tell Cris what Rade wanted me to do? It wasn’t something I wanted to keep from him forever, but he would react much more strongly than Cris had and I wasn’t entirely ready to deal with the issue.

“Hi,” I said to him softly, blushing.

My heart melted at the subtle curve of his lips and the affectionate gleam in his eyes. I looped my arms around his neck as he hoisted me onto the edge of the counter for a long, deep kiss. It was easy to get lost in him. It was too easy to forget about anyone else but the two of us.

“How are we ever going to get anything done?” I asked when our lips parted.

“I don’t know.” He took my hands and I hopped off the counter. “There’s only one thing I want to do right now. Maybe two.”

I blinked at him, liquid with longing. “I can’t wait . . .”
To tear your clothes off
, I thought, and promptly grew red with embarrassment. “To be, um, to do . . .”

He knew what I was trying to say and a pleased grin crawled onto his face. “Ah, well, we can do that any time, you know . . .”

“But,” I continued regretfully, “I need to go to the library this morning. There are some things I want to research. And things we should talk about. Will you come with me?”

“I have to meet the glass people at the house at one,” he said, looking almost laughably cres
tfallen that we wouldn’t have time to ourselves beforehand.

“We’ll be done in time for that. And after . . .”—I grinned mischievously—“I’m all yours.”

~

I want you to kill me.

Rade wanted to die for the pain he’d caused in others. But why did he want
me
to end his life, such as it was? It hadn’t occurred to me to ask. I supposed it didn’t matter who he wanted to end his life, just that he wanted it done at all.

Leaving him last night, I’d started to feel upset at his request. I’d run to the car without wai
ting for Aleskie, tugging on the locked door impatiently. It wasn’t every day a girl got asked for death, yet that wasn’t what troubled me exactly. I couldn’t pinpoint why I’d reacted so strongly to Rade’s request. I blamed it on shock and fear and a general proclivity for life. I blamed my trembling hands on the death they’d caused and a fear of the dark.

I’d been so optimistic in the days following Ivory’s abduction. I’d ignored any doubts and setbacks. I’d
known
we would get him back.

Now, walking up to the library, I felt anxious and desolate. The haunting words Rade had spoken before Jordana’s attack tormented me. It wasn’t likely anything in the library would help me solve the mystery of a vampire prophecy, but at the least I wanted to look up everything I could about lunar eclipses. Just before Ivory’s kidnapping, he had told me not to go out on the night of the eclipse. At the time I’d thought he was simply being protective, but now that Rade had mentioned a blood eclipse, I knew there had to be a connection. Something big was going to happen during the lunar eclipse, and Ivory had known it.

It seemed fairly obvious to me Aleskie had revealed to him some big vampire secret. They’d spent hours talking in his room before our ill-fated mission to Stars. I would ask her about the so-called prophecy tonight, I decided, when Les and I could listen to her together. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask her before.

Inside the library, I pointed Les toward an empty table and set about gathering books. I didn’t know where to begin, so I grabbed everything I could find that mentioned eclipses. My arms were full when I finished and the books spilled across the table.

“What’s all this?” Les asked.

“Research.”

“For what?”

I took the seat across from him. “Rade told me this prophecy that’s supposed to explain what vampires are doing here. Their god or whoever—Pater Luna—is supposed to return to kill us. Or make us slaves. I can’t remember exactly how it went. He said something about blood.”

“Maybe Aleskie knows.”

“I’m going to ask her later. Whatever it means, I’m sure something bad is going to happen tomorrow night.”

“That’s when the eclipse is happening?”

“Yep. I marked it on my calendar a while ago.”

“I don’t think we can have Ivory back by then, Ash. If at all.”

Lowering my eyes, I pulled the nearest book out of the stack. “I know. But if something is happening and he’s still alive, he’s going to be there. He knows whatever the vampires have planned, and they knew he did, and that’s why they took him.”

Without another word, I began looking through the books, occasionally making notes in the little book I used to record astronomical observations. Most of the information was the scientific facts of lunar eclipses, like dust in the atmosphere causing the deep orange color on the moon, or how there were at least two of them each year. Total eclipses, like the one happening tomorrow night, were much rarer.

