A Dark-Adapted Eye (22 page)

I shot to my feet the second the cuff dropped off my wrist. Mercer grabbed me, his hand tightening on the reddened, sensitive skin.

“I wasn’t planning to run,” I said.

“Just being cautious. Should we do it on the floor, or would you prefer the desk?”

My heart was wild, pulse thumping in the back of my throat. I inched closer to him. “I don’t know. What do you like?”

He leaned forward, so close I could feel his hot breath on my face. “I’ll let you know.”

My hand closed around the keys and I tugged them out of my jeans, my jerky movements eliciting no reaction from him other than a surprised sound of pleasure. He had closed his eyes, I saw, and shaped his lips for a kiss. Leaning back as far as I could, I swung my hand up to his face. The key sticking out between my two middle fingers caught him right beneath the eye.

Yelling in pain, he lurched away from me and slapped a hand over the scratch—a minor but painful wound. Blood trickled slowly and brightly down his cheek. With his other hand he made a grab for me, but I kicked him in the shin and he hopped back. I’d have liked to restrain him, but I knew wrestling with him and the cuffs would only get me trapped again.

Holding my fist aloft, I tried to look as intimidating as possible. “Where’s my brother?”

“I know where he is,” Mercer said. “But I’m not going to tell you.”

“Of course not.”

For a moment I debated whether or not to argue, to try and force him to tell me what I needed to know, but I decided the effort would be wasted. He crouched a few feet from me, still clutc
hing at the places I’d hurt him. His eyes glinted harshly and his upper lip curled slightly. He wouldn’t tell me a thing without demanding some ridiculous payment in return.

I backed out of the room, still holding the key out like a blade. “Don’t try to follow me,” I said. I shut the door, wishing it had a lock, and then dashed to the stairs. I took them two at a time, one hand dancing down the wall and one sliding on the narrow metal rail.

Once I’d reached the bottom, I ran over to Les. He was still on the floor, but he’d moved several feet away from where he’d fallen to lean against a column. His left thigh was stretched out before him.

Wide-eyed, I stared at the blood drying stiffly on his jeans. He’d ripped one sleeve off his shirt and turned it into a tourniquet. “Are you—is it—does it—”

“It’s not bad,” he assured me. “It bled a lot, but it was just a bad graze. I can probably walk now.”

I glanced back at the stairs nervously. Mercer, apparently, had decided not to come out of the room. But I wasn’t worried about him so much as the big vampire who’d shown up and then di
sappeared. Not knowing his whereabouts was making me anxious. I expected him to materialize out of the shadows at any moment.

“Good,” I told Les. “We need to get out of here.”

It took some effort to get him to his feet, but once he was on them he could walk all right without my assistance. I held his hand as he hobbled behind me and we made our way to the door, each step bringing us closer to safety. We wouldn’t find Ivory today, I knew. Maybe we never would.
If the vampires who took him want to let him go, he’ll get back to you. If not, he’s already gone.
Ethan’s words echoed maddeningly in my head.

We had barely gone five steps when I saw a dark shape loom up in front of us, blocking the door. I stared at the big vampire’s broad, square face and felt my stomach sink with dread.

He stared at us for a moment, then a quiet, gentle smile, chilling for its lack of feeling, crept onto his face. “My name is Palefinger,” he said in his softly deep voice. “You will stay here until this evening, after the sun sets. And then you will come to witness the beginning of a new era. An era of vampires.”

Les and I shared a look.

“It is only Mercer and I here, now that you have killed those two,” Palefinger said, gesturing behind us to where the dead vampires lay. “More will join us later, but you needn’t worry about anything. We’ll treat you fairly.” He looked around, appearing faintly puzzled. “Where is Mercer?”

“Here!” a voice called desperately from the top of the stairs. “Here.”

Palefinger stared unflinchingly at Les and me for an uncomfortable moment while Mercer clumped down the stairs. Scowling, Mercer came to stand beside Palefinger, giving me a wide berth.

“This facility is no longer used for studying vampires,” Palefinger told us. “I put an end to those disrespectful experiments months ago in preparation for tonight.”