The rest of the information was less scientific. The word “lunar” came from the l
ate Latin
lunaticus
, I learned, and I added moon-struck, moon-sick, and periodic insanity to my vocabulary. Sex during a lunar eclipse apparently resulted in children filled with demons. There were tales of animals and demons swallowing the moon, people banging pots and sticks and lighting fireworks to scare them away. Bad omens. There shall be blood on the moon.

None of the information really had anything to do with vampires, unless they were the d
emons in question. But I hadn’t expected much. I closed the last book and sat back with a sigh.

“I think we shouldn’t lose hope,” I said.

“Why’s that?” Les asked.

“Well, I was thinking about apparent brightness and absolute brightness. The first is how bright something appears, and the second is the measure of the
true
brightness. Here, in Las Secas . . . it doesn’t seem very bright right now, you know? But in spite of all this dark stuff, we
are
bright. We deserve brightness. It’s out there. We just have to get out of the dark to find it.”

Reaching for my notebook, I looked up to see Les watching me, one arm slung over the back of his chair.

“That’s not really absolute brightness works,” I said. “I was just . . .”

“It was nice,” he said. “And you’re smart.”

“Oh.” I felt flustered. “Thanks. But this is nothing. I just wanted to learn a few things about lunar eclipses, just for myself . . .”

“Did you ever think about going to college some day?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes I think about studying in Paris. That’s where Criseyde wants to live some day, and she always talked like we’d go together.” I laughed. “I think she wants to shop at expensive stores and drink espresso and become some artist’s muse. Or a spy.”

“Paris would be nice,” he said. “Anywhere would, really.”

I looked at him shyly. “Do you . . . think about the future much?”

He shrugged. “I never really did, except in a general way. Until I started hunting vampires, I was kind of directionless. The past few years I’ve been pretty busy thinking about what I’d like to do if we ever get to leave here. But it’s hard to figure your life out when you don’t know if you’ll ever have options. I still don’t know what I want, not really, but every time I see myself doing something, somewhere away from here, I see you with me.”

“I see that too,” I said softly.

“So . . . I’m ‘the bright one of the sword,’ huh?”

“What?”

“My star. Nair al Saif. Otherwise known as Iota Orionis. That’s what it means. I looked it up while you were taking notes.”

“Oh, yeah.” I fiddled nervously with my notebook. “When I started reading about stars, I learned that their names have different meanings, and it was kind of fun to assign them to people. I picked that one for you because you like to use a knife, and the star is in the Orion constellation, so . . .”

“The hunter.”

“Yeah.”

“Which one are you?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I never thought about it. I was too busy giving stars to everyone else, I guess.”

“How about Al Nair?”

“There are like, three stars with that name.”

“But they all mean the same thing.”

“You think I’m bright?”

“The brightest.”

“Then that would make me the sun. Unless we’re still talking about absolute brightness. In that case I’m some star in the LMC.” He gave me an amused and slightly uncomprehending look. “We’ll just stick with Al Nair,” I said.

Les helped me put the books back before we headed to the house to meet the glass people. While they worked, he moved the two broken pieces of the table down to the curb and I righted the table lamp and scrubbed at the stain on the couch. There was nothing to be done for the holes in the walls until we could get to the hardware store. They didn’t really matter anyway if som
ething bad was happening tomorrow night.

In a couple hours the workers were done replacing the windows and vacuuming glass out of the carpet. Les signed some papers and took a receipt, and we were alone. I followed him into the kitchen, where he leaned easily against the counter.

“We got sidetracked at the library,” I said. “I meant to tell you this thing about vampires. Apparently they have personal preferences about blood and can taste certain flavors that aren’t even really flavors, actually. But anyway, the reason Rade came for me when I was nine is because he likes the taste of loneliness. And I was lonely then.”

“Ash . . .”

“I’m safe from him now, because I’m not lonely. Because I have you and Criseyde, and I had Ivory, too.”