“I was here recently,” Les said. “The place was deserted.”

“Yes, I emptied it out. You wouldn’t have seen me or any other vampire because this isn’t a comfortable place to stay. But I do keep humans here, just as they once kept their own spec
imens. No one who took part in the experiments ever left here. The researchers, the scientists—I’ve been saving them.”

For the first time I saw a hint of emotion on his face, and he looked disturbingly pleased with himself.

“Yes, it is only us two here,” he continued, glaring dispassionately down at Mercer, “except for the humans we saved, and those we have collected to be among us for the return of Pater Luna.”

“Collected?” I echoed sharply. “Humans?”

“Humans.” Palefinger tilted his head at me. “Your brother. It was your brother Tasker and I took from you that night, was it not? The blond boy?”

I set my jaw. “Ivory.”

“Him. He wasn’t willing to tell Tasker where he’d learned of our plans. He was quite horrified when I informed him I’d sent a few underlings to your house.”

Holding on to Les’s arm, half supporting the weight of his leg, I blanched at Palefinger’s words. Aleskie had been right in her guess that this vampire and the short one—Tasker—had been behind the attack on our house. None of us had been harmed, but Ivory hadn’t known that. How devastated had he been, captured by vampires and probably believing us dead, and thinking it his fault?

“Where is he?” I asked icily.

“Right this way.”

Palefinger walked ahead of us into the shadowed area without waiting to see if we’d follow. We did, hesitantly, Les still limping a little. Mercer trailed grimly behind us.

The shadows weren’t as dark as they’d first seemed once we were inside them. I could make out rows of unplugged computers and a few doors along the wall, feeble light showing from b
eneath them. That was where they kept the humans, I guessed.

Palefinger stopped in front of the furthest door and turned to wait for us, his pale face and blond hair showing whitely in the gloom. “Come in,” he said.

I hesitated beside Les as the vampire opened the door, spilling a faintly green light into the shadows. He slipped into the room and Mercer shoved my back hard. Though I stumbled, I didn’t bother to acknowledge him as I continued forward, Les and I never losing contact with one another. I was afraid of what I’d see.

The vampire stood in the far corner of the room, hands clasped in front of him. He was like a statue for all he acknowledged our entrance. But for the moment, I didn’t care about him. Ivory sat on a metal folding chair in the middle of the floor, hands tied tightly to it. Concern and horror filled my chest as I looked at him. Les let go of my hand to prop himself up against the wall, and I went to my brother.

“Asha? Les?” Ivory said as I knelt before him. I scrabbled at the knots on his wrists, but they were too tight and thick for me to untie. I grasped his hands instead and he stared at us in wonder. His expression was one of disbelief, and after a few seconds he broke into a pained and happy smile. “You’re not dead. I thought . . .”

“Les and . . .” My eyes went to Palefinger, then back to Ivory. If he hadn’t told them about Aleskie and the information she’d shared with him, I wouldn’t be the first to mention her. “Les fought them off. Criseyde and I helped a little.” Tears filled my eyes. “Oh, Ivory, I tried so hard to find you. I knew you couldn’t be dead.”

“He will be,” Mercer said cryptically. “Tonight.” Everyone ignored him.

“But I’m too late,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Ash,” Ivory said. “Don’t worry.”

But how could I not?

“You knew,” I said, “about the eclipse? You knew what they’re planning for tonight, and that’s why you told me not to go out.”

“
You
know what they’re planning?”

I nodded and Mercer made an irritated sound. “She has connections,” he informed Palefinger. “She always knows things she shouldn’t.”

“Immaterial,” Palefinger said. “None of them are leaving here until we bring them to see Pater Luna tonight.”

Your stupid father isn’t coming
, I wanted to say, but the pettiness would be pointless and probably wasted on the vampire. I didn’t want to go anywhere near a vampire during the hour of the eclipse and I didn’t want to find out what they would do when they realized their precious prophecy would never come true.

Unfortunately, it looked like I wasn’t getting out of either of those things.

Palefinger left his corner and came to stand beside my brother. “I knew he was special,” the vampire mused. “That’s why I chose to keep him apart from the others. I will have use for him, I told myself. I could make Pater Luna a special offering of him. The Father will be pleased with me.”

“No,” I whispered, tightening my grip on my brother’s hands. I looked over my shoulder at Les just in time to see Mercer kick his injured leg out from under him. I cried out in shock and started to get up, but a thick hand held me down.

The vampire’s eyes seized upon me, dark yet somehow icy, and I met them reluctantly. They bore into me with dreadfully placid intensity and I recoiled from him in fear. “As it turns out,” he murmured darkly, “I have use for all of you.”

I started to rise, but his big hand fell heavily across my eyes, knocking me down and bringing everything into shadow.

sixteen

star c
luster: a large grouping of stars, from a few dozen to a few hundred thousand, that are bound together by their mutual gravitational attraction

I regained consciousness in the gentle rocking back of a cargo van, my face throbbing painfully. My nose felt enormous. I rested against a warm body I instinctively knew belonged to Les, my arms turned at a weird angle. We were at the very back of the van, leaning against the double doors.

Blinking in the fuzzy darkness, I saw the forms of maybe ten other captives heaped in with us. Ivory wasn’t among them. A cage separated us from the front of the van, where an anon
ymous driver transported us to some unknown location.

When I tried to sit up, I discovered Les and I were bound together at the wrists, facing each other. My movement disturbed him and I felt his breath ruffle my hair. “Asha?”

“I feel better with my eyes closed,” I said.

“Does it hurt very bad?” he asked.

“Only when I blink. Or move any muscles in my face, actually.” I mustered a weak laugh and let my eyes drift up to the van’s back windows. They were flatly black. “It’s dark now. I must have been out for hours.”

“I went after him when he hit you,” Les said. “But between Palefinger and Mercer—and my leg—it was useless. That idiot Mercer managed to knife me in the side—just skin deep, than
kfully. Then they tied us together like this and left us there with Ivory until it got dark. And now we’re on our way to witness the return of the almighty Pater Luna.” The last part he spoke with jaded contempt.

I lifted my hands and his along with them to skim my fingers along my tight, swollen cheeks. “How does your leg feel? And your side? You must have lost a lot of blood.”

“I lost a good amount. But I’ll be fine.”

“How long have we been driving?”

“Not long. We haven’t even left town yet. I think we’re headed north. There’s nothing up there for miles except mountains and some dry lakebeds.”

“We’re slowing down,” I realized suddenly.

“A military station,” Les said. We sat up together, listening hard because we couldn’t see anything outside the van.

There were voices from the front, two of them from outside the van. They grew louder before they were silenced with gunshots. One, two. And the van started moving once more. I tried not to think of the soldiers—at least two of them—who now lay dead behind us.

We came to a stop once more not long after we left the military station. When the driver shut off the engine, I could only hear the sounds of breathing.

A few seconds later the back doors flew open, both of us nearly toppling out. I barely had time to register Mercer’s outline before he grabbed Les by the jacket and yanked. I tumbled out with him, stepping on his shoes as I tried to keep my balance, the rope biting into my wrists. When Mercer let go and went to retrieve the next humans, we righted ourselves and stood chest to chest for warmth in the surprisingly cold desert night. He had his jacket, but I had nothing over my shirt.

Unthinkingly I looked to the sky. The stars were innumerable. More than I could have ever hoped to see from the roof of our house, or even Witcher Park. They were brilliant, winking, so dense in some places they looked like transparent veils. I could have stared up there for hours watching the red and blue scintillation.

If it wasn’t for the light of the full white moon I would have seen even more, and the thought was astonishing. Foolishly, I felt nothing could go wrong if the sky looked like this. There was so much out in the world, in the universe, beyond the vampires’ control. So much. Everywhere, in everything and everyone.

“Look,” I whispered, transfixed.

“I’m looking,” Les said.

His voice brought me reluctantly out of my reverie. As I lowered my eyes, I noticed ours was not the only van to have carried humans to this spot in the middle of nowhere. There were three others parked in a line next to ours, and several cars. All around us the unidentifiable silhouettes of numerous vampires milled about in the darkness, awaiting the eclipse. They began to coalesce, faces turned up to the full moon.

The eclipse had begun. The moon wore a subtle penumbral shadow that would grow and deepen as the minutes passed, the orange color intensifying.

“We could run,” I said uncertainly.

“We could,” Les agreed.

I lifted our wrists. “The rope’s too short. One of us would have to walk backwards or both of us sideways.”

“It’s us. We’d make it.”

“But we can’t go. Not without Ivory.”

“No,” he said with a sad smile. “I’d never leave without him either.”

Someone walked up to us—Mercer, perhaps—and gave us both a shove. He steered us toward the clump of hundreds of faceless vampires, weaving us through them until we came to a gradual halt at some random spot in the midst of them all. No one spoke, no one moved, and the silence was eerie. A stray, chill breeze lifted my hair from my shoulders.

I heard Palefinger address his rapt audience. “Brothers. Sisters. It is nearly time.”

An eager murmur rippled through the crowd, giving me goosebumps.

“We have waited patiently and the return of Pater Luna is nigh,” Palefinger continued. “The blood eclipse signals his arrival. He will come to us from the sky to live among us and guide us in a new world of prosperity, respect, and fear. He will provide us with blood forevermore. The humans will do as we please. Too long have we lived with death and darkness. Pater Luna will be our life.”

His booming voice, normally so calm, rang out across the mass with unnerving zeal, rumbling like thunder. I edged closer to Les, hating the comforting deepness of it. I couldn’t see Palefinger but I pictured him standing at the front of the group, his congregation, delivering his deranged oration with the passion of someone who believed utterly in his cause.

“Friends,” he finished, “we will inherit the earth.”

There was movement in the crowd, excitement held in check. Countless pairs of hungry glittering eyes searched the sea of dark figures for vulnerable humans.

“Do not touch them!” Palefinger shouted. “It is for Pater Luna to determine their fate!”

This was why he’d killed Lucinda, I thought. So she’d stop murdering his offerings for sport.

But it was all right for him to sacrifice Ivory, apparently. I turned toward his voice with h
atred in my veins. There was nothing Les or I could do. Judging by his tense body and twitchy fingers, he felt just as frustrated and helpless as I did.

“Behold,” Palefinger intoned ominously.

Les and I looked up at the moon along with everyone else. It moved into the umbra, the orange shadow creeping slowly across the surface. The color deepened as the eclipse neared totality, turning intensely crimson. The blood eclipse. Everyone on the night side of the earth could see this. Could they perceive this same unearthly color? Did they know what was happening here, to us?

When the middle of the eclipse arrived, the moon entirely scarlet, an eerie, bated silence was almost palpable.

“I will perform a sacrifice,” Palefinger decided. “The blood will draw Pater Luna more quickly to us.”

And here it came. The moment of my brother’s death. I surged toward the vampire’s resonant voice, heedless of the rope straining on my wrists. Les kept as little distance between us as he could. We pushed bodies roughly to the side, not caring if they were human or vampire, as we stumbled our way to the front. I felt like screaming.

Breaking through the front row of vampires, I saw Palefinger lift a young man from his knees. Without hesitation, the vampire put his mouth to the man’s throat and made savage animal noises. When he pulled back, his mouth was as red and messy as if he’d dived face first into a cherry pie. The young man was dead or close to it, his throat ripped wholly open and spilling blood to the dry barren ground.

“This blood symbolizes the distinction between our past and our brilliant future!”

Feeling slightly sick, I leaned against Les. The man’s hair was much too dark for him to be Ivory, but I didn’t feel any relief whatsoever. If the scattered shouts of praise were any indication, no vampire gave a shit about human life. Palefinger had taken this one so easily. That dead man, now discarded to the ground, could have been my brother or any one of us. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know him or the dead girl in the park. We would never be safe with them populating our cities as predators in the shadows. Whether or not Pater Luna was coming, they had to be stopped.

My hands jerked around as Les pulled his arms in to his waist to reach for something. His knife. I looked up at him, eyes questioning.

“Just go along with me,” he said. “I’ll need your help.”

I nodded.

We moved apart from the crowd, which had begun to shift restlessly, tension seeping into the air. They were expecting their god, their father, because he was what they had been promised. He was the reason they had traveled to Las Secas to stand on the cracked desert floor and stare at the moon on this very night. How Palefinger had duped so many into believing some space vampire was coming to lead them was beyond me.

“Another sacrifice!” someone called, the voice clear and distant in the huge silent night.

I saw Ivory kneeling on the crowd beside Palefinger. It was only chance that the vampire had killed the other guy instead of him. But I knew that if Les and I didn’t act, my brother would be next.

Palefinger’s eyes came to rest on us as we approached him. He didn’t seem afraid, only cur
ious. He didn’t notice the knife Les held.

“Now,” Les said.

He thrust the knife up beneath the vampire’s sternum. I moved my arms with his, using the force of my wrists against the rope to give him the extra strength he needed to drive it deeper. Hot blood spilled onto our hands, soaking into the rope. He twisted the knife sharply, then pulled it out. Palefinger’s mouth hung open in surprise. One meaty arm swung up, but Les and I ducked somewhat clumsily behind him. We raised our arms again, this time using our combined strength to stab the knife into the base of the vampire’s skull.

It had been tougher than I’d expected. My wrists ached and burned so bad there were tears in my eyes. Palefinger fell before us, leaving us facing the massive black crowd of vampires. They grew unnaturally still.

“Shit,” I said.

But their eyes looked past us into the impenetrable dark of the desert. They turned their heads slightly, as if listening to some far-off, unknown sound. After a moment I heard it too, a staccato vibrating sound that vacillated widely between the mountains. I stared wildly into the dark sky, at the swollen bloody moon, and shrank against Les with fear.

Suddenly a blinding light blazed over the entire lakebed and the vampires reacted with violent aversion. For some reason I thought I was witnessing selenelion, where the sun and the eclipsed moon were visible in the sky together. But it was the wrong time of day and they would have been on opposite horizons. This inexplicable light wasn’t the sun and it was nowhere near the horizon.

Pater Luna.

The light brought everyone standing in the lakebed into stark relief for a brief moment before the washing whiteness grew unendurably brighter, erasing detail and forcing me to shut my eyes. I felt a stabbing pain behind them and pressed my face into Les’s shoulder. He buried his in my hair. Our binding made it impossible to hold each other, which was all I wanted to do now that the end had arrived.

There were loud sharp noises, growling explosions. Screams. Tears streamed down my cheeks and I trembled with fierce fear. I knew I would never become a vampire’s slave because I was going to die instead. I hoped Les would die too, and Ivory, and every other human here, so none of them ever had to see the terrible deadly beast that Pater Luna surely was.

I became aware of a new sound. My name. My name whispered in my ear.

He knows me
, I thought hysterically.
He’s come.

“Asha!”

Forcing my eyes open, I saw Les’s frantic face, my name shaping his lips. It was a shout, not a whisper, only my ears were so clogged with a quiet fullness I couldn’t quite hear what he was trying to tell me.

Then I looked around us. The white light had moved further away and shone from above. Less blinding now, it moved in slow irregular circles over the scene. The vampires were no longer clustered together in expectation but scattered onto the dirt like dead crows. Clouds of dust wafted upward between the bodies surrounding us, hazily obscuring dark stains of blood that had soaked into the earth. Not everyone was dead—here and there someone twitched or cried or began to stand up with raised hands, eyes darting cautiously.

Humans, I realized. They were the only ones still alive.

And then I saw the soldiers. Dressed in fatigues, some wearing masks, all brandishing wea
pons, they moved purposefully among the hundreds of scattered bodies. Vampires who were not quite dead were shot. Any human found alive was given a blanket and escorted to a medic.

I could see them now, the big army vehicles that had driven up seemingly out of nowhere when the light had whitened everything. Fitted with powerful guns and cannons and I didn’t know what else, they were parked in a loose circle around where the vampires had congregated and fallen.